There was a recent article published in the Wall Street Journal outlining the pros and cons of self publishing that had me thinking about potential business ideas for beginners. Is it possible to make extra income publishing Kindle ebooks?
It turns out that Amazon has a very generous program where you can earn up to 70% in revenue for ebook sales. The problem though becomes what to do for content. According to the WSJ article, if you already have a following it’s fairly easy to rack up ebook sales. However, if you’re just starting out, how do you get noticed given all of the ebook publishers out there? How do you get people to search for your stories when you’re an unknown author?
Amazon Ebook Self Publishing - 70% Revenue
Well, how about if you could publish existing stories that were already popular and not have to worry about copyright issues? How, do you ask? By republishing public domain material as ebooks. This might be one of the best business ideas for beginners as you would not even need to author the stories.
Amazon’s guidelines indicate that republishing public domain material is perfectly acceptable, as long as the work meets one of three criteria: It either needs to be translated, illustrated, or annotated. I think the most straight forward path would be to add some illustrations. Amazon requires 10 or more unique illustrations relevant to the book.
So here’s the plan. I would look for a public domain book that is extremely popular. Some quick research shows that there are 2,775 daily searches for Pride and Prejudice so this would be a good one to try. The next step would be to download the text version of the book at Project Gutenberg and find at least 10 public domain images that are relevant to the story. Package it all together, upload via Kindle Direct Publishing, set a fair price, and start collecting some revenue.
