Nielsen Research has predicted that with a sales figure of 47 million in 2014, ebooks will surpass printed books in terms of numbers. While writing an ebook is relatively easy and anyone can become an author, selling ebooks is a challenge that most don’t manage to face up to. You need to arrive at some decision about how to sell your ebook.
Read about selling
Selling an ebook is not too different from selling other products and services. You have to shed the shyness and aggressively try and sell your creation. Even if you haven’t made a single sale before, you need to learn. There are books on effective selling that you may want to go through to learn how to sell. Or if you are rich enough, get a media company to take up the job.
The 2 big decisions
Considering you are not rich enough to hire someone to sell your ebook, there are two big decisions that you need to make.
1. Do you intend to sell through the established markets of Amazon, Apple iBookStore, Kobo or B&N?
2. Do you want to sell directly using your social media connections?
But before arriving at this decision, there is another important decision you need to make and that is regarding the format of your ebook. For selling on Amazon, your ebook needs to be converted into the Mobi format and for selling on other marketplaces, your ebook needs to be converted into the Epub format.
If you know HTML and CSS, you can use free online guides to convert your Word document ebook into both these formats. If you are not comfortable with this idea, get an expert to do the formatting for you.
Now let’s go back to the two ways to sell your ebook.
Through marketplaces
If you decide to go ahead with the established marketplaces, you get to reach out to a wide range of established customers. 90% of the ebook readers can be found on Amazon, Apple iBookStore, Kobo and B&N.
However, when you deal with these marketplaces, you are forced to keep the price of your book below $10 to get the best royalty rates of 65% to 70%. If you go above $10, the royalty rate could significantly drop to 30%.
An alternative is to use KDP Select or Kindle Direct Publishing. If you choose this option, your ebook is available in the Kindle Owners’ Library for 90 days. Readers can borrow your ebook for free for a month and you get paid as a result. And of course, the book can be bought too.
Through your contacts
If you have a strong social media presence, you should look to directly sell your ebook. This way you can get 95% royalty rate. This is an excellent option not only money-wise, but also in terms of increasing your follower and fan base. You can use blogs and social media to promote your book and the most of the profit is yours to keep. The other benefit of selling directly is that you get paid almost instantly.
Pricing your ebook
When you go ahead with the established marketplaces, they will command the price to a large extent. But if you decide to sell directly, you will need to price the book by going through the rates of similar ebooks. Overprice and you could get killed by the competition.
I sincerely hope these tips would help you sell your ebook quicker. Use some of your marketing genius and this job wouldn’t seem so challenging.
Image credit: bermarte on flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0[author] [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://writingtipsoasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Profile_Pic_Moumita.jpg[/author_image] [author_info]Moumita Goswami is a full-time homemaker and a passionate writer. She stays in Pune with her husband and daughter. After giving up working, she started writing about five years ago and can now be seen using her computer keyboard almost all the time. An MA in Psychology from Calcutta University, Moumita has spent time in Kolkata, Delhi and now Pune. For Moumita, writing started as a sudden chance but she soon discovered her likeness for it. And now she has developed a passion for writing and hardly any day passes without her scribbling a few lines. She dreams of publishing her own book one day and is working towards it.
[/author_info] [/author]