Have you heard of self publishing? Thousands of books self-published books are downloaded on Kindle every day. The other super popular avatar of a self published book is a self created e-guide or an e-course which you can sell on Clickbank.
Teaching, tutoring, guiding and mentoring are some great ways to monetise your knowledge, which brings your knowledgeable self into the picture with full lights and camera rolling.
Teaching is one of the most lucrative ways in which artists and artisans monetise their skills. So can you, and publishing an e-book or creating a guide can be worth the shot. I know it seems like a lot of work. But that is because you are imagining that you have to write a thesis on the subject of your choosing.
That’s not how it works. Any category of your choosing can be broken up into small segments, and that is how you are going to start, i.e., small. As I will tell you later on in this article, I have read books on kindle that were 20 pages long. But they worked for me because they addressed a specific query of mine. There are several such examples where you can teach people to a single specific thing.
Self publishing is wildly popular and can be lucrative, if you know what you are doing. The two platforms that I recommend are Kindle and Clickbank. Each has its pros and cons.
First, I am going to talk about the Kindle self publishing program, also known as the Kindle Direct Program (KDP).
Also, remember that whatever I explain about KDP applies to potential authors and ebook creators in all walks of life, who have something to share or write about, including fiction. In fact, fiction sells really well on the Kindle book space.
In this post we are going to talk about everything to do with self publishing, including how to write the good stuff, and how to generate the sales numbers.
Contents of the page :
- How to Self-Publish On Kindle Direct Publishing.
- How To Sell Ebooks On Clickbank.
- How To Sell Ebooks On Your Blog.
What Is Kindle Self Publishing
First a note about what is amazon kindle and how popular is it…
Do you know what a Kindle is? Many years back it was an E reader, that is, a device on which someone can read digital books. Now Kindle is also an app on your phones, tablets and computers that allows you to do the same thing, which is, read the Kindle books from the Amazon Kindle books marketplace.
Of course, the stand-alone Amazon Kindle reader also exists and has developed more over time as a very popular choice with book readers.
The purists will tell you that they prefer a real old-fashioned book to read. Well, like many things it’s a ‘pros and cons’ situation. I read both but really appreciate Kindle for many reasons.
Advantages of a Kindle Reader and App
- A Kindle can store hundreds of books. Storing the same number of books in the house will call for some serious space planning.
- I don’t have to worry about book weight and luggage space while travelling. All my books travel with me.
- The Amazon Books Marketplace is always available. I can purchase new Kindle books instantly from anywhere.
- In the beginning you couldn’t find Kindle versions for all books. Now, not only is the Kindle books library very extensive, you will also find great deals on the digital versions. They are almost always cheaper than the physical copy by a substantial margin.
- Kindle exclusive books. (This is where you come in) Kindle has its own library as well where writers publish their work. These books are often Kindle exclusive because of which you will discover some additional genres and authors.
- Eco-friendly. I like the idea of paper less books. Reading a digital book translates into a more eco-friendly option and this resonates strongly with me.
Why Amazon Kindle Readers Are Really Good
Kindle e-readers are great. I still use one of the older Kindle models that is without the touchscreen and has tactile buttons to turn pages, complete with a small keyboard for text entry.
I never took to the touchscreen models even though they were supposed to be next generation and more advanced, because they did not have the buttons. I do not like touch screens very much. Not on my e-reader, not in my car and, if I could have my way, not on my smart phone either.
Well guess what, Amazon now sells its top end Kindle with the same tactile buttons it had more than 10 years ago, and calls is it a premium feature that adds convenience.
Regardless, Kindles are great for reading books. They are light, compact with zero eyestrain during reading, be it dim lighting or broad daylight. This is an area where the apps on your mobile devices will not be able to compete, although they too have great functionality and convenience.
Although I have to say that with minimal brightness and sepia reading setting, the strain of reading you on the Kindle mobile app is also greatly reduced. All of these are reasons why Kindle book marketplace is highly popular.
So how can you get a piece of the Kindle pie? Remember the part we mentioned about Kindle exclusive books?
Publishing Your Own Books On Kindle
Amazon allows people to publish their own books in the Kindle library – for free. Now the Kindle library has several categories under which it lists the books. There are millions of Amazon Prime member is all over the world. Not all of them are readers of course. A few key facts about self publishing on Amazon.
- Your book doesn’t have to be hundreds of pages in length. I have read short ones that were 30 pages long.
- There are dozens of categories. So your book can be about literally anything. It doesn’t have to be a novella. Finance, fashion, fiction, self-help, sports, lifestyle, anything goes.
- Before writing and publishing go through the various categories of books. Find one that fits the topic you want to write about. See if similar books exist. If not, you probably need to research the idea a little more.
- Test the waters. Unless you have your hands on sure masterpiece, don’t go writing that Magnum Opus just yet. Publish something small to test the system and the strength of your idea. You will have the opportunity to expand your concepts in future works.
How much does it cost to self publish on Amazon?
Well, its a free, for most part. You do not have to pay anything upfront to have your book listed. You only pay a percentage as commission when it sells, like with any other book publishing business, the author receives ‘royalty’ from the book sales.
The royalty on the sale can vary from 35% to 70% depending on whether you sell through the regular KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) program or the KDP Select.
Once more, creating quality content and a well designed e-book is key. Read more about the Amazon Self Publishing program know official as the Kindle Direct Publishing. https://kdp.amazon.com.
What is KDP Select Program
You get paid higher commission with the KDP Select because you also sign an agreement of exclusivity with Amazon, stating that you are not going to sell that book elsewhere, and through any other medium. Amazon promotes it’s exclusive titles more aggressively to its readers. It also lists those books with the Prime membership readers, greatly expanding the reach of the book.
Advantages of the kindle select program is exposure to a lot more readers. You can also sell your e-book for free in the beginning if you believe in the merit of doing that. We will talk about that in a bit.
The disadvantage is that you have to go exclusive With Amazon. You lose the right to sell it elsewhere even on your own blog. But again, the increased exposure might be a trade-off as you will probably get a lot more sales through the kindle select program.
CreateSpace – Amazon’s Print On Demand Service For Kindle Books
CreateSpace is a print on demand service by Amazon. You can also offer physical print copies of you book to readers without actually printing anything beforehand. By using the CreateSpace service, Amazon will let readers order a physical copy, print it as and when the order comes in and ship it to them.
If you avail of this service, they will let you know what the printing cost is going to be. For example, if it is roughly $2 for a 100 page book, you can set you price at anything over that. When a physical copy sells, they will deduct the $2 and pay you the remaining money.
Amazon Prime Reading And It’s Advantages
As you will be aware, Prime Library allows the readers to read all the books they without any additional cost to what they are already paying as a Prime member. Which means that they are free to download any book that interests them. This means more books downloaded.
The way Amazon pays its publishers in the Prime readership space is by diving the revenue they get from Prime members with the number of book downloads. This gives them the cost/download which is multiplied by the number of downloads your books had. Of course, they don’t allocate the entire Prime membership fee to the Kindle Library.
The Kindle Unlimited Space.
Kindle Unlimited works in a similar way, where readers pay a fixed amount every month to download any number of book in the Kindle Unlimited library. Amazon calls this ‘lending’ books, much like a conventional library system, and much like that system, the only limitation is on the number of books you can ‘borrow’ at the same time. Whenever you have borrowed the maximum quota of books, you can return one and download another.
How Much Do Self Published Kindle Authors Make
Well the earnings estimate for Kindle direct publishing holders isn’t very exciting, for most part at least. If it is direct income you are looking at the most self published books do not make a lot of money. There are reasons for this.
The selling price is low, usually $5 to $9. So not much money is made per sale. You have to do promotions and launches to market your book because it won’t sell on its own simply because you have published it . Amazon gives priority to new releases. This is a good thing that gives new authors a fighting chance but it also means that the momentum wears off quickly. You need to keep the momentum going by rinsing and repeating promotional campaigns.
The books that sell the best belong in the fiction category. So if you happen to be in any other category of writing you are already at a disadvantage. In order to start making money on Kindle direct publishing you need a lot of books published. Successful authors also publish on a regular schedule.
Those are some reasons why not everyone makes a lot of money with self publishing. But it can be a profitable venture in many circumstances.
Traditional publishing vs. Self Publishing.
The first thing you need to understand is that all the points that we have mentioned above are pretty much applicable in some form to traditional publishing as well. Even the mainstream authors go on extensive book tours, have press conferences, do reading and signing sessions all to promote their book and boost the seats.
Considering that ordeal, promoting your book online on social media and launch campaigns and using services like book a read and first read seem like pretty relaxed options .
The goal behind creating Kindle direct publishing, at least in the altruistic part, was to remove the middleman between the writer and the publication of his work, that is the publishing agents.
It was a manual and time costing process in which scripts went unread and through countless rejections. It was a slow process from the time that a writer sent in his work and the publisher would read it, which might not even happen. Publishers did not want to print something that they did not think would make the money. At least they were not willing to spend money on it.
Where I stay, several local people get published from time to time. They have local book lunches and book reading sessions. My city has a lot of history. So a lot of books are around the subject of culture history, art and architecture of the bygone era.
The writers who get published are mostly first-time writers who are socially well-known. They probably pay for the publishing of 100 odd copies of the book and have the book launched at a prominent club or bookstore during the weekend. They make it a wine and cheese event so that a lot of people come. But at the end of the day, that’s that. They are not going to make it on any hot-seller list and neither are they expecting to. The main idea behind this entire enterprises to get a boost in social standing as well as to add officially to the roster of achievements.
Kindle direct publishing works in a similar way for people. It doesn’t mean that it has somehow made it easy to make money with your writing. But it has made it easier to you publish your work.
If you have reasons to benefit from publishing a book apart from making money such as, using it to boost your credentials, using it as an indirect marketing or promotional method for some other venture, to boost your newsletter subscribers or blog readers, then Kindle direct publishing can definitely help with that. But if your goal is to become a successful and prosperous author through the self publishing platform then a lot more needs to be done after you have written and published it.
4 WAYS TO SELL MORE BOOKS ON KINDLE DIRECT PUBLISHING
Now, this is a very real part about self publishing, or any kind of publishing, for that matter. You need to do your bit to promote and advertise your book.
Amazon does its bit for promoting your work. But it will do a better job of it if it gets some good response and reviews from its readers. Once that starts happening, they will feature your work in the suggested books, featured section etc., giving you more exposure as a Kindle author.
It’s a bit of work to get your books to sell on Kindle direct publishing program. Here is the process, in general.
1 – Create engaging content.
Bad books don’t sell, obviously. Unlike conventional publishing there is no one reading your manuscript and commenting on it beforehand. With Kindle direct publishing, as long as the book is bereft of glaring mistakes and errors, anyone can publish their book provided the content follows certain Amazon publishing policies.
So how do you know if you actually have good content before publishing? Seasoned authors can usually tell when they have something good on their hands. But they too resort to getting a review of their work.
With any kind of creative process, it’s common to lose perspective if you spend too much time with it. This is as applicable to photography and painting as it is to writing. You want a 3rd party perspective.
Seasoned authors often send the first chapter to the publishing agent who’s opinion they trust. They might also send subsequent chapters as they keep getting written.
Another common practice is to have a trusted family member or spouse read the book. This is something that you should do. Have your book read by a few people who represent your target reading audience.
Finding targeted people to review your book is important . Harry Potter may well be the most popular and the highest setting book of all time but believe me I have people around me who have no intention of reading it because they do not enjoy reading the ‘fantasy’ genre.
So what if it turns out that you have written bad content? Be very open to what your sample readers have to say about the work. If you don’t listen now you might have to hear about it with the reviews you get later, causing damage to your profile as an author. Those kind of things can take a while to recover from.
Often things that make the content of the book ‘not work’ can be fixed. Sometimes the whole concept has to be scrapped and see if anything can be salvaged. How do you know which is it?
Consider taking creative writing classes
I can only assume that since you want to publish a book you have been writing for some time in some form or the other and have received validation from others in the form of appreciation. But in case that is not the case, why don’t you try taking a few classes in creative writing?
No matter what subject you are writing on, fiction or non-fiction, you want to get the reader engaged with the content. A good writing style is important in keeping things interesting for the readers where as the lack of one can kill that experience pretty fast.
If taking writing classes seems like a long drawn out affair, I have some good news. You don’t have to go anywhere to take classes in creative writing. I use Skillshare to learn dozens of different subjects. Check out some of these online writing classes. This link will give you free access to Skillshare for two months with complete access to all their online courses.
So once you have good content on your hand, what next? Moving on to promotional campaigns, microblogging and more.
Make no mistake you will have to promote your book for it to sell. Yes, joining the kindle select program and doing a free launch gets your book exposure. But the momentum can fade quickly. You will have to keep repeating promotional campaigns to keep the sales up.
Promoting your book is almost 70% of the work.
2 – Promote and advertise your self published books
You are probably aware of the fact that the biggest authors and even musicians have to go on extensive tours to make sure that their latest work sells enough copies. Well, I am not implying that that is what you will have to do. Although, hitting the mainstream and going on book tours won’t be so bad now, will it?
Have a basic strategy prepared on how you are going to promote your work once it’s done. Social media, blogs, email and word by mouth seems like the first line of action.
For this reason it is a good idea to keep up a social media feed and a blog. A book is a long process, but micro blogging with short posts can gather potential readers and keep them engaged, for the time you make the book launch announcement.
Microblogging – what is microblogging?
Unlike blogging which is mostly about writing full-length features (like this one), microblogging means making short posts and updates on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and such.
Even before you launch the book, gather followers and generate interest in your work with the help of microblogging on social platforms.
Even when your next work is a long way off from completion you can keep the interaction alive with your potential readers. And when the publishing date gets near you can amp up the efforts and create interest by posting news about the book giving sneak peeks, running contest, giving free copies et cetera.
This cumulatively is called a pre-launch and it doesn’t just apply to launching books. You will notice that all new products go through a pre-launch.
You can also run a fully functional blog. We have written about that later in the post, as it is also a way to sell your own ebooks.
3 – Using paid promotions to get more book exposure
I think you can use promotional campaigns within the kindle book space so that your book appear in the sponsored listing for a particular keyword search even if it doesn’t show in the organic results. You will have to check whether this is still applicable when you read this. This is the link to the KDP help section that outlines the process for sponsored listing and adversing campaigns in the Kindle Book space https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201499010
Apart from the internal advertising there a few other reasonably priced services that help to get the word out for your book to interested readers. They are Bookbub, Book Gorilla, Freebooksy or Bargain Booksy.
They have thousands of registered subscribers who are people interested in new books and promotional offers. When you subscribe to them they will email a word out about your book to their subscribers.
What I like about these services is that they are easy to use. You do not have to deal with creating complicated campaigns. For the same reason the entire process is easily repeatable any time you need a boost in book sales.
The only thing about repeating the process is that your offer will be seen by almost the same set of people and so the response rate might not be as high as the first time, if you are promoting the same book. On the upside, not everyone gets interested enough to buy a book after seeing it the first time. So the the repeat exposure will convert those people.
4 – Leveraging Free Book Launches And Downloads
As for launching a book for free in the beginning, it has mixed opinions from the experiences of various authors. The idea behind a free launch is to get a lot of traction going for the sales that hopefully continues even when the free promotion has ended. But does it work that way? It probably does. But you will have to experiment to know if it is working for you and besides, as per the rules of Kindle publishing, I think this is something that you can do once.
Some people say that every time they have made their books free they see thousands of downloads and a slight boost to the sale later on. Others are disappointed by the fact that in spite of thousands of free downloads they still end up with only a handful of ratings and reviews, if any.
Authors also reported that Amazon has a separate ranking system for free and paid books.
Rankings are directly connected to the number of sales your book receives. The higher your book rank the more exposure it gets and more sales. Conversely, the more sales and favorable reviews the book gets, boosts up its ranking.
No one is quite sure how this works but the connection is there. But the fact remains that the boost in sales during the during the free launch is not going to boost your ranking later on. And that makes sense.
However, I do feel that while sales during the free launch might affect the rank of a book, the reviews that it gets during that time might have an impact.
The fact is that different authors experience different results from doing a book launch with free sales. Maybe some authors did not entice many reviews but you might.
Some authors also do not opt for the select program because they have a good presence online through their blogs and social media accounts and can generate independent sales for themselves on their blog.
In the spirit of experimenting and trying different things, it is probably not a good idea to not create a lengthy work that takes months to complete before you can put the system to test. Break up the work or or launch your simpler books first.
The above highlighted points are the general strategy for promoting self published kindle content. There are many other factors that also have an effect on the amount of exposure that your book receives. Some of them are:
- Word-of-mouth publicity. Usually this happens if you are good at what you do.
- Lots of good reviews on your book which also happens for the same reason as above.
- The ranking of your book on the kindle marketplace. While no one exactly no one has how the system works, the rank is connected to the sales and reviews of your book and vice versa.
- Your growing popularity as a writer on the kindle book space, and through other medium such as print media, radio Et cetera
CREATING AND SELLING EBOOKS ON CLICKBANK
Are you in a position to create an e-book or an e-course that addresses any specific issue for a group of people?
For example, on Clickbank we have guides from prescribing a paleo diet to dating advice. There are help guides for helping children to read and there are ones that help you better your golf swing.
As an artist or a creative person you too will have knowledge to share. Teaching others is one of the major streams of income in the field of art and crafts. But course and guide creation really applies to all fields and is a powerful monetising tool for all forms of expertise.
What sells on Clickbank?
Clickbank is know to be a network for solely digital products. There are no physical products on it for sale, except one that they added fairly recently.
The rest are guides and resources in various categories like fitness, self-help, business, e-commerce, beauty, food & drinks, education, music and many more. They are mostly in the form of e-books or something more interactive like a numerology reading. There are also products like ‘binaural beats and sounds’ for better sleep. All digital stuff.
So the answer to what sells on Clickbank is that a lot of things can as long as they are in the form of a digital product. The product or access to the product is emailed immediately to the buyer after the payment.
How do ebooks sell on Clickbank?
The first thing to remember is that Clickbank is a digital delivery processor and an affiliate network. It is not selling anything directly. You will and other people on the network will sell for you. If you go to the homepage you will find the products listed there and can be bought. But I doubt that people visit the homepage to buy stuff like they do with, let’s say, Amazon.
The people who visit Clickbank are two kind. One are the sellers, also known as the vendors, and the others are affiliates. The vendors are the ones who own the product, whereas the affiliates are usually bloggers and social media influencers looking for profitable products to promote in the niche that they work in.
The ebook that you list on Clickbank will get sold when you and your affiliates promote it, by referring other people to the your sales webpage. That bring us to the next steps..
What is your knowledge / expertise
There are many of you who have knowledge and content to share. It could be anything you know, as long as it is something others can benefit from. Maybe you know about marketing or you know about embroidery. The topic ranges are as diverse as you are.
Even if you are not an expert on a subject, you know that topics can be researched and information be compiled. That is how most marketeers work anyway. They choose a profitable niche, which is something that also interests them, and go about creating informative content around it. I personally have created extensive content in finance, art, music and more.
The 2 main steps for Clickbank success
There are two main challenges before you : One, creating the e-book or the e-guide. Second, having an online webpage where you sell the product.
Unlike Kindle, you need a landing page for your book when you sell through Clickbank. Like we just mentioned, Clickbank is an affiliate network. I am assuming you know about affiliate marketing, otherwise you can read our extensive post on the subject: all about affiliate marketing.
Why Clickbank is such a powerful sales generator
Clickbank offers two powerful features for you to sell an ebook or an e-course. You can use it as a payment and delivery processor. This means that it will process the payment for you and also securely deliver the digital product to the subscriber.
The second more powerful feature is the affiliate network. This can actually be the main driving force of listing your product on Clickbank. There are thousands of people who promote the products listed there for a share in the profit. These people are called affiliates. While listing your product you have to set a percentage of commission for each sale that happens through the affiliate.
Two things make your product successful and popular with affiliate’s: high quality product that converts well into sales, and a high percentage of commission.
It is not uncommon for products to give a 75% percent of the selling price as commission. This mostly happens on the digital products because for a few reasons.
- There are no overheads on digital products, like shipping.
- There is also no cost of physical manufacturing.
- The only cost associated with selling a digital product is using a service that securely stores the files and sends them to the buyer after accepting payment for it.
- The seller recognises that the affiliates are making the sales through their own effort. So the more affiliate they can gather the better.
- Once again it is pure profit without any effort of their own. So giving off a large chunk of the profit to attract more affiliates makes sense and that is when the 25% profits really start to stack up.
- You can have thousands of people making sales for you without the need for you to do any active marketing.
- Because your product converts well and pays handsome commissions, people will use their own marketing channels such as post on their own blogs and send newsletters to their email list.
Why choose Clickbank to publish your ebook?
Publishing on Kindle and Clickbank are inherently very different. There are pros and cons to both situations.
One of the biggest difference is that you are not going to make millions with your book sales on Kindle alone. Whereas, several vendors of e-products on Clickbank have done that and continue to do it. Well, not everyone makes millions, but there is still a lot more money to be made on Clickbank if you have the right e-book. There are reasons for this.
On the Kindle Library, the books that sell the most are in the Fiction category. You will often find books on kindle in the non-fiction category that sell for about one dollar. Other are usually under $5. I am not speaking of books from known international authors. I am speaking of the self-published books like you and I are going to put up. If you do not know about self-publishing yet, read about it here.
However, on Clickbank, the median selling price for a guide or e-course is around $50. Therefore, as long as you can create worthy and popular material, you stand to make much more money. Then there are things like upsells and downsells. These are offers that the buyer sees after they have purchased your initial product. These are high converting and really add up to the main income.
In fact many sellers sell their front end product cheaply to get the buyer convinced and then show him all the other offers.
The other reason is, as we have already mentioned earlier, that Clickbank is an affiliate network. That means that if you have a popular product on hand there will be thousands of other people making the sales for you.
Of course, some content will be better suited to the Kindle space, especially if you want to write fiction. There are millions of readers buying Kindle books everyday. So that is a plus.
Back to selling your e-books on Clickbank.
How to create a high selling product for Clickbank
There are two things you need to do to ensure that you have a high quality product that converts well into sales.
- Have meaningful content and
- a well designed landing / sales web page.
I recommend using the right tools to do both these jobs correctly. I will recommend what I use myself.
Use Shopify or Gumroad to create a selling page. Both these services have thousands of users around the world from personal bloggers to multi-national and multi-million businesses.
How to create a powerful landing sales page
You need a professional looking webpage that inspires confidence in a visitor. The page should establish your authority and professionalism about what you are saying and selling. Do not get intimidated by this. Today it is so much easier to create professional looking webpages with only a little know how.
I am not going to beat about the bush with the fact that this is going to cost you money. The whole process is going to cost you time and money even though listing e-books on both kindle and Clickbank is free.
This is the case with any product creation. But the good part about digital products creation is that once it’s done there are no repeat costs. The selling price is pure profit. One of the major reasons why making and marketing digital products is so powerful.
Anyway back to creating the webpage. There are many ways to go about this and there are many services we can use. The easiest and fastest way to do this is to use tailor-made solutions that create good looking landing pages for you.
Use Shopify or Gumroad to do this.
You can also learn about WordPress and host your own website of course. But it’s better to use the services of a landing page creator. Buying a fast hosting, buying multiple themes, customising them etc. gets to be too much work with too many things to learn. The cost will also roughly be the same as using a landing page creator.
One of the best ways of selling anything is with email marketing. So I recommend a service like GetResponse. When people come to your sales page, there should be a way to get them to sign up with their email. The advantage of doing is that you get highly interested leads to sign up that convert into sales when you send them informative emails.
The other thing is that when most people will see your offer on the website you can re-introduce them to it many times through emails. You get opportunity to convince them with more information and interaction. Repeat exposure is important for people to buy anything specially if there are other choices around.
This is an advantage of selling your ebooks on your own blog. If you sell them on Kindle will you never know who your buyers are and you cannot contact them again.
HOW TO SELL EBOOKS ON YOUR BLOG
Run a blog as an extension of your author profile and get more publicity.
Running a blog where you post short articles is especially beneficial if you write in the non-fiction category. In fact, having a blog is a pretty natural outreach of being an author. Writing in the non-fiction category means that you are probably sharing your knowledge on some subject. One can also assume that this is a subject that people will be interested in reading about. Better still, this also actively search topics related to this subject online.
This makes for great content for a blog. A blog gives you more freedom to ride and express than microblogging. You can create blog posts around the topic covered in your book, which will encourage the blog readers to buy the book when it’s when it does eventually come out.
The great part is that a blog that starts getting organic traffic from each engine will continue to get a steady stream of regular visitors, creating a source of perpetual promotion for your book. Creating content for the blog also should be fairly easy because you are working on similar content for your book. Your musings, your thoughts and your research can very well become a part of your blog posts. The writing can be more relaxed.
One of the things I love about writing a blog is the comments section. The comments give an opportunity to add content to a blog post by responding to them, without the need to brainstorm new ideas. Sometimes meaningful comments can add value to the blog post on their own. So it’s always a good idea to invite discussion and questions on your articles.
Sell your book on your own e-commerce enabled blog
Also, you can sell your book on your own blog its self, using services like Shopify and Gumroad. If you think creating an impressive e-commerce enabled site for your book is difficult, it’s not. You can make use of 70+ ready to use themes and the managed payment gateway to create an amazing store in very short time.
Another great thing about Shopify is that comes ready with a built-in blogging engine. So you can run a blog alongside your bookstore to get more traffic from search engines. It is a great all-in-one package and money’s worth if you are serious about selling your stuff online.
There are other options as well like choosing a hosting plan from web hosts like Bluehost and Dreamhost ( the 2 most recommend web hosting companies for WordPress) and running a WordPress blog. But I do not recommend this process for someone who doesn’t already know how to do this. It is much too time consuming and falls expensive when you have to buy themes and customise them, enable e-commerce on it etc.
Shopify offers ready made templates to create a website, where you can blog and sell your things. It is fully enabled to process your sales and payment.
As a reminder of something we already mentioned, you cannot sell your e-book yourself or anywhere else if you decide to join the kindle select program. Then you have to be exclusive with the Amazon book space.
Collect emails and build an email list through your blog
One of the biggest advantages of having a blog is the ability to have people sign up with their email addresses and maybe even phone numbers. What they sign up for is entirely up to you.
You could promise them interesting content in the form of a newsletter, early deals, free e-book downloads et cetera anything that you feel would be enticing enough to get your target readers to sign up. Hopefully your email list will keep growing over time to a robust number so that when time comes for the book launch, you can email these interested subscribers to go ahead and buy it.
I use GetResponse for this. Another advantage of using Getresponse is that you can also create unlimited number of landing pages. Landing pages are pre-designed pages with that are used to make people subscribe to your offer. They are different themes you can choose from depending on what you are promoting and are fully customisable. But the heavy lifting of doing the designing and optimising has been done for you. Landing pages yield a very high conversion rate and almost all blogs selling digital products use them.
How to write great content for an e-book
In order to package your content as an E course the composition will matter. Plain text editors are fine for most part, unless you have a different ‘method’. We have already written earlier in this post on how to create engaging content for a book.
If you are writing in a non-fiction category, you need to impart some knowledge or information that will be useful. I will give a few examples after kind of E-books I’ve found on Clickbank.
- How to start a small business from home.
- Various food related ebooks like paleo diets, keto recipes, making smoothies etc.
- Learning musical instruments like guitar, piano, ukulele, flute etc
- Singing courses.
- Sports based ebooks such guides to improving golf swing, improving jumps for basketball.
- Education based ebooks like language learning, teaching kids etc.
- Self help is a popular category with ebooks on yoga, meditation, relationships, self-development etc.
- Home improvement guides on furniture building, solar energy, power tools and more.
These are just a few examples by no standard an exhaustive list. There are hundreds of topics out there being sought out by millions of people. Go with what you want to write about. Research a popular niche if you have to.
Hopefully we will keep adding to this article with more insights into self publishing and selling your own books. In the meantime, it will be great if you posted your own views in the comments section below, or raise questions that we can answer. All the best!
