How To Sell And Market Your Own Ebooks

You must have noticed that these days ebooks have transformed into one of the best viral marketing tools. Almost anyone can write their own ebooks and either give them away for free or sell them for a very reasonable price. In fact, selling or giving them away is the very first question you have to ask yourself when you decide to write your own ebooks.

So what is it, sell them or give them away?

The benefit of selling your ebooks, of course, is that you can take nearly all of the money for yourself. On the other hand, giving them away for free does have its own merit in that it gives your blog or website more exposure and therefore more traffic. And, because they're free, more people would want to download them and even pass them along to their friends.

The rule of thumb here is that if your ebook has 60 or more pages of good useful content, then you should charge people for it. But, if it's a mere 30 or so pages, even with great content, you should just give it away for free and benefit from the backlinks instead.

Now, to set up your own storefront is very easy. First, open an account at www.lulu.com. It's totally free. Then, simply upload the ebook you've written. Don't worry if you don't have a PDF converter, because Lulu will automatically convert your Ms Word DOC file into a PDF format. If you can create your own design for the cover, it's good. But if not, there's a whole list of templates you can choose from and customize.

And voila! The only thing left to do is set the price. The deal with Lulu is that it takes 25% of the royalty you set.

My suggestion is, you browse Lulu a little before you decide how much your ebook is worth. Setting the price too high will put the buyers off, while setting it too low will make it look amateurish and not worth buying.

Set the price to zero and people will be able to download it for free.

Now on to the marketing!

Since most of Lulu's visitors are sellers like yourself, it's kind of hard to just rely on their storefront display to sell your ebook. It is now up to your creativity to advertise it in your blog. Write a review about it. If your friends or relatives have read it, then quote them. Nothing attracts a reader more than a genuine testimonial from another fellow reader. Lastly, put the catchy picture of your ebook in the top left hand corner of your blog (or your right, if your blog is still in a two-collumn format).

Another way to make some extra sales is by subtly promoting your ebook in related forums. You can place the ad in your signature and start posting as many times as you can, or you can simply look for opportunities to mention about your ebook in your posts. The key here is to always be genuinely helpful. Write down some lines of very useful answers before mentioning your ebook. It could be something like, "If you want to know more about it, then I suggest you check out this ebook." (It's best, though, that you don't use your real name as your nick there, so that it appears like it's an unbiased suggestion from a reader.)

One more tip!

If you decide to give it away for free, you can actually start a thread in forums saying that you've just found this great ebook that really works and it's free to download. Believe me, they'll thank you for it.


More Cool Stuff You Can Do With Lulu

Lulu also allows you to sell all kinds of digital stuff from music to photographs. If, for instance, you happen to have your own band but are having a really hard time selling your music, or if perhaps you're an aspiring photographer who wants to earn some bucks, then try your luck here. As with the ebooks, you get to charge your own price.

With your creative marketing techniques, you can surely turn your hobbies into another money making opportunity.


Source: Blog for money: A Beginners Guide