But wait, there's more. Each and every booklet that a co-author distributes markets every other co-author in booklet. Plus (and this is just so terrific) booklet is of great interest to reporters and journalists in media who love to interview more than one person for any article they write. It's a ready-made mechanism for getting lots and lots of publicity.

I recently started a conversation with a representative from a group of about 15 health care professionals in related areas of expertise, exploring idea of group jointly co-authoring a booklet. Each person in group contributes a handful of tips, shares in production costs (bringing that way down), and becomes a published author. This takes much less time, m0ney, and brain damage than if any one of these people wrote a complete booklet themselves. That's not to say they won't ever do one on their own. It just means they will get one done probably sooner through collaboration of this tips booklet anthology, and they will expand their reach every time any other co-author distributes this booklet.

Has your mind started racing about who to approach to do a booklet with you? You don't have to be best pals with a colleague or love everyone in your mastermind group or agree with every pearl that comes out of every coach in your Special Interest Group, or think that each person at recent chamber of commerce meeting was most brilliant person you ever met. You don't even need to live anywhere near each other in order to put together a collaborative booklet. All you need is to find a group of people interested in contributing some tips in a somewhat related field. Depending on size of group, it may be one or two tips each, or 10-12 tips. In either case, it's a minor amount of time, effort, and m0ney to instantly become a published author.

© 2005, Paulette Ensign

If you go partner route, choose wisely.

The second part of this equation is you need 'a body of knowledge that other people are willing to pay good money for'

I'm talking here about making *real* money. If you just want to make a few hundred extra dollars a month selling an e-Book, fine. But if your goal is to end up with a *business* that pays your mortgage, makes car payment, and puts kids through school, and then you're going to want to take a more serious approach.

When it comes to making a living selling information, there are two things that matter: picking right kind of 'deep pockets' market and serving market you pick like crazy.

There are all kinds of info categories where people are willing to spend serious money... And those are kind of markets you want to go after.

But here's price of admission. You have to be able to consistently produce serious, high quality content that's *worth* big money.

The 'smoke and mirrors' guys like to gloss over this reality. 'It's easy,' they say. 'Just put up any old e-Book and you'll be rolling in it.'

Wrong.

The reality is most e-Book publishers who are making real money sell a lot more than just e-Books. They sell home study courses, seminars, coaching programs, etc. And none of those things are cheap.

If writing, researching, teaching and high level promotion are your life passions, you can do this too, but if they're not, be easy on yourself and take a look at one of two other paths to online success.