Making money from home while doing something you love would be everyone’s ideal dream. At least, I would assume most people would love to have freedom of time and money. However, starting a passive income stream takes time, energy, and knowledge.
I became fascinated with the idea of creating royalties after reading “Rich Dad, Poor Dad.” Since then, I have made it my mission to create passive income from royalties by writing books and articles. So far, the first six months have been absolutely fantastic.
I have learned so much about writing, designing, and advertising. In fact, those are the three things we need to talk about today. If you can learn these basics, you will be in good shape to start your eBook series.
Print Your Own Money
Why an eBook series and not a standalone book? As independent writers, we do not have a ton of leverage. The best way to get attention, at least on Amazon, is to become a prolific writer. In addition, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) favors new releases, so you have a better chance of someone noticing you if you keep releasing content.
Here is the bigger picture. I have something I call the Triangle of Profit. The three points of the triangle are my books, my blog, and affiliate marketing. Using all three will help you grow your income three times as fast.
Everything in the Triangle of Profit requires an audience. Everything in life is a numbers game, where everyone starts at the top of your sales funnel. The goal is to have people buy your book, click your ads, or support your affiliate marketers.
Now, books, blogs, and affiliate marketing are not the most lucrative online business around. But what you lack in money, you make up for in pure passivity. I have been creating this passive income stream for six months and haven’t dealt with one customer, client, or employee.
I am 100% free to do as I choose. I love to write, so I do this every day; however, if I need to take off for a day, week, or month, I can do so. The money will just keep rolling in. And, if I keep doing it for the long term, more people will become part of my audience, which equates to more passive income.
Create.
When choosing how to make passive income for royalties, I decided against YouTube. In the short term (5-10 years), YouTube will be way more lucrative than writing books. However, books over a long time (30-40 years) are more sustainable and can equal or exceed YouTube.
Creating videos also takes a whole studio, time to edit, and worst of all (at least to me), dealing with the YouTube comments section. To truly become a great YouTuber, you have to be a man (or woman) of the people. Unfortunately, I am too old (40) to be arguing with people on the internet.
Nope, I would instead make money from my home, quietly, with only my Chromebook. That’s right, all I need is my Chromebook and an internet connection. Writing is a 100% portable profession.
Plus, I am underselling the amount of money made from your blog and book audience. There are so many ways to monetize other aspects of your blog or books. For example, you can create merchandise on Redbubble, sell an online course, or review other people’s cover designs. Plus, you can translate your books into more languages and sell limited edition hard books (high-profit margins).
Dividends vs. Royalties
Once you have an audience, the world is truly your oyster. However, I am not at that phase yet. My main goal right now is to create a solid base of content via books and blog posts. I figure I will do that for two years. After that, my goal is to be making $1,000/month from royalties, $500/month from my blog, and $500/month from affiliate marketing by the end of 2022.
That will have been two years because I started in January 2021. Looking at my royalties thus far, I feel that this is 100% reasonable. I made over $40/month in Kindle royalties in month five. Each month that passes, you have more and more content collecting.
Once I have a ton of content, I can start slowly advertising my blog. This will increase traffic, affiliate sales, build my audience of “Superfans,” and increase book sales. I currently have 450 articles published and over 100 books published on Amazon. People who like my work will want to catch up. The easiest way will be through reading my books.
“Josh, how did you write so many articles and publish so many books in six months?” Alas, time to get to the meat and potatoes of this article, how to start your very own eBook series. You will need first to have the correct mindset. Then you will need to focus on three categories; writing, designing, and advertising. Let’s take a good look at each of these, starting with mindset.
Building the correct mindset. First off, you cannot only do this for passive income. A blog is a business, as is creating books. The job of an entrepreneur is to solve other people’s problems at a profit. Thus, you must add value to the lives of others. If you can do this, people will join your audience. If you create blog posts and books filled with spam affiliate links, then your chances are a lot weaker.
Six Traits of a Successful Entrepreneur
The book “Superfans” digs into the art of adding value from your business to the audience. Also, you can read my article “Retire Rich, Retire Comfortable with a Business (book),” which is an excellent way to read 40+ of my business-focused articles in one place.
I recommend you get your mind right before creating content. Many tutorials on YouTube focus on the making money side of the house, but adding value is what will truly make you rich. If you can help someone, chances are they will tell a friend. Word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertising on Earth.
Recently, I have had readers go through and read over 300 articles in my back catalog to get caught up. Of course, they wouldn’t do that if they didn’t find my work valuable. So aim high in the value department.
Run a Profitable Herb Garden
Another thing about adding value is that most of the time, adding value means “free,” Yep, you will have to give a lot of your content away for free. It takes over 11 “touches” for someone to want to purchase something from you. So you need to be in the game for the long run. I’ll talk more about free book promotions later in the article. First, let’s move on to the writing phase.
How to Write 1000+ Words Every Day. Luckily for me, I just completed an article by that exact name (“How to Write 1000+ Words Everyday (book)”) Please read that article as it is a companion article to this one. Indeed, writing is the most crucial part of creating books—who would have guessed.
So, do you need to have a blog? Yes, I believe that you need a blog. First, you can get many ideas for your books from a blog. Second, your blog has an instant connection with your fans. For example, I released an article called “How We Plan to Retire on Dividends (book)” that did very well on my blog.
I created a book, then added related books on business and real estate. Then, I combined all three books into one megabook. I’m pleased to say, all four books did exceptionally well and will keep making me money for the long term. All this sparked from my blog.
Start a Luxury Vehicle Business
Another reason you want a blog is to diversify your income. You do not want to rely entirely on Amazon for your income. When you sign up for KDP, that is the only platform you can publish to. KDP gives you some perks because of this, but you also want to build an audience away from Amazon. A blog will help you find readers, build an email list, sell merchandise, and connect with your audience. And if Amazon goes to crap, you can sell your books through your website.
So now that you are writing every day and publishing to your blog, what is next? Now you need to decide how you want to roll those articles up into a series of books. I combine every ten pieces into a book (Financial Independence Magazine Series). These books are usually 10,000 words, which is roughly 40 pages in a book.
Do people really buy small books? Yes, people love to pay full price ($3) for a short book. After reading 51 books in the last ten months, I can completely understand—sometimes, you just want the quick hit of finishing a hyper-focused book. The majority of my direct book sales on Amazon are books with lengths of 40-50 pages.
When it comes to KDP and Kindle Unlimited, it is entirely different. These readers love to have long books to read. For Kindle Unlimited, you get paid by the pages a person reads. So you will want to combine a ton of your related articles to form gigantic books as well. If you are writing over 1000+ pages a day, this will not be an issue. Now, let’s review some basics of design and advertising.
Mothers as Entrepreneurs
How do you design your book covers? Before I jump into this question, I would like to refer you to an online course I took six months ago to learn about publishing books on Amazon. In addition, I have followed Project Life Mastery and Stefan James for over two years on YouTube.
When I finally made up my mind to publish books on Amazon, I knew that his course would be top-notch. His course “Mastering Book Publishing” (this links to his affiliate marketing course) took me about two weeks to complete, off and on. When you are truly serious about making passive income from royalties and books, this is the best place to start. Also, he spends a reasonable amount of time talking about building the correct mindset.
I bring up this course because he recommends that you do not design your own book covers. I can agree with that if you do not want to learn how to design. I forced myself to learn design. For every article I publish on my blog, I have custom-designed artwork. You should consider doing the same.
I thought I was improving until I read the book “The Non-Designer’s Design Book.” This book opened my eyes and allowed me to start creating some magical covers. And guess what? My book sales improved overnight. So, I would highly recommend you learn how to design your own book covers.
Young Brilliant Entrepreneurs
You will create books all the time. Once you get into a rhythm, you will have more articles than you know what to do with. This abundance of creative work means you will be creating a book, combining various topics, almost daily.
As I will discuss in advertising, your book covers will appeal to different audiences. For example, look at these two book covers on investing; which one appeals to which audience? So you will need to design your own covers to give you the best options available. You can find some quick tips on design in my Basics of Design 101 Series.
The more you spend on ghostwriting, editing, advertising, and covers, the more your books have to sell to be profitable. I don’t spend money on any of these; I do everything myself. Yeah, everything isn’t perfect, but it is a solid package. There are tons of perfect books out there if people are looking for that. But, again, I am not trying to set the book-publishing world on fire, just add value and make some nice passive income.
On a side note, it helps to have a goal for your passive income. My wife and I have decided we will use the royalties to go to dinner for the month. So, this upcoming month we will have $40 to go out and eat. Not bad.
Run a Profitable Dog Park, from Your Property
How do you advertise? First and foremost, the most crucial forms of advertising are your book cover and your book blurb (description). To understand more about human nature, you will need to read a book on advertising. Luckily I can recommend a good one. “Ca$hvertising” is a great book and will help you target and appeal to the portion of your audience the book is designed for.
If I have ten articles on investing, I can create ten different book covers, names, and descriptions to appeal to diverse audiences. I usually like to write a unique introduction chapter to appeal to the group; however, the main content remains the same.
You have groups like women, men, young people, older adults, mothers, fathers, married people, kids, etc. Why create a book that only appeals to one type of group. I have captured some advertising ideas in my Advertising 101 series. You can use this as a quick start guide, but reading the book is the best bet.
Dividends vs. Royalties II
Your books enrolled in Amazon KDP can go on five-day free book promotion, every 90 days. This means that every three months, each book gets to have a five-day free giveaway. These free days help to widen your audience and are a way to advertise your platform for free. In addition, I release a new free book every day of the week.
As I said earlier, to add value, you will have to give something away for free. Don’t worry; the more free books I give away, the more book sales I receive. There will be people who take, take, take. Don’t worry about them “they are not your people.” Your people will support you once you have given value to them. Focus on them, and you will be okay.
Forming the right mindset. As I wrap this up, I want to ensure that you understand the intent behind adding value to someone’s life. If you’re going to have a long writing career, you will need to add something meaningful and valuable to someone’s life.
Do not try to discover your greater purpose right now. You need to get started, and things will slowly begin to formulate. I didn’t just start creating covers and building books in my first month. It was a long progression, and I am still learning. That’s what life is all about, pushing forward into unknown territories.
I hope I added value to your life and helped you discover more passive income streams to build. This is the long game, and I am in it for the long haul. There is no easy money. Start forming your base of knowledge and build yourself up from there. What you decide to create will probably be vastly different from mine. And that is okay. Good Luck!
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Disclosure: I am not a financial advisor or money manager, and any knowledge is given as guidance and not direct actionable investment advice. I am an Amazon Affiliate. Please research any investment vehicles that are being considered. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it. I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.
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