SELLING E-BOOKS

An e-book is the electronic equivalent of a printed book. The subject of an e-book is entirely down to the author. If you have something you specialise in, why not write on the subject and make money from your knowledge? You don't need a publisher, there are many ways to publish your own work; ebay is a prime example of authors making money from their expertise. You can write an e-book on a food recipe, education, pets or how to glow a certain flower. These are some of the ideas you can carryout in your spare time
Can you be blunt and tell me if its possible to make some money publishing e-books? It appeals to me it could be interesting and it sounds as though it could run its self for short spells.
Yes, it’s perfectly possible to make money publishing ebooks. For example the company 37signals claims to have sold over 20,000 copies of of their ebook Getting Real. At $19 per copy that’s made them at least $380,000.
However 37signals are very well know in their niche and have an excellent reputation, so don’t expect to be able to duplicate that level of income without putting in a lot of work. At the other end of the scale I do know of several authors who sell a modest 10-50 copies of their ebooks per month with books priced between $10 and $100 each making them between $100 and $5,000 per month. I suspect that most ebook authors are earning between $1 and $2,000 per month for each ebook they’ve published.
How much money you can make will be determined by two main factors:
· your ability to market your ebooks – without access to customers you won’t make a penny, no matter how good your ebook is;
· how many ebooks you write – many authors make the mistake of only publishing one.
and several other factors, such as the payment options you offer and price you charge for it.
As the reader rightly points out, one of the benefits of selling ebooks over the Internet is that once you have written the book (and put some effort into marketing it) the business can be left to run itself whilst you take a short break or (better yet) spend time writing the next ebook.

Read more about Can You Make Money Selling Ebooks? at Business Opportunities and Ideas.
The first step is obviously writing an eBook. Don’t concern yourself too much with copyright. Thanks to the Digital Millenium Act of 1998, anything you generate and publish online is already legally copyrighted under your author name. However, it is true that enforcing that copyright could be somewhat difficult unless you do hold proof of copyright, so if you’re very concerned about someone stealing your work, then submit the claim electronically and pay the fee.
If it sets your mind at ease, it’s well worth the cost. If you’re wondering what format you should write your eBook in, here at MakeUseOf, authors provided a number of excellent tools that can help you generate that first eBook. Saikat wrote about the PHP script converter at EbookHood to convert your eBook into iPod readable format. You’ve also probably read about the cool MyEbook eBook publishing platform, or my favorite one, Zinepal, which creates your PDF eBook in a format that most common readers can display. Another very good option is converting your Word document to PDF format, as Aibek described in his article on doPDF. Once you have your eBook in a format that you can sell, you’re ready to move on into marketing and selling your eBook.