E-books

Hollyann,
I'm going to port this to nonfiction books. I think you'll get a better response there.

I know this will come off as a bunch of bs, especially because I don't want to go into details, but I've been making OK on two of my e-books.

Simple: I found a subject. Wrote the stuff in word. Downloaded a ghostscript and printed the whole thing as a PDF. Made a website about the e-book, got a paypal account and sold each copy for 20 Euro. I spent 2 weeks gathering information for my e-book (about 40 pages) and used about 100 euro for my website domain (registration and stuff like that). Not many people wrote about the subject so I got a page 1 placing in google if you searched for the subject, without me spending a dime on marketing. When people pay with their creditcard they are forwarded to my subdomain where they can download the pdf file. I don't really worry about a thing, except changing the subdomain url once a month to prevent abuse etc.
I've sold about 200 copies of that particular e-book in 2 years and it all goes straigh into my pocket (minus 0,5% that paypal charges).
So it's roughly about 200*20= 4000 euro. I don't know how much that is in dollars, but I've been told that I'm a lucky bastard for being able to sell an e-book for 20 euro pr. copy.
So it surely isn't making me a fortune but I'm not lifting a finger either and it's making me more money than if the project just sat at my desk, dreaming about an agent or publisher, that wouldn't dare touch it or just offer me 8% royalties etc.

I recently wrote an ebook: http://www.loseyourbellyfat.com . I was paid upfront for it but I've heard that you can do very well with these provided you are doing enough online marketing and are targeting a specific audience. There is a lot of work invovled though from what I'm hearing in getting the whole site up and running and getting visits to come to it.

ShannonC_77 said:

I recently wrote an ebook: http://www.loseyourbellyfat.com . I was paid upfront for it but I've heard that you can do very well with these provided you are doing enough online marketing and are targeting a specific audience. There is a lot of work invovled though from what I'm hearing in getting the whole site up and running and getting visits to come to it.

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Okay! The world just got a bit smaller. I actually wrote an endorsement for your E-Book!

Ha! That's so cool.

Hollyann, it's hard to actually lose money on an e-book, because there are very few costs involved. (Unless you pay for advertising, which you don't have to do. There are plenty of free avenues for publicity. You can also choose to take very small risks until you figure out what pays off in terms of paid advertising.) However, the main question is, is it worth your time? Hard to know, of course, without knowing what kind of book this will be and how you will reach the audience.

I've released three e-books. One sold about 1,000 copies before I rewrote it and sold it to a commercial publisher. One sold only a few dozen copies and got outdated too fast to bother with updating, and the other still sells about 1-2 copies a week.

All were books for writers, and I have a very obvious market for that built in here, so I didn't have to go out of my way to promote the titles. If you have no particular way to reach the audience you're targeting, you'll have to spend more time figuring out how to get their attention (writing articles for e-zines related to the topic; starting your own blog, newsletter, or e-mail group; getting reviews and endorsements; etc.).

There are a few e-book authors who make more money than most print book authors, but they're generally people who really know what they're doing in terms of marketing on the web-- search engine optimization, Google Ads, writing sales copy for the web, and so on. It can be done.

What sells best in terms of nonfiction e-books are usually how-to/self-help titles on niche topics that people want to know about immediately-- how to give a speech, how to get a cheap divorce, etc.

But like many other things, there's a huge variation in success and earnings levels.

Lisamer said:

Okay! The world just got a bit smaller. I actually wrote an endorsement for your E-Book!

Click to expand...

Wow! That is crazy! I must say then...THANK YOU!

Actually it was so odd because the the guy who endorced the ebook contacted me as well but about something totally different...funny how things work.

JennaGlatzer said:

Ha! That's so cool.

Hollyann, it's hard to actually lose money on an e-book, because there are very few costs involved.

Click to expand...

I'm just curious, how much money did you invest into the development of the website, marketing, etc in order to sell the ebooks? I'm just curious what a typical start-up cost of a site like this would be.

Hi again. I edited your post to snip out most of the quoted part (that's an etiquette thing around here so people don't have to scroll through the whole same post twice).

To answer your question:

I spent literally nothing because I already had a website, and didn't pay for any advertising. But I'm presumably in a different position from you-- I already had this website for writers with tens of thousands of subscribers, so I didn't incur any extra costs and I had a built-in audience. If I didn't, it would probably look more like this:

Domain registration: Less than $10 a year (Godaddy.com is cheap; that's who I've used for most domain registrations)
Website hosting: About $10 a month for a small personal site.
Cover design: My graphic artist friend designed one for me, and I did the other two myself. If I had to pay for it, I would expect to pay $50-100 for a simple design, because I just don't believe that e-book covers are all that important for nonfiction books.

The promotion I did was mostly effort-based, not money-based: I wrote up lots of free-to-reprint articles, gave away copies of the e-book as prizes for other people's contests, did lots of interviews, offered the e-book for review all over the place, paid attention to search engine strategies to get my book's page toward the top of the list for keywords like "freelance writing" and "magazine writing," joined e-mail groups where I could participate and offer advice on my topic (and included my e-book link in my signature line), and so on.

Thanks for your reply (and letting me know about the quoting thing...).

That's really cool. I am starting to develop more of a 'name' for myself it seems in the fitness industry as I write some free articles for a large website and actually think I get quite a few viewers from that.

I was just reading some articles on starting a page and they were talking about software you could buy that did mailing list subscriptions, auto-e-mails, things of that nature but the pack itself was $400 which since I'm not entirely sure if the book would see is a large investment. I was even thinking this morning maybe I could even get something going on myspace since everything there is free and it seems to be all the rage these days.... I've had people somehow find me on myspace from seeing me on other sites where there is no direct link...not sure how that works.

I guess I'm just amazed at some of the stuff you can do all online and I guess how interconnected it can get.

Check out MySpace, but also check out Blogger:

http://www.blogger.com

And the Blogging forum on AW.

And when you check out Blogger, check out the nifty little program you can download that will save each of your blog entries, email them to you, and when you're ready collect them into an e-book!