Since detonating into the eBook market a couple of years ago, devices for digital reading have turned incredibly famous. For the first time in history, Amazon announced that the sales of digital books have exceeded that of paperbacks.
With the looming of the recently developed Amazon Kindle book reader, it’s now time for book authors to make the most of eBook sales.
Advantages of eBooks
When compared to traditional/printed books, digital books attract a series of benefits. The cost of publishing is consequently reduced, shipping costs are written off, and splitting of revenue becomes minimal. Of course, you can single out the marketing of a digital book to an ideal group of readers.
Promotional endeavors for digital books are equitably cost-effective, as promotional copies can be provided totally free of charge. There’s also a streamlining of the production process, as the lengths of traditional/printed books exceed that of eBooks. Above all, coming up with an eBook is an amazing way to showcase your expertise in a more economical and streamlined fashion.
Steps to Writing an eBook
The factors to consider while writing a good eBook differ vaguely from the yardsticks for a traditional printed book. Here are 7 fundamental steps to look into while writing an eBook:
1. Topic for the eBook
Selecting a topic that you’re passionate about is instrumental in writing an informative and profitable eBook for your ideal audience. However, before you start writing, you want to target your niche market.
Writing your digital book now and identifying your niche target later is just like attempting to fit a rectangular block into a circular hole. Make a decision on what specialty market you want to target, figure out their basic needs, and structure the subject matter of your eBook to those slants.
2. Length of the eBook
When it comes to how long an eBook should be, there’s no stringent rule. In particular circumstances, I’ve gone through some creative and informative digital books that were as short as 5 pages.
Do not be restrained by any preset word count. Present what you have to discuss in an organized, precise and concise fashion.
3. Title of the eBook
The digital book industry is a highly competitive market; thus, you should have an outstanding title among others. An unimaginative title like “7 ways to save on Home Energy Expenses” is not likely to sell simply because it has no “Wow” signal.
It’s just unfeasible to evaluate how much profit could directly be connected to a creative title, but it’s better to say a captivating title that’s capable of drawing in not less than seven people to take action.
4. Unique and Original Content
With how competitive the eBook market is, enriching your digital publication with unique and original content is instrumental in achieving ultimate success. Your interest in your selected topic will enable you to provide the readers with the key intuitions which other digital books do not offer.
If your book is an instructional resource, study the competition. You may realize that their content is impersonal, obsolete, irrelevant to the average audience, or in most cases, erroneous. Write in simple-to-comprehend terms, and where feasible, leverage real life illustrations. Making yourself distinct from the competition is a great signal in the ultimate success of your digital book.
Remember to incorporate significant sections of the eBook such as your table of contents, pertinent copyright info, and an “About” section as well.
5. Format of the Digital Book
Ensure to have your work saved in a PDF format. The conversion to PDF can sometimes be worrisome when you begin to format your work in MS Word, as some links may potentially get lost. The only alternative to avoid this is using Open Office to produce your work and then having it saved in a PDF format.
An additional advantage is that Open Office, unlike Microsoft Word, can be downloaded and installed completely free of charge on the web. Also, your book will be easy to print if formatted to a 1/2″ x 11″ page standard.
6. Editing the Digital Book
You can produce the best digital books in the whole wide world, consisting of ideas and tips that have never been found in any other book, but if it’s full of grammatical mistakes and errors, being doomed to failure is guaranteed.
In order to be accurate with all of your books, I strongly recommend leveraging professional editing services; otherwise, the smallest of grammatical errors can even make readers believe that the author was unprofessional in his write-up, or that he has come up with inaccurate content.
7. The Design of the Cover
After completing your digital book, coming up with a captivating cover design is also Key to its overall success. Most readers quickly judge a publication by its cover design, and if your digital book is given an unprofessional look, no one will ever care to have a look at your original, unique content.
A lot of platforms out there allow their users to write an eBook design cover without spending a dime, but I’d strongly recommend utilizing a professional designing service, unless you’re a professional designer yourself.
However, you can save some money by leveraging sites like Elance to outsource a professional cover design for your digital book, where a good number of professionals are always waiting to help you design book covers at a more cost-effective rate than the most paid sites.
If you do not like to use Elance, you can alternatively use KillerCovers. With more than 19 different cover templates, you are offered custom-made book cover designs. Aside from that, you’re offered web design services and money-back guarantee.
You also have the option to use 99designs – a platform that operates on the idea of crowdsourcing! With this idea, a design contest is established with a team of professional designers and you can self host it, and after a week or less, you can have your design order delivered. Order begins from $195 only and you’re offered a money-back guarantee as well.
Promoting and Selling Your Digital Book
1. Identify Your Niche Market
Identify a specific niche market for your book rather than trying to sell to everyone out there. Focus on a small category of people, and channel your marketing endeavors towards them.
For example, if your digital book is strictly about landing your first job, you wouldn’t definitely have to reach out or market to IRA retirement websites. Instead, you’d surely want to promote your book to college degree holders.
And aside from the demographic tactic, you’d need to get those who are interested in reading digital books. Marketing your book on specific digital book download websites is equally an amazing way to reach out to the potential customer base.
2. Selling Price
If you’re a novice to the whole system of selling digital books, pricing your digital book should be considered competitively. Once you’ve made a beautiful name for yourself and achieved some milestones, you can increase your price a bit. Just as potential buyers are on the lookout for deals on groceries and gifts, they’re also on the lookout for cost-effective digital books.
An excellent tactic is to have your book sold for one dollar or even less. This way, you’ll be able to add more to the number of book reviews and purchases on websites like Amazon and the likes, assisting you with blasting the bestseller catalogue within your target digital book genre, while boosting your expertise for word-of-mouth promotion/advertising.
3. Create a Captivating Squeeze Page
A squeeze page is a web page that shows after clicking through an advert. A prosperous squeeze page is specifically targeted at whatever service or product you offer, with the ultimate objective of selling your digital book to the potential buyer.
Your squeeze page should be highly targeted and focused. You want to sharpen on precisely what you offer, what category of readers you’re attracting, and why they’d have to buy your digital book and offer particular and intelligible instructions on how to buy it.
4. Expand Your Online Marketing Tactic
Promoting your digital book should include the following methods;
Leverage Social Media
Leverage a free promotion where you can find it, which includes social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Instagram, Delicious, and StumbleUpon. For instance, one of the most prominent ways to market your digital book without spending a dime is making use of your Facebook official/business page for advertising. Another amazing tactic is to use digital book snippets on Facebook to boost passion.
Complete Guide to Getting More Traffic to Your Blog through Social Networks
Create a Personal Blog
You could be posting articles on your own blog every day and integrate this content into your digital book. It’s a good blogging practice to follow!
Creating a personal blog is simpler and easier than it seems, as you have a lot of resources online at your own disposal that can help walk you through the process bit by bit.
Once your blog is fully set up and ready to go live on the web, you should publish content targeting the topic of your digital book, describing in detail its components, and generate a link to your squeeze page. However, you must endeavor to generate traffic to your blog. The most ideal way to achieve this is to share articles on multiple forums and social media networks.
Instead of logging into multiple social networks posting articles, consider leveraging a free social service like SocialPilot or OnlyWire, which enables you to deliver links to numerous social media sites all at once. This is the most prominent way to generate traffic to your personal blog.
Create Content
Utilize the articles you already have in your digital book to write informative and interesting pieces that focus on your demographic. You have a good number of famous websites at your disposal like GoArticles, EzineArticles and the likes to which you can post those articles.
Talk about your digital book within the content, and add links to your blog or sales page. Don’t forget to include an author resource box towards the bottom of the article where you can add your website URL. By demonstrating that you’re an authority yourself, you will have successfully won your readers’ minds.
Promote through Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Reach out to colleagues, family, and friends, and send to them free copies of your digital book. Inquire them to draft testimonials that you can utilize in your squeeze page or sales letter. Where feasible, also, ask multiple bloggers or a very famous one to draft reviews of your digital book and publish them on their own sites. By implementing this strategy, you can get in touch with prospective customers through people they believe in.
Optimize for SEO
You would want to integrate your digital book to ensure it ranks well on search engine result pages (SERPs)! Not only that you’ll be targeting to appear on the first page, but also above the first page and beyond.
Add some free content around the topic of your digital book on your site, and endeavor to rank for certain key phrases that will captivate the expected readership. Leveraging accurate and unique page titles and adding relevant key phrases within your blog content will surely be of help.
5. Set Specific Goals
Just like in any other business, setting specific goals to keep track of your activities is instrumental in achieving ultimate success. After launching the book, set certain specifications for one, two and three months. If the set goals are exceeded, that’s awesome! You’ll then come to find out that your tactic is perfect.
And if your predictions fail, you’ll want to review your promotion capabilities. So, you may want to consider other avenues or perhaps pinch other aspects of your selling tactic.
Conclusion
If you want to start publishing a self-authored digital book, you’re really planning to move higher in the online world, and having a blog of your own would be of great help.
Why not learn how you can set up a blog that will realistically help you turn your passion into a thriving online business? You have all the resources at your disposal to learn everything pertaining to setting up an online business ideally. If you’re ready to get started, learn more here.