Selling eBooks as online courses is one of the most profitable ventures for authors today. If you have been publishing and selling ebooks on Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and other online stores, you may have to look at selling your ebooks as online courses.
I will be using this post to share our experiences with you so that you can get motivated and inspired to try this out. I will be using a future post to share the steps by steps process of turning your eBooks into online courses
Related: How I publish books on Amazon KDP
Selling eBooks as online courses: Our experience
We decided to start turning some of our books into online courses to sell online in our bid to diversify our earnings and to ensure Amazon does not remain the only platform we sell books.
Related: 10 places to publish your ebooks online
Other formats of ebooks
First, you should know your published ebooks can exist in many forms other than ebooks or paperback books.
Ebooks can be packaged as:
- Videos
- Online courses
- Podcasts
- Blogs etc.
So we are still talking about books when we talk about online courses.
Selling eBooks as online courses: Udemy
We started with the biggest platform for online courses online – udemy.com
What a platform this has been for us. This is the Amazon for online courses online. We started about three years or so and we have drawn some passive income from this platform even without paid ads.
We can still push this up with ads though. It’s just that we don’t know the right place to advertise courses on Udemy. I am not a big fan of Facebook ads.
I have also received some emails from those who took our online courses on udemy.com offering ads services. We have not used any of them.
What Udemy gives you
The truth is that Udemy gives extra promotions to the courses on its platform. Though, if you sell any course through their self-sponsored ads, you will receive a lower royalty.
Related: Check out the great deals on offer for you on our various bestselling publishing resources
Selling eBooks as online courses: 10 published courses
We now have about 10 online courses on this platform. We have lots of enrolled students and reviews on our online courses at Udemy.
The good news is that Udemy now pays by Payoneer. It used to be by PayPal alone. So you have another payment option to consider.
Other Udemy alternatives
There are other Udemy alternatives to sell online courses online but a lot are not reliable. We tried some of them but our experience with some is not too good at all.
Learndesk.us for example was a bad experience. You should watch out for that. The CEO, Vivien Puri is deceitful.
We canceled our account and up till today, Learndesk has failed to pay our royalties. When we applied for the cancelation of our account, we were told that our royalties will be paid after one year!
We waited and it’s over one and a half years now, Puri and Learndesk have stopped responding to our emails. Please avoid Learndesk as much as possible.
How to create an online course
I know the question on your mind now is how do I create an online course and how do I publish it on Udemy?
Really we have not done an ebook or an online course on this but we hope to do it very very soon. We will even do a post on it.
You can visit our profile link on Udemy
