I recently released an e-book on Amazon Kindle using public domain nautical-themed books, such as Moby Dick, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, etc. and have made a couple hundred dollars off of it since September without doing any marketing. I have made a few thousand dollars running Google ad campaigns for our family's construction company, which seems a lot more productive in a time/money reward sense. Little tip about Amazon I learned the hard way; if you take their higher percentage program, you will be majorly penalized for the size of the book, which I am sure some of the tech background people here would tell you is a ridiculous and unreasonable policy. I shaved my e-book as much as I could and still ended up with a 14 megabyte file and didn't realize for the first month that no royalties were happening because every sale I made was technically negative, based on the file size penalties, lol. The lower percentage royalty program is 35% but has no size restriction penalties. I used public domain texts and ran the HTML files through Calibre to make a Kindle file that was ready for Amazon. I used Calibre because apparently the Kindle software is a little bloated, but I never verified this. There are quickstart guides for Calibre and I managed to do the whole book from start to finish in a weekend with no prior knowledge. It is not performing well on its own, but ten of these would make a real difference in personal financial freedom.
I am wanting to transition out of residential construction (especially with the market and economy beating us up over the last few years) and do much cooler stuff, like the "Duke of Permaculture" Mr. Paul Wheaton, Jack Spirko, etc. I am a complete newbie to Permaculture and stumbled into it last Summer after hearing The Survival Podcast and getting hooked, and Paul has another infected brain under his belt. We sold our spec home 1 year ago and rented a farm house in Tennessee and got some chickens, before learning about Permaculture. I want to document our very beginning attempts at poly-culturing a decent sized mulched, no-till garden and the hopefully productive results in a Youtube video series to help generate ad revenue. Basically in the vein of, this guy never planted a garden in his life, and now with these concepts, is cutting his family grocery bill and building soil. Also want to do a newbie video series on a Rocket Mass Heater in a woodworking shop, possibly integrating cob into a workbench... Any thoughts and/or experiences in relation to this type of income would be very much appreciated.
