7 Home Business Ideas for People Who Love Books
One lovely thing about side hustles is that your side hustle could be borne out of something you enjoy doing. The kind of passions that could generate income for you includes painting, teaching, writing, and even reading!
People who love books can start home businesses of their own, and here are six ideas to consider.
1. Start a Book Blog or Podcast
Bibliophiles can get into the blogging industry. These are quite popular among writers and readers seeking exposure for their works.
However, you must be ready to do more than just create content that resonates with your passion. You must be ready to treat your blog like a total business. Especially considering that the marketplace has become crowded, it is important to be able to stand out with your brand.
The way you can leverage this industry is to focus on a niche area or market group where you can compete favorably and gain authority, while you spread your tentacles gradually later on.
You can create content on reviews of books that you have written. You could do a videocast, podcast, or you may want to combine weekly podcasts with blogging.
Some of the ways you can earn through this medium are to sell books as an affiliate marketer, leverage contextual Advertising such as Google AdSense, sell ads space for authors and publishers, offer to review a book for a fee, among others.
Your key focus should be to generate avid readers for your blog. You cannot determine the extent to which you can earn.
2. Become a Book Reviewer
You can get paid for reading and reviewing published books. Blogging is one nice way to earn from book reviews but you may also want to pitch yourself as a freelance reviewer or review on other platforms.
You can review blogs, magazines, or newspapers. You can also look for review jobs on platforms such as freelance job sites.
3. Write Books
It is often said that 81% of people have a book in them, but only 1% put them into actual writing. You may be in the category of the one per cent of people that are ready to express what you have inside of you.
Writing books can generate huge revenue for you, but they aren’t part of the great ways to earn through books. Many authors are not lucky to sell up to 5,000 copies of their works. In fact, many only end up selling only a few copies. But then, if you have a great book produced with a well-crafted marketing strategy, you’ll cash out big on your books.
There are diverse options you can leverage to sell your books. For instance, you can pitch with an agent or publisher directly via a synopsis (fiction) or proposal (non-fiction) and a query.
You can also leverage any of the affordable or free services to self-publish your e-book or print book.
Hybrid publishing companies can also offer you both services. These companies can vet authors as traditional publishers do and provide access to their editors, marketing experts, and cover designers.
4. Begin an Editing Service
Publishing has been made easy with a lot of online platforms such as Amazon. You can get your publication out with little investment without the need to involve traditional publishers and agents. But beyond publishing books, the books need to be discovered by potential readers and enjoyed. Hence, the need for editors.
As an editor, you must be well inclined in the use of words, writing styles, sentence structure, and other factors that is suitable for a particular genre of book you are editing. You may just want to engage in basic copy editing where you’ll only have to correct grammar and punctuation.
You can also consider line editing which puts word choice, flow, and paragraph structure into context. And then, you can do developmental editing, which refers to evaluating the content. You’ll need to see the flow of the story if the characters are well developed, the pacing of the story, and others.
Your level of depth will determine how much you can earn from the service. But it is important to understand everything necessary about story development and the writing craft to be able to offer developmental editing.
Begin by creating a personal website, or social platform that help to outline what you do, along with samples of your work and references.
Then, network with other authors to get referrals. If you are just starting out, you may want to offer free sample edits to potential clients to get your job seen. You should also consider creating your own profile on freelance platforms.
You have high earning potential as an editor. You can earn between$25 to $50 per hour, while some clients will prefer to work per page, which can go anywhere from $4 to $7.50.
5. Rent or Sell Used Books
Selling used books on sites like Amazon, used to be a goldmine way back. But since there has grown intense competition in that regard, with many used books being sold for just a penny, it has become a bit hard. But you can still take advantage of speciality books, such as textbooks, unlike just selling any kind of book.
Students are constantly on the lookout for cheap textbooks, especially since a single new one can cost up to $300 or more. But they can find used ones for sale or rent from you at a much-reduced cost. The books can be sold online on platforms like BookScouter or eBay.
6. Become a Publisher
Writers need publishers to help them get their books to the world. Many of them do not know how they can publish their books, but you can help them with a different range of publishing services.
You can serve as an editor, format for print and ebooks, create cover designs, and also submit to publishers such as Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. And even when you do not have the knowledge or skill for any of the services, you can hire contractors to perform the task while you serve as the company CEO or project manager.
You can offer a one-time fee for all the services. You can also kick off a full-fledged publishing company where you’ll publish books in your name and pay authors royalties.
7. You Can Also Become A Book Agent
If you are a bookworm, you can offer to help other great readers get their books to the world by becoming a literary agent. Your job as a literary agent is to locate manuscripts and help the author to improve them, and further submit them for consideration to appropriate publishers. If the book sells, you’ll receive a percentage of the advance (if there is one) and royalties for as long as the book is printed by the publishing house.
As a literary agent, you must have a good eye for what publishers want to have in a book. Most agents feature specific topics or genres. For instance, an agent might choose to work with authors who write nonfiction business books, mysteries, or children’s books.
Agents must understand business, book contracts, have mediation skills to help mediate between authors and their editors. It is also important to network with other agents and editors. You will find many of them on social media.
One challenge with becoming successful in this area is the length of time it can take to generate an income. Agents do not get paid until the authors have been paid. Authors also only get paid after a book has been sold to a publisher. Most publishers pay the royalties of their authors once in six months.
The point from when you take on an author to when a publisher buys the manuscript could take up to a year. The book getting published could take another one year and six months. If there was an advance, the author may not still get royalties quickly as well.