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.

Brand awareness has been the big-ticket item among marketing professionals for a number of years. The logic behind it is unarguable: people won’t buy your product if they don’t know you exist.

Because of this, huge corporations, startups and even government departments have together spent billions on advertising, splashing their logo on billboards, in newspapers, on your TV screen. They even spend an unguessable amount every year sponsoring big-name sports stars just so to get their logo on that sports star’s baseball cap.

These days, brand awareness has found its way into websites. Marketers are slowly becoming aware of the impact the web is having (not to mention the reach!), so they’re trying to make use of it in the best way possible.

Unfortunately, many of these marketers seem stuck in the mind-set of twenty years ago. Even now, many of them are still trying to treat the web as just another advertising medium. They’re implementing brand awareness campaigns in much the same way they do in the real world. They’re:

• outsourcing their web marketing to advertising agencies
• buying banner advertisements
• paying whatever they need to pay to get their Google ads to the top of the first page of results
• creating advertisements and hosting them on You-Tube, and paying online newspapers to display them.

For them, the cost of Brand Awareness has gone up. They always had to pay for the billboards, the newspaper ads, the direct mailouts, the radio and TV ads. Now they have to pay for the equivalent of all that to do the same in the online world. They’re doing this out of a sense of having to, just to keep up. For them, brand awareness is still essential to get that sale.

At the same time, there are new companies exploding onto the marketplace with little or no marketing budget at all.

How are they doing it?

They might be doing it with a brand awareness strategy that makes proper use of the web. They might not even have a brand awareness strategy. They might just have a site promotion plan.

The fundamental difference is that they understand how Web is different from other media. The difference is this:

In all other media, whether it’s radio, TV, print or whatever, your audience is a passive observer. They look at what other people have created (the advertisement), and either take it in or don’t.

With web, your audience has the ability to engage. They can choose to pay attention or not. They can choose to take part. They can choose to show your promotion attempt to a thousand of their friends – or write a post on how incredibly bad it is on their blog.

It’s the difference between looking at a picture of a lake – and going for a swim in it.

In real-world terms, that means it’s possible to promote a billion-dollar company without spending a dime (anyone ever heard of Google?), if you know what you’re doing.

In New Zealand (which is where I’m from), one of the most popular websites is an online auction site called Trademe.co.nz. The Chief Executive recently gave a talk, in which he was quite open about their marketing policy. They intentionally keep their spend budget as low as possible, relying on web promotion techniques to get the word out.

Obviously, they’re doing quite well. But here’s the rub: one of their revenue streams includes selling banner ads on their site – targeting the marketing people who just haven’t quite figured out that banner advertising is like placing a billboard where no-one cares to look.

What am I saying? By all means, have a brand awareness campaign going if you can afford it. If you can’t, or choose not to, stick with site promotion. But don’t pay a big advertising agency to manage it for you. Instead, hire someone who knows what they’re doing, and let them go for it.