Write and Sell EBooks in 30 Days

Internet marketing and writing ebooks, or electronic books, may be a good and simple way of generating some much needed income. However, like any endeavor worth the time, it’s no walk in the park.


Knowing just how much money to ask for is one of the difficult decisions you’ll have to deal with. Price it too low and no one will trust your digital book – after all, if something is cheap, something didn’t take much to make. Too expensive and you may just be eating internet space. Later on you might lower the price of your e-book, potentially pissing off customers who bought it at the more expensive price – that may cost you more than you’d gained from the higher price, due to lost future sales.

It can be absolutely frustrating and nerve wracking to try to figure things out. One key tip is to remember that underpricing will always be more devastating than overpricing ever would. The purpose of the way you price that e-book is to make sure that you make a profit – no matter what your overall objective or at one position your business is in, you should be making a profit. You’re not running a charity here!

If you know your audience, it won’t be too difficult to figure out what their average income would be, especially if you’re targeting people in a very specific demographic. Knowing how much they make can give you a clue as to how much they would be willing to pay on a relatively new product. Ebooks are great and all, but they’re still a new idea to hundreds of thousands of internet users. There’s no real benchmark yet on how something like that should be priced.

The current goal of your business should also have a say in your ebook pricing. At the start of a venture, you’re looking to be seen. You want people to take notice and associate your business with good and “worth it” feelings. You’re the new kid on the block, and you want to be liked. Price it a little lower than you normally would under the same considerations.

Your expected number of sales should also determine how much you sell your work for. Have a target total profit before you start doing any kind of marketing. With that in mind, compare how many ebooks you expect to sell to the kind of profits you’re looking to achieve and from there, you can probably figure out just how to price your ebook. After all, you’re not just selling that product once. If you’ve created something with infinite appeal, you can hopefully sell it an infinite number of times.

Whatever you price it, it should reflect clearly on both your needs and the objective quality of your ebook. Does it bring anything new to the field, or did you just cleverly rewrite some things? Are people really interested in what you wrote about? Is it relevant to the target audience? Whatever the case, knowing these things will make selling and writing ebooks a lot easier.

The 800-Pound Gorilla: 305-page guide for Writing, Publishing, and Selling EBooks and 17 video tutorials at The Wealthy Plumber: Writing, Publishing & Selling EBooks.

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A workable and well planned internet marketing strategy remains one of the key foundations in a successful internet based endeavor. Random acts and moving on mere whims will cost you more money than you could ever pose to gain. That would basically be gambling. While the internet is a good place for that, with online casinos up the wazoo, that’s just not what an internet business is all about. An internet business is one based on carefully thought of moves.


The first move that you should take into account is, of course, your product or what you’re offering people. The choice of product that’s becoming more popular as it gains prominence is the electronic book. This is one of the many important aspects in successfully making money and one of the reasons that many internet businesses based on ebooks tend to fail.

They just don’t pay attention to quality, at least, not as much as they should. Developing an ebook with quality could cost a person, especially if they were paying for a professional or a team of writers. Paying a lot before making profit can leave a bad taste in the mouths of the inexperienced. They end up cutting corners before production even begins. That means hiring less than the best and ending up with less than the best or sometimes, something that is merely passable.

People can find passable for free – don’t expect them to pay for it and not demand a refund. You can’t just offer crap in a neat package and expect people to pay for that packaging. You also can’t offer or have an ebook on something common that’s just plain common sense. If people do buy it, they’ll probably leave a review somewhere on the huge world wide web, making a negative mark on your reputation.

Now, if you make an ebook with exclusive content, like say a detail filled interview with an expert in a certain field, or a unique view on some sort of “how to” information, then you can really start making yourself look and feel special in the eyes of your buyers. They want to buy something they wouldn’t be getting otherwise. If people could get something easily found for free, they’d get it for free. If they could only get it by paying through the nose and it’s something that’s really good, then of course, you’re going to see sales.

The target market is another consideration for your e-book. You need a writer or you need to be able to write according to the understanding, demands and lingo of the people who you’re expecting to buy your e-book. This will reinforce the idea that you’re really catering to their needs and intellects, making it far more appealing for them to leave a positive review, possibly generating more sales in the process.

Do the right research, and the path will eventually reveal itself. Always remember that even if you’ve found that niche that’s just looking for the right e-book, you still need to properly harness it, to properly turn it into a product, an e-book that will sell hundreds if not thousands of times over. Also note that while this is an important aspect of any internet marketing strategy, this is only one aspect of it.
The 800-Pound Gorilla: 305-page guide for Writing, Publishing, and Selling EBooks and 17 video tutorials at The Wealthy Plumber: Writing, Publishing & Selling EBooks.

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Are you a fledgling ebook author who has products you’ve created and self-published that are ready and waiting for the world to celebrate them? If so, then you know it’s pivotal to your success to get your ebooks where potential buyers will be able to find them. That isn’t always an easy thing to accomplish, particularly when you are just getting started in the ebook business.


Sometimes you may need some help in getting your ebooks promoted. There are many options for marketing your products on the internet and it can be challenging to figure out which of them is the most effective for your purposes.

One of the best methods of marketing your ebooks in through affiliate marketing. This is the practice of getting other people to promote your products by posting banners and text ads on their websites that link to your products. If sales are made from the referral or affiliate links on their sites, then you agree to pay them a commission or certain percentage of the sales made. They essentially serve in the capacity of third-party sellers.

On one hand, you may not be happy with having to give up 100% of the profits you would have made, if you tried to just make sales on your own. On the other hand, you could have hundreds of people promoting your ebooks across the internet, increasing your chances for achieving sales. The more folks getting the word out about your products, the more potential traffic you will get to where your products are.

One of things you could do is to create an affiliate program, where people could sign up as affiliates directly from your ebook store site. You may want to make sure that potential affiliates are going to promote your products on sites that have a lot of traffic, as sites with less traffic may decrease the chance for sales. You can also opt to sign up as a merchant with an affiliate network, such as Clickbank, Commission Junction, Linkshare, Share-a-Sale and other similar directories.

You will need to create appealing banner ads and text ads for your affiliates to place on their websites, ones that will capture the attention of potential buyers. If you have the technical know-how, you can design your own banner and text ads or, if you are not especially tech savvy, you can use a service that designs professional banner and text ads that make people want to learn more about your products.

To make the record of your sales easy to keep track of, you should provide easy, immediate payment options for buyers who come to your website, via affiliate links. Having buyers make purchases through online payment programs, like Moneybrokers and Paypal offer a secure way for customers to pay for your ebooks. They also protect you from fraudulent purchases,since credit cards must be verified, before being accepted.

While affiliate marketing certainly isn’t the only marketing strategy you should use to market your products, it can be an effective solution towards boosting your ebook sales and bringing in all that lovely cash.

strong>The 800-Pound Gorilla: 305-page guide for Writing, Publishing, and Selling EBooks and 17 video tutorials at The Wealthy Plumber: Writing, Publishing & Selling EBooks.

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If your want to sell your book with Lulu print on demand you need to make the eBook available in this format to begin with. This is very easy to do, thanks to the wealth of information and advice that Lulu gives you in its help section. Check out this Lulu section on formatting. This is broken down into stages so that you can easily access the parts you need. You can also pay Lulu to perform the editing for you and prices range from $200 for light editing to $500 for heavy editing.


Lulu also provides design prices for covers here where prices range from $80 for a custom eBook cover to $1,000 for a deluxe cover. The only thing to bear in mind with print on demand via Lulu is that you have the cost of actually printing the book to think about. There are still no upfront charges though – you won’t have to pay a thing until you make a sale. Check out their demo here. You can also see what they charge to print books here, just scroll down and the pricing tool is on the right.

At the time of writing Lulu has broken down the fees into two main types. First, there is a flat fee which they call a base cost. This is the same regardless of the type or size of book you want to publish. Second, there is a printing cost, which varies depending on how many pages your book has, and whether they are in color or black and white. Basically this is a flat fee per page, which is made in cents.

Lulu itself still takes a cut of the proceeds from each sale, but as with eBooks when you make a sale, you will simply receive your portion of the cover price in your account. Simple, eh? And if there is anything you aren’t sure about, you can bet that Lulu will have answered your question already in their help section. Although, they do also have a live help facility where you can speak to someone directly if you need to.

There’s also plenty of info about ISBN’s as well (remember those?), and it will benefit you to read it. If you just want to make a hard copy of your book available on Lulu, then you don’t need to worry about getting one if you don’t want to, but as we found out before, it is necessary if you want it available to 60,000 bookstores and libraries including Amazon and Barnes and Noble so that anyone can find out about it. You can also sell your products on CD through Lulu.

And since I’m assuming you want to be selling as many copies of your books as possible, you’ll probably be only too pleased to do whatever is necessary to make that happen.

This information is one of 305 pages of detailed steps for Writing, Publishing, and Selling EBooks and now you can receive a FREE 110 pages ABRIDGED VERSION just by clicking Work From Home Writing, Publishing & Selling EBooks.

To view the unabridged version and the 17 video tutorials see The Wealthy Plumber: Writing, Publishing & Selling EBooks

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WRITING A GOOD PRESS RELEASE

Every good press release follows a template, and while this varies from source to source the template I have included in this section will certainly do the job.

You’ll notice that I have included a sub-heading in this template; this is because a lot of press releases use them to alert readers to an additional fact about the event that is particularly important.

Here are some examples which show you how a sub-heading can be used to your advantage:

• “New widget is the cheapest available”

• “200th addition to Widget World’s range”

• “Widget World Opening Day on April 15th 2008”

You can see how your sub-heading allows you to share another snippet of useful information about your newsworthy event, so it should be used wisely.

Here are some places that will distribute press releases for free:

• www.prlog.org

• www.pr.com

• http://i-newswire.com

• www.pr9.net

• www.bignews.biz

You can also increase the likelihood that your press release will be picked up by Google News and other top news websites by submitting to a pay service, such as www.prweb.com. For a cost of $40 and up you can receive a significant increase in the effectiveness of your press release. Features include:

• Same day distribution of your press release

Upload of graphics and multimedia (graphics are not usually possible with the above free services)

• Inclusion of RSS, XML, OPLM, and NewsML

• Inclusion into major search engines including Google News, Yahoo News, MSN News, etc.

• Availability of SEO assistance

• Excellent stats

• Targeting of as many as 10 industries

• Free editorial review

PRWeb Direct also offers valuable tips on their site to help you with press release development and submission. The company is one of the oldest online press release distribution agencies around, with 100,000 contacts, industry analysts and freelance journalists in their databases. It’s a great service and well worth checking out.

For article marketing, if your budget allows, is to use an article submission service, but you need to make certain that you use a quality service or your plan could backfire with the search engines. About the favorite service among Internet Marketing Specialists is Article Marketer. Article Marketer reaches over 67,246 publishers through 5,910 sites, forums and lists.

Submitting articles to many quality websites with links back to your website (backlinks) is very important for your Google Page Rank and to other search engines. These backlinks are connections from websites all around the internet that guide readers back to your website. Your linking strategy could mean the difference between the success and failure of your online business.

A high quality strategy will provide lots of qualified and pre-sold traffic that will convert at high rates for your newsletter, eBook, and buying other products.

Backlinks are gigantic when it comes to driving tons of traffic to your site because major search engines use the quality and number of backlinks to decide where your site ranks in search engine results.

This information is one of 305 pages of detailed steps for Writing, Publishing, and Selling EBooks and now you can receive a FREE 110 pages ABRIDGED VERSION just by clicking Work From Home Writing, Publishing & Selling EBooks.

To view the unabridged version and the 17 video tutorials see The Wealthy Plumber: Writing, Publishing & Selling EBooks

Marketing eBooks, selling ebooks press release template

The continuation of how to promote your eBook with Press Releases:

A good way of making sure you don’t write to anyone in particular is to check your release after you have written it. What you need to do is strike out every occasion where you have used the word ‘you’.

Here’s an example:

•    BAD – “You can find cheaper insurance using the info in this eBook.”

•    GOOD – “Everyone can find cheaper insurance using the info in this eBook.”


It’s a subtle difference – but a big one. If a company that distributes press releases receives one which is full of sentences like the ones in the first example, you will very likely receive it back. You can edit it and resubmit of course, but why not get things right first time?

It’s also important to make sure that you lay your press release out properly. You should have your contact details at the top of the release, aligned to the right hand side of the page. Following that, make sure you center the words ‘For immediate release’ and add the month and the year too.

Your headline is next. Make sure it states the facts and makes it clear exactly what the newsworthy event actually is. Once you’ve done all that, you should write around 500 words for the release itself. This length should be plenty of room to get all the necessary details down on paper.

You will normally find that even the free press release distribution sites will have guidelines on how they like to receive releases. It’s ideal therefore to read through the guidelines for each one, to ensure that you adhere to their exact requirements.

Another point to bear in mind is that quotations are good to keep the interest level up and make your press release more readable. This might seem strange when you are writing about the eBook that you have written! But all you need to do is to come up with some quotations from you that are relevant to your eBook.

If you get stuck, here are some sample questions for you. Use the answers you come up with to give you some ideas for quotations:

•    What made you write this eBook?

•    Have you had personal experience of what you are writing about?

•    How do you think other people will benefit from it?

•    What feedback have you had already?

•    Has it already proved successful?

•    Why have you added new updated information to it?

These questions should be enough to get you started. And again, the best advice if you are stuck is to go online and read some of the press releases that have already been published. These will give you an idea of how to proceed with your own.

So think about when you will need to issue a press release and think about as many newsworthy events that you can in the life of your eBook. The more events there are, the more publicity you will be able to get as a result.

Include contact details on your press release. These should either be for you personally or if you are part of a larger company, the person who is in the best position to field questions and queries about the subject of the release. If you don’t include any contact details, there is again a very high chance that your release won’t be published.

There are plenty more things to bear in mind too, which we will address in the next part of this chapter, but these are the three things you absolutely must have in place if you are to rise above the thousands of other press releases out there and stand a chance of being published and seen by the very people you are trying to reach.

This information is one of 305 pages of detailed steps for Writing, Publishing, and Selling EBooks and now you can receive a FREE 110 pages ABRIDGED VERSION just by clicking Work From Home Writing, Publishing & Selling EBooks.

To view the unabridged version and the 17 video tutorials see The Wealthy Plumber: Writing, Publishing & Selling EBooks

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Ah, now this is where it starts getting a little tricky. You’ve done all your research, and you sat down and accomplished what a lot of people simply cannot manage to do, and that’s write the darn eBook in the first place. And what’s more, you’ve also persevered and managed to keep going and built a good website and sales page to prepare for product launch.

There’s only one thing missing now. And that’s the price. And you have asked yourself many times “how to price my eBook”. Let’s take a look at what could happen if you went too far in either direction.


PRICING YOUR EBOOK TOO HIGH

This has several disadvantages – both with copies that you do sell and copies that you don’t. Let me explain.

Let’s say you find a website that is promoting a brand new eBook. And let’s say you really like the look of this eBook. You want to buy it. You want to learn from it and use the information inside it to make your life better in some way.

By the time you get to the bottom of the sales page – where the price becomes apparent – you are sold on the eBook. You’ve practically got your credit card out and you’re looking for the pay now button.

And then you see the price.

And unfortunately there is no way you can afford it. As much as you want to get the book, the price is probably double what you could justify paying. So you have to pass it up.

This scenario happens often because some authors are intent on getting the most money they can for their product. Now it’s fair enough that you want to make a nice chunk of change for your efforts, but if you price it out of the market you are aiming at, it won’t sell.

Think of it like this. Would you consider taking a Porsche into a run down part of town to try and sell it? Of course not – because the product doesn’t match the market. But you’d probably sell a less expensive car without any problem.

When you are thinking about setting the price, think about two things:

• What you are offering

• Who you are offering it to

Those are the two main points you need to think about with each eBook you write.

If you have written a comprehensive eBook about making money online, you’ll need to think about who it is aimed at. If you have aimed it at people who have already had some success, you could probably charge more for it than you would if you were aiming it at people who wanted to get started on a shoestring budget. Think about it – if they don’t have the money to invest in getting started on a large scale, they won’t have a large sum of money to invest in your eBook either.

PRICING YOUR EBOOK TOO LOW

Your eBook can actually sell fewer copies if you price it too cheaply. It sounds amazing, but if you have ever had a browse round eBay or any other auction site online where you don’t see the goods before you buy them, what is your reaction if you see something really cheap?

This information is one of 305 pages of detailed steps for Writing, Publishing, and Selling EBooks and now you can receive a FREE 110 pages ABRIDGED VERSION just by clicking Work From Home Writing, Publishing & Selling EBooks.

To view the unabridged version and the 17 video tutorials see The Wealthy Plumber: Writing, Publishing & Selling EBooks

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SELLING YOUR EBOOK WITH A WEBSITE

Selling your eBook through a website is just as important as writing the eBook. The website must be persuasive. You’ve got to let people know how darn good this eBook really is! Think of it as the difference between sticking a copy of your book on the back shelf in a bookshop… or putting a big display of them just inside the door, with a big billboard outside telling everyone that it’s there.

You’ve got to blow your own trumpet in this business; otherwise you won’t make many sales. That’s a fact. So be proud of your book and make sure that you shout about it at the top of your lungs.

WHY A DEDICATED WEBSITE?

If you hadn’t seen any before, I am sure that by now you will have looked online and come across plenty of eBooks that are being sold from a dedicated website. This is by far the best way to sell them since the site focuses on one book and one book alone.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Let’s say you want to write and sell ten eBooks in the next year or two. Hey, it’s more than possible. How much is that going to cost you in domain names and hosting fees for ten separate websites? Surely it will be a whole lot cheaper to stick them all on one site – especially if all the books are on similar subjects?

I see your point, but those extra fees will be more than counteracted by the extra sales you will make as a result of having every book sold from a separate website. You can also get a domain name and web hosting very cheaply nowadays, and it’s well worth the cost. Depending on the web package you choose, there will either be a limit to the number of websites you can host, or it will be unlimited.

That means that if you bought the unlimited package, you could literally write a hundred separate eBooks and set up a site for each one – and they would all be hosted under the terms of that one package. And the price for this kind of service is a lot less than you might think.

One of the main problems with putting everything on the one site is that it makes things harder for people to find. Let’s start with the domain name for example. If you have a mini site, then your domain name can relate to that specific product.

But what do you do if you are selling ten different products all from the same site?

You can’t choose a domain name that is relevant to a product because you’re selling more than one. And if they are all on completely different subjects, the only thing you can do is to choose a domain name that has some relevance to eBooks in general.

And believe me when I say there are thousands upon thousands of websites out there with the word ‘eBook’ included in the domain name. You’ll have a lot of competition if you try this route.

It also gets tricky when you are putting keywords and phrases into the site, because you need to focus on lots of different topics. If you have a single page website focusing on a single product, you can use basic keywords and phrases as well as having the room to dig deeper and use other ones that will attract attention.

But trying to do this when you have more than one product to tell people about is not an easy task, and it is almost as if you are trying to sell too much at once. So stick to one at a time – you will notice the difference (and the benefits) if you do.

This information is one of 305 pages of detailed steps for Writing, Publishing, and Selling EBooks and now you can receive a FREE 110 pages ABRIDGED VERSION just by clicking Work From Home Writing, Publishing & Selling EBooks.

To view the unabridged version and the 17 video tutorials see The Wealthy Plumber: Writing, Publishing & Selling EBooks

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Writing the ebook and putting the finishing touches to the final draft is really only the tip of the iceberg. Now, as a self-publisher, you would need to spruce up on your marketing skills to get your literary piece to your intended audience. This is actually more difficult than it sounds. Making money, online writing and selling ebooks is really not as easy as most people would like you to believe. And this becomes a heck more personal because this is your literary work you are trying to sell. Simply put, you cannot tag this process as simply marketing one ebook. There are some steps you must undertake to make sure you reach as much potential market as possible.

Putting up a website is not really necessary, especially if you prefer marketing your ebook through other channels like article submission in different ezine sites or directories; via forum discussions; or through e-mail ads. However, a website can help greatly in providing your interested public or inquisitive potentials about what they can expect form your ebook, what the scope and limitations are of your discussion, price, etc. If you are not so well-versed with web development and website maintenance, you might want to avail the services of a freelancer to take this load off you.

On the other hand, if you would rather do this on your own, then you must also contend with getting a domain space and hosting (for your site,) putting up testimonials for your ebooks, setting up autoresponders for potential email queries, etc. Websites in the Web 2.0 seem to either have audio messages or video messages installed in their respective opening pages. This is proving to be quite popular among Internet surfers who want to get to the “heart” of things, without having through scroll through the entire page. Video messages and video descriptions of your book may also help your website score a high ranking in most search engine results page. That is an investment in marketing you might want to keep in mind.

If you would rather not have audio or video messages on your website’s opening page (because they do tend to slow down the uploading process, especially for people who are using dial-up Internet services,) you could provide a link to such messages in the other pages of your website. The important element here is that your website should both complement and reflect the contents of your ebook. As a way of attracting more traffic to your site, you may also want to include bonuses you can offer to the first few buyers of piece. These bonuses may take the form of market reports, coupons or discounts to other ebooks, etc.

You would also have to deal with payment processors and the shipment of sales copy. A website also gives you the capability to set up your affiliate programs.

However, if you do find this marketing process a bit too overwhelming, you could always ask for help from the pros. A very good recommendation would be to seek the services of online companies like Lulu, BookSurge, Lightning Source. The pros in such companies will sell your ebooks for you on their websites, which basically takes care of the ordering, handling, and shipping of the goods to clients worldwide. Lulu can even help you access related marketing services and other online ebook retailers. They do, however, ask for a certain percentage of your sales.

For a complete concept to full time writer and publisher in 30 days check out the insane resources at TheWealthyPlumber.com.

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