I earn money passively from ebooks — Here’s how I do it

Step-by-step mini guide to sell ebooks for passive income

Passive income is what’s hot this year! Creating digital products like ebooks is one way to get there.

I’ve been making a steady income from ebooks for the past few years!

This is 100% passive income which means I make money in my sleep and I earn income without any ongoing maintenance or work needed.

Here’s my step-by-step process of exactly how I did it!

My 4-step guide for selling ebooks

When you first start, there are going to be challenges. There’s a learning curve.

You’re getting to know all the tools and you’re feeling your way through the process.

Give yourself some grace while you’re learning. After you finish ebook #1, creating subsequent ebooks will be a lot easier and a faster process, likely.

Here are the 4 steps I personally follow to sell ebooks for passive income:

• Poll your audience
• Create your ebook
• Publish
• Marketing and sales

Poll your audience

This is about figuring out what your audience’s pain points are so you can create an ebook to solve those problems.

For example, for new business owners, it could be figuring out how to create an automated email campaign.

For gardeners, it could be how to keep roses thriving and living all season long.

Once you determine what your audience needs help with, create your ebook as the solution to their problem.

Create your ebook

You’ve got the topic down. Now, it’s time to make the book.

You can use AI tools to help you with this process like:

• ChatGPT for outlining your chapters
• Jasper AI to create the boring (but needed details) like definitions, etc.
• KoalaWriter to write your chapters for you

The ebook can be as short or as long as you wish. I generally use tools to help me outline, create, proofread, and edit the book.

I use Canva for design, like creating an eye-catching ebook cover and for marketing graphics.

Google Docs is where I write my ebook draft.

Then, I sell on the Gumroad platform (more on this below).

Publishing the ebook

Choose a platform for publishing your ebook.

I like Gumroad. They make it easy to upload your ebook to their platform.

Once it’s live, they handle the payment collection, distribution, and sending you payment.

It makes the process hands-off so you can truly make passive income from this.

Marketing and sales

Marketing happens before, during, and after your ebook is published. This can be:

• Content marketing
• Influencer marketing
• Email marketing
• Etc.

To make ebook sales as passive as possible, I’d recommend creating an automated email marketing campaign with an opt-in form, to serve new prospective customers' emails on a schedule.

The goal will be to sell your ebook to that customer, and the email campaign will drip emails to them on a schedule over time.

Email marketing software programs like Aweber, ConvertKit, Systeme, and others can help you set this up.

I like to do content marketing where I plug my ebooks at the end of my blog posts on my personal blog and Medium.

It takes no effort at all to recommend my ebooks at the end of my blogs.

Onto You!

And, that’s how I do it. My 4-step ebook passive income formula has helped me earn nearly $20K from Gumroad so far!

You can see my ebooks here.

I have a handful of books I’m selling and I hope to grow this small collection to at least 10 books by the end of the year!

What do you think?

Would you sell ebooks for passive income?

Note: Affiliate links are in this article which means if you click a link and make a purchase, I earn a commission at no additional cost to you.

Want to read more stories like this? Check out my Substack where I talk about side hustles, social media, content creation and business.