Business Opportunities Weblog

Millions from eBooks!

By on August 30, 2012 in Books / Featured

Amanda Hocking sold 450,000 e-books in January directly to her readers, for under $3 each. The 26-year old writer has never been traditionally published and according to one anonymous publisher it is unlikely that any traditional publisher could offer her a better deal than the Kindle store.

Hocking only began self publishing in March 2010 after becoming fed up traditional publishers and their refusal to publish her young adult paranormal novels.

How is this possible? Joe Konrath of A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing explains:

If you’re an indie writer, you get to sell books at a price way, way lower than what a Traditional Publisher can sell at. And yet you make more money, because your only costs are to an ebook and cover art designer (whereas the traditional publisher has to support a legacy system, plus the traditionally published author gets a 30% cut, while you get 70%).

In the meantime, readers are more inclined to buy your stories, even if you’re an unknown author, simply because your book prices are cheaper. So you get high sales, low ebook prices, but high revenue once you’ve hit sufficient scale. And the best thing is that it’s infinitely scalable: your ebooks are out there, getting sales every single day. No shelf-space, no print runs to worry about.

Ebooks are only 11% of all books sold. What happens when they hit 20%? 50%?

books ebooks

Business Opportunities Weblog editor and publisher Dane Carlson lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, just 15 miles from Yosemite National Park. He accidentally became a professional blogger in 2001. He has added 12,198 posts to the site.

Another Idea: How to Start a Desktop Publisher: Community-Based Coupon Books Business

  • http://www.business-opportunities.biz Dane Carlson

    I have never been more motivated to write a book!

  • http://wahm.business-opportunities.biz Angela Shupe

    Ebooks are a growing trend, and I think this demonstrates quite nicely why. It’s easier to make money going that route, and people are willing to pay a couple dollars to discover if someone is any good. If they’re good, more ebooks will sell. If they are bad, the buyer feels like they did not lose much in the process. All of those sales really do add up.

  • http://sergeybloger.ru Сергей

    Publishing is a very profitable business. I, too, began to think about a newspaper in Moscow.

  • http://www.dog-crate-shop.com Donna White

    In my opinion, ebooks are definitely the future. With the declining number of forests, paper will be too costly to waste on a book. The computer or kindle-type book reader will be the norm, so creating ebooks now is just a jump on the future band wagon.

  • http://love2buyhousespronto.com Tom Bailey

    Awesome! How does one set this up? Does one just develop a website or is it through social networks? Great story.

  • lewe

    very interesting article, also if you want get free ebooks with resell rights so that you can profit from then visit http://www.myfree-ebooks.org they have thousands of them and most come with a sales page :)

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