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Comment by SN76477 | Hacker News Reader

I work in digital marketing. There is a whole scene of guys that do nothing but create simple digitally published ebooks. They will research the market for the niche. Research the topic in depth (something like frying chicken can be deciphered and recipe and method variations can be collected in 20 hours) Then create content on the niche and sell it. Even a $3 ebook can make several thousand dollars a year.

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A friend of mine does exactly this with self-help books (NLP, hypnosis, dating, how to quit smoking etc.). He makes in the low five figures a month with this business. He identifies niches, by now using his existing audience. For example, he once had a blog post on a subject that received surprisingly many views. So he hired a writer to write a book about it, and then marketed it through his channels. It's surprisingly lucrative.

As someone who actually likes books, this makes me sad. Leanpub and Gumrroad are already full of quite mediocre content, to the point that I avoid them altogether--which is a shame, since there are some serious self-published authors that would benefit from a good platform. These cheap ebooks (e-brochures?) also made their way into Amazon, which really annoys me.

How do they get traffic to it? I'd imagine the vast majority of time is spent on marketing and not on content creation.

I just checked then. Say you write a book with the title "Cooking with Buttermilk" and built a unique book page you are likely to rank on the first page pretty easily for the search "cooking with buttermilk book".

With a book you can always pull out excerpts for SEO value too.

I would image if you could churn reasonable content for a low price this might be a sustainable business model, assuming you can pick the right topics.

>buttermilk

>churn

I see what you did there.

I wonder how many hits HN will get because of these key words, and a few others here.

as always, the question is how to locate the niche...

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