Publishing on the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes and Noble Nook can be a great way to earn some extra income in your free time. Just one of the many advantages of doing this type of work is that you can do it whenever you have the free time to do it.
Whether you are an author or publisher or neither, you can make some money on the side with both of these platforms. Recently however, Amazon is catching on that a lot of people are doing this, and have cut back on the ways public domain books are being published. My self personally, I have had a few books removed from the Kindle platform for this very reason. Do not let this deter you. There are still ways to make money with public domain books on the Kindle, they are just not as easy to implement as they were a year ago, or even two months ago.
The publishing backroom on the Nook is called Pubit!. It is a rather easy process to use. They allow you to upload books in both .html and .epub formats. If you are not familiar with .epub, it is more of a standardized format for ebooks, and is probably going to be the set standard for all formats in the future. I would recommend learning about this format and using it with Pubit! You can get a free converter at Calibre.
There is a 40% royalty on Pubit!. So for each book you sell, you keep 40% of the sale price. Royalties are paid two months after the month your sales are in, assuming you made the minimum of 10 USD. Direct Deposit is available at no charge.
The Amazon Kindle publishing backroom is called Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Keep in mind, if you are planning to publish public domain works, the rules just got more strict. I would read them so you know what you are going to be getting into.
The royalty on the Kindle is 35%. Sure, it is lower than that of the Nook, but you have a much higher chance of selling more books on the Kindle than you do on the Nook, so it all evens out for the most part. Direct Deposit is also available for USA citizens. The Kindle is also sold in the UK, and that means you will also be selling to people in the UK. My personal experience with this is that you do get paid, however it is usually a month after the US royalties are paid to you for that same month. But you do get paid.
You can get free books from a number of places. My personal favorite is Project Gutenberg. Unless specified, these books are all in the public domain, and you are free to do whatever you like with them, including selling them for a profit.
You can also get free text editing software at OpenOffice.
In all, if you give this work some time, you can definitely make some money on the side. You won’t make a lot of money if you don’t have a lot of books to sell. So the name of the game is volume. The more books you have for people to look for and buy, the more money you can make month after month of some potentially great passive income.
There are no fees with any of the programs and resources given in this brief article. So your start up costs will cost you nothing.
