Self Publish For Profit

If you’re looking for ways to make money online, you can self publish for profit. The internet comes with a variety of free resources, including most or all of the resources that you’d need to write a book, post it for sale on a website and have other people sell it for you on a commission basis. The power of the press is available to anyone. This is one of the micro businesses that you can build in order to create passive income with $0 start up fees.

Unlike other forms of ecommerce, digital products allow you automate production and delivery of your product. When people buy digital copies of your self-published works, they don’t have to wait for it to arrive by mail. They receive it almost instantly. For those who wish to have a hard copy, there are also resources available to print on demand. You do not have to print thousands of books and store them in your garage until they all sell.

Is Profit From Self Publishing Actually Free?

There are multiple forms of media that you can use to publish. However, electronic books or ebooks are used as a demonstration for the majority of this page.

What are all the things that you’d need to create and sell an ebook or multiple ebooks online? You can theoretically get all the resources that you need to self publish and sell your works for free. If you can get all of these for free, then yes, the profit that you get from it is actually free.

You’d need a word processor to write the ebook. You can get that for free on Google Drive. You’d need to sell the book in PDF format so that it can be read on multiple devices. Anyone who wanted to read your ebook can download Adobe Reader, which is free. To convert the book to PDF, you’d simply “print” it or download as a PDF from Google Docs. If you needed to add additional hyperlinks to your book in PDF format, then you could use PDF Escape, which is free.

You’d need to create a cover for your book. The book may or may be printed in hard copies. Even if it isn’t, it has been proven that books with a cover, even electronic books, sell more than without a cover. You can get free stock images to integrate into your cover from places like Pixabay and Pexels. You can use a free graphics application like Sumo Paint or Canva to create your 2-dimensional cover design. You can apply your 2D designs in a free 3D Book Cover Generator to create a 3-dimensional image of your book cover.

Once you have your book created and the book cover, you’ll need a website where you can sell the book. You can get a free website that comes with a free sub-domain.

You’d need a payment processor to accept payments for the book. You’ll set it up so that when payment is received, the user will be sent to the page where they can download your book. PayPal is one free payment processor that you can use. Yet, you may want to use the one that comes with your chosen affiliate program.

You can get a free sales force and generate additional income from your book through affiliate programs. As the publisher, you can recruit affiliates into your affiliate program who will promote you book for free. The affiliate platform that you use will generate a unique link for each affiliate. They promote that link and when people click on it to buy your book then the affiliate gets a commission. You can also become the affiliate by adding links for other products in your book. The more your book sells, the more the links are spread out among the internet and the more people might click on them. When they buy the products you’re promoting, you get a commission. Affiliate programs are generally free for affiliates. I do not know of a current one that is completely free for the publisher. However, from the sheer number of them, it’s likely that one exists. Yet, you may not want to use it and opt for a better one, as described below.

You can also increase your reach for new customers by giving free copies of the book to influencers in your niche. Influencers often accept free stuff in exchange for writing a review for your product online. Influencers already have a large following, so when they promote your product, people visit your website and buy the product. You can even sweeten the deal for the influencer by recruiting them to become an affiliate for you. That way the get a copy of the book free and they can earn money to promote it. You can also set up an email marketing campaign with autoresponders that automatically funnel prospects to become new customers. Mailchimp is free up to a certain level of use, although the autoresponders are a paid feature.

You can also distribute the book through bookstores like Amazon since they have their own market and that increases your potential reach.

Production and delivery is free. Since you’re basically selling a computer file, it is automatically copied and delivered when the buyer downloads the product. You can also use a print-on-demand service like Lulu or CreateSpace.

This is virtually everything that you need for self publishing and you can get all for free, with no up front costs. Some costs may incur as copies are sold. For example, the payment processor will take 1-3% of every sale. You’ll determine the affiliate commissions for every sale, but 50% or higher would attract more affiliates. Print-on-demand services will also take a portion of each sale.

Are The Free Options The Best Options?

The more professional your product, the more it will sell, and sometimes making it look more professional will require professional services. So, while you can get all that you need for free, you might decide to use paid services if they will help you make more money. You could potentially hire an editor to improve the text copy of your ebook. You could even hire a copy writer to write the entire ebook and the sales copy for the website. Then the venture becomes completely passive and allows you to spend time on other things. You could hire a graphic artist to design the ebook cover. You could hire a web developer to build a better website. All of these will contribute to the presentation of your product and help it sell better. (Consider Mirex Marketing for professional digital marketing services, including web design, graphic art and email marketing.)

Instead of free web hosting and using a subdomain, you might want to pay for reliable web hosting and get a domain name that is easier to promote. A subdomain might be something like “yourdomain.freewebhost.me”, but a marketable domain name would be something more like “yourdomain.com”.

It is certainly better to use a paid affiliate program over a free one (free as in free for publishers, it’s always free for the affiliates). The one that is free for publishers won’t have as many affiliates which means a smaller potential sales force that is selling your product for you. The fee is nominal to join as a publisher, $50 for Clickbank.

It is also better to use a paid email marketing platform so that the autoresponder features are available. Autoresponsders are also called “drip campaigns.” Two of the greatest keys to success in any business are automation and outsourcing. Email autoresponders, such as Aweber are a favorite among self publishing authors.

What If I Don’t Want To Write Ebooks? I Might Want to Create Video, Music, Software or Other Works.

Of course you’re not limited to ebooks if you want to self-publish. You can create any digital product in any media and sell it in a similar method described above. For example, video tutorials might even sell better than an ebook. You can get free video recording and editing software and free video hosting.

Beyond selling the works on your own website, you could also consider selling in other markets. For example, most stock websites for images, photographs, video, audio, and software will allow you to create a seller’s account. You’ll upload your works to their platform, they’ll sell the works for you and pay you a split of every sale.

See also Profit From A Free Website, Design & Sell T-Shirts, Free IP, and Web Freebies for free web hosting, stock websites, and free software.