A E-book is an electronic Book which can be downloaded and distributed. There are several ways to publish a E-book when it's ready. But before you publish an e-book you have to make sure the quality of the e-book you are providing is what your customer is looking for.
If you write a poor quality e-book the next time your customer will not buy an e-book from you again or the customer will write a bad review. That is why you should write a good quality e-book. With a good quality e-book i do not mean just the cover. I mean that you offer an e-book with content where the reader learns something from, and talks with others about. Fresh content, better than the content that is offered by any of your competitors.
You have to start with creating a good book, before you can have any hope to sell it and make money from it. If you sell an e-book set the price cheaply so $5.99 or less.
Do not make the price to low like $0.99 because at such a low price your potential readers will think your e-book is of low quality. Usually you get what your are paying for. Avoid any publishers that not let you set your own price. If you want to sell your e-book for a certain price you should be able to do so.
Defining your Target Audience
If you write you will not write for “everyone”, so before you start with writing you e-book you should know who your audience is. If you know who your audience is you know how to speak to them. You need to speak the same “ language” as your audience. If your audiences are novices you should not put your language full of expert terms. Otherwise if you want to learn experts something, your content needs to be fresh, new and you should not tell something they already know. Your book needs to be interesting and that is why your information needs to be up to date.
The advantage of an e-book is that you do not have to use still illustrations in your e-book. You can actually use You-tube videos and sounds in your E-book to bring your content alive. And to make it more interesting for your audience to continue reading your e book.
What is the content you want to offer to your audience? How will your audience benefit from your content? If you start writing an e book you need to write it from the end to the beginning.
If you want to write about a certain subject, you should start your own Twitter account, and get yourself some followers.
You should ask the audience on Twitter if they are interested to read information about a certain subject. You can tag the subject like this on Twitter #subject. If people reply you ask them what kind questions they have about the subjects and if you have gathered some questions, you can start writing a book or blog about the subject. It doesn't matter if you do not have all the answers for all the questions that are being asked. You can learn by researching – and looking for an answer in the search engines. No one knows everything about a certain subjects, it's always time to learn more yourself.
But you should also ask yourself if your audience is twitter enthusiast, or if they rather use Facebook or are LinkedIn or Pinterest fanatics. Facebook has one billion users so changes are your typical customer might be amongst them.
Start writing your e-book by Contacting Your Potential Readers
The biggest challenge for marketers is to write engaging quality content.
You start by brainstorming which product you want to have written after you have wrote your e-book. To do that you need to communicate with your readers or buyers.
It helps when you ask for feedback. On which way can i ask feedback to customers you might think.
Well there are several ways:
If you have a blog, make sure your readers can post comments on your blogs.
When you read the comments to the blogs you might read several new suggestions of subjects where you can start a new blog about. You can write a new blog in which you answer questions and use comments of your readers to write even better content. Also talk with your family and friends about subjects you discuss in your content. Maybe you can use their opinion and knowledge when you write new content. More knowledge means more quality for your blog. But you can also use the information in your blogs as a start to write new e-books.
If you have an off-line shop or service call your customers and ask them what they think of your products and services and how you can improve your products. Let your customers know you made the changes they suggested, and you will have more satisfied customers in the future.
Talk with your (potential) customers on social network sites like Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin and Twitter.
If you talk with your customers and engage in conversations you will draw more customers to your site. You will know by the conversations what keeps your customers busy. And you can write new content when you know what your customers want to read on your website.
Your potential customers like to be entertained if you create a funny but informative video for your company and upload it on YouTube and on your website changes are people will share your video, place it on social media and get your more promotion then you would get by simply promoting your products by simple adding them to your store and promoting your link everywhere.
And everyone likes to win a prize, and you get a lot of retweets and traffic when people can win a prize if they retweet your message. Of course you have to offer a great price, but it's a relatively cheap way to market your website and attract a lot more visitors to your website.
People will not only retweet your message but they will also share and like your website and send they will send your link to their friends if they like your products. The word of mouth is very powerful if you want to promote any kind of product.
Create a cover for your E-book
If you want to create a professional looking e-book, you should not only offer good quality content. You e-book also needs to stand out from the rest of the e-books offered on-line in a positive way. A potential customer who is interested in the subject of your book should see the cover of your book and after that he should be ready to buy your book. At least that is what all people want that self publish items on websites.
To make your customers want to buy any of your self published items on-line you should make sure your book (or whatever you try to sell) looks professional. The cover should look professional, and the content should have a professional looking lay-lout.
To be able to determine what kind of lay-out and cover is looking professional download some e-books and look at their covers and lay-out. Do you think they look professional? Do they consist of typo's, is the lay-out looking professional? What would you do to make the e-book look better for potential customers? By answering those questions, you also know what you should do to create a professional looking e-book. Not everyone has the budget to hire someone to create a fantastic looking e-book cover.
And Photoshop might not be your favorite program to create professional looking e-book covers with too, especially if you never have created an e-book cover before. There are easier programs to create a better looking e-book cover with.
If you are looking for a site where you can generate free covers for your e-book I can recommend Myecovermaker.This website also offers a paid subscription (14,95 monthly) which enables you to have more e-book covers to choose from. But there are plenty of paid E-book cover makers on the internet. If you want to upload your own images to create the e-book cover you need to be a paid member.
If you use the images they already have in their database you can use them for free on your e-book cover. If you do not want to pay a monthly or yearly subscription to create a cover for your e-book you can try Ecovers Software Pro, you will have to pay $27 once for the software and you can use the software that you download unlimitedly after that.
With the e-cover software you can create membership cards, e-book , boxes, cd's and DVD's' cover. An e-book is a great way to make extra money or to give away for free on your website and to generate extra traffic to your website.
Look for potential publishers of your E-book
When your e-book is ready you should use Google to determine which publisher is the most suitable to publish your e-book. You should compare prizes of several publishers on-line. You have to figure out if the publishers offer an on-line bookstore on which your e-book will be displayed. In other words what will the publisher do to sell your e-book?
You should also know whether or not you want to publish a normal book version of the e-book as well and look if it the publisher offers the possibility to offer a (normal) book version of your e-book. To get started I have listed several Publishers here that you might consider when you want to publish an e-book:
On Amazon you cannot just self publish books, you can also self publish, music, DVD's', videos. You can offer a Kindle / e-book version of your book but also a normal book version of your book. Your e-book is offered in the store of Amazon and you and potential customers can search for the book in the store.
Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)
If you think you will sell a lot of copies from your e-book, why would you not publish your e-book directly on Amazon? If you do so and not get some other publishing company in between that wants a share of your profit, you can keep most of your profits yourself.
Amazon offers a 70 percent royalty rate, but some rules do apply.
You have to fill out an application to be added to the Bookstore, this can be some work but on the end you make more money when publishing on Amazon directly. So the time you take for filling in the application is really worth your time. Amazon prime members will use the Kindle lending service this allows them to check out your book for free to thousands or millions of customers, and you still will get paid very well for that according to Amazon.
CreateSpace
CreateSpace is a company from Amazon. Uploading your documents to CreateSpace is easy and fun too. It's no problem to make changes to your text or your cover. You can submit an updated document and your book will be updated to your complete satisfaction.
For just $25. you can create a complete book to your own satisfaction this price also includes expanded distribution services, a free ISBN number and editing assistance. If you want to publish your e-book right away and be available right now and not want to go to the years of submitting your manuscript to many publishers before you get published.
Your book is listed in a database and will not be stocked in normal warehouses
Lightning Source
it's possible to publish your book in any kind of quantity. You can publish one book but also 10.000 books. Lightning Source gives you access to the most comprehensive book selling company in the United Kingdom and The United States . The printing Quality of Lighting Source is better than with Lulu. You need to spend $60 to be included in the Ingram catalog.
Lightning Source Offers both POD and offset printing. At Lightning Source you provide your own ISBN to Lightning Source. The best way to promote your book is to make it available on Lightning Source And Create space with the same ISBN.
Lulu.com a print on demand publisher
International store you can publish your e-book, calendar, CDs or books for free with Lulu.com
There are no hidden set-up fees. They will take of 20 percent of the profits earned by your book. You can create a cover for your book when you publish a book on Lulu.com If you want your stories to be read Lulu might be the right publisher for you.
You need to buy a marketing package on Lulu for them to promote your products. If you do not buy the marketing package it's a matter of luck if a potential reader will find your story or not. If you not suspect Steven King Sales for your books or think you are going to be a best seller Lulu might be the publisher you are looking for.
If the book or e-book contains errors and you want Lulu to correct those errors they might ask a fee for doing so. You have 30 day money back guarantee. You should be aware of any errors in your manuscript that needs to be fixed. If you do all the work editing, reading, writing, proofreading than Lulu.com is free. If you ask them to do anything they will charge money for it. Lulu.com is a middleman company that uses another company to publish your book.