Creating and selling your own eBooks is a great idea for starting a home-based business. It’s not unlike selling information products, but you may choose to sell them through Kindle or other online methods and shops aside from your own website.

Getting started selling Kindle eBooks is inexpensive, and in fact it is currently free to upload and sell your eBook on Amazon Kindle. The only money you have to invest is really time to write the book and perhaps money for a graphic designer to develop a professional-looking book cover for you.

There are people who are making anywhere from zero money with eBooks to over $300K a year. There are success stories from people like John Lock who sold over two million dollars in eBooks before he got a deal with a publisher. Then there is the story of the teenager Amanda Hocking who made over a million dollars selling her thriller eBooks on Kindle before signing a publishing deal. There are also lesser-known successes where people are making a grand a month selling eBooks via Kindle and other avenues – such as PDFs from their own websites or via affiliate marketing channels like E-junkie.com.

The fact is, Amazon is selling more eBooks than paper books. People love reading on their mobile devices, and let’s face it – it saves the environment and costs you nothing to participate. All you have is the possibility to make money with no real expensive outlay if you write the books yourself. You can get a cover made on Fiverr.com or by a friend who is a graphic designer. You can even try making a book cover yourself if you want to.

If you put in the time and effort you can, over time, make a living with eBooks – whether you sell them via Kindle or on your own. People have been doing it for years before Kindle became popular, building literal empires selling PDF eBooks about a variety of topics from starting a business to building a back yard chicken coop. Just go take a look at the books you can read via ClickBank.com and E-junkie.com. In fact, most of the information products out there are really just eBooks. It’s a profitable business model, and you can earn a full-time living doing it.

Here are the basic steps you’ll need to follow:

Conduct research – Look at Amazon Kindle’s top 10 list and realize that you likely need to write about something in that top 10 to make that much money. You can also look at the top 10 by genre and see if you can fill out the topic with more information than what is already written, or present it in a different way.

Choose a niche – The best way to choose a niche is to choose one which you enjoy reading about yourself and that you’re passionate about. If your niche has plenty of followers and fans, then you may have a good choice. If it’s kind of out there, you may want to choose something that you may be a little less passionate about but where other people also share the passion. There are some niches that will always be popular: weight loss, fitness, personal empowerment, self-help and also business books such as “How to______ in business”.

Create the eBook – Now you need to write the eBook using your research, and following the guidelines of the place you plan to distribute it. For instance, with Kindle you need to read their guidelines to ensure that you have formatting correct so that readers get the best possible experience reading your book. Don’t skimp on outlining the book and creating it in an organized manner.

Promote your eBook – After you’ve finished the process and uploaded your book, the work begins. It’s important to promote your eBook just like you would any other product or service that you seek to sell. Even if you did get a publisher, they don’t spend time marketing for people who are unknown, so it’s important that you get known. Create a blog, a social networking community, and work hard to promote your book to everyone.

Don’t stop there; do the process over again. The more good books you have written, the better you’ll be perceived by others and the more likely people are to buy from you. By following these steps, and being realistic about the amount of work necessary to make money writing eBooks, you will be more likely to put in the work necessary to make a living with eBooks. You can make as much money as you want to based on the amount of effort you put into it.