When I was about 9, I felt frustrated that it was so difficult to make significant money as a child. After all, most decent ways to make money are age-restricted, such as jobs or investing. Or at the very least, they need something like PayPal, which is again, age-restricted. It feels a bit like the world is against you. One way I did find that I could do was selling ebooks. I did tons of research, but I couldn’t find many satisfactory answers to this question. And after a bit of experience, I can say that quite a few of these “satisfactory” answers are actually not very realistic for most people. So how much do ebooks make?
So after writing three ebooks, here is my short answer:
The vast majority of ebooks make little to no money. But a very select few titles can make thousands a month, or more. It is usually down to dedication, skill and time if an ebook succeeds.
In order to join the club of rich authors, your ebook needs:
1. Marketing. And a lot of it. You need to do good marketing. Putting an ebook on Amazon and leaving it is not enough. It may sell a little if it goes on sale, but it won’t work out in the long run. Your book will almost certainly fail if you cannot do this step. You can learn some techniques for marketing here, including social media, paid ads, and more. Plus, at the end of the post there is a quick guide.
2. A good book launch. Tying in with marketing, you should do a book launch. A good book launch includes a sale, heavy promotion, plus more you can find here. A book launch will help you to kick-start the sales and hopefully keep it high.
3. Actually good content. If you have bad content, you will receive bad reviews, discouraging future buyers. Having good content is likely to gain buyers because of recommendations to others. Without this, your book is doomed to the back pages of Amazon.
4. A good niche. Most niches these days are either over-saturated, or simply gets no buyers. I made this mistake once, and the ebook made almost 0 sales. Choosing a good niche is another make-or-break factor, but as long as you have good enough content, it should be possible to win in any niche.
5. A good selling location. For example, you would prefer to sell on Amazon over some shady 30-year-old-looking site on the back pages of the internet, even if there is less competition. For an in-depth guide on where you should publish your book, go here.
How many ebooks actually end up being profitable?
Pretty much every ebook in existence is profitable, as it costs nothing to start. Only ebooks that have no sales (or books that, for some reason, cost a lot to make) are not profitable. That is the definition of profitable: making more than it cost.
However, since over 500,000 ebooks are sold every day, some are definitely very profitable. The downside is that there are over 6 million ebooks on just Amazon, and growing. This means that on average, a self-published eBook will sell approximately every 12 days, with a median ebook performing even worse.
This number sounds a little disappointing, right? Well, some ebooks can fair much better than that. For example, Andy Weir sold over 5 million copies of his book “The Martian” through self-publishing, in only the U.S.
So the short answer to this question is that very few books make significant cash. The market is tipped in the balance so that a handful of titles get the majority of sales, so unless you are extremely skilled, you should expect your first ebook to fail. Badly.
But if you have enough skill, ebooks can be a huge opportunity for incredible success. You just need to outshine the competition, which with the growing use of AI is becoming easier and easier. This is because AI, when not used properly, just rewrites existing content which isn’t usually very helpful.
How difficult is it to make an ebook?
It is incredibly easy to make an ebook. You can create an absolutely garbage book using AI in under an hour, and submit it to Amazon.
This is part of the problem. There are some people churning out three of these a day for months on end, hoping to strike lucky. This is not the right approach. Instead, you should create a great book (using AI a bit if you want) that will rise to the top and crush the competition.
But to get noticed at first nowadays, you have to use marketing. Because there are so many ebooks out there, just getting that first sale is becoming more difficult. With good marketing, you can get noticed and start off the reaction. This is the reason that marketing really is the key to success in the self-publishing industry.
You can start creating your book in a Word document, like I do, use a PDF editor, Canva, or a custom tool. For best results, you should export/convert your file into a PDF, as you can also use this to make a paperback or hardback later down the road. It also helps Amazon format it easily, as otherwise images can go a little… weird. Here’s a full guide to creating your ebook, including formatting, etc.
My first ebook included a few images, which I ended up having to remove. I didn’t know that you could format it to a PDF to help KDP understand it. Some images were removed, some the size of the entire page and some were nearly impossible to see because they were too small. This may have been fixed now because they recently had an update, but I still recommend to submit it as a PDF.
Making an ebook is possible on any computer, so it’s really no surprise that the market is getting so overcrowded. In fact, there is a way to remove yourself from all the competitiveness, which is to sell it on your own website. Since on your own website, you control everything, you are not at the mercy of Amazon. You are the only competitor.
This isn’t for everybody, as it requires more time, effort, and technical knowledge, and far more patience. But the reward is definitely worth it, especially if you already have a site or blog. Making a successful blog is tough, but rewarding. But for the sake of simplicity, the rest of this blog will focus on publishing using KDP (Amazon).
How can I make more from my eBook?
To make more money from your ebook, all you need to do is create a better book than your competition. But it isn’t as easily said as done. So here’s a quick guide on how you can achieve this:
1. Write it yourself. Using AI is very tempting, as it can create all the content in less than a tenth of the time. You can use it to help you with writer’s block and short sections, but those sections will need heavy editing, as they are usually low quality. There are many more downsides to using AI in the legal space; that’s here. Try to also create a good amount of content, which is about 75,000+ words for fiction and 30,000+ for non-fiction.
2. Use a tool like Hemingway Editor, else hire an editor. Online, there is a free tool called Hemingway Editor, which is incredibly useful for making your writing easy to read and professional. If you don’t have the time to do it yourself, you could hire a professional editor on Fiverr. If you are creating a fiction book, you should also do some deeper editing, such as moving around events to make it easier to understand.
3. Get the most critical person you know to review it. Ideally this is somebody that doesn’t know you very well, as you want them to care as little as possible about your feelings to get more helpful information. There are also plenty of places online you can find people like this.
4. Review everything here. At this link is a guide to writing an ebook. It covers everything in much more depth.
If you follow this quick guide, then you are already far ahead of most of the ebooks on Amazon, and you probably will sell a few copies. But you can hugely increase your sales with a bit of marketing.
How can I market my ebook?
Here is a full guide on how to market an ebook, but here are a couple of ways to market your book so you can get a good overview:
1. Social media. Social media is an incredible tool, especially if you already have a following. You should tease your ebook for a few months before publishing for the best results. This works great as well if you are publishing on your own site.
2. An email list. If you don’t have one, don’t worry. You can create one by offering a discount to people who sign up. This is best suited to sellers on their own site, but can work as well for KDP users.
Another way you could try to make more money is to optimise the pricing. Too high and it won’t sell. Too low and you won’t be able to make anything from it. My advice? Aim low. Since it costs nothing to sell a copy, you will still make a profit even if it costs a penny.
Also, on your own website, you receive 100% of profits, an instant 43% increase over Amazon. I highly recommend you at least have a look into creating your own website, which you could have a look at here.
I hope this post was helpful to you. It definitely would have been to me about 4 years ago. Good luck!