Ebooks?

Hi,
I'm thinking of branching out into writing ebooks, probably to do with internet related things to start with (marketing, SEO, adsense), and then if that goes well I plan to start writing in other fields.

Anyway, moving on to the questions, my plan was to write a book of high quality and then selling on the full rights to the buyer, so that he/she will be the only person to sell it on, so basically selling the copyright to the book.

Is $300 a realistic amount to expect from each book? I'm a pretty good writer (sorry for sounding big headed ), so the book should be pretty high quality, probably of 50-100 pages in length.

Should I sell a few copies first to prove that it sells, or just write the book and sell it on?

Also, where should I sell the book? Where will I get the highest price for it?

Thanks for your time, and any answers will be greatly appreciated...

 

You'll make much more in residual income selling it yourself. You can earn much more selling to your own audience based on the trust they have with your than you can by trying to convince a general buyer of "quality" - everyone claims to offer high quality around here, and not many out of that bunch actually do. Sell it yourself and keep that income coming in.

 

If I'm honest, selling ebooks has never really appealed to me. I recently went through a phase recently where I bought quite a few ebooks with the intention of selling them on, but I soon realised that selling is much harder than I thought, so I felt I should stick to the writing side, and then let someone else take the product off my hands. Also, it might just be the juvenile side of me, but I really love the idea of selling it once and getting a half decent sum of money. I've always thought that selling fewer of bigger is better than selling mass small products, if you get what I'm saying?

 

There's a reason though that those making "big" money from e-books are selling their own. That's where the bulk of the money is. And one way or the other, you still have to market them - you can have a solid plan to continually market one of them for residual income, or you have to come up with marketing plans for separate audiences in separate niches just to make one sale. There's definitely a higher return selling something yourself over time repeatedly - less effort, more money, and you don't even have to do a huge amount of marketing.

 

There are 3 possible business models you could use

1) Sell one copy of the book with full rights. This is usually commissioned content; many ebook sellers pick these up for selling it under their own name. However, buyers with large budgets are few and far between; they look for people who can write to order (they specify the topic / approach etc.); and you'll need to build up your credibility. Since you won't want to give away the full content upfront (without payment), and they'll be hesitant to commit a large amount upfront without having seen your capabilities, it does become a catch-22. You may need to start off smaller; writing small reports, then building up to larger ebooks.

Check out the Warrior Forum as well as several of the freelancer sites; you'll see many such offers & requests.

2) An alternative model is to sell it with Private Label rights; here, you sell a limited quantity of say 25-100 copies, at a lower price each. ($20 - $50, maybe). Catch here is that you need to provide a package including site graphics, ecover and sales copy. You could outsource parts of these, or find a partner.

3) As Jenn suggests, sell it yourself; while each copy may sell for less, sheer numbers will make it viable. A good way to go about it is to set up the sales website, then list it through clickbank for affiliates to sell. You don't do ALL the marketing yourself; instead, leverage on the affiliate network that clickbank has, to generate your sales. Even if you make a buck per copy sold, that should translate to a fair amount with a few hundred sales.

PM me with details of your proposed book, please.

 

Thanks for the replies.

Option 1 sounds more appealing to me as I don't want the hassle of sorting out affiliates and then selling them, and nor do I want to sell PLR. My plan is to create a series, all on 'make money online' related topics. As much as I like the idea of a constant flow of money, I much prefer the idea of a lump sum everytime I write one. How much could I sell a single book for in terms of profit, after all affiliate and marketing costs?

 

I get the attraction, but what it really comes down to is that you'll do much more work for much less money that way. You also seem to be looking at only one benefit to writing e-books. There are others. You're talking about writing high quality e-books and not just garbage lumped together from other sources. That means:

1. Those e-books are a marketing tool / authority building tool for you, which can help sell other services in the future (and they can be extremely effective for that).

2. Unless you require your by-line on it through a one-time sale (and most buyers will want the right to label themselves or at least their company as the author), you putting together a quality e-book lends no authority whatsoever to the e-book to the end readers, because they don't associate you with it. So if your buyer has a lousy reputation, that transfers to your work.

At a bare minimum you should release one yourself (even if you give it away for free), as an example of your idea of a quality e-book. It would help you make the one-off sales on future e-books when you have a sample to show them (because you can't really show the full product to everyone who asks for it if you plan to ultimately sell full rights).

But as for "how much," I'd say $300 is insanely low for most, unless it's a really short one. I know e-book writers who write them for as little as $10 per page and as much as over $100 per page, depending on their area of expertise - however, they never write them and then try to sell them off. Buyers willing to spend decent money on these things most often want a custom job - they'll contract you to write something that meets their specific needs rather than buying a ready-made e-book.

If your last question is about how much you could you earn selling it yourself to multiple buyers (since you mention affiliate costs), you can earn far more than the $300 you mentioned. My first e-book made that much pretty quickly with very little time spent on marketing (and no money - just links on my blogs, here, etc.), and without an affiliate program.

 

Jenn, thanks for the brilliant reply.

I really like your idea of releasing one ebook first to sell individually, and then reassesing the situation afterwards to decide whether I want to continue like that or move on to selling the full rights to the book. If I'm completely honest, I don't mind if the new buyer changes the names in the book, as I would be selling the full rights to book.

I thought $300 was a bit cheap, but then didn't want to come on here and oversell myself. One of my ideas was to auction the full rights to the book, in which case I would put the starting bid at $300 and then a BIN of around $600, although I've only recently thought of that idea so I'm not sure of the exact price I would want.

 

If you do go that route, an auction definitely sounds like a better idea than a flat rate. Something else you may want to do is start a poll or something seeing of potential buyers are even interested in these kinds of things, and what they consider a decent budget. That will probably not attract those on the higher end, but you'll get an idea of what many here value a project like that at.

 

Another good idea, thanks. If I'm honest I don't know where I would sell the rights to the book, and the only suggestions I have are the ones that newrhodes mentioned a few posts up. I would be really happy with $600 at the moment, as I'm running low of funds.

What affiliates would you suggest? Clickbank seem like the leader, but I don't know many more. I'll try to spend a bit more time in the Affiliate section of this forum but recommendations are always good.

 

I'm going to be using Clickbank for my new e-book (which actually launches today), but I know if you want to handle more of it manually you can use www.e-junkie.com.

 

Clickbank probably is best. But that category is quite crowded and with commission payouts to affiliates being very generous, you have to take care with the ppc advertising unless you have a great list and jv partners to help promote.

 

Thanks, I thought that might be the case as it's pretty much the only program I've heard of.

webgal, by JV partners do you mean affiliates, or people that will work alongside me for a percentage of the profits? If it's the first then I'm quite happy with that, but if it's the second then that's a big no-no in my opinion. I've never really liked JVs so wouldn't be interested in that.

I know it's a "how long is a piece of string" style question, but how much could an ebook sell for individually? I thought around $30, which means that after affiliate costs (I'm assuming around 75% as this is the reply I got when I asked in the affiliate section) I'm getting $7.50 per book. Again, a pretty vague question, but how many sales do affiliates usually make?

Also, two more questions, slightly more to the point this time though. How do I pay the affiliates? I'm assuming it's all done through the affiliate program rather than me doing it manually, and how do they take the money from me (ie, Paypal)?

 

I sold my first for $17. My new one is priced at $37. I have another one in the works that's so specialized and for such a limited audience that it's going to be priced at around $100 at a bare minimum. You can sell them at any price point - it's just about knowing what price points are going to work with your particular audience.

For my affiliates, I'm probably going to do 25%. However, I also have a strong promotional background, and I'll be doing a huge amount of legwork on the marketing side for this one myself. The less marketing you want to handle, the more you're going to have to pay to attract affiliates. You also need to figure out what kinds of affiliates you want to attract. For me, I don't want the hard-core affiliate types who will promote anything that will earn them a buck - I want people with relevant audiences in my niche who would recommend it on its merits whether or not they're earning from it. The affiliate program is being launched more as a bonus for that group and less as a means of pushing a lot of sales. You'll have to decide on your sales goal, image that you're striving for, etc., and base things like affiliate cuts on who you're trying to attract.

I believe through Clickbank they handle the payment processing. With e-junkie, they give you tools for tracking, but you're paid the full e-book price, and then you have to process your affiliate payments (why I don't want to do my aff program through them - more admin work).

 

Hmm, I just feel $30 is about right, and if I'm going to be getting $10 ish per book that sells then I'll want to sell 40, 50 or even 60 copies before I get the same amount as if I'd just sold the full rights to the book in the first place. If I'm honest, although it may not sound very good, I'm in it for the money as I think we all are, so I wouldn't mind people selling my book just for some money. If I get the money then I'm happy.

In an ideal world I'm looking to take on ebook writing as my primary occupation and complete two ebooks per month to then make a total profit of around $500 each. I have bags of time on my hands so think it's doable to complete a book a fortnight, so around $1k per month would be my goal. If I am going to be writing books like this, however, then I would rather focus on the writing side of things rather than the selling, hence the idea of selling full rights sounding appealing.

 

I agree, an e-book in two weeks is certainly doable. I actually ran a 14-day e-book writing challenge on my freelance writing blog a while back. And $500 is definitely an achievable goal - over the long haul you may find they're bringing in much more than that - heck, after you have a good group of them out there (assuming not the one-time sales), you may even be able to cut back on how often you have to write them to keep the same income coming in.

If you want to see the step-by-step plan on my blog for writing one in 14 days, here's a link:

http://allfreelancewriting.com/2008/01/07/e-books/14-day-e-book-writing-challenge/

 

I don't want to step on any toes, because this feels more like a private conversation, but Kiteguy--when you sell all of the rights to your ebooks, you won't be able to build upon them, reputation wise. I understand not wanting to deal with affiliate hoopla, but if you sell all the rights, won't you basically have to start from scratch each time you have an e-book you want to sell? When you sell all of the rights, you lose the ability to point to a previous project as an example of your work. Couldn't retaining the rights save you a lot of marketing time as well as making you more money in the long run?

 

When I've ghostwritten ebooks, I've asked clients to allow me to keep an exerpt as a sample to show to previous clients. I agree to show these samples only on request and not publish them in my portfolio.

I don't know how many potential DP buyers would think to do this, but they could always look into his post history to see what kind of work he's done on DP. If he's making sales through DP threads, the evidence of experience would be here.

When it comes to ghostwriting, networking is key. He (or anyone else) would have to get his name out there as someone who does a good job ghostwriting ebooks. Writers do it all the time. Referral discounts is one way.

 

Jenn, thanks for the link, I'll have a proper read through when I have the time.

snarke, thanks for the reply. Yeah, I see what you're saying there, so I thought I would release one or maybe two ebooks to sell individually, with all the profits going to me. I thought this way, not only could I use the books as past experience, but I could also make references to the amount of sales I made when I come to sell full rights to future books. I think if I released an ebook every two months or so for me to sell (quarter of the time) then I'd build a reputation for myself and still get some steady profits flowing in.

latoya, good point, but I am a very active member here and make a lot of posts per day, so people might struggle to find my past threads, although I was hoping they might remember me, my threads and my reputation.

 

Jenn, I've just had a read through some of the posts off that post and they're brilliant. I'll definately be sitting down properly later on and reading it all. Also, as I've started writing my book I've realised that I can easily write one per fortnight...

A couple more questions for you all.

Should I get an ebook cover designed for my book, and if so, how much should I pay for one? If I'm honest I don't have very much money at the moment so I'm not sure whether I could really splash out on one, so does it matter that much?

Also, should I write some sort of document at the start of the book that says you may not steal or reproduce the book? If yes, how do I go about that? Do I need a qualified lawyer to write it or could I just get an idea of what to write from reading other ebooks?