Is There Value in Writing and Promoting an eBook?
Since joining the social media revolution for business, you have been hearing more and more buzz about offering eBooks on your website and you are wondering if it is really worth writing and marketing. Will you really make money?
There are many people who don’t fully understand the value of eBooks and view them as inferior to print books. There are several advantages that eBooks have over print books and being savvy enough in business nowadays to recognize the value will definitely take you a long way on your journey toward ultimate success in business. Before you realize it, you will have a completed eBook that will be ready to be sold and distributed to a vast number of interested people. The following are some of the most pronounced advantages that eBooks have over print books:
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Subject matter expert: In your particular niche, you will come across as a subject matter expert (SME) through all of the knowledge that you have imparted in your eBook. This will happen as soon as your eBook has been read by others. Your eBook will be filled with useful advice, which is presented in an educational manner. You will be offering all kinds of tips and advice that other people will learn from and will start to use themselves.
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Building your database: If you offer your eBook as a gift, you will be building valuable lists of people whom you can add to your database. People love to get things for free and the more you offer them, the more they will be willing to get involved with you and your business. There is nothing more valuable than a pre-approved subscriber. At that point, they have opted in and are becoming loyal to you. You need to remember to have a strong and concise message on your website regarding the content of your eBook so that your visitors will want to get a hold of it.
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Authorship: Writing an eBook gives you the right to say that you are a published author. Being a published author gives you a nice degree of status and prestige. You can’t get the same kind of mileage from an online video or podcast.
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Short eBooks: eBooks can, of course, vary in length. Sometimes it is beneficial to write a shorter eBook, which you can then offer as a bonus when someone buys your full-length eBook. You may also want to consider using a short one as an incentive when someone subscribes to your blog or newsletter.
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Viral eBook sales: Currently, more eBooks are being sold than traditional hardcover books. People seem to finally understand the value of eBooks and the fact that there is no difference in the information. The only difference is in the physical properties. During these times when everyone is so conscious of preserving what we have left of the earth, it is brilliant to avoid doing anything that will waste any part of our environment yet still being able to take advantage of books.
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Busy schedules: Another clear advantage of eBooks is that there is no waiting involved on the part of the consumer. Instant gratification is certainly satisfied because the delivery of the product is instantaneous. The book arrives electronically and the consumer can instantly get to work on using the information in any way that he or she chooses.
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Cost: The cost of producing an eBook is much less than a print book would be. You will also get a great deal of mileage from your eBook, such as promoting your goods and/or services, which will inevitably produce results that will bring you increased revenue. Another advantage regarding cost is that once the eBook has been created, it can be reproduced an infinite number of times at virtually no cost. There are no printing costs or shipping costs to worry about. There are also extremely minimal downloading costs.
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Modest pricing can lead to greater profit: Sometimes, it is necessary to invest a great deal of time and effort and to compromise on price so that you can reap tremendous benefits in the long run. If you are willing to either give complimentary copies or sell them at an extremely reduced cost to your customers and potential customers, you will probably gain a great deal that initially cannot be assigned a price tag. You will be building valuable relationships with people who will eventually become loyal to you and the amount of business that you get from them will far exceed what they would ever have paid for your book.
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Revenue: You can earn additional revenue from selling your eBooks and through your eBooks, you will be strengthening your position as a subject matter expert. Your goal is to get other people to immediately think of you when they have a problem or a question in your area of expertise. You want to be their “go to” person forever.
Conclusion
It is critical that you educate other people on how much you have to offer them and how capable you are of solving their problems. If you are looking for topics about which to write, you will get some excellent ideas from article directories and by searching on the Internet. An eBook is an excellent tool to help make people truly understand the value of what you offer. It is one of the many powerful tools in your armamentarium, which will ultimately bring you wonderful and ever-increasing success for your business.
We are pleased to provide you with the insightful comments contained herein. For a complimentary assessment of your online presence, let’s have coffee.
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Via LinkedIn Groups
Group: Books and Writers
Discussion: Is There Value in Writing and Promoting an eBook?
i have written an e-book and a blog that I post to four times a day (www.thesilverclouddiet). I'm the writer my partner is the medical expert. It s paying for itself, some months it makes money. the key is a good pr campaign. for three months we hired a firm and got Doc on television and we made plenty money. We're getting abudget together to go at it again and I'm starting the second e-book. I have written 20 print books and won all the prizes but I truly believe all writers better get conversent with e-books. I made a lot of mistakes in book 1. First one being I made it too long
Posted by Linda West Eckhardt
Via LinkedIn Groups
Group: The Content Wrangler Community
Discussion: Is There Value in Writing and Promoting an eBook?
It will…the early turners to this technology will surely make money.
I sincerely believe that e-books would be the most happening thing in the next 5 years with print books almost out of "print".
The plus points of online books would be: Eco-friendly, Book on Demand, Easy to store (with so much of storage space in PCs), easy track of Author royalties, and the grand success of e-readers.
But again, it depends on how you promote the book, how valuable it is to the market etc.
Posted by Prabhuram Ramachandran
Via LinkedIn Groups
Group: TopLinked.com (Open Networkers)
Discussion: Is There Value in Writing and Promoting an eBook?
Hello , Dear group members
Writing and promoting eBook would play vital role in saving our environment by considerbly reducing cutting of trees ( Forest conservation) as we know that pulp is raw material for production of paper that we use universally.
Posted by AJAY TIWARI
Via LinkedIn Groups
Group: Network of PR Professionals
Discussion: Is There Value in Writing and Promoting an eBook?
Yes Carolyn! There are agencies who buy your work and promote in specialized user communities who in turn become their end consumers. If your work adds value in the revenue generation to the agency, they'll get back with more requirements.
Posted by Santosh Mosalikanti
I agree, overall, with your conclusion. I disagree with how you got there. 😉
– Most authors of ebooks are not SMEs; most vary from having some knowledge to having almost none. Most (not all!) self-published books are poorly written material that the author couldn't get published any other way, and most people are well aware of that, and still view books that come out only in e-format with skepticism.
– Ebook publication is still not considered authorship by most of the major writing groups. Epub alone will not get you membership in the SFWA, for instance, and was not considered authorship under the Authors' Guild rules last I read. This *is* changing! But it's happening slowly. Universities and other official entities will be very slow in this adoption for the most part.
– Revenue models are still in flux. You can earn a great deal per book by selling off your website; but then you need to get people there! You can earn some (less) per book by selling at a major site like Amazon, but again you need to find ways to encourage people to read YOUR book instead of the thousands of others. It's a challenge, especially for writers who are not generally used to having to do their own promotion (this historically was the publisher's job, and writers as a breed have a *horrible* track record for business management and marketing; exceptions occur, of course). These are a lot of new skills for an author to pick up.
– My biggest bone of contention is that ebooks are more ecologically sound than paper ones. It just ain't so, much as the marketing wants us to think it is. Paper books are paper – a renewable resource that we're finally learning to manage decently – and recyclable as well. Contrast that with cheaply made ebook readers that are designed (like our cell phones) to last a couple of years and then be replaced with a new model, the old one being junked (often not recycled). The metals which go into these contraptions are a much more limited resource; they are often poisonous in landfills; and the parts are usually manufactured under conditions which add large amounts of pollution to the environment in countries without many controls on pollution.
There are 300 million people in the USA. Three hundred million times a book or two a year (average? just guessing) is a lot of paper! But we can plant new trees, and recycle old books, and thrown out books just rot and disappear. Three hundred million people buying a new ereader every 2-3 years is an enormous amount of waste metal and toxic material going into landfills where they will sit gradually leaching into the water tables for the next several thousand years.
This is not really an improvement.
Via LinkedIn Groups
Group: NJ Association of Women Business Owners (NJAWBO)
Discussion: Is There Value in Writing and Promoting an eBook?
Yes you can make money with e-books. The secret is in driving people to your site through organic searches and advertising. You capture their email addresses, then market your book through e-newsletters. Bob Bly is a good example of someone successfully selling e-books.
Posted by Penny Thomas
Via LinkedIn Groups
Group: AssociationofWriters.com
Discussion: Is There Value in Writing and Promoting an eBook?
I am serously considering turning my novels into ebooks. Really looking forward to some feedback to this topic. Do you make money on fiction books? Seems like all the buzz about ebooks are usually nonfiction and how to books.
Posted by Candy Little
Via LinkedIn Groups
Group: Telecom Professionals
Discussion: Is There Value in Writing and Promoting an eBook?
Like everything else, it depends. If you write well and provide information of value at a reasonable price, and put in the effort to develop a network through social media and other means, then yes, you can make decent money from a book. That's a lot of ifs. It can be done, but it's not a fly-by-night venture. You have to acheive and maintain a presence and be in it for the long haul.
Posted by Brad Whittington
Via LinkedIn Groups
Group: Creative Designers and Writers
Discussion: Is There Value in Writing and Promoting an eBook?
Yes, it can, if it is a good book. The e-book must be very well structured, because it's more boring to read an e-book that an actual book, I think. It all depends on the cost, promotion and content, I think
Posted by Tiago Gonçalves
Via LinkedIn Groups
Group: VERIZON CONNECTIONS
Discussion: Is There Value in Writing and Promoting an eBook?
I believe that yes money can be made offering eBooks or any eMarketing services. The days of having your newspaper dropped on your door step or getting in your car and driving to a "bricks and mortar" retail location are going by the wayside. The latter was Jeff Bezos vision over 10 years ago and very few thought that was possible. I believe people will make more money because the supply I believe can meet the demand.
Posted by Rose Kimball
LinkedIn Groups
Group: NJ Association of Women Business Owners (NJAWBO)
Discussion: Is There Value in Writing and Promoting an eBook?
How do you protect an e-book? Once someone has downloaded it, what is to stop them from distributing it?
Posted by Marlene J. Waldock
Marlene,
There are many eBook services (example: lulu.com) that handle the publication, distribution, and payment collection in a secure manner once your eBook is ready for publishing.
Stay tuned for our review of some of these services in a blog article coming up soon.
Regards,
Carolyn
Via LinkedIn Groups
Group: Telecom Professionals
Discussion: Is There Value in Writing and Promoting an eBook?
One of the famous e-book author has this opinion to justify his view. Hope this helps you to make that decision. Good Luck!
(From the foreword of an e-book "Thinking in Java" from BruceEckel.com)
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""This book is a case in point. A majority of folks thought I was very bold or a little crazy to put the entire thing up on the Web. “Why would anyone buy it?” they asked. If I had been of a more conservative nature I wouldn’t have done it, but I really didn’t want to write another computer book in the same old way. I didn’t know what would happen but it turned out to be the smartest thing I’ve ever done with a book.
For one thing, people started sending in corrections. This has been an amazing process, because folks have looked into every nook and cranny and caught both technical and grammatical errors, and I’ve been able to eliminate bugs of all sorts that I know would have otherwise slipped through. People have been simply terrific about this, very often saying “Now, I don’t mean this in a critical way…” and then giving me a collection of errors I’m sure I never would have found. I feel like this has been a kind of group process and it has really made the book into something special. Because of the value of this feedback, I have created several incarnations of a system called “BackTalk” to collect and categorize comments.
But then I started hearing “OK, fine, it’s nice you’ve put up an electronic version, but I want a printed and bound copy from a real publisher.” I tried very hard to make it easy for everyone to print it out in a nice looking format but that didn’t stem the demand for the published book. Most people don’t want to read the entire book on screen, and hauling around a sheaf of papers, no matter how nicely printed, didn’t appeal to them either. (Plus, I think it’s not so cheap in terms of laser printer toner.) It seems that the computer revolution won’t put publishers out of business, after all. However, one student suggested this may become a model for future publishing: books will be published on the Web first, and only if sufficient interest warrants it will the book be put on paper. Currently, the great majority of all books are financial failures, and perhaps this new approach could make the publishing industry more profitable. "
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Posted by Jayakumar Kuppuswamy
Via LinkedIn Groups
Group: NJ Association of Women Business Owners (NJAWBO)
Discussion: Is There Value in Writing and Promoting an eBook?
I assume that what Marlene is asking is, once someone buys the e-book and downloads it to their computer, what stops them from then "giving" that file to someone else. Or printing it out and giving it to someone else. The publication, distribution, and payment side isn't the concern, it's what happens after that is the problem. David Pogue (NY Times) discussed this in two columns: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/22/technology/personaltech/22pogue-email.html?_r=1&8cir&emc=cira1 and http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/technology/personaltech/29pogue-email.html?8cir&emc=cira1 .
Posted by Nancy Passow
Via LinkedIn Groups
Group: NJ Association of Women Business Owners (NJAWBO)
Discussion: Is There Value in Writing and Promoting an eBook?
Nancy…thanks for the links to David's articles. I try to follow his stuff now as it is enlightening. This is a very interesting point right now. I have an eBook and the thought crossed my mind. I also know many people who have eBooks and do make money. If it is going to your own database of people who know you and, as Carolyn states, value your expertise and work, they are buying and are usually forwarding the link to their colleagues so they can take advantage of this great piece of knowledge. Although I'm sure it happens, fortunately more people do find it is profitable, while still helping your following.
Posted by Louise DiSclafani
One Word,
KINDLE!
The Kindle by Amazon has been the #1 best seller on Amazon for 2 years in a row, its the most wish listed product.
If Amazon has created a product specifically as a reading device for digital books I think that should give any one with an ounce of perception the value of digital report or ebooks.