Marketing ebooks

Don’t get any ideas about putting your feet up once your book is formatted, uploaded onto a website, ready and available, the hard part is yet to come. At least there is a free ebook from ‘Smashwords’ for some ideas on how to get started - details on their home page.

What’s that? You don’t need to worry about distribution because you’ve hosted the files on your own website? Sorry, this is very unlikely to be enough. And don’t get all smug because you’ve decided to use the Smashwords option. All you have done so far is make the product available. Yes, a few may stumble across it by chance, but nothing like the numbers you probably want.

Think of ebook distributors as giant warehouses. You can add your book onto the shelves, but selling to browsers is going to pretty hard, if not impossible. Before you create your book, please make sure you have a plan to market it.

Even if you are aiming for distribution via the Premium List, it still helps to get potential readers to actively look for your book. By sending them to your Smashwords site, you'll earn a much higher return than via the main distributors.

For both of these reasons, you must now stop being an author and become a business person – and that means learning about mailing lists, free offers, customer services and all that jazz.One of my all time favourite books on marketing unfortunately went out of print when the marketing expert who wrote it went into retirement. But without having all the hassles of conventional printing, and after some pretty hard graft converting the text from an old PDF, I was able to make available now crafted from the finest quality electrons and pixels!

If you are new to the whole marketing scene, then this is an excellent book to start with, and should give you a massive advantage over the opposition.

As soon as you can, start collecting the names and emails of those who are interested in your books. It can be really useful to have a focused list to send offers, updates and and pre-launch notifications to. To see how these can look, click on the 'Author updates' button on the left.

A Cunning Plan

I'll go into this all in more detail later (probably in an ebook!), but here is a really good plan to start with:

Firstly, have a completely free ebook available that can be downloaded as a 'taster of your work. Make sure there is at least one link in it to a web site, a book for sale (possibly with a discount voucher) and somewhere for readers to sign up for a list as above.

Secondly, pass on details about your books (especially the free one!) on every relevant forum or user group. Don't be a pain, but make sure those who are interested can find your stuff.

Thirdly, the most powerful and cost effective way to sell your books is through word of mouth. Aim to give readers what they want - convert them into raving fans. There's a lot of competition out there. Whilst it can be fun and therapeutic to write about what you want to, if you can match the content and style to what there is a demand for this will be a lot smoother (and hopefully more profitable) for you.