RSSWho will buy my lovely ebook?
Feb 12
Make money with ebooks selling ebooks No Comments
Sounds like something out of a book by Dickens doesn’t it! I can just imagine some wrinkled old crone sat on a street corner in Edwardian clothes, clutching a laptop…
OK, maybe not.
If you’re going to write a successful ebook – no matter what the subject, you’ll stand a much better chance of success if you have a good picture of your reader in your head. Who’s this book going to appeal to? What are they really looking for? Etc.,
Sure, you can just go bashing away at your keyboard and turn out a master work, but your chances of making a few dollars are greatly increased if you know you’re writing something that people want to buy!
For ebook fiction writers it’s perhaps different than for non-fiction authors. The fiction writer is, to an extent, always trusting to luck because it’s almost impossible to know if your style of prose will appeal. You can read as much as possible, of course, you can submit short pieces to various sites to see what reaction you get, but until your work becomes known you don’t have a customer base to appeal to. Your task is to create a buzz, perhaps at Squidoo.com, Stumbleupon.com or other social sites. You can try seeking out blogs or article sites that accept short fiction like Buzzle.com
If you’re going to publish an ebook which is factual, either a resource book or a “how to” project, then we can be much more accurate about targeting potential readers – your customers.
There are many ways to do this, lots of it for my favorite price: Free.
You can get a feel for what the market wants by visiting forums. You can search the web and see what your competition is doing. What else is on the market at Amazon and at independent ebook publishers? Can you see any gaps in the market that you could exploit?
On the other side of the coin, if you can’t see any competition is there a market at all? It can happen, sadly, that the “great” idea you have for an ebook has no competition simply because nobody wants an ebook on the subject!
It’s a mistake I’ve made myself. I should have done my research before I started.
Of course there are no guarantees, but we can work at defining our market before we start and give our ebook a better chance of success.
On the other hand there are those people who just have to get the ebook done. Have to get it out of their system. If that’s you, just go for it. I know an author who did just that and published his ebook last year. Last time I spoke to him he’d sold about a dozen copies. It didn’t matter to him, he’d achieved his goal and was happy to have done so.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that attitude at all. For me though, this is what I do for a living. If you want to earn a reasonable income when you publish an ebook make sure you don’t just know your subject but your customer too.
