How To Turn Your Blog Posts Into A Kindle eBook

Every blogger should try their hands at Kindle publishing at least once.

Income from blogging is far from passive.  When you stop working on your blog, traffic slowly but surely dwindles away to nothing. New sites emerge and take over your rankings, sites with your links go offline, and your business dies.

Kindle publishing is not this way. Books are forever, and Kindle publishing comes about as close to passive income from writing as you can get. As long as your eBook is live on the Kindle store, Amazon will continue selling it to people.

Here’s the problem. Many bloggers want to write Kindle books, but do not feel that they have the time to do so. The time they do have is spent writing blog posts, marketing their content, and trying to sell. What they may not realize is that they may have already written most of the content they need for a book, they just need to organize, refine, and publish it.

This article is going to teach you how to turn your blog posts into a Kindle eBook, and publish it on Amazon for easy leads and passive income.

Choosing Your Topic

Unfortunately, creating an eBook isn’t as easy as copying and pasting the latest 10 posts from your blog into a word document and clicking publish. While you may already have a lot of your book’s content written, there is still a lot of additional work you have to do.

First of all, you’ll want to find one specific topic that you cover on your blog. The more specific, the better. I’m going to use my own site as an example. While this site covers many aspects of blogging and marketing, my example topic in this scenario is going to be Email marketing.

Start out by looking for the biggest and best posts on your site on the subject. In my case, this would be:

• 25 Guaranteed Ways To Increase Your Email Opt-Ins!
• Should You Use Email Pop-Ups? Do Email Pop-Ups Actually Work?
• Your Blog Is NOT A Business! (Discusses the importance of creating an email list and sales funnel)
• How $15 Could Have Saved Me Thousands (Discusses why you should NEVER use a free email marketing service)

Those four posts alone add up to about 7000 words – about 28 Kindle pages. This is already longer than many of the booklets people are paying several dollars for on the Kindle store. Let’s see how we could work these into a small book.

The main topic of the book could be increasing email opt-ins for bloggers. I could start out by explaining the importance of creating an email newsletter, and how it can be used to make money. I could then introduce the 25 ways to increase opt-ins to the reader’s email newsletter, and talk about pop-ups last (and go into an extreme amount of detail about them.) Finally, I could close out the book by discussing the importance of getting a good email marketing service from day one, and share my story to help reinforce my idea.

Of course, you can’t just put all of these posts together and leave it at that. Your book has to have some sort of structure. Unlike a series of blog posts, books are meant to be read from beginning to end without overlap. You’ll want to cut out unnecessary pieces of each blog post such as the intro or conclusion, remove links to other blog posts, and structure the content in a way that keeps the book flowing. This often means rewording entire paragraphs of text or moving things around.

Finally, I think it’s always a good idea to add a bit more to your Kindle book than JUST what’s available publicly on your blog. This ensures your current blog readers do not get pissed off by accidentally spending money on content that they’ve already read for free on your site.

This doesn’t have to be necessarily long – a few thousand words is more than enough. Especially since you shouldn’t be charging that much money for your books (we’ll talk more about that in a minute.)

How To Get Extremely Easy Leads With Kindle Publishing

You can make a good amount of money off of Kindle publishing, but the money you make from your readers does not have to end as soon as they’ve purchased your book. You can monetize your book further by persuading the reader to opt-in to your email newsletter on your site.

If somebody’s willing to pay for your book and read all the way through it, you bet they’d be willing to opt-in to your email newsletter without hesitation. ESPECIALLY if you offer some sort of lead magnet that ties into the content of the book.

Many people find success creating squeeze pages specifically tailored to people who have purchased the book. This adds to the exclusivity factor and makes your book buyers feel special, as if the opportunity to opt-in is only available to them. This encourages them to opt-in then and there, improving your squeeze page’s conversion rate.

In many cases, you’ll actually make more money from the leads the book generates than the actual book royalties itself. This is why it may make more sense to price your book low and push for volume.

Pricing Your Kindle eBook

I have original Kindle books (not stemmed from blog posts) published everywhere between 99 cents and $10. For books who’s content is mostly available online for free, it usually makes far more sense to price the book low and aim for a ton of sales rather than price the book at a premium and make more per sale.

Other than the leads you get (which are worth more than a few dollars anyway) you’ll also attract a ton of new loyal blog readers. I can not even begin to tell you how much my readership has increased on some of my other sites due to the small, 8000 word eBooks I’ve published on Kindle. Had I priced the book at something ridiculous like $10, I would not have half the readership or the email subscribers I do today.

Again, people who buy your book and read through it are already engaged. They like you. They like your content. Direct them to more of it, and you may just make a ton of money.

I recommend publishing all small eBooks for 99 cents, to try and get as many people as possible to buy them. While you’d make 6x more money per sale pricing it at $2.99 ($2.99-$9.99 pays a 70% royalty rather than 35%), you’ll make far more money from all of the extra leads.

Of course, you don’t have to listen to me. If you have a longer eBook of at least 10,000 words, you may wish to publish the book for $2.99 which would put you in the 70% royalty bracket.

In the end, I recommend playing around with price and finding what works best for you. You may find that 99 cents makes you so many more sales that you actually make more money from royalties as well than pricing your book at $2.99.

What About Free?

If you look around the Kindle store, you may find people offering their books for free. While Amazon doesn’t allow you to price your book at $0, there is a way to work around this and give away your book for free should you wish to do so.

All you’ve got to do is publish your book somewhere else for free (on another eBook retailer, or even on your own site) and tell Amazon to match the price. Shortly afterwards, your book will be free on the Kindle store, allowing you to get even MORE leads and readers should you wish to do so. Of course, these readers aren’t as engaged because they haven’t paid money for your book, but the volume may make up for that.

Keep in mind that once you make your book on Amazon free, you can not begin charging for it again later. The price-match is permanent and your book will remain free forever, even if you start charging for it everywhere else.

Is Charging For Public Blog Content Wrong or Immoral?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with charging for content that is publicly available. Even if people know the content is publicly available, many will still purchase it anyway. Why?

Convenience. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather pay a dollar for a bundle of blog posts than spend an hour of my time searching for them on the internet. I’d pay money for the convenience of having everything I need to know about a given subject all in once place.

I’m not the only one either, which is why so many books made up of blog posts still sell fantastically well. If you need proof of this, check out the reviews of Mark Cuban’s, “How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It.” The book is entirely composed of blog posts on Mark Cuban’s blog, yet thousands of people still willingly pay $2.99 for the book. Sure, they could take the time to look up all of the posts individually, but it’s a heck of a lot easier to just pay the few dollars for the book than to bother to find all of its content online.

If your book was just one really long blog post, it would be a different story. If you add anything else to increase the value of the book, it will justify its cost.

Other Important Things To Take Note Of:

KDP Select

When publishing on Kindle, Amazon will try to convince you to sign up to their KDP Select program. This program offers a number of benefits including free promotion days and higher royalty rates. The catch is your book must be published exclusively on Kindle, and the content must not be available anywhere else.

Obviously, because your eBook is composed of publicly available blog posts, you will be ineligible to publish your book through KDP Select. That’s fine, I personally do not think it’s all that great anyway. Especially since there are so many other retailers to sell your book on.

Smashwords

One of these retailers is Smashwords. Smashwords is great because once your book is approved with them, they give you the option to distribute your book to most other eBook retailers including Apple’s iBooks, Barnes And Noble’s Nook, Kobo, and more. In fact, the only major retailers they do not distribute to are Kindle and Google Play.

Having your book available in 10 different stores is a lot better than having it in just one! While Amazon has the largest market share, you can certainly make more money by appealing to all of the other markets as well.

Formatting

Amazon’s formatting requirements are fairly strict, and the formatting requirements for Smashwords are even stricter. I highly recommend reading through them before you begin writing your book, as it’s much easier to format as you go than to try and do it all afterwards.

If you don’t want to take the time to format your book for Kindle, hire me to do it for you!

Copyright

Amazon allows people to publish publicly available content so long as you own the copyright to it. Because your book is made up of publicly available blog posts, you may be asked to verify that you own the copyright to the book’s content.

DRM

I’m not a fan of DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) on eBooks. DRM forces your purchasers to read their book on only one device, preventing them from transferring your books to their computers, phones, or other Kindles. This is frustrating and many readers will not purchase a book if it has DRM enabled.

DRM is supposed to prevent piracy, but it doesn’t really do that great of a job at it anyway. A quick Google search will show you how to break the DRM on Kindle books, so it really doesn’t help you much.

Honestly, if you’re putting your books out to get leads piracy isn’t really that big of an issue. If anything, it gets you more leads and increases the exposure for your book.

Cover Design

We are told not to judge a book by it’s cover, but unfortunately most people do so anyway. Therefore, it’s extremely important you have a professional looking cover, and not a cover that looks like it was done by your 9-year-old cousin who is just learning how to use Photoshop.

Great looking covers can be purchased for as little as $5.50 through Fiverr. There are plenty of great designers available, simply do a search for “eBook covers,” sort by “High Rating,” and choose the person who’s style appeals to you the most.

Becoming A Successful Kindle Publisher

There’s certainly a lot that goes into becoming a successful Kindle publisher, far more than I can fit into just this one blog post.

If you want to learn how to truly succeed on Kindle, you’ll want to check out the course I’ve created on Kindle publishing.

Kindle eBook Publishing – Achieve Success With No Marketing covers everything from choosing profitable book topics, to writing great books quickly, to optimizing your books so they sell without any marketing whatsoever. There is no Kindle course on the market that is more complete than this one, and I guarantee it will save you a ton of time and money.

Conclusion

If you are a blogger, you now have no excuse not to publish your own book on the Kindle store. While it’s not as easy as throwing a bunch of blog posts into a Word document and clicking the publish button, your already existing blog articles will make a good basis for a short book. By publishing your eBook on Kindle, you’ll find yourself attracting a lot of new leads and readers, while also making a small amount of passive income as well.

If you have any questions about Kindle publishing or eBook creation, feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I’ll do my best to get back to you as soon as I can.

I’m looking forward to seeing your book in the Kindle store!