Many people dream of writing a book and many are deterred by the thought that it’s very difficult to get published. But that’s where they’re wrong. The easiest way — and it is easy — to get your book published is to write an e-book. Here’s a general overview on publishing and selling e-books online.
Setting Your Goals
Before your fingers even touch the keyboard, you need to figure out exactly what your goals are for your e-book. Ask yourself how it fits in with your current business. For example, are you using it to expand your influence, to sell your services or improve your writing skills? And how are you going to design your e-book to meet these targets? Once you’ve answered these questions, you should be able to allocate a reasonable timeline for writing and marketing your book.
Choosing Your Sales Method
Here you have a number of options. For example, do you want to sell your book from your website or blog or list in on a marketplace like Tradebit? Tradebit is the world’s largest download store for digital files, including hundreds of thousands of e-books in hundreds of categories and several different languages. E-book categories include gardening, repair manuals, health, law, cooking, business and marketing and much more. By becoming a Tradebit merchant you will have access to everything you need to publish and sell your digital book.
Brainstorm Your Book Idea
By now you probably already have an idea of your e-book’s subject matter. Whatever your specialty is, make sure you write about it in a way that interests you. If you’re bored when you write it, no one else is going to read it. Think about how your book can help others. Create a unique title that will attract readers. If you’re struggling to come up with a title, think about what different about the angle you’re taking on the subject matter and try to convey this to the reader. Now you’re ready to make the book’s outline.
Set Yourself a Reasonable Schedule
Whether you decide to write 1000 words each morning before you go to work, or burn the midnight oil before you go to bed, be consistent. It will help your writing flow better. Try to stay focused. If you find yourself losing interest, look your work over and see if you can take a more interesting angle on the topic. Once you’ve finished the first draft, edit, and re-edit. If you can get a second pair of eyes to look it over.
Designing and Publishing Your e-Book
Although the PDF format is the most popular, it pays to format your e-book for multiple devices so you sales coverage with be greater. For example, if you want to sell you book to Kindle readers, you should also convert it to MOBI and EPUB formats. When it comes to designing your cover, check out other best-selling books about the same or similar subject matter, see which designs they share and if you can replicate them. You can find plenty of free stock images at sites like Pexels and Unsplash who provide royalty-free images for commercial use.
Launching Your First e-Book
A great way to launch your first e-book is to show behind the scenes. Mae a video of the process of the book to give the reader glimpses of what’s to come, and to build momentum. Write regular blog posts about how the book is coming along.
Marketing Your e-Book
Unfortunately, you work is not over when you have written and launched your e-book. A whole new process is about to begin: the marketing process. If you can’t afford to pay someone to do this for you, you will have to do it yourself, and it needs to be done precisely and consistently in order to keep your sales from going flat. You can find some good ideas for marketing your book here. But don’t forget the most obvious ways to promote your book, like on your website and blog and throughout your social media channels. You can also guest post on other’s blogs and send out press releases.
Self-publishing a book is always a good idea, just make sure you go about it the right way. Take your time and go through each stage of the process thoroughly. You don’t want to fall into terrible mistakes like these, which will doom your e-Book from the get-go.
