🤑He Made $9K with Public Domain Books on Amazon

In case you missed it as I published on a Saturday, you can read my latest update on how my site SEEMS to be continuing in its good graces with the big G.

Today, I have an online business idea for you that is eminently doable and might make you some nice monthly passive income…

Jason Hamilton is “The Nerdy Novelist” on YouTube. He helps writers to use AI to write and market books.

It’s the kind of channel Shawna Newman (a big fan of this approach) must be subscribed to (“Hi!” if you’ve opened this email Shawna - I bet you have!).

Anyway, Jason published a video about how he has made $9K so far with editing Public Domain books and selling them on Amazon.

These are books where their copyright has expired after a certain time period. This time period varies by country, but once it has expired, you are free to do what you want with the work and be as creative as you like! (Keeping in legal, obvs).

In a nutshell, here’s what you do:

• Find a public domain book in your target market

• Research the competition (too popular and you’ll struggle to get any visibility, too obscure you’ll…struggle to get any visibility!). The sweet spot is somewhere in between.

• Make significant changes to the book so that it clearly offers something different/more to the original. This might be a translation, new imagery, annotations, or even a new or adapted version (why not give that a bash?!).

You need to take particular care to ensure the book is actually in the public domain in your market, and you have the rights to any new images you create (even with AI). You need to do your due diligence before you start.

Anyway, I’ll post the video below, but before you start watching, here are the pros and cons of this model as I see it, based on my initial brief research from the video.

Quick poll…should I start a Niche Ranger Online Community?

One second - I’m thinking of starting a Niche Ranger online community, most likely on the Skool platform. This would be a place for us to chat, share what we’re working on, get inspiration, discover new tactics and strategies, ask questions, get feedback on our ideas, and more…!

Would you be interested in seeing such a community? The signup fee would be reasonable - thinking like $10-15/month or something for the founding members.

Please vote below (takes a second):

So, back to the Pros and Cons of this model

Pros

• Easy to start, minimal investment required (maybe some tools, design costs, etc.)

• A fresh batch of books go public domain each year, so you have plenty to choose from.

• You can get really creative because you can pretty much use someone else’s work as you wish!

• You could make some nice passive income (perhaps a few hundred dollars per month, depending on various factors of course), although you will likely need to develop a few books to achieve this. Of course, you could make nothing either, or even lose money.

Cons

• It feels like there is real art to picking a good book - one that is popular but without being TOO popular. If you are looking to adapt or modify an Agatha Christie book but you have 15 results on Amazon for the title you want, you might not have hope of even getting seen, never mind making any sales.

• If you are going Kindle-only, which you most likely are, some of the books are crazy cheap. Like I saw one today on sale for $0.25! You’d need to shift a lot of words to make anything there, unless you had the top spot or were ranking high.

• As I said above and as Jason alludes to, you will most likely need to have a variety of books on the go as some will do ok, some will flop and you might have one or two solid successes. This will most likely require lots of research and well, work.

Still, I like this model and it feels like there would be an art to this, and it could be fun to do.

I like books, I like publishing, and I’ve made some very modest but 100% passive income with Amazon KDP before. So it is totally a viable model.

Plus, I know people are killing it with KDP. Do you know anyone who is? Let me know!

That’s all for today, stay tuned for more this week. And here’s the video! Jason does go into detail on the step here with this recorded-live video, so do watch if you are interested!

Best,
Anton

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