How to make easy and fast money selling a short book (which is available for download)?

While there are various venues and services which make it possible for you to make a bit of money off your book, it is unlikely in the extreme that you actually will. The only way any of these services will return any significant cash is if your book becomes wildly, extravagantly popular - which is unlikely to happen unless you've got an amazingly good book and some superb marketing and advertising. And probably not even then.

Or look at it this way: how many free, online books, providing some sort of revenue to their author, have you had occasion to read? Assume that's average for readers and web-surfers. Now, what's the odds they'll be reading your book specifically? Please note that if your answer to the first part of the question was "zero," then so is the answer to the second part.

In general, the only way for self-published works to achieve any financial success is with a lot of self-promotion. (This makes sense - after all, who would promote your book but the people who would benefit from its success? If you're publishing yourself, nobody's promoting your book but you.) That's hard work, and returns are dubious at best. Selling your work to a publisher is basically convincing somebody else to take this risk - and a lot of the responsibilities of marketing and production, and some creative control over the book - in return for guaranteed income. You wouldn't expect all that to be necessary if somebody could really make money simply by posting the story online according to some simple, revenue-generating process, would you?

In conclusion, I suggest you publish your book online, and make a few bucks babysitting or flipping burgers. As Ralph answered more succinctly, there is no way to make fast, easy money by writing, save by miraculous serendipity and/or acts of god.

posted almost 14 years ago

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