How To Make Money With Your Mother By Helping Her Sell Ebooks

Last Updated on December 15, 2021

Here I will show you how to make money with your mother by helping her sell ebooks.

So there I was, sitting on the sofa of a Florida apartment watching TV when my phone rang. It was my mother. As usual, she asked me how things were going and if I wanted to come over for dinner sometime soon.

When mom had exhausted her list of questions, she said something that nearly made me fall off the couch: “Hey, do you remember those books you wrote a while ago? Someone just bought them on Amazon! Can I have some of the money?”

Wow, Mom! You’re taking advantage of your newfound fame as an author who’s sold a few copies of his books online?! Hmm, let me think about it! But before we get to the financial pros and cons of such a venture, let’s take a look at what you would need to do to realize this potential income stream.

Setup A Payments Account For Your Mother To Make Money

Assuming your mother is like most mothers and doesn’t live close enough for regular dinners, the first order of business is to get organized.

This means setting up an account with a payment processing company like PayPal so mom can quickly receive payments from her new customers.

Start To Work On The Books

Once that’s in place, it’s time to start work on the book(s).

Assuming they’ve already been written, the next step is to format them for Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Apple iBooks, or Kobo (or all four if you’re ambitious).

Once they’re formatted, the final task is to upload them into the relevant storefronts.

Writing, Formatting, and Uploading

Now, if your mother is anything like mine, there’s a good chance she’ll have no idea what you’re talking about when it comes to writing, formatting, uploading, and all these other crazy-sounding terms you keep dropping.

Also, her patience for technical matters will be non-existent, so keep it simple!

As an example of this in action, let me tell you how I chose to approach my mother’s ebooks:

First off – deciding which ebook(s) to convert for distribution. Only one of the books that I wrote a few years back made sense as a possible candidate: How To Make Money With Your Mother was a short guide that explained how anyone with minimal computer knowledge could make money online with little to no cost.

I put the guide together due to my own experiences working from home, and it quickly became one of the most popular VDI newsletters of all time.

Now, if I were writing this article two years ago, I would tell you that formatting an ebook for Amazon Kindle or similar e-readers is a massive pain in the butt.

They are proprietary formats, but there are also different versions for different operating systems! However, times have changed.

For example, Apple’s iBooks now accepts non-DRM’d ePub files, which means you can upload your formatted Word document without any hassles.

This applies to Kobo as well, so unless you’re writing about Windows 8, you’re laughing! I know this because I tested it with mom’s ebook.

Publish The Books As eBooks

So, if the formatting isn’t a nightmare, who cares about ebooks anyway? After all, they do nothing but sit on an e-reader or computer until someone deletes them, right… Wrong!

Here are just some of the advantages of having your books published as ebooks:

1. Users can read them on any device anywhere in the world. Just like physical books, ebooks download to whatever device their reader is using, so there’s no need for international shipping and inventory management (as long as you’ve formatted correctly).
2. They can be given away for free or sold at a discounted price – You control how much money each copy costs and who gets them for free.
3. They can be given away to promote your other services or businesses – Done right, this business model has been shown to generate exponentially more money than selling the books at the total price!
4. They can be used as an opt-in bribe to build your list. This is an excellent way to get potential customers’ contact information before offering them something of value in return (perhaps via email).

The numbers are hard to argue with.

For example, I’ve personally spent over $100 on physical copies of Stephen King’s books so that people could sign up for my newsletter.

What does that say about the ebook format? Well, it means you have all sorts of possibilities. It comes time to push them out to the masses!

The Sales Process For eBooks

The last step – and my last contact with mom – was to explain the sales process for ebooks.

This is simple: You upload your book(s), set a price, and wait.

When someone decides they want one, they buy it (automatically) before downloading it either directly or via their email client.

Conclusion

Oh yeah, if you were wondering why I didn’t recommend including an affiliate link in her book(s), this is why: If someone purchases her ebook, she gets 100% of the profits without any middlemen taking a cut.

Why would anyone go through all that trouble when they can promote other people’s stuff instead?!