Adsense on my recent book

promoting book and earning money.

[robinponty]

Hi,
I am an author of a physics book for Undergraduates. I would like to explore the idea of putting all 128 pages of my book online and the doing the meta tagging according to the subject of the chapter and running adsense on it. I do not see a potential loss in my offline book sales because of this SINCE I am not planning to put an ebook but a complete website having the online version of my book only. What do you all say. Can i make some money. Thanks

[dkoller]

Since it is your content you can do whatever you want with it. I do think it would make you some adsense revenue but yes, you need to weigh that against the potential loss of offline sales.

[Shak]

are there ANY advertisers in your chosen topic/subject?

Shak

[irock]

I want to ask the same question ;)

[danny]

I have one "physics books" page, and I can tell you that there aren't a lot of physics ads around. And half of them are for crank sites with their own Theory of Everything...

So I don't think you'll make much money from AdSense just from physics content. You might do better signing up as an Amazon associate and selling physics texts (yours and others) and study guides.

[globay]

You could try and just put some chapters online. You probably won't loose any offline sales, since some important chapters could only be found in the book, and if it works really well, you can add more chapters, if it throws off some money you could just keep some chapters online, and if it does not work at all, you could take the site offline.

In my opinion though, I don't see many advertisers paying a lot for ads in your field, and students are probably more likely not to click on the ads, since they are looking for information for free.

Still there is some potential for your site. Since you will put some high quality content online, it should be easy for you to get people to link to your site, and if your site is build well you should get a nice amount of very targetted traffic.

Now, if you put your own ads on every page, something like "You like this chapter? Buy the Book at Amazon for just $ XX.xx" with a picture of the book. Then you would get 7.5 % comission in addition to the money you get for every book sold.

You could also add links to books that relate to the very chapter, etc.

[wgonz]

Hello Robinponty!
I have tutorials on the net, about artificial intelligence; each one segmented in short pages. In each page Adsense is on the top and amazon books at the end. The sales from Amazon are nothing compared with benefits from Adsense. I think it is a good idea that initially you place only a selection of your chapters.
Good luck,
Wilmer

[europeforvisitors]

First, make sure that your contract with the book publisher allows you to do this. (Just because you own the copyright doesn't necessarily mean you control all subsidiary rights to your book.)

[cyberprosper]

I suggest, since you are able to write well, that you write a number of articles on "applied" physics... computer physics, viagra physics, credit card physics, mortgage loan physics, etc... In other words, write articles, that you can tie into MONEY categories... Put a bunch of chapters from your book online, this way you can make money from adsense, encourage people to buy the rest of the textbook (tough sell), and link the pages to your MONEY pages. The MONEY pages should also have adsense on them. Then, since you likely can, get as many links from your University to your web site.

If I were you, and had your skill set/free time of a prof, I think you could expect to make at least a couple grand a month with about 10 hours work per month. It is not rocket-science, a topic that you probably know something about too.

My suggestions for articles, are of course jokes. However, you should get the idea. Write small article.. .you know, "physics in your everyday life"...

The physics of anti-lock brakes... You will get car ads and loan ads...

The physics of airplane take-offs and the pain in your ear... you will get travel ads....

The physics of credit card readers work...

The phyics of the ATM machine...

The math involved in Life Insurance....

Basically, the topics are endless. One article a day and you will make bucks. And since you can start with an online version of your book and good links from .edu sources, you are as good as AU!

[loanuniverse]

Not from physics, but talk to some of the other faculty, and you can probably get some good topics. EFV brought up a good point regarding the publisher, if you signed a contract it would be a good time to read it again.

On the other hand, even with exclusivity this does not mean that similar content could not be posted.

[cornwall]

>>if you signed a contract it would be a good time to read it again.

I wrote a book on Internet sites for hotels a couple of years ago. The publisher got me to sign a very weight contract, which entitled me to a very handy sum for authoring, ....

...but left all other useage rights with the publishers.

I would be very surprised if the publisher would allow you to put the work on the web :(

[level80]

Check the terms of the contract - the contracts that authors sign tend to expire after a certain amount of time eg 1 year, 2 years, 3 years.

If the author is only putting a page at a time out of his 128 page book on the web then I doubt that either publisher could get him into trouble as each page is less than 1% of the book. You are perfectly entitled under the fair use provisions to use copyrighted works in various circumstances - eg education which I think that this book & website would fall under.

Excerpts of books are often printed in other books (a few pages), on Amazon, quotes are printed as reviews. The copyright laws aren't as black and white as people think that they are.

[hyperkik]

There's no magic amount that can be reprinted without violating copyright. The excerpts used in book reviews are often used with permission of the publisher - and when a book review, without authorization, excerpts portions which affect the market value of a book, the copyright holder can recover damages. (The Nation learned as much, after being successfully sued over its printing of excerpts from Gerald Ford's memoirs.)

[widget]

If you find, due to the contract, that you cannot re-use it for the web, should not be too difficult to make a different version. Use the practice problems (one per page, or several similar ones) to cleverly attract the right adsense ads. For example "A college student decides to use his credit card to buy a plank...to roll his guitar speakers up into the back of his Jeep CJ... the wood is...$/ft, ... well, you get the idea. Agree with cyberprosper - Au.

[level80]

OK, maybe copyright laws are different here than in the US. I remember a copyright case involving the National Geographic (in the US). National Geographic had a website on which they put an online version of their magazine. However the contributors (successfully I think) argued that they had only agreed for their work to be used in print and National Geographic was not allowed to use that agreement to also publish their work on their website without paying them more.

Online and print are different types of publishing. An interpretation of the contract between the author and the publishing house may find that only the rights for a print version are transferred and not the rights for any versions of it stored on an electronic format.

After all if it was the case that the publishing house had the electronic publishing rights too they would have rights to (assuming the other used a word processor) - any computer file involved in writing the book.

[europeforvisitors]

The issue of whether the original poster can publish his book online (or not) isn't related to copyright per se. The real issue is what rights were licensed to the publisher in the contract. If the original poster isn't sure, the next step is to consult an attorney.

[charlier]

I have a web site that has 11 ebooks on chromatography published on it with adsense. It does get a lot of nice ads for instruments and consumables but the problem is people looking for information in book form are not really looking to buy so the CTR is pretty low. Considering the amount of money earned from the average academic text I would say it is worth doing but don't expect too much.

[Just inPrefs]

What if I do a mixture of content a little from one offline source, a bit from other offline source and then I put it online? There are lots of offline resources whose authors or editors will never check for something LOOKING LIKE small PORTIONS of their content SOMEWHERE on the Internet. Obviously after I make my first million and become a big and well known figure, I will have my great content, my own brand new name and I'll be glad to show you how I make every penny...

:-) Sounds bad? I guess it sounds genuinely...

[robinponty]

Thanks all for the reply.

What are the areas yo can think can bring in good traffic. I have a friend who write on business management and I can try and find out more authors in different areas in my professional world.

Thanks for the advice again...

[jomaxx]

>> What are the areas yo can think can bring in good traffic

At the risk of being glib, these are typically some of the most popular searches on the Web:
- travel
- people search
- hotels
- jokes
- april fools
- health
- lyrics
- google
- ebay
- yahoo

[europeforvisitors]

Just remember that there's a lot of competition for most popular topics, and it takes work and time to stand out from the crowd.