how I make money writing books online | Passive Income Ideas

How I Wrote & Self-Published My Book (for Free) To Make Money Online

Entrepreneurship & Business / Make Money

How To Create and Sell Your Ebook for FREE + Get Paperback or Hard Copies Made! This is EXACTLY How I Make Money Online Writing Books! Looking for EASY Passive Income Ideas? There are tons of people making money writing books online as ebooks and offline as physical paper copies! Launch An E-Book Using THIS Strategy!

I’m covering everything about How To Write A Book: from how to create an ebook for free to where to sell ebooks and how to make money writing short stories! Plus, did you know? You can Write An Entire Ebook in 24 hours using ChatGPT and Make Money Online Every Week on Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing)!

No joke you can learn How to Write an eBook in minutes and Make Money Selling eBooks Online with ChatGPT and AmazonKDP! A Quick Google Search will populate many stories of others sharing “How I Made Money With ChatGPT eBook Automation” 

Learn everything you need to know about how to make money writing books! Think of this as a Free Course on how to earn money from writing books! Including all the mistakes I made writing my own book!

PS I made you a video to go along with this (watch it down below)

How I Wrote + Self-Published My Book (and Started Making Money Online for FREE)

If you love to write, then you’re going to love this post! I’m sharing how to make money online—passive income—by writing and publishing a book. I’ll tell you how I wrote my own book, how I put it online, and how you can do it too. The best part? It’s pretty much free to do!

So if you’ve ever dreamed of writing a book and making passive income from it, keep reading. I’m going to share everything I know about doing it yourself and self-publishing.

Who Am I?

If we haven’t officially met, I’m Blogging Brandi—an ex-corporate Kool-Aid drinker, born-to-be creator, digital nomad, and entrepreneur. You can usually find me in my RV, a hotel, Airbnb, or condo… working from anywhere—because I’ve found ways to make passive income.

One of those ways is by writing books online.

Yes, Writing a Book Is FREE!

Let’s be clear: writing a book is completely free. Sure, you might want to hire someone or get some help, which I’ll talk about in a minute. But if you want to do it all yourself, you totally can.

You don’t need:

  • A publisher
  • A big platform
  • A fancy budget

You can literally write a document and sell it yourself! But I’ll show you how to make it a little more professional than that.

My Book: Brand Like a Boss

The book I wrote—Brand Like a Boss—was written and self-published completely for free. The only thing I paid for was ordering printed drafts (a couple of bucks each).

Here’s the thing: when I wrote the book, I went by the name Bloggin Brandi—now I go by Blogging Brandi. That’s part of my rebranding journey (yes, kind of ironic since the book is about branding 😅).

Another mistake?
When I wrote and self-published my first book, there were no page numbers in it! But here’s the cool part: if you have an eBook, you can update it anytime. When someone redownloads it, they get the new version.

So yes—I had to spend time updating my book and fixing those things.

Not Ready to Write It Yet? Try a Pre-Launch

If you’re feeling unsure about getting started, try a pre-launch.

I gave myself 90 days to write and publish my book. You can even start selling your book before it’s finished, so you’ll have some money coming in and a little less pressure to finish it.

Here’s how I did it:

📚 Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing)

  • It’s free.
  • You can list your book for pre-sale.
  • People can pre-order your book while you’re still writing it.
  • You can now schedule your release up to a year out.

I’ll drop a link to Amazon KDP below this post so you can check it out for yourself.

Writing + Formatting Your Book

I used Google Docs (part of Google Workspace) to write my book. You can also use:

  • Microsoft Word
  • Apple Pages

Then I uploaded it to Amazon, and the software formats it for you—super easy.

These days, with tools like ChatGPT, you could even get help writing your book if you’re stuck!

Short vs. Long Books (Yes, Short Counts!)

Your book doesn’t have to be long. Mine is about 123 pages, but the online version might be 70–80 pages. It all depends on the size and formatting you choose.

You can write:

  • A short story
  • A mini-guide
  • A series of short books

Think of it like a TV show vs. a movie. You can even bundle short pieces into one longer book later.

Where I Got Help

While I wrote the content myself, I hired help for:

  • Book cover design
  • Formatting

Here’s what I used:

  • Fiverr* — Hired people to help with design.
  • Canva — Used it to create my book covers and social graphics myself.

Canva even lets you design the spine, back cover, and everything else!

Turning a Book into a Business

Inspired by The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss (the book that helped me quit my corporate job), I took things further.

Here’s what I did:

💡 I created a whole brand:

What started as a book became a brand and a business.

Tools I Used to Build My Online Business

  • Domain Names: I bought howtobrandlikeaboss.com and blabossinc.com
  • Website: Built on GoDaddy using their WordPress Managed Hosting
  • Email List: Started free with Mailchimp

I’ll drop links to all of these tools below the video or post so you can check them out!

>> READ: How I Started A Very Much Loved Business Blog

Why I Love Amazon KDP

Once your book is uploaded to Amazon:

  • You can update it anytime
  • People can buy the digital or print version
  • Amazon has a built-in audience of buyers

So even if you never build a website, you can still make passive income just by having your book on Amazon.

In Summary…

Writing a book has been one of the most powerful ways I’ve created passive income.

What started as just an idea turned into:

  • A book
  • A blog
  • A brand
  • A business
  • A digital product ecosystem

Let’s Talk!

Have you ever thought about writing a book? Have you already started one?
Drop a comment below—I’d love to hear how this resonated with you!

And of course…

👉 If you enjoyed this post:

  • Hit the like button
  • Subscribe to my YouTube channel
  • Tap the bell icon so you’re notified when I publish another video on making money online, passive income, and digital nomad life.

Thanks so much for reading (or watching). I love you, and I’ll see you in the next one.

Stop drinking the corporate Kool-Aid… no more! 🙅‍♀️

⬇️ Get The Book: How To Brand Like A Boss ⬇️

BLABoss Book cover NEW
>> Get The Book! <<

>> ✅ DOWNLOAD My ULTIMATE GUIDE to making money online from anywhere! <<

Related Videos You’ll Enjoy:

ABOUT

If we haven’t officially met Hi, I’m Blogging Brandi, an EX-Corporate Kool-Aid Drinker, born to be blogger, Female Entrepreneur, and Digital Nomad who LOVES RV Living, since it keeps me close to Nature! All though you can catch me from time to time on an airplane, in a hotel, Airbnb, as I can WORK FROM ANYWHERE not just my RV. I’m also an all-natural, introverted, God Fearing, Rescue Dog Mom, but most importantly a Writer and Creator! I believe you can have many passions, create multiple streams of income, and don’t have to conform to the norm!

Video Transcript:

00:00

if you love to write then you’re going to love this video because I’m teaching you how to make money online passive income online writing a book and how I was able to write my own book and put it online and so I wanted to give you some tips and tricks for how to do that and how I was able to do it and actually it’s pretty much free to do it so if you love to write and you want to write a book I’m going to tell you everything I know about doing it yourself and self-publishing if we haven’t officially

00:32

met I’m blogging Brandy an ex-corporate Kool-Aid Drinker Born to Be Creator digital Nomad and entrepreneur and you can usually find me in my RV but a hotel Airbnb the condo you can find me working from anywhere because I found ways to make passive income and one of those ways is with writing books online writing a book is completely free obviously you might want to hire somebody or get some help and I’m going to tell you about that here soon how I’ve done that and gotten help with my

01:05

book over time but you can do this yourself you don’t have to have any help so the first thing I want to tell you is that it’s free so it’s free to write a book you can post it online and get people to buy it and you don’t even have to have a platform to sell it on such as like Amazon or the online platforms you could just sell it yourself you could put it in a document and sell it but I’m going to teach you how to do a little bit more professional that so it’s free it’s free to do this and my book that

01:30

that I wrote I wrote completely free this didn’t cost me anything other than ordering these drafts which were a couple bucks to order this was the book it’s called brand like a boss this is my book and I I’ve redone the cover a little bit now this is an older draft but the other thing is that when I wrote this book I was going by the name b o gg i n blogin Brandy and now I go by the name blogging Brandy that’s a little bit of I don’t want to say a screw up but a rebr branding process and it’s kind of

02:01

ironic the whole book is about branding and I rebranded myself so I have to actually Rebrand the book now but if you want to learn about branding and how I did this you can actually pick up this book I’ll put a link to it below this video and you can grab this on Amazon I also like to call it blab so if you go to how to Brand like a boss I’ll teach you how to blab so people can blab about your brand and I created social media accounts for this and everything so this is like a product but a business and

02:29

I’ll tell you more about that in just a second the one thing I’ll tell you is the mistakes I made in this one mistake I made right now is this rebranding issue that I have right now so whatever name you want to go by that’s the name you want to put on your stuff and not have to change it also with this I don’t have any page numbers if you look at the book there’s no page numbers in it that’s another part about this but the good thing is with the platforms online if you have an ebook and online

03:00

book you can actually just update it and then it gets updated and so whenever somebody redownload the book then all the new updates are on there you can also update your book re-upload it back online and then when people buy the new version or a newer version then they get the updates and whatnot so I’m in the process of doing that on my book now the other thing I wanted to tell you if you’re like okay well I really want to get started writing and I want to write a book but you know I’m kind of iffy

03:23

about it well I get myself 90 days so you can do a pre-launch before you even write it you could get people to buy the book so you have money coming in and you’re like okay I’ve already sold this many copies or I know how much money I’m going to have and be able to write the book with a little bit less stress so the way that I’ve found to do this is Amazon’s Kindle Direct publishing okay and I should have mentioned that earlier but I put this on Amazon Amazon’s KDP Kindle Direct publishing allows me to

03:49

publish my book and do all of this for free 90 days was it at the time I gave myself to publish this book but I think now you can do a year out so you can put it up there that hey in 90 days my book’s coming out and I think you can even change the date or move the date up however it works for you I do that on Amazon’s KDP Kindle Direct publishing I’ll put a link to it below video so you can check that out but you can plan your book out and start writing it now even though you don’t have it to sell yet you

04:17

can start selling it even though you don’t physically have the book you can start selling it the next thing that I kind of mentioned was Google Docs and Microsoft Word or Apple Pages could do this for you but I love Google Docs and I use it online I use Google workspace and I’ll put a link to that below this video it’s more for like businesses and managing once you get a business online but you can use Google Drive as well it’s free version but I use the Google workspace and create Google Docs and put

04:48

all of this titling and transcript into a document and then you upload the document on your computer to the software on Amazon or whatever platform you’re going to use and it literally creates the book for you so you don’t have to do any of the work it does it all for you and nowadays with things like chat GPT you could probably even have them write a book for you and upload that to Amazon I know tons of people are doing that speaking of that when it comes to writing your book I don’t want you to think that your book

05:18

has to be long this book I want to say it’s 123 Pages uh maybe the online version is like 70 or 80 pages I can’t remember you can do a long version of your book or you can do a short version of your book so you can tell short stories say that you have a series coming out and you want to do just many stories you can do short stories on Amazon and get paid for those you don’t have to sell long versions of these books maybe you take a compilation of the short stories and put them into a

05:48

longer book kind of like how people have a TV show versus like the movie think about it like that it’s up to you maybe you want to write just short versions of things and sell those and see how that works first and make a longer version another thing I want to tell you is how to get help so I actually got help designing not this cover but another cover for one of my other books because I did write a short story or a short version it was called how to name your business I believe and I was going to

06:14

write a whole series but I end up just writing a book so I’ll put a link to it below this video I’m pretty sure you can buy it s if you can I’ll put a link to it you can check that out if you want but it was a short story and so I got help with like the cover and the text been hiring people on fiverr.com if you haven’t heard of that it will change your life and also without hiring help but maybe getting Design Elements I use coma um C A NV a I think I’m spelling that out of my head but it helped me

06:50

create all of my book cover text and you can do the labeling on the spine and even the back and how I’ve done all my designs online how I promote my book how I do everything Fiverr you can get people to help you com you’re helping yourself I think you can actually hire people on there somewhere but I’ve never hired anybody I just use it for myself so I’ll put links to that below this video but I I design everything in there from my book title to all my social media graphics and everything that I’m

07:18

going to promote this book with another thing that I did and I took this a step further because I kind of took this idea from the 4our work week in Tim Ferris a book that actually caused me to quit my job which I talked about in a prior video about my resignation letter and quitting my job but it was this book that I read so it was the 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris it kind of gave me some ideas about what I could do for passive income or making money online and I’m just a writer at heart if you

07:46

don’t know that and so I got the idea about writing this book it helped me so I’ll put a link to that book uh below this video as well but what I did with that book I noticed that Tim Ferris took the book and then he made like a online website for all the links that he mentioned in the book for instance I mention in the book like okay you could design and brand your business on coma and so I would put a link to that and say like in the book I would say something like don’t forget that you can

08:17

go get all these tools and resources on brand likeaboss docomo to Brand like a boss.com put it right here I can’t even talk to you right now but see I put this in here and I was like oh you can go get all the tools and resources for the things that I mentioned and people could get them since you had this paper copy with you you didn’t really like have all the resources right here so I made it that you could get them on the website and I have a email list set up as well so I created my book and turned it into a

08:48

Blog and made it a website so I bought a domain obviously I bought how to Brand like a boss.com and I bought black boss in.com which which is the website and I turned like all these chapters into blog posts and I created videos and tutorials to go along with the book and so I really turned it into a business so I turned the book into a Blog and a business and you can vote calls with me you can take courses I’ve made courses out of this I even have T-shirts and mugs and cups and things that people could buy with the

09:25

name on it I turned the whole thing into bigger than a book okay it was bigger than a book but I bought the domain name I bought two domain names like I mentioned and then I did the website on GoDaddy so I created a website it literally takes like 5 minutes I bought the domain name on GoDaddy and I built the website with godaddy’s WordPress manage hosting which I’ll put a link to below this video you can check that out and you can also find all the things that I mentioned on blogging br.com the

09:52

website I built with GoDaddy took a matter of minutes you literally just put in like your name and a couple things and it will build it for you and you can customize it and then I built an email list So for anybody that got the book and they bought it on those platforms or maybe before I sold the book I was like hey get all my email list so you know when I have the book published but having an email list is essential so I created an email list absolutely free on mailchimp.com and then I’ve kind of like built up from

10:19

there I’ll put links to all the things that I mentioned of course on my website blog.com and I’ll put links below this video to everything I can fit in the description here writing a book has just been one way that I’ve been able to make passive income and so yeah you can update this once a year or every so often but the book is done the book is done and I can continuously update it year after year or I don’t really have to do anything and people can just go buy it and so I have these online tools

10:45

and resources that go with it as well and it’s just this full circle thing and so people can sign up for the email list they can get the book they can take a course they can read the blog post they can watch YouTube videos this is essentially a passive stream of income but it’s more than just a book it’s a Blog it’s a website there’s merchandise to purchase there’s so many other things that go into this and so I hope that makes sense that this is way bigger than a book at this point that’s what I did

11:15

to write a book and did it completely free and put it up on Amazon’s KDP and then of course you can start you know writing this stuff and keeping it for yourself not keeping it for yourself but putting it on your own website or maybe like publishing your own stuff but I like Amazon because I don’t have to do anything and they already have a built-in audience so when people are searching online for where to buy something they can just download it on Amazon it’s already a platform that they

11:42

buy on and they can pick this up download on their phone or on their computer their Kindle or whatever it is that they read on so that’s how I wrote my own book and how you can too so I want to hear your comments I want to know what questions you have have you ever written a book have you ever thought about written a book drop a comment below this video and let me know how this video resonates with you and of course if you like this video and you want me to make more videos like this please pleas please let me know by

12:10

hitting the like button below subscribing to my channel and tapping that little bell icon you’re notified each and every time I publish another one of these amazing videos about making money online and all the other fun stuff that we talk about over here until the next time I’ll put links to everything that I mentioned below this video in the description also on my blog brandy.com and that’s where you can find all that and you can check out some more fun videos that have to do with making money

12:37

online and passive income and all of that in a playlist below this video that I’ll drop a link to I can’t wait to see you in the next video so thanks for watching this one I love you and I’ll see you then stop drinking the corporate Kool-Aid no more [Music]

#PassiveIncome #PassiveIncomeIdeas #MakeMoneyOnline #Writing #OnlineIncome #OnlineBusiness #BloggingBrandi #BLABoss #BLABossInc #Author #Entrepreneur #Blogger #Blogging #AmazonKDP #OnlineBusinessIdeas #DigitalNomad #MakeMoney #ChatGPT #Money #DigitalEntrepreneur #SideHustle #WorkFromHome

You might also like…

>> 📚 Get MY BOOK “Brand Like A Boss” on Amazon!

Affiliate Disclaimer Note that blog posts and pages throughout this website all contain affiliate links that allow you to find the items mentioned and support the website at no cost to you. While this website may earn minimal sums when the viewer uses the links, the viewer is in no way obligated to use these links. Thank you for your support!
Updated: July 30, 2025
Tagged:

You Might Also Like

Add A Comment