Post: #1

My e-book is finally finished and ready to go. Now I have to figure out the best way to sell and market the e-book.

For those who have sold an e-book before, what strategies did you use?

What merchant platform did you sell the e-book (ejunkie, etc)?

What mistakes did you make?

What general advice can you give?

My e-book is fitness related and I expect a large number of sales. I plan on marketing the book mainly to my targeted twitter followers (28,000 and growing). I also plan to give my e-book for free to fitness bloggers so they can write reviews.

After the initial sales I am going to look into making a kindle version.

Post: #2

Maybe the first thing you need to do is not to expect a large number of sales. I'm not trying to talk you down and wish you all the best and high sales but there are hundreds of books on fitness so keep your expectations low at first so that you don't set yourself up for disappointment.

The market platform I use are Smashwords (all formats ebook) and Amazon kindle. Both are fairly easy to set up except maybe the IRS part if you're a non US resident like me.

There's a lot of advice from several posters already in my book thread so i'd browse through that one first if I were you. There are some gold nuggets in there especially if you're a fanatic writer and blog poster.

By all means, keep us posted on your strategies and successes.

Post: #3

I'm in a similar situation in that I'm about to launch a niche ebook product.

At this point I'm mullling over getting an ISBN.

Smashwords gives you an ISBN but I lose a lot of my control over the product to Smashwords, which I'm not willing to accept. I want to be able to finetune my product at a moments notice without going through the whole Smashwords engine everytime.

Amazon gives you a specific number for kindle versions so you don't need an ISBN. But that's only for the kindle ebook.

Post: #4

Thanks for the advice Neil and Thomas.

Neil, I do expect large sales. I surveyed my twitter followers before I wrote the book. I asked them if they would be interested in an e-book. I got a great response. One lady practically begged me to release the e-book. I sold her my rough draft.

I'm looking into smashwords, but I am probably just going to sell this e-book on my blog via paypal.

Post: #5

Gumroad is by far the easiest way to sell a digital product. Just upload the file and share the link with fans/followers. There's no ongoing fee, but instead they keep about 5% of each sale. Customers pay by credit card (not PayPal), but the money gets sent to you via PayPal at the end of each month. http://www.gumroad.com

Alternatively, if you really want to let your fans pay via PayPal, there's Sellfy which is very similar. http://www.sellfy.com

-LS

Post: #6

Random questions.

Do you have an ebook cover?

Have you set up a sales page with lead capture?

“I also plan to give my e-book for free to fitness bloggers so they can write reviews.”

What’s in it for them? A good commission?

Do you know what percentage you’re going to pay your affiliates?

Have you considered adding some sort of upsell for customers?

Post: #7

(09-19-2012 09:17 PM)Tbone Wrote:  Random questions.

Do you have an ebook cover?

Have you set up a sales page with lead capture?

“I also plan to give my e-book for free to fitness bloggers so they can write reviews.”

What’s in it for them? A good commission?

Do you know what percentage you’re going to pay your affiliates?

Have you considered adding some sort of upsell for customers?

No ebook cover yet. I don't think I need one. It's an informative, non-fiction book. Roosh doesn't have one for Bang and it sells well. I may get one in the future.

I don't think I'm going to offer affiliate commissions. For now I am thinking about pricing the ebook at an introductory low price of $3.97.

What in it for fitness bloggers who write a review? First they get a free ebook which may help them. They have to write blog posts anyways, so they might as well write a review. It gives them credibility. I also will give them a shout-out on twitter which will give their blog great exposure. I already have a few bloggers lined up to review the book. I know I can get a lot more, especially with the connections I've made through twitter.

Soon I am going to set up a sales page on my blog with a 'buy it now' paypal button. I will write the sales page myself.

I haven't really considered offering any upsell to customers.

Post: #8

(09-19-2012 09:32 PM)zoom Wrote:  

(09-19-2012 09:17 PM)Tbone Wrote:  Random questions.

Do you have an ebook cover?

Have you set up a sales page with lead capture?

“I also plan to give my e-book for free to fitness bloggers so they can write reviews.”

What’s in it for them? A good commission?

Do you know what percentage you’re going to pay your affiliates?

Have you considered adding some sort of upsell for customers?

No ebook cover yet. I don't think I need one. It's an informative, non-fiction book. Roosh doesn't have one for Bang and it sells well. I may get one in the future.

I don't think I'm going to offer affiliate commissions. For now I am thinking about pricing the ebook at an introductory low price of $3.97.

What in it for fitness bloggers who write a review? First they get a free ebook which may help them. They have to write blog posts anyways, so they might as well write a review. It gives them credibility. I also will give them a shout-out on twitter which will give their blog great exposure. I already have a few bloggers lined up to review the book. I know I can get a lot more, especially with the connections I've made through twitter.

Soon I am going to set up a sales page on my blog with a 'buy it now' paypal button. I will write the sales page myself.

I haven't really considered offering any upsell to customers.

Roosh does have ebook covers. They're not fancy but they don't necessarily have to be.

If you're pricing your ebook at introductory $3.97, I'm assuming it doesn't have many pages? Here's some advice to consider...

Flesh it out. Add as much value as possible, and price it like some of the top fitness ebook sellers.

Browse fitness ebooks on clickbank. Study their sales pages. Take note of their prices. One good ebook with a good price point that overdelivers on value can be enough to live very well on for the next few years or beyond (especially if you have an affiliate program).

"Soon I am going to set up a sales page on my blog with a 'buy it now' paypal button. I will write the sales page myself."

Make sure you do two things:

1. Capture emails.

Many who are exposed to your sales page won't buy immediately. If you build a list, you can follow up with visitors to your sales page, build more trust, and have repeated chances to sell them. Plus you can sell them stuff in the future.

2. Split test.

Initially, set up two slightly different sales pages. After 100 or so visitors to each page, keep the one that sells best. Drop the other.

Afterwards, create another sales page, and split test again. Split testing will earn you hundreds to thousands more dollars.

Post: #9

Thanks for the advice TBone. I will take everything you mentioned into consideration.

Post: #10

It really depends on what you want out of it. If you want to make some decent extra money, none of what I said is really necessary.

But those tips can earn you thousands of dollars more. It is more work... but for a much bigger payoff.

Post: #11

10 Useful Services To Sell Digital Goods Online

Post: #12

(09-19-2012 04:28 AM)Thomas the Rhymer Wrote:  I'm in a similar situation in that I'm about to launch a niche ebook product.

At this point I'm mullling over getting an ISBN.

Smashwords gives you an ISBN but I lose a lot of my control over the product to Smashwords, which I'm not willing to accept. I want to be able to finetune my product at a moments notice without going through the whole Smashwords engine everytime.

Amazon gives you a specific number for kindle versions so you don't need an ISBN. But that's only for the kindle ebook.

Not sure what you mean by the whole Smashwords engine. If your Word file formatting is correct then uploading a new file is as easy as sending an email. Just upload a different file and it's live directly.
I changed the main file quite a few times with my first version of my book and yesterday I uploaded the Second and final version of my book within minutes.
Just make sure the formatting is correct.

Only downside is that for inclusion in the premium catalog is takes one to two weeks. This means that retailers like Apple and B & N have to wait a bit to order your ebook.

I really don't care what ISBN number there is on my book. I got a free one with my Createspace sales channel (paperback books)

I have now uploaded my new version to all sales channels but still working on the promotion page a bit before I announce it.

Post: #13

(09-19-2012 04:31 PM)zoom Wrote:  Thanks for the advice Neil and Thomas.

Neil, I do expect large sales. I surveyed my twitter followers before I wrote the book. I asked them if they would be interested in an e-book about curing/preventing shin-splints. I got a great response. One lady practically begged me to release the e-book. I sold her my rough draft.

I'm looking into smashwords, but I am probably just going to sell this e-book on my blog via paypal.

What ebook formats are you planning to use? The main reason that I use Smashwords is that it possible to sell every possible ebook format so I don't have to disappoint people not owning a Kindle or willing to read a PDF.

I would definitely advise to look into a good cover. Do not take Roosh's succes as an example. He was already a known name when he started selling his books.
I'm pretty sure I sold quite a few books based on the cover.

I can PM you name of my cover designer at 99 designs. He a really professional guy and a very friendly Pinoy. I'm sure he can create a great cover for 300 dollars or even less. You make that money back in no time if you're already expecting large sales.

What is the name of your blog?

Post: #14

I think it was Rionomad (not sure but i don't have time to read through my whole thread again) who advised me to create a mailing list by offering a free ebook with some advice.
I still have to follow up on that advice but great advice it is. I'll probably work on that next week. I just need to find a wordpress plug in for that.

Post: #15

Linklok is excellent for selling digital goods through PayPal.
I like it because it allows me to be in total control of the sale process: website layout, how the file is sent, encoded links and links that expire, specific to ip address. etc. Seamless integration, it appears there is no 3rd party involved, aside from PayPal, of course.

Post: #16

I'm going to write an ebook on fitness and I hope to make at least some drinking/notch money out of it.
It's good that you found a niche market. I am surprised that people do not know how to prevent/cure shin splints.

Post: #17

@XXL Thanks for that link. There's a lot of options there.

@Neil Smashwords does seem like a good option. I'm definitely considering Smashwords and also e-junkie. E-junkie has an affiliate program that could potentially earn me more money. You are right about the cover, I plan on investing some of the initial book profit into a nice cover. One of the problems is that I would probably need to buy a stock image for the cover. Those are expensive. Also I definitely want to create a mailing list at some point.

@tjuan Thanks I will look into Linklok.

@Hades Yeah finding a niche market seems to be a good idea.

Post: #18

Sunday the 30th will be the release of the ebook. I'm getting excited for the upcoming sales.

I'm going to send out numerous tweets this week as a part of my promotion strategy.

Post: #19

I would give out some 'review' copies in advance, for free, to some of your mailing list, twitter followers, blog readers or whatever in exchange for them writing up a good review on release day. If on Amazon you're selling it the more reviews it gets in a short time the higher it appears in their search results so then draws in more natural traffic.

Post: #20

Hey Zoom. I just wanted to thank you. I bought Tweetadder software based on your recomendation, and its working great for me.

Im confident your book will be a success.

Post: #21

(09-25-2012 01:16 AM)germanico Wrote:  Hey Zoom. I just wanted to thank you. I bought Tweetadder software based on your recomendation, and its working great for me.

Im confident your book will be a success.

Great to hear it's working for you. It's a powerful tool.

Thanks for your vote of confidence.

Post: #22

Zoom, how did this go?

I'm working on the formatting of my ebook now. It looks good saved in PDF but I'm not sure how that transfers to Amazon. I tried formatting it as an epub but it looked bad on the KindlePreviewer. Anybody know a good way to format from a Mac?

My book is all text so I figured it would be simple but now I'm wondering if I should go the Smashwords or Createspace route...

Post: #23

The launch did not quite go as well as I expected. Ironically, I probably could have made more money longterm if I gave it away for free- I will talk about that in a bit. But I have learned so much in the process. I think that my ebook was a little too niche specific. I'm marketing towards runners. I read online that only about 13% of runners have shin splints. So essentially, I can only market towards 13% of my followers. Right now I'm writing a different ebook that I can market towards all runners.

I setup a payment system with ejunkie. This was a great decision. The ejunkie system is easy to use and has a lot of features.

What I didn't realize before, is that having an e-mail list is so important. It's way better to sell something to email list than it is to sell something to a twitter list. Right now I am in the process of transferring my twitter followers into email subscribers. It's going well so far. I'm using aweber as an autoresponder.

Now if I had given this ebook away for free, then I would have a much larger email list and this would give me a lot of leverage. Unfortunately I don't think I can offer the book for free now. The people who paid for it would get mad and I would lose credibility. Some people also would not buy future products in the hope that they would also become free.

So overall, it's been a great learning experience and I have bigger plans for the future.

Post: #24

Don't give up so fast. It's only been a few days. Give it some time. Anyone who sells a book hopes it with explode in the first weeks. People who sell shitloads of books from the start are usually backed by the major publishing houses who do the promotion for them. I guess this goes for known writers also.

How many book have you sold so far?

Post: #25

I'm definitely not giving up. I have sold a handful thus far.