Write An Ebook Discussion – What Are Your Questions?
Many years before actually writing my first ebook I regularly dreampt of having my own top selling book, of operating my own self-publishing business out of my home and creating a collection of highly profitable information-based, "how-to" ebooks, reports and multi-media products.
With 12 ebooks on the market, dozens of reports and mini-infoproducts, a successful membership site, a home study course, CD's and DVD's – I can now see how crazy some of the questions and excuses I had for not taking action earlier really were.
I wrote about 3 of those misconceptions in a recent email sent out to my subscribers – they were:
- That you had to be an expert BEFORE you could write an ebook – more than 80% of the most profitable ebooks in fact prove this is NOT the case.
- That your ebook must be 150-pages or more…again, many of the most successful ebooks hit the market at 50 or 60 pages with some being as short as 20-30 pages – the topic and organization of your infromation is far more important than the number of pages.
- That ebooks are perceived as low-value backed up by the fact that you see so many $5-$10 ebooks on the market. Once again, this is a fallacy – if you choose your topic and target your market appropriately, the desparation for your information can easily convert into ebooks that are perceived at much higher values than typical books – $37, $47 and even $97
What other questions, challenges, excuses (sorry reasons) are holding you back from realizing your desire to one day write an ebook?
Post your comment below and we'll do our best to give our first-hand input based on operating offline and online self-publishing businesses over the last 10-years.
Jeff
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Comments on Write An Ebook Discussion – What Are Your Questions?
Hi,
I would like to market one book I have copy writes on it.
I have only hard copy. It is for Christians. How can i start.
Can you advice.
Thanks
I would like to publish an ebook. However, I don't know how to make a download or thank you page for it, or how to attach the file of the ebook to the page so people could buy it.
I am very interested in getting into the Info Products business but it seems the biggest weakness in the business is that others will photocopy my book and give it to their friends. Worse yet, someone could put it on the internet for free and hide behind a torrance. This is especially a problem in countries with weak intellectual property laws. I know it can't be entirely prevented but is there anything that can be done to curtail this?
Alexei – assuming you have the rights to market the digital version as well as the printed version of the book, then the first task would be to have the book scanned into digital format at which point you would clean up the formatting, convert it to an Adobe PDF and you would have your own ebook to sell online.
Here is a book scanning service that Yanik Silver advertised a while back – their rates are quite good…you'll want to check with them how they will treat your original book though, most of the time they have to take it apart to scan properly…
http://www.megainternetsuccess.com/pdscan/
Cheers,
Jeff
Hi Edward, good question – I think I'll put up a video to help make this clear in the next few days, it's easier to show than tell.
But roughly here is the process.
You get a website domain for your ebook business, let's say it is http://www.mywebsite.com
That is where your sales site will be.
You need to signup with a payment processor who can take payment on your behalf and submit the payment to your bank account – some of them are http://www.paypal.com http://www.clickbank.com http://www.2checkout.com
With them, you setup the description of your product and the price you will sell it for – they will then give you some code to put an order button on your sales site and handle all orders for you.
When an order is taken, you specify the "Thank You" page URL with your payment processor. Your thank you page can be quite simple – a page with your banner on it saying "Thank you for your order, you will receive an email within the next few minutes with the instructions to download your products"
You upload your ebook (usually a file in Adobe pdf format – something like ebook.pdf) to a sub-directory you create on your webhost.
Then you create the actual download page where you simply include a web link with the file name at the end – let's say http://www.mywebsite.com/download/ebook.pdf – when they click on that they will be able to download your ebook.
There are some additional instructions to secure your "download" directory as well – your webhost can help you with that.
We recommend Thirdsphere web hosting over at:
http://www.infoproductcreator.com/part/tsphere/
Jeff
Hi Barry – this is a common concern, however even the biggest names in the industry will tell you that it doesn't happen that often.
To help, you can do a few things:
1. Include a very clear statement of Copyright in the beginning of your book – I've had people give away or sell my content truly thinking it was resell rights – a bold Copyright prevents that sort of mistake
2. You can put restrictions on PDF files or even use secure exe files, but in my experience the bad customer experience this causes makes it a negative more than a positive
3. You can organize your content around a model that continually updates itself – example, your customer buys an ebook with an upsell to monthly subsrcription where they get new content (interviews, listings, videos, reports, newsletter, teleconferences, case studies, etc…) monthly so that it's much tougher to copy AND you get a continuity income source.
The real power of an infoproduct business is leading with a fixed info product such as an ebook, report or home study course, then upsell to either consumable information or consumable products (Ex in weight loss market it could be nutritionals or weight loss programs – pet training ebook could upsell pet food or pet products, etc…)
Jeff
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for your blogs! I have a concern. I created an ebook (with your help) and I sold two copies of it the first day. now i havent sold one for over two weeks? I changed my website so i had no outgoing links and made it look more like a sales copy but still no bites. Please give me some suggestions.
Hi Wolfgang – this is often the case when first starting out with a new product, you'll make a few sales, then things will slow as you refine both your traffic sources and sales letter.
What you should be aiming for is approximately 1 sale in 100 unique visitors (to start out – ideally you refine that to be between 2-3 sales per 100 unique visitors, but anything above .05 and 1% is not a bad start)
If you are under that over a period of 400-500 unique visitors, then you need to test some new ideas on your sales page and/or test your traffic source.
Where is your traffic coming from?
Not sure if you are aware of it – but when you sign up for a Google Adwords account (it's free), you can use their Website Optimizer which is really a terrific "split-testing" tool that allows you to setup multiple versions of your page that will be mathematically tested to see which one produces the best results – I recommend coming up with at least another (if not two) versions of your sales page and re-testing to the point where each sales page version gets at least 100 unique visitors.
Jeff
Jeff,
Thanks for your encouragement but I am really scared though had been excited to see your ebook which I paid for with the accompanying bonuses. Am yet to lownload the book and read but my fear stems from the fact that it appears there are many things involved. Am lacking things like a website, how do I get organised, how do I start who will guide me eventhough I have materials in many areas. Will the book contain many issues I am deficient and how will I overcome them
Jeff, when I download and read your book I shall ask you more questions.
Hi Mary – the Ultimate Information Entrepreneur's Package and Membership Site should help a great deal, and yes, feel free to ask any questions.
Step 1 is to change those feelings of being "scared" to one of "exploration" – think of building your information publishing business as a journey – one that will continue to get better and better over time.
Jeff
Do I need a merchant account to sell online? If yes,do I need a good credit rating to get a merchant account? Also I am an American currently living in China. Will that be a problem for selling things online to Western countries?
Barry – you need a method of taking payment, could be a merchant account or a payment processor arrangement such as Clickbank, 2Checkout.com, Paypal, etc…
Not sure why living in China would be an issue – as long as you can get a merchant account or payment processing account, should be no issue.
To get a merchant account with a bank, you typically do need a good credit rating. The payment processors tend to not require quite as good a rating.
Give one of them a try.
Jeff