Author: charlie

The Delicious Joy of Becoming an Ebook Writer

How many people do you know that can call themselves a published writer?

A few?

But, then if you think back to high school how many people that you knew then wanted to become a writer but then grew up to be something boring and practical instead?

From Hollywood Movies to prime time television the lives and lifestyles of a writer have been romanticized and exalted. (In part I believe because the writers of movies and television shows aspire to be published writers themselves).

At parties anyone who writes for a living becomes an instant celebrity. Everyone wants to know how they get their ideas and give them their ideas for stories or articles they think should be written about. Many people upon meeting a writer will tell them there whole life story hopping that the writer will somehow use it there next book thus making them immortal.

Sometime it is downright reticules the amount of attention paid to writers.

Yet that is the draw for some people to sit alone in a coffee shop and gaze off into their imagination and then type furiously while cup after cup of expensive good coffee goes cold on the table un-touched while they feverishly tap away at the keyboards of their laptops.

Thanks to self publishing more and more people are getting to experience the lifestyles of Hemingway, Poe and Thoreau.

The costs to self publish and ebook online is almost nothing and takes little if no time at all. A web site that allows customers to buy eBooks can be made easily with free websites like those had through websites like WordPress.com and setting up a payment processor through sites like Paypall.com can be accomplished in less time than reading this article.

So did you have a story to tell?

Do you remember the ones that floated around in your head as a teenager? Is there anything left of the raged spiral notebook you scratched in, as the buss rumbled you along home? What was that story you and your best friend were telling each other and adding bits to in the light of a flashlight at summer camp that year? What was the name of that movie you saw with the dumb ending? How would you have done it better if it was your story? Do you want to make the world laugh or expose something worth crying about until someone does something to stop it?

Why not shut off the television and set out on the back patio with a tom colons dripping sweat down its side and pop open your laptop and start clickity clacking on the old keyboard while the dog chases bird shadows up the fence.

Life is good as writer, just you wait and see!

Special Touches Can Make or Break You.

Adding perceived and real value to your eBooks and other downloadable information products can be accomplished in many ways. Having original well written content is of course the most important. For those that research and compile useful information but do not have topnotch writing or editing skills professional writers can be found on line at place like elance.com, rentacoder.com and ebookedit.com at reasonable prices. This is the standard or starting place though really for a successful information or ebook product.

To make sure that your customer is wowed by the purchase they made, you will want to up the perceived value of your products by making the initial first impression they get when opening it as favorable as possible. The first impression the customer makes when they open the download will greatly affect the value they put on the information inside. Ultimately this will even affect the return rates of information products that are purchased.

So how do we accomplish creating this all important first impression economically?

We need to make the ebook as visually appealing as possible.

How is this accomplished?

Adding pictures is a good start. Finding and adding great pictures to eBooks which can be obtained through free photo sites is a great start. Often just by asking permission and notifying the artist how there picture will be used is all it takes.

Adding info graphics to explain hard to visualize concepts is also a great way to add color and piazzas to an otherwise gray looking ebook. Using Open Office Draw or similar programs to create pie graphs, bar graphs and other info graphics is a great way to impress purchasers of your products at a glance.

Making a clickable table of contents, will add ease of use for the customer and demonstrate professionalism and build legitimacy for your content. It’s also a feature ebook readers have come to expect and one off the reasons they choose buying eBooks online versus taking the alternative route and buying hardcover and paperbacks from your competitor.

Adding borders and page number should also be part of your standard ebook creation procedure as well as picking out an easy to read font.

As more and more of the world switch from traditional paper to electronic books the electronic book or ebook world will become even more competitive. It is essential then that you either become acquainted with these techniques or have someone on your team who is.

You simply can’t ignore adding special touches to your information products if you wan’t to succeed in today’s marketplace. After all, you do only get one chance to make a first impression!

Promoting Your Own Ebook

Of course if you create your own ebook you will want to get it in front of as many people as possible for as little work and cost as possible.

You could go on Twitter and tweet every hour “Hey just wrote an ebook” and leave a “tiny url” but that would probably get you un-followed faster than eBooks would fly off the virtual shelves.

Is there a better way?

Well what is your ebook about?

If your ebook is about home schooling for example you could answer tweets about problems that deal with homeschooling and simply put a link to your sales page on your Twitter profile this way people who read and follow your good advice would be interested in you look at your profile and purchase your ebook considering the information you give away on Twitter is so good it easy to assume your ebook is even better.

You could use this same strategy in forums related to home schooling as an unobtrusive way to earn respect in the home schooling community and looked to as the go-to-guru for all things home schooled!

The trick is not to appear over bearing and to self promotional. These are real people on forums looking for solutions to their problems and not expecting forum posts to be mini commercials.

Tact and patience are the watch words in social marketing. People who understand this gain large fan groups in social media and this large fan base translates into sales.

You can also start a blog about home schooling. Blogs are free, and rank high in the search engines as long as new content is added regularly for specific keywords used in titles of blog entries. You could use a blog to develop a fan base of people interested in homeschooling and also create both advertising for your sales page with your blog and a vital link to your sales page.

Buying the keywords “home schooling” from search engines and creating your own snappy little Adwords campaign is also another great way to get people who are interested in homeschooling to see your ebook. The process is easier than you would think and the directions can easily be followed at the search engines website.

Another free and easy way to get your website some visitors is to remember to put it in your signature as a link at the bottom of your emails.

This way every time your email is forwarded an intact link to your sales page will get passed along.

There’s almost no end to the free and easy things you can do to promote your ebook and buy the time you finish this article the Internet may have changed again already and you may discover a new form of self promotion that wasn’t there yesterday!

EBooks That Sell Themselves!

Now that you have wrote, or have had written for you an ebook “so good” that it should sell itself don’t be surprised if it doesn’t!

I’m not insinuating that you won’t be able to sell your ebook but I am inferring that your work is not done yet.

If you really want to sell your ebook you need to create a page that “sells” it.

It’s called a sales page and special attention needs to be given to it, to make sure anyone who gets to it, will feel compelled to read it, long enough to find out that your ebook is so great, that they have to buy it.

To make sure you eBooks sales page is compelling you need to start by writing a catchy headline which uses words people who are looking for the solution your ebook solves may be using to show you identify with your customers and their problems and at least hints at a solution. Your head line, like all text on your sales page, should be in an easy to read font and one that displays well in all browsers.

From your main head line you will want to roll into a sub headline which is an extension of the main headline and serves to build hype enough to grab readers attention and get them exited enough to read the rest of the page and all about all the benefits your ebook will give them.

Your first few paragraphs should be used to build report with your customer let them know that you understand their problems. Following the introductory paragraphs explain that your ebook is here to solve it.

Then show them a picture of your ebook. Although eBooks don’t need covers you should still show them a professional looking representation of what your ebook would look like. People almost need the image of a book to help them understand what there “virtually” getting and research shows that better the ebook cover image looks the better sales will do.

After displaying a picture of the book you should offer a button or field in which people can start the process of purchasing if they choose. After the “Buy Now” area of your sales page you will want a list of specific benefits your book will solve, for the “doubting” but still interested group.

Once you have laid out all of the benefits’ of your ebook follow up with a strong call to action. Perhaps a limited time offer or something that shows the potential customer that procrastination leads to regret. Again offer means to start the buying process within site of the words or a picture that represents a guarantee and then expound on the greatness of the guarantee to ease the doubters mind about the safety and security they can feel in making the decision to buy now.

All of these things should be considered the backbone of your sales page strategy if you truly want to have your ebook sell itself!

Audio Ebook Explosion

When you consider the purchaser of an ebook how do you imagine them? Are they sitting at home late at night searching for information or sitting in an airport browsing the web from their phone? Can you can draw certain conclusions about your potential customer, conclusions that will help you understand their wants and needs and help you figure out how to satisfy their desires.

Just from the above mentioned examples you will note that your potential customer is not browsing a library or book store for information.

If you are trying to beat a library or a book store and see them as competition you have missed your mark.

From this new perspective you understand that your potential buyer is A. Busy and B. Capable of downloading information from the web in many formats.

You can also assume that because they are considering purchasing information from the web that have some disposable income.

Knowing this at the start of creating an ebook package may help you in reaping more profits by supplying more of what your customer wants.

Busy people who are on the go look for solutions that fit their hectic lifestyles. How much more valuable would it be for the late night web surfer if you could provide an audio version of the information you are providing so they can shut their laptop and learn about it from the comfort of their bed? How to could you better serve the man or woman stuck in an airport running from gate to gate if you could provide for them and audio book they could listen to with their .mp3 player while on the run?

Imagine how offering this group of people a sample of the audio could clinch the deal!

Creating a complementary audio version of ebook you are offering lends credibility to the original ebook, much the same way a movie about a book boost the sales of a traditional novel.

By adding an audio version of your ebook the benefits’ are then two fold. The audio exposes the eBook to a wider audience (those that don’t have time or like to read) while also simply bolstering the eBooks status by having it.

Turning an ebook into an audio ebook is easy and can be accomplished with a fairly inexpensively with a microphone and some open source recording and editing software.

Simply turn on the microphone and read the ebook yourself and then later edit out the mistakes.

There are many professional looking SWF (First meaning “Shockwave Flash”, but later changed to “Small Web Format” ) players to play audio samples which you can be easily add to any HTML, ( Hyper Text Markup Language) sales page so there is no reason to fear the process.

Although it may take a little more time to get your ebook to market the benefits’ of more sales at higher prices will more than offset the investment.