How To Sell Ebooks Without Writing One From Scratch

There is a way to sell an ebook without writing one, and most people either have never heard of it or have heard of it in a context that made it sound faintly disreputable. It is neither secret nor shady. You buy a finished book together with a licence that permits you to resell it, you put your own name and cover on it, and you sell it. Publishers have licensed content to each other on these terms for a very long time. The only new part is that individuals can now do it for the price of a meal out.

What You Are Actually Buying

You are buying two separate things and it helps to keep them separate in your head. The first is the file, the finished manuscript and usually the cover and the source documents. The second, and the more important one, is the licence, which is the written permission describing what you are allowed to do with the file. The file is the easy part. The licence is what determines whether you actually have a business or just a book you paid for.

• Read the licence before you buy, not after. Anybody selling this properly publishes it. If it is hard to find, that itself is the answer.
• Check whether you may change the text. Most licences of this kind allow it, and changing it is how the book stops being identical to everyone else's copy.
• Check whether you may put your own name on it as author or publisher, because the answer is not automatic and it varies.
• Check whether you may pass the resale right on to your buyer, or whether your buyer only gets to read it. These are different products and they sell to different people at different prices.
• Check whether there is a price floor. Some licences set a minimum you may sell at, which exists to stop the market being destroyed by a race to nothing.

Why This Is A Sensible First Attempt

The argument for starting this way is not that writing is too hard. It is that writing and selling are two completely different skills, and attempting both at once means that when it does not work you cannot tell which one failed. Starting with a finished book isolates the variable. The product is known to be competent. If nobody buys, the problem is your listing, your price, your audience or your description, and every one of those is fixable this week. That is a much better position than staring at a manuscript wondering whether the book itself was the issue.

There is a second benefit that people underrate. Selling somebody else's book teaches you what buyers of that subject actually ask before they buy. You collect the real objections, the real questions, the phrasing people use. If you later write your own book on that subject, you write it already knowing all of that, which is an enormous advantage over writing it blind and hoping.

Where People Go Wrong With It

• Changing nothing at all. If you upload it exactly as supplied, you are one of many identical listings and you compete only on price, which is the worst position available. Change the title, the cover and the opening.
• Buying a stack of them. Ten books you have not sold is not ten times the business of one book you have sold. It is a folder. Sell one first.
• Picking by what looks easy to sell rather than by what you know something about. You still have to write the listing and answer the questions, and that is much harder on a subject you do not care about.
• Ignoring the licence terms when reselling to somebody who also wants to resell. If you pass on a right you were not granted, the problem lands on you and not on whoever sold it to you.

None of this is a route to something for nothing. You still have to build a page, write a description, set a price and find the person who wants it, and that work is the real work in every version of this business, written by you or not. What you have removed is the months of writing, which for somebody with a full time job is often the difference between starting and not.

It is also worth setting expectations about the subject matter on offer. Books sold with resale rights cluster in a handful of areas, because those are the areas where demand is steady enough to justify writing one on spec. You will find a great deal on business, marketing, health, self improvement and household subjects, and very little on anything narrow or technical. If your interest sits outside those clusters, this route may simply not have a book for you, and that is a fair reason to write your own instead. What you should not do is pick a subject you have no interest in purely because a licence happened to be available, because you will still have to write the listing and answer every question a buyer asks.

Our shelf of ready made books sold with resale rights starts at $11.99, and each one ships with a stamped licence certificate in your own name so you can always show what you were granted.