You Have An Ebook, You Want To Start eBook Selling. So What Do You Do?

Ebook selling is not hard. creating the ebook is not hard. Creating an income from an ebook is hard.

How do you create an ebook?

write out your text in your favourite word processor
save it off as a pdf (especially in Microsoft Word)
upload it to a website- or your website
use a payment processor and sell it

Sounds familiar right?

However each of those points has some small print, for example:

an ebook needs to be formatted so that it can be read easily through an ebook reader- so page numbering is not needed
over time you will probably want your pages to look nice or have a nice front page which means that (unless you are good at art) you might need to hire someone to do those things. It is a hugely good idea to hire people to do things that you are no the best at.

Payment processors all have the same issue:

there are subscriptions models
a percentage of what you sell models

Clickbank and Gumroad (to name some common payment processors) will allow your ebook to be hosted on their website but will either take a percentage or a certain amount of money per month for the luxury.

Websites like Amazon will do everything for you for a certain amount of the sales price. But you won't have access to peoples email addresses to follow up with again.

Everything has pluses an minuses so which one is the best? Hard to say. Amazon is pretty cool and if you add links back to your website within the ebook then you are trying to cover the lost email address issue.

I realised long ago that when you try and get into ebook selling you are met with a few issues.

most people suggest you create an ebook and then throw it on Amazon
everyone has a book in them...go for it!

But as of always, there is a process. And this process dictates whether your ebook will sell or not. So lets not forget that before you actually sell something you first need to create something.

This creation is where most people drop down with issues.

Failure to start the process makes trying to start ebook selling online really difficult and time wasting.

In my efforts to create this site, to create ebooks through the many years I have noticed one glaringly obvious fact.

You can not do this by yourself and think that people will beat down your door and buy your ebook from you.

Doesn't happen.

When celebrities sell a Kindle book and it shoots up the Amazon charts it is because of 2 things:

they are trading off their name- so they already have some following
the publisher goes to town on the marketing

When someone unknown does it, well, they miss out tons of steps. They have prepared before hand, usually many months before hand. They have created a mini celebrity status around them. Then people buy because of the name.

Nothing online sells without either:

you are paying people to go to your sales page
you tell people to go to your sales page.

That is it. nothing more.

The main "secret" is actually to presell to a group of people who actually want what you are giving.

Having thousands of subscribers is cool but are they actually converting to anything? If you release anything without some sort of build up no one will know that you have released it right? So movies, publishers and affiliates promote the product well before they ever sell it.

You will make money with ebooks?

Ebooks can be quite lucrative if the following is adhered to:

you release multiple ebooks- one 99c ebook is not going to make you a living
there has to be a way for you to interact with your buyers- or at least create multiple ebooks on the same topic so that one 99c ebook becomes four ebooks that sell for 99c
do they lead anywhere? Some people use cheap but very informative ebooks for a leading product which then directs people to a more complete package with videos and other important information. You cant promote affiliate links within Amazon ebooks- so be careful
one 99c ebook might not make you rich, but one $9.99 is going to be quite helpful. With the amount of 99c ebooks out there, higher priced ebooks look more professional. If you jam pack it with tons of information that it would be silly not to buy then that will generate sales
it really helps if you have an audience. We have talked about this multiple times and it is no wonder- an audience who already knows you/ knows of your work is much more receptive to buy something from you. Show them the 99c ebook- and if you have done your home work, then selling for 99c is easy. Then you need just generate more people who know your work and filter them into your sales funnel. This funnel already have converted prospects/ warm customers. It is just not a throw a ton of traffic in and see what sticks.

You can lose money selling ebooks

This is going to get covered in the Adwords article. But you can very easily lose money without realising it. It is very temping to buy clicks. Lets go over some numbers:

Amazon will take a percentage of your list price for themselves. Which is fine- they have done a lot of the backend work. So a 99c ebook might become 70c. If you want 1k at the end of the month then you need to sell around 1450 ebooks to cover that goal
If you are hosting your ebooks through your own website then (for easy maths) $200/yr for website domain name and bandwidth. Now you need to sell roughly 285 ebooks just to cover that cost- not just your 1k/ month
Clickbank asks for $80/ product to get listed- 114 ebooks to sell to cover that cost

A huge amount of authors forget about how much they need to cover the basic costs. Which, in our example, is the domain name hosting. This always has to be thought of first- without the website you have no selling ability if you go down this route.

People then try pay per click- advertisements. This is fine as long as you know what is going to convert.

If it costs 10c per click and only 10 people buy out of 100 people who click (a really good conversion by the way) then you have made $7- 10x0.7 if buying through Amazon). But now you need to figure out the cost of clicks: $10 (100x0.1). You lose money. To make this work?

you increase the conversion
you increase product price
you increase what people buy

Paying for clicks is fine but you need to know your numbers of the main factor: How much does one person buy. If one person out of 100 buys $10 worth of items from you- and that number is pretty much set in stone, you know what you can afford and you know where to improve your system.

Ebooks are not the ebooks you thought of

An ebook now is something bigger than what it was many years ago. The people who are saying they sold thousands of ebooks did so following the above and by doing it early with very few competitors. You could write just about anything, have a cool sales page and people would buy.

But now people are a little bit more savvy about their shopping and will have an instant reaction to what you have and what you say:

a 99c ebook is a throw away ebook that instantly solves a problem- like boredom travelling or a solution to help someone
a $9.99 ebook is going to solve someones problem but they need to invest some time into this. So are you up to their expectations? Is your background good? Can this book help them in a cool and effective way?
a $20+ ebook is now something of a package. The more you have in it the better because now you are being compared to websites full of information and Youtube. Is what you have better? People will pay for these ebooks but if you just write text and nothing else you may get one sale, refunds or no future sales on other products.
Also you are being compared to everyone else and you have to lift that bar up and make your competitors follow you. There are more competitors. They haven't included video? Who cares, you do it. They havent added tons of very related bonuses? Oh well, more customers for you.

Find an audience then write rather then write and find an audience

Many an ebook has failed for the one and simple reason;

No-one wanted it.

Now it may sound like a cool idea, it might even be a a passion project but I have found something that every author should know of:

People don't care

They don't care if it took 20 years to make- unless you are a celebrity author/ musician and people are eagerly awaiting your next project, they just don't care.

What they do care about is themselves and what you can do for them- that is all. It is what we all do so it is nothing ground breaking but it is easily forgotten with a project that we have spent time upon.

So the first thing you should do is actually figure out if someone actually wants what you are offering. Or better still give you ideas to create something to actually offer.

The only way to do this is go where you audience is a hang out and interact. You will find golden nuggets of information of what people are looking for and what they are missing. You can look up books and see in comments what people liked, disliked or what the book missed out.

All this is important information so that when you do actually release something you will:

all ready have an audience who has some interest in what you have
know where your audience is
know what people will buy

So lets choose a group and see how they do it. The online marketing group seem to have success in this field. They focus strongly upon online marketing information and then some will subset into other categories like email marketing. Then they just solely focus on that. Their audience is generally made up of online marketing interested individuals so selling a generalised ebook on this topic will get sales. But selling and email marketing one is going to get more sales.They rarely stray from the field they are in. They know what people look for because they are in deep within the topic.

You then create 2022, 2023 versions of products etc.
Video courses
subscription email marketing systems
You then become to go-to person on email marketing and start speaking at seminars
other marketers ask you to do their campaigns
you interact with more people and then they send you customers and traffic (usually through affiliates sales)

However.

You can be too niche.

You are always recommended to go niche. I is a good idea to be a big fish in a small pond and try to dominate it. However, you can be in a pond that is way too small and has no growth possibilities.

For example, fishing lures. A very competitive field within the fishing niche, but a good niche to be in because there are so many subsets of this- fly fishing, bass fishing etc. You can move around in a small subset and grow out whilst keeping under the fishing lure niche. They are updates regularly, there are TV shows, personalities, magazines, locations etc.

On the flip side to this is building your own ant farm. Now you may be able to sell ebooks, videos, equipment but the niche is very restrictive and the potential to grow further is limited. Worm farms on the other hand is a little bit better because they are getting better publicity due to their recycling abilities and helping with the environment.

Below are everything that you need to start ebook selling

How did one person sell 130 ebooks in 1 week?

A pro explains some of the top ebook selling strategies

Can/ should you use Adwords to sell you ebook?

How do you convert your ebook to Kindle?

Can you use a Facebook technique to sell more ebooks?

Sell information online! Sounds cool. Is it?

How much should you sell your ebook for?

Sell more ebooks by increasing your conversion rate

Sell your ebook to libraries?

Best selling ebook categories?

Can you sell ebooks on eBay?