E-Books are part of the new frontier of cyberspace. They are an entirely new medium for sharing marketing information, ideas, techniques, and expert knowledge. Each day the number of people accessing the Internet grows, causing the exposure of your E-Book to increase incrementally. It’s obvious why electronic self-publishing has become so popular so quickly.
The publishing industry, I hope, does not intend to forever banish the printed word to the dustbin of history. Books in print have their own special qualities and merits, and the world would be diminished by their disappearance.
Having said that, let’s look at what makes E-Books so important and so unique.
- E-Books have certain abilities and qualities that other mediums do not possess. For example, E-Books are fairly easy to produce, and their production cost is inexpensive. Just think about it: you don’t need a publisher, an agent, a printing press, offset film, ink, paper, or even a distributor. You just need a great concept, the ability to write it or to hire a writer, and the right software.
- Additionally, E-Books are easily and rapidly distributed online. They are also easily updated; they do not require a second print run. All you need is to go into your original creation and modify the text or graphics. Because of this flexibility, E-Books can change and grow as fast as you can type.
- E-Books are also immediately obtainable. You don’t have to go to a bookstore or search through endless titles at an online bookstore. All you have to do is download it from a website, and presto! It’s on your computer, ready to be read.
- E-Books are interactive. This is one of the most unique and specific qualities that E-Books offer. You can add surveys that need to be filled out, order forms for customers to purchase your products or goods, sound and video that draw your reader into the virtual world of your E-Book, even direct links to relevant sites that will expand your E-Book outward. The potential is virtually limitless.
- E-Books have a particular kind of permanence that other mediums do not possess. Television shows and radio shows air once, and then may rerun a few times. E-Books remain on your computer for as long as your choose, and they can be read and reread whenever you choose to. They can even be printed out and stored on the shelves of your traditional home library.
- Another wonderful quality is that E-Books have no barriers in terms of publishing. You don’t need to go through the endless process of submitting your manuscript over and over again, and then once you land an agent, having the agent submit your manuscript over and over again. Nor do you have to shell out thousands of dollars for printing a self-published book. All E-Books require is a writer and appropriate software.
Figure out your market, write your book, post it on your website, and with the right business savvy, your audience will come to you.
Finally, you have creative control over your E-Book. You don’t have to compromise with an editor or the publishing trends of the time. You don’t have to haggle with a designer or wait for copyedited galleys to arrive by snail mail. You are in complete control of the design and the text.
How to Use E-books for Marketing and Promotion
There are innumerable ways to use E-Books to promote your business and drive quality traffic to your website. Once posted on your site, you can turn them into a daily course, which brings your customer back to read the next chapter. You can use them as a free gift for making a purchase or for filling out a survey. Put your E-Book on a disc, and you will have an innovative brochure. Blow your competition away by inserting the disc into your sales packages.
The most effective marketing products are those that are unique. Copyright your E-Book, and immediately, you have a powerful tool that you, and you alone, can offer to the public. People will have to visit your site to acquire your E-Book, which increases the flow of quality traffic and the potential of sales and affiliate contacts.
Make sure that you keep your E-Book current. Update it frequently as the market and trends change. Add new advice and techniques to show your prospects how your goods or services can enrich their lives. By constantly keeping abreast of new trends and techniques, you can continue to see profits from your E-Book for years after your original creation.
Another phenomenal advantage of E-Books is that you can test their marketing potential without putting out hardly any cash at all. You can even produce an E-Book one copy at a time, each time you receive an order, eliminating the need for storage and inventory. By this method, you can gauge the salability of your E-Book, and make adjustments as necessary until the orders start pouring in. E-Books allow you to learn about your market and customer habits and motivation over a period of time, without risking your precious financial resources. They also provide you with an invaluable way to gather marketing information, which you can use in many different facets of your business.
Use your E-Book to discover what the specific goals and problems are in your specific industry. Then figure out how to solve these problems, and publish an E-Book with this invaluable information. This will increase the value of your business, upgrade your reputation, and get you known as an expert in your field.
You can extend the value of single E-Book by breaking the book down into chapters for a serial course, into special reports available on your website, or into audio or visual tapes. E-Books can be broken down into several different promotional materials by accepting some of the articles and using them to promote your product. You can include a catalog in your E-Book to promote all the products or services you sell. You can include a thank-you note for reading your book and an invitation to download a trial version of your product. Or you can include a form for your audience to contact you for further information or with questions, thereby building your business relationships and your mailing list.
Using E-Books in this manner helps to cut the cost of individually producing separate promotional materials. You can use a single E-Book to entice new prospects and to sell new products to your current customers.
No other medium has this kind of flexibility and ability for expansion. Think of your E-Book like a spider spinning a beautiful and intricate web. Now go and create that web, and see how many customers and prospects you can catch!
Why Sell E-Books?
It’s not true that everything that has been said has already been written. Since that unfortunate axiom came into use, the whole universe has changed. Technology has changed, ideas have changed, and the mindsets of entire nations have changed.
The fact is that this is the perfect time to write an E-Book. What the publishing industry needs are people who can tap into the world as it is today – innovative thinkers who can make the leap into the new millennium and figure out how to solve old problems in a new way. E-Books are a new and powerful tool for original thinkers with fresh ideas to disseminate information to the millions of people who are struggling to figure out how to do a plethora of different things.
Let’s say you already have a brilliant idea, and the knowledge to back it up that will enable you to write an exceptional E-Book. You may be sitting at your computer staring at a blank screen wondering, “Why? Why should I go through all the trouble of writing my E-Book when it’s so impossible to get anything published these days?”
Well, let me assure you that publishing an E-Book is entirely different than publishing a book in print. Let’s look at the specifics of how the print and cyber publishing industry differ, and the many reasons why you should take the plunge and get your fingers tapping across those keyboards!
Submitting a print book to conventional publishing houses or to agents is similar to wearing a hair shirt 24/7. No matter how good your book actually is, or how many critique services and mentor writers have told you that “you’ve got what it takes,” your submitted manuscript keeps coming back to you as if it is a boomerang instead of a valuable mine of information.
Perhaps, in desperation, you’ve checked out self-publishing and found out just how expensive a venture it can be. Most “vanity presses” require minimal print runs of at least 500 copies, and even that amount will cost you thousands of dollars. Some presses’ minimal run starts at 1,000 to 2,000 copies. And that’s just for the printing and binding. Add in distribution, shipping, and promotional costs and – well, you do the math. Even if you wanted to go this route, you may not have that kind of money to risk.
Let’s say you already have an Internet business with a quality website and a quality product. An E-Book is one of the most powerful ways to promote your business while educating people with the knowledge you already possess as a business owner of a specific product or service.
For example, let’s say that you’ve spent the last twenty-five years growing and training bonsai trees, and now you’re ready to share your knowledge and experience. An E-Book is the perfect way to reach the largest audience of bonsai enthusiasts.
E-Books will not only promote your business – they will help you make a name for yourself and your company, and establish you as an expert in your field. You may even find that you have enough to say to warrant a series of E-Books. Specific businesses are complicated and often require the different aspects to be divided in order for the reader to get the full story.
Perhaps your goals are more finely tuned in terms of the E-Book scene. You may want to build a whole business around writing and publishing E-Books. Essentially, you want to start an e-business. You are thinking of setting up a website to promote and market your E-Books. Maybe you’re even thinking of producing an E-zine.
One of the most prevalent reasons people read E-Books is to find information about how to turn their Internet businesses into a profit-making machine. And these people are looking to the writers of E-Books to provide them with new ideas and strategies because writers of E-Books are usually people who understand the new cyberspace world we now live in. E-Book writers are experts in Internet marketing campaigns and the strategies of promoting and distributing E-Books. The cyberspace community needs its E-Books to be successful so that more and more E-Books will be written.
You may want to create affiliate programs that will also market your E-Book. Affiliates can be people or businesses worldwide that will all be working to sell your E-Books. Think about this. Do you see a formula for success here?
Figure out what your subject matter is, and then narrow it down. Your goal is to aim for specificity. Research what’s out there already, and try to find a void that your E-Book might fill.
What about an E-Book about a wedding cake business? Or an E-Book about caring for elderly pets? How about the fine points of collecting ancient pottery?
You don’t have to have three masters degrees to write about your subject. People need advice that is easy to read and easily understood. Parents need advice for dealing with their teenagers. College students need to learn good study skills – quickly. The possibilities are endless.
After you’ve written your E-book…
Getting your E-Book out is going to be your focus once you’ve finished writing it, just as it is with print books. People will hesitate to buy any book from an author they’ve never heard of. Wouldn’t you?
The answer is simple: give it away! You will see profits in the form of promoting your own business and getting your name out. You will find affiliates who will ask you to place their links within your E-Book, and these affiliates will in turn go out and make your name known. Almost every single famous E-Book author has started out this way.
This doesn’t mean you should stop here. Eventually, you will move into where most of the wealth mountains are – selling them, and then maybe their Resell Rights and Private Label licenses!
Another powerful tool to attract people to your E-Book is to make it interactive. Invent something for them to do within the book rather than just producing pages that contain static text. Let your readers fill out questionnaires, forms, even crossword puzzles geared to testing their knowledge on a particular subject. Have your readers hit a link that will allow them to recommend your book to their friends and associates. Or include an actual order form so at the end of their reading journey, they can eagerly buy your product.
When people interact with books, they become a part of the world of that book. The fact is just as true for books in print as it is for E-Books.
That’s why E-Books are so essential. Not only do they provide a forum for people to learn and make sense of their own thoughts, but they can also serve to promote your business at the same time.