One way to earn money online is through dropshipping. Similar to affiliate marketing, you will be selling books that are distributed by another company by creating a website, marketing the books and taking orders. While this may seem like an easy way to earn an income, you should look at this method carefully because you may be able to earn even more money by not having to rely on distributors.

When you create your website and start selling books, customers will not know that they are being shipped by the distributor. For a monthly fee, you will be given access to books that are available. Advertise these books anyway you want through websites, banner ads, blogs, articles and through other websites. When customers place an order, you will be responsible for collecting the money and processing the order. The order is sent to the book company who then ships the book to the customer. You will not have to worry about shipping the books, returns or making sure the book arrives on time.

The monthly fee you will have to pay for access to the books varies from distributor to distributer. Many distributors have thousands of titles for you to choose from based on which groups you want to market to. This saves you a lot of time in developing a product and shipping it to people. All the profits are yours and you can expand your list of books at any time. Many people have earned a steady income through dropshipping.

But dropshipping has its drawbacks as well. You may not be able to sell bestselling books, or new books until a certain amount of time has passed. The monthly fee can be very high, so if you are not selling enough books to cover this expense, you will lose money. If the distributor goes out of business, you will have to find a new distributor or a new product. Book sales vary from year to year depending on the needs of customers, so you will have to choose very carefully which books to sell.

Before you decide to enter into the dropshipping business, you should research distributors to see which ones are legitimate as there are some that will take your money and then disappear. Make sure the distributor will send books via regular post and via the internet as ebooks have become more popular over the years.

When you find a distributor that is legitimate, you should review their book list to see if there are books that will sell online. Out of print books, genre books, how to books and inspirational books usually sell online faster than novels, poetry and other types of fiction. Choose your books carefully and market them to the right groups on the Internet.