MARKETING AND SELLING YOUR E-BOOK

 

Once you have your e-book written, you can sell it in various formats.  Here are some techniques on how to do that.

Selling an E-Book in a PDF Format

One popular way of marketing and distributing an e-book is by setting up a landing page, also called a “squeeze page,” where you feature the benefits of your e-book.  It’s called a landing or squeeze page, because that’s where you send people with your ads. 

The page should include an auto-responder where you collect e-mail addresses and a series of buy buttons, interspersed with the copy, so people can buy online.  Begin with a powerful headline that captures the interest of the reader, followed by copy and a photo or video touting the many benefits people will get from the product or service.  Then, include the first of several buy buttons followed by more copy and another buy button.  A typical landing page features several of these sections with alternating content and buy buttons.  The content is written to draw the prospect on, while the buy buttons give the prospect repeated opportunities to buy.

Then, if a person wants to buy and clicks a buy button, he can place his order on line and pay through PayPal, Amazon payments, or a credit card.  Once the buyer pays, he is taken to another page where he can download the e-book.  An alternate way is for you to get the order, and then you manually send a thank-you and e-mail the e-book.

I’ve sold e-books as PDFs in both ways. I sold about 200 e-books on “Sell Your Book, Script, or Column”, when I owned the PublishersAndAgents business, primarily for promotional purposes.  When someone ordered the book, the cost was $10 via PayPal or a Credit Card. I manually sent them a link to download the book, and to add some protection, I saved each copy with a password made up of their first name and the initial of their last name.  Then, if they placed an order for sending out a query within a week, they could apply their $10 e-book purchase to the cost of a query, which cost $240-380.  While about 200 people ordered the book, 25 of them subsequently ordered the query services.  So what I really wanted in offering the e-book was to convince people to order the service, which about 10% of the people ordering the book did.

Selling Your E-Book through an Online Reader

An increasingly popular way to sell e-books now is through an e-book reader, such as the Kindle.  There are about a dozen popular reader formats now, and you can generally upload and convert the book into that format from Word.

There are also some e-book publishers who act as intermediaries, where they format your book for these other readers, such as SmashWords.  However, you have to set up a Word document according to their special guidelines, which include taking out tables and especially large headlines, which you might have set up for the PDF-format e-book. 

Publishing Your E-Book as a Print-On Demand (POD) Book

You can readily convert an e-book into a POD format with a number of companies.  This way you have a physical book.  I have worked with iUniverse on over 20 books, since I like the way the company does the formatting for you, whereas many other companies want you to format the book exactly as you want it published.  Also, since I have a special arrangement as a member of rate of only $100 per book – or at no charge if I have a previously published book which is no longer in print.  I can also provide that price to my ghostwriting clients, as long as my name is on the cover, such as “with” or “and” Gini Graham Scott.  Otherwise, they would be treated like any other customer.

Some of the other well-known POD companies include LuLu, BookSurge, a division of AMAZON, Lightning Books, CreateSpace, and Trafford Publishing.  Some of these companies have a set up charge, from about $100-500; others work on a royalty basis if you have your book already set up and ready to go.  You can contact these different companies to obtain information on the cost and pricing of your book.  Commonly the price depends on the number of pages, with an extra charge for interior graphics and photos, if you have any.   Generally, these companies will provide you with a choice of photos and graphics for the cover, and in some cases, they have a design staff that will design the cover for you, subject to your approval.