There are many ways to publish your book online. Here’s a quick step-by-step guide to one of the easiest:

1. Create an account on Createspace.com. It’s owned by Amazon. If you have any question you hit a button that says “Call Me” and within 30 seconds they have a customer representative calling your phone.

2. Download a Microsoft Word template they provide The template is similar to those used by any publisher when they format your book.

3. Make a cover. Createspace has over a million options when you combined their templates with images, fonts, etc.

4. Save as a PDF and upload it. Let them pick an ISBN number.

5. Choose a price. $7.95. is the minimum price if you want them to distribute it to bookstores, libraries, etc along with Amazon. You’ll get about a $2 royalty per book at that price. But if you choose a price of $20 then you would get about a $14 royalty. Much higher than any publisher will ever give you.

Online video has opened up a lot of money making opportunities. Speaking Exchange, based in Brazil, is one such opportunity which brings together Brazilian nationals wanting to learn English, and US senior citizens with time on their hands.

The idea is that the students log on to a website and form a video link with a senior citizen living in a retirement home. They then have a chat on a pre-determined topic, and the whole thing is recorded for tutors to evaluate. It’s a great way for the students to have a conversation with someone whose mother tongue is English without having to go to the expense of travelling. The other side of the coin is that it’s a nice way for senior citizens to feel more active and engaged with the world.

Could you use online video to bring together people who would never usually encounter each other for mutual benefit? If so, there could be a business in it.

Las Vegas has long been known as a place where people go to get married, but there’s a new growth sector in town – divorce party planning.

The newly divorced are no longer content to let the event slip by, marked only by bickering, recrimination and lawyers fees, and are celebrating in style instead. I just read of one divorce party planner who takes the newly divorced ‘bride’ into the desert with her friends where she gets to let loose on her wedding dress with a machine gun!

With almost half of weddings ending in divorce, the market is huge and totally untapped in the UK. Not everyone wants to celebrate a divorce, but I can see it becoming more popular and socially acceptable in the years to come.

So here’s a question for you – what kind of events and activities could you arrange for the newly divorced? It doesn’t have to be as ‘negative’ as the destruction of a wedding dress but there are certainly plenty of women who would welcome the opportunity for a bit of creative destruction.

At its most basic, arbitrage means little more than buying at one price in one market and then selling at a higher price in another. Sometimes that shift in market can be geographic, and at others – as is the case here – it can be a shift over time.

I just read an article about a guy called Bob Peterson in the United States who figured out that the market for college textbooks was unlikely to be stable. He did an analysis of online selling prices and found, sure enough, that prices swung widely through the year in line with the academic calendar. Prices were at their lowest in the summer and then went through the roof once the college year started. This was a discovery that enabled him to double his money each term by buying in summer and selling in the autumn.

Two things to take from this I think:

1. Why not copy this simple arbitrage system in the UK?

2. What other products display a similar demand cycle?

Maybe there’s a clue in the very last word I just typed!