Ever had an e-book deal make you money? Or did the publisher just take your best idea, lock you into a five-year contract, list your book on Amazon and not lift another finger to promote it?
That’s what happened to me the first time I got a book published. I must have sold almost a hundred copies during those five years. I made hardly enough in royalties for a decent meal, let alone a living.
At the time, I figured that’s just what happened with e-books, but that’s only one business model. It can work for the publishers if they keep their costs down, because they can publish hundreds of books and live on the accumulated profits. Authors trying to establish themselves this way just end up slowly starving.
The Better eBook Strategy
If you’ve spent any time on the internet, you’ve probably stumbled across it already without even knowing. Done well, with the right product and marketing, a single e-book can generate tens of thousands of dollars per year.
Let’s say that again. Tens of thousands of dollars per year. Sometimes even more.
The problem is that it can only reliably be done with a certain type of book. Not with fiction, or poetry, or anything that you’ve written with the intention of changing the world. It can only be done with non-fiction written to solve a problem.
It doesn’t matter what that problem is, as long as your book offers a solution, and there is a sufficient number of individuals in the world looking for that solution. If your book fits this criterion, you’ve got a known market. From there, all you need to do is tap into that market.
Tapping Into The Market
To tap into that market, you need to:
- build a simple website
- write compelling sales copy for that website
- integrate that simple website with a payment system
- integrate that simple website with a way to both protect and deliver your e-book, and
- drive relevant traffic to your site.
Basically, it’s all about the web. The information on how to do all of this is freely availably, if you look hard enough.
Don’t misunderstand me, though. You’ve really got to know what you’re doing. If your site doesn’t look professional or work the way it should, it won’t generate the results you’re after. Nor are these skills the type of thing you can perfect overnight. My advice is that if you don’t have the skills yourself, pay someone to do it for you.
eBook Marketing Difficulties
That’s where the business model starts to fall down. If you can’t do it yourself, it can cost. Even if you can, it can soak up a lot of time. Because it isn’t just the initial building of the site and making it functional that we’re talking about. It’s that last point as well: driving relevant traffic to your site.
This type of site is almost never going to rank highly enough for people to stumble across it by themselves. Instead, most of these sites rely on pay-per-click advertising.
Pay-per-click advertising can be a huge trap for the unwary. You’ve got to get the balance right. How much is a sale worth to you?
To work that out, you have to know what your conversion rate is once qualified buyers reach your page. You’ve also got to know what the return rate of your product is. And yes, you do have to offer a proper no-questions-asked return policy, or people simply won’t buy.
Once you know these things, you have to know what sort of margin you will accept, and adjust your advertising to suit.
It isn’t a set-and-forget process. To get the type of results we’ve discussed, you need to tweak everything. Advertising placement. Advertising copy. Website copy. Colors, book cover design. Price.
It’s about optimization, and it never stops. It can take hours of your time.
Nimblewords Books
Or you could try a publisher like Nimblewords Books. There may be other publishers with a similar business model, but Nimblewords Books would be my choice. But then, I’m biased. After all, I do work for them.
