Big companies seem very good at giving non-committal and completely pointless answers. Amazon is no exception. After enquiring as to why I could promote the Kindle or any other Amazon product as an associate (affiliate) but not publish for the Kindle I received this:

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” I apologize for any confusion but in order to publish your content with Digital Text Platform you will need a U.S. issued Social Security Number, Tax Identification Number or Employer Identification Number.

For future reference your concerns would be best addressed by the Digital Text Platform support team. You may reach them by writing to digitalpublications at amazon.

I hope you found this information useful. Our goal is to help you get the most out of your Kindle experience.”

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No, this information is not useful. It is designed to fob me off without answering the damn question.

Not surprisingly I have had nothing from the Digital Text Platform Team either.

So if you live outside the US and want to write for the Kindle you’re stuffed?

Not quite.

You can’t use Amazon and you can’t sell your ebooks at Amazon in the Kindle library.

But you can use the Mobipocket format - which is a free download (although Mac users would have to use it under a Windoze emulator).

Then you could sell the output from your own website or via Mobipocket themselves.

There is a proviso. Mobipocket format books with DRM don’t work. For those that don’t know, DRM is digital rights management - basically a way to protect copyright and stop people sharing their books with one another. If you choose not to have the DRM then you can publish the Mobipocket format for the Kindle.

Personally it’s not something I’d worry about. People have always shared books and always will. In fact I read somewhere that on average each book is read by four different people. It happens, don’t fret about it.

If I had a bit more time I’d set up a website and offer to convert other people’s text files into Mobipocket format and publish them for Kindle. There must be hundreds of authors around the world who are currently prevented from accessing what is potentially a very lucrative market.

If someone wants to take the idea further, do let me know.

A free download of the Mobipocket Reader and Mobipocket Creator Software can be found here. The issue of publishing with Mobipocket is a bit complex, publisher and retailer info can be found here.

I think the self-publishing / own website idea is definitely viable.

More information on the Amazon Kindle ebook here.

Imagine that for an investment of a grand total of $7.00 someone would give you not only an ebook showing you how to build an ebook business from start to finish but also a complete packaged system to make it all work. No, I haven’t got that decimal point in the wrong place, that’s seven dollars. Job done.

You get the idea, the methodology, the software and comprehensive instructions on how to install it (it’s a breeze). Not only that but there’s good after-sales support to iron out any little wrinkles you might have AND you even get the rights sell the whole package yourself if you like AND keep all the profit!

Too good to be true? Don’t you believe it. Listen, this is important.

The $7 secret is a deceptively simple concept. It’s also remarkably powerful if used correctly. Its creator, Don Morris, has put the whole package together in fine detail. If you’re investigating making money with ebooks then this could have you up and running in a week.

I use this system myself. A lot. It’s almost a license to print money. It isn’t a get rich quick scheme (you’ll get bored with me telling you that such things are a rip-off) but it is what I like to call a “get richer quicker” method.

I’ll be absolutely straight with you. I know of no cheaper way to get started making money with ebooks. The system works if you work it. Click here for all the details.

At the very least you should review Don Morris’ site to see how an expert does it. I’d be startled if this didn’t work for you but if it’s not what you’re after, fair enough.

But let’s be frank and not waste each others’ time. If your decision is no because you don’t want to invest $7.00 in your ebook business then you should probably be looking elsewhere. I don’t think I’ll be able to help you.

NB: If you do get the $7.00 Secret then email me: info@boxabooks.com and I’ll send you a little bonus report that can add even more power to the system. I don’t want to be accused of spamming so you’ll need to drop me a line and ask for it, OK? Please include a copy of your receipt.

However, I am doing it to illustrate a point, a very important one, and whether you buy the ebook or not will make little difference to me but could make a great deal of difference to you.

A bit more disclosure: if you do buy it, I will make a few dollars.

But then this blog is called the Ebook Income, and it’s pretty clear it’s about making money from ebooks, so what do you expect?

There are in fact a couple of points here. They should probably be under a heading of “income diversification” or, “not having all your eggs in one basket”.

But I’m going off at a tangent, let’s restart.

It’s my belief that you can make a substantial income from ebooks. Depending on your drive and your goals, possibly a fortune. I make a very good living and I have no special qualifications. I didn’t go to university and I’m no computer whiz-kid (few people can call you a kid at 47!)

I’m not going to tell you how much I earn because it’s not necessarily relevant to what YOU want. Anyway, my thing is time, not money. It just so happens that the money lets me do what I want, most of the time. Suffice it to say that we have two cars and a six bedroom home and I owe the bank precisely nothing. No mortgage, no loans, nada.

I believe you can do this too but, and here’s the cold hard truth, you are not going to do it tomorrow.

Sorry. I don’t do “get rich quick”, there’s no such thing. I can maybe offer you “get richer quicker”.

Creating your first successful ebook is going to take a while. Even if you write quickly, you’ve still got to market it. Until the serious money starts coming in you’re going to need to stick at the day job a bit longer.

Wait a minute though. Who said your ebook was the only way you could make money from writing?

How about if you could work a couple of hours an evening or at weekends and earn a few hundred extra bucks a month (or pounds, euros, yen or whatever you earn where you are)?

No, it’s not going to make you rich, and yes, I understand extra time is sometimes hard to find, but if you like writing and you want to really make a difference to your future you’ll find a way to make it happen.

And the results might turn out much better than just a couple of hundred dollars.

There are lots of ways to write and earn money. Journalism and other freelancing probably come to mind straight away but they’re not easy to break into and there are plenty of others. Plenty of opportunities too.

Article marketing has become very popular of late. Basically not much more than writing short pieces promoting products that pay you a commission if your work leads to a sale. I know people who make a very, very good living just doing this.

In fact there are so many opportunities that David Goldsmith has put together an excellent ebook “25 Ways To Write For Money” which I thoroughly recommend.

It has helped many a budding best-selling writer ease the transition from wage slave to author and many others who have perhaps found that another form of making a living from writing suits them better than being a novelist.

For my part I earn my money writing in four ways. I co-write ebooks in the ‘how to” genre, I earn money from blogs, I do consultancy work and finally I earn money from affiliate programs.

It’s taken me a few years to get to the stage where I now only work about 20 hours a week. If I had worked harder along the way I could probably have done it quicker. If I was prepared to work harder now I could certainly earn more.

But I’m doing it the way I want to. I strongly encourage you to do the same.

Here’s a link to that book again: 25 Ways To Write For Money.

I know some people don’t like the looks (I do) but in use you actually forget that it’s a digital device at all after a while. It’s just like reading a book - which is how it should be.

My problem isn’t with the Kindle at all, it’s with Amazon. More to the point it’s with Amazon’s approach to people writing ebooks for the Kindle. You see if you live outside the US you simply cannot have your book published by Amazon for the Kindle. Can you believe that if Stephen King lived in England he couldn’t get his book on the Kindle? According to Amazon he couldn’t

Oh really. I think they would find a way round it for Mr King, don’t you? But for us mere mortals, apparently there isn’t.

At the moment you can’t actually buy the Kindle outside the US. I understand this because it has to do with the Whispernet technology that it uses to connect. But how does that prevent me from writing an ebook for it?

I should point out that I spend most of my time between England and France. I am fortunate enough to have an American friend who got my Kindle for me.

But I digress.

Amazon will not let me submit my ebook for the Kindle because I have neither a US bank account or a US tax code. Both of these are virtually impossible for you to get unless you are a US resident. Clearly I’m not.

They claim that it’s because of Federal Tax Laws. Yet as an Amazon affiliate I can sell the Kindle reader from my website and earn a commission. In fact I can sell any Amazon product: book, DVD, Sony Reader, any of the other electronic gadgets they promote and they’ll pay me a few dollars.

But I can’t write for the Kindle. Does that not make sense or is it just me?

I have yet to receive a satisfactory answer from Amazon. I’ve nothing against them really but like most big businesses they’re very good at giving completely non-committal answers.

I’m not letting it rest though. The potential for getting my ebooks on the Kindle is too great. Maybe I can’t go via Amazon direct - although being on the Kindle library would obviously be best. Maybe there’s another way. I’ve just had an idea…

Now you’ll notice I’ve changed the word “book” to “ebook” in the paragraph above. Although there’s nothing to stop you writing and publishing a traditional book, by far the most profitable approach now is ebooks.

It’s also a market which, in part thanks to Amazon’s Kindle, is expanding rapidly - faster than at any time before.

It gets better. Virtually everything you need to start writing a best selling ebook you either already have, or you can get for free.

You’ve got access to a computer and the internet, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this. That computer almost certainly has a word processing program so you can write your ebook. If not you can get a free one from openoffice.org. To turn your text files into an ebook you just need some software to make a PDF file, and you can download free programs for that too.

About the only thing you’ll need to spend a little on is some hosting for a website and that’s going to be well under a hundred dollars a year.

So there you go, your very own ebook publishing empire. Just sit back and count the money!

OK, it’s not exactly quite as easy as that, but don’t let anyone tell you it’s hard work - not if you enjoy writing. Yes, it’ll take some time. Yes, it will take some effort. But the fact is that if you’re prepared to put in the work now it’s the sort of business that will repay you year after year and, like it says in the title, you’ll be able to earn money while you sleep.

It’s the very nature of the business that when you write and sell and ebook you set up an income stream that will carry on virtually forever. Just think about the power of that and how it could affect your lifestyle. Once your ebook is written and available online people from anywhere in the world can buy it at any time of the day or night - and you don’t need to work 40 hours a week to maintain it.

Maybe your first ebook won’t be a best seller. To be fair, most aren’t. Maybe you won’t earn a hundred thousand dollars a month - although it’s perfectly possible that you could.

Perhaps you’ll be like my friend Bob. Bob makes wooden furniture and loves it, in fact he doesn’t want to do anything else, but five years ago Bob wrote a little ebook.

That ebook only makes him about fifteen hundred dollars a year. But it’s done that each year for the last five and it shows no signs of stopping - and Bob does absolutely nothing. He hasn’t changed the website, he doesn’t even answer emails about it.

Just think what he could do if he put some effort into it - but that’s not what he wants to do.

On the other hand, perhaps you’ll write and sell an ebook and enjoy the process (and the money) so much that you’ll write another, and another. Why not? Maybe you’ll end up like Jim Edwards, Jay Conrad Levinson or Yanik Silver. These guys earn tens of millions a year.

Does that get you excited? There’s a lot more to come.

Just think about this powerful effect for a minute - it’s the sort of thing that can change lives.

When you go to work you’re on a fixed wage. You’re a wage slave. In order to earn - let’s say $40,000 - you need to be earning at least four times that for your boss. In other words, at best you’re getting 25% of your worth. At best.

When you sell your ebook you may not get $40,000. Not for your first one anyway. In fact if you’re just starting out you’ll be lucky to get anything like that unless you’ve had plenty of money to invest in the launch.

But let’s say you did the launch as cheaply as you could. In fact let’s say you spent nothing. You did a bit of article marketing, you got the word out on some appropriate forums. As a result, maybe you’ll only get a few hundred dollars your first month.

The point is, there’s very little more to do. You should continue your marketing efforts, of course, but the ‘hard work’ of writing your ebook is done. People buy it and you do almost nothing.

And it’s going to go on like that for years. That’s residual income. You created something that perhaps doesn’t quite sell itself but as near as damn it does. You’ll probably need to answer a few emails and you’ll want to keep on getting the word out but other than that… That’s the beauty of residual income.

If we go back to the “25% of your worth” comment I made earlier and compare it with selling an ebook you’ll probably find that after expenses (which can be just a few dollars) you could be making as much as 90% of the cover price in profit!

Of course if you’re ebook is only selling a few hundred dollars a month then you’re not going to be ditching the day job overnight. If you’re looking for “get-rich-quick” you better stay with the other dreamers - they’re all still going to the office or the factory too.

Like any business it takes time and it takes work (although frankly I find it difficult to call writing for a living “work”).

But it’s not rocket science. Once you know the basics it’s pretty much a question of doing more of the same. Write a second ebook. Try your hand at promoting other people’s ebooks through affiliate marketing (which can be another powerful example of “residual income”).

About twice a week, almost every week, I get money for selling an ebook I wrote five years ago. It’s only $15 a time - $30 a week - so clearly it’s not my only income. However, I do nothing for it. I spend no time on it at all. I haven’t even updated the website for three years. Still that little ebook sells.

If you’d like help doing something similar yourself, visit the main site at Boxabooks.com

I’ve haven’t met a single successful writer who isn’t also a great reader. I’m pretty sure you’ll be the same. You’ll almost certainly be wanting to write in the same genre as your preferred authors.

So if you want to write a romance novel, study your favourite romance author. If you want to write a historical novel, a thriller, whatever style of writing you want to emulate, study the best in the business first.

How does your favourite book begin? How does the writer suck you in? How are the characters developed? Read your favourite books again but this time have a notepad handy. Examine the book in detail. Just exactly how are they doing things?

Now I don’t in any way mean you should copy. Never, ever copy. That’s not how to write a good novel, that’s how to fail. Plagiarism is nothing more than theft.

However, if you want to know how to write a romance novel you’ll find there are structures which are more successful than others. How the main characters are fleshed out, how they are drawn to each other. Read a selection of romance novels and you’re likely to find similarities in the way they’re put together. Same if you want learn how to write a horror novel - there are ways to draw you in, to build tension, to shock.

If you study a dozen Stephen King novels you’ll find patterns. A dozen Barbara Taylor Bradford books will give you different patterns but definable structure nonetheless. I’m not in any way saying that they’re all the same but every successful author has a “style”. You can recognise it in their writing and it’s that “style” that you can learn from to help create your own best-seller.

I’m not suggesting it’s easy. For every best-selling author there are hundreds who didn’t make it. It takes dedication, perseverance, practice and determination but if you have those things, and if you study and learn from the best, the rewards are both achievable and more than worth the effort.

With the new demand for ebooks it has never been easier to self publish your novel and instead of getting perhaps 10% of the cover price you could get as much as 90%. That’s a different subject though which I’ll cover in detail another time.

How to write a good novel is a combination of things. Natural ability and passion are invaluable places to start but great success requires more. You also need to observe your market, realize what works. Study it and see if you can incorporate it in your own novel. You might also want to take advantage of one or two books that are available about the writing process. A few dollars invested at the start could dramatically shorten your learning curve.

I have a couple of recommendations that you might find useful:

Andrea Rains Waggener lives the kind of life a lot of people dream of. From here seaside home she can often be found walking her dog along the beach.

It’s one of the perks of being someone who knows how to write a good novel.

In this ebook Andrea shares her well-proven system for writing books that sell. I won’t go into detail here, I’ll let Andrea do that on her website. Click here for details.

One of the biggest challenges a lot of people have when learning to write a novel is keeping everything organized.

You have all kinds of character descriptions, plot situations, odd ideas you’ve jotted down to expand on later… it can all get very confusing.

The New Novelist software can not only help you do that but so much more. It helps you plan, it helps you structure, it’s a bit like having a writing coach at your shoulder as you write.

It is based on the course first started by best selling author Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia - the UK’s top creative writing institution - and is also supplied to UK schools.

The benefits to your writing are too numerous to cover here. See the site for full details.

Baloney.

I guarantee that you have, right now, all the qualifications you need to become a successful ebook author. How do I now that? Well number one, you obviously have access to a computer because you’re reading this and number two, you can read.

That’s it. You can now go on to be as successful as you decide to be. Write your own ebook, write your own check.

I’m really not kidding.

In order to become a successful ebook author you need access to a computer (and a couple of bits of software, but you can get them for free) and you need to be able to write. If you can read, clearly you can write. It’s that simple. There’s absolutely no need for some fancy Harvard degree in English. To be quite honest I don’t know a preposition from a hole in the ground and believe me, I make a good bit more than a lot of university educated academics.

However, the things you almost certainly don’t have are the right tools and the right knowledge. Being a successful ebook author is not just about your ability to get the words down, it’s also about getting the word out. You could be the next Stephen King or JK Rowling but if the only place your book exists is on your pc, who’s going to know?

Fortunately the knowledge is not difficult to come by. There are some very good websites that can help and ebooks written by people who know the ebook publishing business inside out, upside down and backwards. For a few dollars you can get more ‘education’ than you’ll get from years of college.

There’s also nothing quite like selling to a hungry market and the ebook market at the moment is experiencing explosive growth. Now is definitely the right time to be an ebook author. Amazon’s Kindle ebook reading device has made ebooks available to a far wider audience and every ebook author stands to reap the rewards.

Some people will make a nice few dollars - some will make a good deal more.

I’m not going to try to tell you ‘how’ to write, it’s not my thing. Although I’ve been involved with the writing of several ebooks what I really do well is the marketing side.

What I can tell you is that if you’ve ever thought of doing it you should do it now. The only thing stopping you is you. If there are gaps in your knowledge, do a bit of research. Again, you have all you need - a pc and access to the internet.

You may need to invest a few dollars. Not everything good is free (and not everything free is good). If you’re not prepared to invest in your own future you probably ought to be satisfied with where you are now and get used to it.

You’ll find plenty of vital ebook author information, tools and resources at our main site: BoxaBooks.com

Let’s say you’re a writer and you’ve self-published your own ebook. A blog is a great way of communicating to your potential readers. Actually, let’s call them customers, after all we would like their money as well as their critical acclaim!

If you’re an ebook author then adding articles to a blog is hardly ‘work’ is it? Should be a walk in the park by comparison to putting together several hundred pages for your manuscript.

Well it had better be, because if you have even a little success with your blog you need to keep at it on a regular basis, your public demands it of you!

OK, that comment may be a little tongue in cheek, but it’s done to emphasise a point. A blog, if it’s to be of any use, needs to be updated on a regular basis. People will subscribe to it and expect new items every few days - at minimum once a week. If they don’t get their ‘fix’ they’ll be off, and no amount of coaxing will get them back.

So you think that’s not a hardship. If you can think up a relevant and entertaining blog post every week then that’s great, go for it, but believe me, it’s not as easy as you think.

At first you can promote your blog and promote your ebook. That’ll take a few articles. If you’re working on a new ebook you can drop in hints about content. Then what?

You can’t keep just giving people progress reports, especially if deadlines slip. You certainly can’t make excuses about why deadlines have slipped. An extract or two maybe? OK, that’s another couple of weeks, then what?

As an ebook author and publisher (I use ‘and’ because you’re almost certainly both) the effectiveness of your blog will depend on your subject. Making money online is a popular genre for ebooks and you can expand your blog to cover other material. If you’re a craft author or you’ve written some kind of instructional or educational ebook then again, there are associated subjects you can use.

If you’re a fiction author it becomes a bit more difficult.

So before you decide, consider the commitment because doing otherwise would be unprofessional and no matter what your subject if you’re unprofessional your sales will suffer.

If you are going to do it, then in my opinion there is one golden rule. Get a blog on your own domain, not a free one from Blogger or Wordpress. Although I use Wordpress software (and thoroughly recommend it) I nevertheless have it installed on my own domain because that way I control it.

If your ebook author blog is at “mywonderfulebook.blogspot.com” then someone else has control. Imagine if suddenly they decide your ebook is controversial and they ban your blog? Maybe it could never happen. Maybe. Personally I’m not taking the risk.

You name it, if it’s relevant to ebooks it’ll appear here.

Whatever people say, the money is important so we’ll be focusing not only on how to make money from writing but also other ways of generating income, like promoting other ebooks alongside your own.

And because, as far as I know, none of us like working any harder than we have to, we’ll also be looking at automation wherever possible. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go all techy on you - that’s not my field of expertise - it’ll all be from the simplest point of view possible.

When you need more detailed information on ebook writing, ebook publishing and marketing, and ebook reading devices you’ll want to visit the main site.

Admittedly it’s a little thin on the ground at the moment - but then I’ve only just created it! I’m working hard on getting as much useful ebook information there as possible and it will soon build into an indispensable source of ebook author resources.

You can subscribe to the rss feed here to keep up to date with additions or, if you prefer, go to the main site and sign up for the newsletter that I’ll be sending out every so often.

On the subject of which, I better set that up. Until next time, keep scribbling!