How To Create And Publish Electronic Books

There are many different ways you can sell your own books - eBooks - on-line. One method is selling it from your own web site. Another method, selling it through an agent capable of distributing it on the Net while still protecting the copyrights capability. The third, submitting it to on-line publishers for possible publication. These are three. There are many more. In the scope of this section, we're assuming you are going to sell it yourself from your own web site.

First, you will need to convert your text to an eBook (electronic book) format. For this you will want an eBook compiler program. E-ditor Pro is one highly recommended program. There are others available on the Net as well. For more information on the tools required to do this see our section on "E-Book Tools".

MyFreeOffice Suite - for free web space on the Net, this one comes with an excellent package of tools to help you sell and make money on the net, whether it is for selling your eBook or selling other products. The selling tools included with your free account include:
 

Your web site should include at the very least the following information: a short synopsis of your e-book (or sample pages - easy to have available by "unlocking" a few pages, a full chapter, or more if you are using E-ditor Software), a short biography on who you are, links for downloading and/or purchasing your e-book, and testimonials about the book if you have some available. Also, try to describe what the benefits are to your reader for purchasing your book. The "what's in it for me" principle applies to on-line marketing as much as it does in standard marketing.

The Total E-Commerce Solution - I personally recommend this package for accepting credit cards on your site. Who wants to deal with 2 or 3 different sources for the sales processing part of their web sites? Not me! I prefer to keep things as simple as possible BUT I also want to be sure it's safe, secure, and as inexpensive as possible. If you take the time to shop around (and believe me, I have) you soon realize there are 4 main ingredients you want for selling anything on the net and they can add up to a pretty expensive process.

• merchant account (the bank you will be using)
• transaction processing software (the software that "calls" in the card information and approves or declines the card - you'll want one that does this "real-time")
• a secure server (for encrypting confidential data such as credit card numbers, customer names and addresses, etc.)
• a virtual shopping cart system (particularly if you plan on selling more than one book).

Please Note: if you are planning on selling any product, whether it is your own eBook or anything else, I cannot stress enough the importance of being able to accept credit cards and other electronic forms of payment on your site. In particular, one of the major selling points of having your e-Book for sale on the Net is the instant gratification for readers wanting to read it. They get it instantly. Without the ability to accept payment electronically you will be defeating this very important incentive and more than likely losing many many potential readers as a result.

There are a number of methods for promoting your own e-book(s) on-line. How much you wish to learn on the subject of marketing on-line is up to you. If you really want to become a pro at it and go in-depth I recommend Corey's Internet Marketing Course. You will be as impressed by the thorough content of his course as you will be by the packaging of his materials. It is an excellent program well worth the investment!

However, if you don't wish to go into great detail on marketing (many writers prefer to be authors - not marketing giants) then we've put together a small section here to help you at least get on your way... (A quick trip to the WebGuide will be helpful too.)

One of the main steps you will want to take is submitting your web site to search engines. A free software program is available for this task through MyFreeOffice, however you may want something with more capabilities, more search engine destinations, and better description/meta tag functionality. There are several available on the Net. We use Submit Wolf which rose our site from zero traffic to over 25,000 page views per day. We were impressed.

You may also wish to consider submitting to Free For All (FFA) link sites to improve your position in the search engines (since most use link popularity as a guide to which pages are returned first in a search querry). A software program we purchased for this purpose is the FFA Blaster. A free version is also available but it is limited in the number of FFA sites which it sends your advertising to. Still, the free version is better than doing everything manually.

You may also want additional promotion tools such as e-mail autoresponders (GetResponse is a good one) or e-mail handling software (such as Mail Loop) to assist you with automating at least a part, if not all, of your on-line business... and yes, it is a business you are running. The minute you decided to sell your own book(s) on-line you became an entrepreneur. Welcome to the club!!