A practical guide to selling ebooks online | Hacker News Reader

A practical guide to selling ebooks online

denis.papathanasiou.org

A few tips I've picked up by finding a few ebook marketing websites recently by accident:

* Long-form! Write a lot of text explaining why your ebook will be useful, giving helpful examples (but not real answers... that's in the ebook) and basically just lots of stuff that'll make the reader feel like you've put lots of work into this thing, you're giving them all this text for free, and it'd be kinda rude if they didn't buy a copy of your ebook.

* Get people saying "yes": the simplest is to only have the beginning of your interminable pitch on the home page... don't have any actual info there (not even the fact that you're selling an ebook): instead, put a big link at the bottom of page 1 that says "Yes! I'd like to learn more!" or similar.

* Urgency AND anchoring in one! When you finally show the price (after initial anchoring like "most people would expect to pay hundreds of dollars for tips this valuable"), use a bit of JavaScript to say that "Our normal price is $79 -- but due to high demand we've lowered the price to only $49... but only until " + tomorrowsDate + "! If you miss this flash sale, you'll need to pay full price, sorry!"

* Get their email so your long-form sale can go on forever! Require an email address to see an excerpt, or maybe even to see the page with pricing. Then every week or so send them an email with another ton of text, and "accidents" like "oh no, we accidentally lowered the price with a typo but we'll have to honor that just for today!"

This is only partly tongue-in-cheek. This may sound annoying -- and indeed, it is -- but I'll bet it really works. Even recognizing the tricks at each step, it's sometimes hard for me to avoid getting sucked in.

I have no experience making millions of dollars from eBooks, but I can report that the final section is incorrect. I have sold books on leanpub.com to technically savvy users who apparently do pay for ebooks.

Twice I have tried to give away ebooks here on HN, and both times there were people who chose to pay even though the content was available free in PDF, iBook, and Kindle formats.

I would argue that that represents an unusual case: people here pay you out of respect/gratitude for your contribution to the community.

For unknown authors, the sales picture is different.

That may be true. Let's say that it is. In that case, the article could be improved by distinguishing between the two cases of an author with a niche brand of some sort and an author without. If you have a niche brand, some of the other marketplaces may offer advantages such as lower costs or more flexibility.

An author with an established brand or significant following (and I count your HN reputation as an example) can sell anywhere, b/c readers will seek out his work and deal with all kinds of annoyances: usb cable device syncs, finding out which folder to copy into, which ebook format file to use, etc.

If you don't have a brand or following, though, selling through marketplaces that are not tied to devices is a huge disadvantage.

The typical ipad/kindle/nook user does not go outside the store built-in to the device looking for content (the majority of them probably don't even know it's possible), except for a small, bleeding-edge minority.

From the titles was expecting the story to have practical tips for publishing and marketing ebooks. This reads more as a short overview of the 3 most popular markets but doesn't dive that deep.

As I mentioned at the start, it was an extended explanation for people who needed more than just links to KDP and iBookstore.

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