Tips to Earn Money Online #1

First of all, what exactly is the public domain?

The wikipedia definition is: An intellectual property designation for the range of content that is not owned or controlled by anyone. Simply put, it’s material you can freely use without infringing copyright.

There are four categories of information in the public domain:

1. Work published before 1923
2. Works granted or donated to the public domain
3. Works of the government or its agents.
4. Formerly copyrighted works that have fallen into the public domain or have lost their copyright due to a number of different situations

Now you may be wondering “why would anyone pay for it if it’s available for free?” Well that’s a myth. The truth is that every year bookstores sell hundreds of thousands of copies of works that are in the public domain and simply reprinted. One of Amazon’s best sellers is a work in the public domain: The Art of War.

As long as the information you provide is relevant, people will pay for it, especially if you make it easy for them. For example, if you turn it into an ebook that’s ready to download to your Kindle reader.

So where do you find public domain books that are already digitized? A useful site to use is www.gutenberg.org. I personally prefer to download the html version and copy the content to word. When you download the Gutenberg book, be sure to read their terms of use before publishing the book.

After copying the book into a Word document, I do 2 simple things to make it easy on the reader’s eyes:

1. Insert a page break at the end of each chapter so that the next chapter always starts on a new page.
2. Insert page numbers at the bottom of each page.
3. Insert a table of contents at the beginning for quick reference. This step can be skipped if you find it too cumbersome.

Now, to publish the book, I save it in Word format or print it as a PDF. And voila, you are now ready to publish the book on Amazon!

Happy to make money online!