Business Corner

When Amazon announced that their Kindle digital download sales had eclipsed both their hardback and paperback sales combined, the moment of the new ebook revolution had arrived.

The launch of the Amazon Kindle in 2007 allowed people to simply click and buy to download ebooks from the Kindle marketplace onto their device. In 2009 the Apple iPad exploded onto the scene bringing with it the iBook app that also enabled ebook sales via other Apple family of products such as the iPhone and iPod.

Other ebook readers such as the Nook range of readers opened up the Barnes and Noble marketplace with Sony and others joining the fray.

This is truly exciting time for writers and information publishers throwing open a mainstream marketplace that is quickly expanding.

Firstly why should you publish an ebook?

• You establish yourself as an expert
• You can use your books and guides as lead generators to build your list and sell backend services and products
• It doesn’t have to be a mammoth book. You can publish guides, short reports, whitepapers and even publish your blog posts as a book.

The global ebook market grew by 200% in 2010, so the question is how can you take advantage of this huge market?

There are plenty of Publish on Demand platforms out there that can help you publish and distribute your books. You can ‘Google’ publish on demand and see what is available and best suits your needs.

Lulu is probably the most well know of POD (publish on demand) services with a range of add-on support services such as marketing, proofreading, design and editing.  Read more... (406 words, estimated 1:37 mins reading time)

When you are thinking about writing something either entertaining or informative, you may want to do it outside of the norm. Sure, you can write your standard written publication, or, you can go the new route and become an Ebook writer with the ability to reach hundreds of thousands of people, without the middleman of a publisher.

When you’re an Ebook writer, the sky is literally the limit. If you would like to write how-to books, short stories, or full novels, now is your chance. While yes, you will need to have a general knowledge of literature, story telling, grammar, and spelling to create a great Ebook, it is possible for just about anyone to become an Ebook writer.

To get started with Ebook writing, you will want to have a general idea in your mind. Once you have it, it is a matter of allowing your muse to let loose. Generally speaking however, you will want to ensure that your story is entertaining for the masses. Especially since this is how you will help to capture more sales.

The typical Ebook will be anywhere from a couple chapters to a full book length long. So, if you’d prefer to simply give short stories for your readers to read, that is entirely possible. But, I would have to admit that full-length publications tend to be far more popular as consumers have to pay for each copy they download, unless you opt to offer free Ebooks for them to read.

With the ever-growing popularity of Nooks and Ebook readers, it is no wonder why more and more Ebook writers are coming out of the woodwork. However, with all of those writers out there, it is becoming increasingly hard to write a successful Ebook that will begin getting sales. Fortunately, if you have an edge in any one particular subject and market your book well, you too can sell your latest and greatest writing.  Read more... (519 words, estimated 2:05 mins reading time)

As an internet marketer working from home, it’s vital that you understand the actual reasons why consumers buy eBooks in the first place. Generally speaking, people purchase them for discretion, for practicality, and also because when they have a problem and they go online to find a solution, eBooks are readily available. So, exactly how many pages should there be in an eBook? They answer is actually very simple – It should have as many pages as it takes to get the message across.

When your subject material has been delivered in full, your eBook will be complete. In other words, your eBook could be 15 pages 50 pages, or even 150 pages. One frequently comes across eBooks which are 50 or 60 pages long, and yet the actual subject material only account for about 70% of the pages.

The remaining 30% of the book is irrelevant material, which in writing circles is known as filler. This is content which is added simply to help increase the page count so that they are able to charge more. This is definitely not something you want to do to your own clients. If you do, your customers will be left feeling disappointed, and as you can imagine, disappointed customers don’t return. Just remember, the average person knows the difference between quality and quantity.

When you include pages which aren’t really necessary, you’re wasting your own precious time, and you’re also causing your customers to waste their hard earned money. Prudent internet marketers have long since known that people will pay hundreds of dollars to get an eBook which is jam-packed with valuable information, rather than end up with an eBook which is 40% filler.  Read more... (470 words, estimated 1:53 mins reading time)

No doubt that professional ebook covers will make your website and the product look trustworthy. It gives the perception that you’re an expert in the field and the product has quality.

Just ask yourself this question… Would I buy a product that is presented by a poor quality image?

Lets’ look at an Amazon study that was done on 45 top ranked publishers, and 15 top ranked authors with over 100 covers reviewed ebook covers. The covers were ranked into 4 categories:

1) Unreadable

2) Poor

3) Average

4) Good

Conclusion: A good ranking was awarded to a cover if the Author’s name and Title could be read in the thumbnail/cover and the image or background did not interfere with the legibility of the two.

Another conclusion was that, developing “one size fits all” ebook covers, is not really working and that, part of the prospective customer’s decision making is the eBook’s cover.

Now, here’s why professional ebook covers will increase business

There are few “angles” to look at, when you start selling your eBook product.(Although, is valid for other digital products as well):

- A professional cover will increase the perceived value of the product.

- Well designed covers attracts attention. The result is “stickiness” to your website.

- It build your brand. If you are in business for a long run, you really need to build “a brand” around your product.

- High quality design of your ebook covers will help your customer visualize what they are considering buying. The representation of the graphic has proven time and time again to increase sales and increase the overall professional image of your website.

- And last, but not least… increase the “buzz” — believe it or not!  Read more... (468 words, estimated 1:52 mins reading time)

One of the best ways to get a good start on your online business, blog, or online store is to buy a well written e-book that can explain the latest in internet marketing and online business start-ups. The internet is constantly changing and with change comes new methods for promoting and ranking your business or blog. Time is money and a lot of time will be saved by having this knowledge researched and provided for you as opposed to doing the research yourself. After all, to attempt a serious go at online income will need much more of your time than you expect. Unfortunately, there are both well written and poorly written e-books out there, all claiming they are the best. How do you sort through the pile to find the gem you’re looking for?

As an e-book reviewer, I tend to use these 7 indicators to decide if an e-book is good for my viewers and worthy of a review:  Read more... (703 words, estimated 2:49 mins reading time)

1. Google Search – Search for the title of your e-book in Google and see what you come up with. Good publicity is obviously good, while sites claiming the book is of low quality, a scam, or any other negative annotation raises red flags.
2. Check the Popularity – While searching about in Google for reviews or warnings, also take a look at how many people are promoting the book. Affiliates who sell these books only spend their time with decent products that sell well. If every other person who purchases the book demands a refund or files a complaint, nobody makes money and the product dies out.

Contrary to popular belief, an eCover is not just something thrown onto your eBook without a second thought. In fact, creating your cover is a crucial part of the book writing process.

The hard fact is that you may have the greatest book in the world, but a lackluster cover will hinder your sales tremendously.

Buyers are accustomed to surfing the Internet. Every day, each and every one of us visits more websites than we can count, and most of the time we hardly even remember what we just read.

Your customers suffer from the same problem.

When your customer looks at your eBook, chances are they are looking at other books too. They may even be looking at many, many other books.

A lackluster eCover has no chance of standing out from the rest of the books out there. Let’s say that someone is looking at a book on horse training and they have looked at five other books on the subject. If your eCover does not stand out, your book will be just one of many. Sure, you may squeak out a few sales here and there, but the real sales and the real money, is going to the business-person with the eye catching book cover. If a customer does not remember your book, they will not buy from you. It is that simple.

So what is the easiest way to make sure that your eBooks are always remembered?

Work to ensure that your eBook covers are designed to create emotion in your potential customers.

Your cover layout should show customers that their lives will be much better once they have your book. Customers should feel like they cannot go one more day without your book in their hands.  Read more... (433 words, estimated 1:44 mins reading time)

Over the years, I’ve written a few e-books, and I am also a reader who likes to partake in e-books and load them onto my e-reader. However, there is something that has concerned me over the last year, and that is when I buy an e-book based on its title, I expect a little bit of substance and meat in it. All too often, I end up downloading the e-book only to find out that it isn’t more than about 25 pages, and it is conveniently spaced, and a font which is larger than normal. In fact, if one were to take out the pictures, and all the formatting, it wouldn’t be more than 10 pages.

Now then for all of you e-book writers who produce these ultra-short e-books I have news for you; that’s not an e-book, it’s an essay. Further, even if you’re selling your e-book for only $.99 because you are hoping to go for volume, it still isn’t fair to the reader who expects something of more substance. In a way you are cheating your readers and you are hurting other e-book authors because the consumers who feel cheated may think twice about buying an e-book from a newer author who they are unfamiliar with, as they don’t want to take the risk of being cheated again, and in this way you are doing a disservice to all e-book authors.

Indeed, if this is something you are doing, I sincerely wish that you would stop, but if you aren’t a very good writer or you don’t have very much information to impart to your reader then I have some tips for you. Don’t call your e-book an; e-book. Instead call it an;

Essay
Report
Novella
Mini-Book
Short Story
Ultra-short E-book  Read more... (442 words, estimated 1:46 mins reading time)

You’ve got a great website and business is fair. You know it could be better, but you aren’t sure what to do to improve your traffic. One answer might be to write an ebook promoting your products!

Before you declare that you cannot write a book and think I’m crazy, let me explain how this works.

Ebooks are the easiest way to promote a specific product or help people solve a problem. Giving them away via your website, autoresponder or as a promotion is one of the simplest and best ways to market your other products. For example:

· Ebooks are generally fairly short-20-50 pages in length

· They are limited to one specific topic

· They give quality information people may not have the patience to find themselves

· They solve a problem for the reader

· They display the expertise available through your website or business

· They help to expand your contacts lists via email for future sales and promotions

These are niche specific mini-books, think of it that way. A home decorating business might offer a free ebook on how to install bathroom tile, or a scrapbooking shop may offer one on choosing a layout for a scrapbook page. An antiques shop may offer a free email course on preserving and repairing antique furniture. Each is short and devoted to its particular subject while generating interest in aspects of the business.

You don’t have to write a novel (unless that is what you plan to sell) to get your point across. Visitors to your website enjoy the idea of getting something for free and you get to expand your contacts list when they enter their email to receive the ebook or email course. Delivery can be done by autoresponder and most of your customers will have a PDF reader on their PC so format isn’t an issue.  Read more... (448 words, estimated 1:48 mins reading time)

Although Amazon will not confirm how many of their popular Kindle e-readers have been sold, the number is estimated to be in the millions. One testament to the Kindle’s popularity is that there are more than 950,000 ebook titles available for immediate download from Amazon’s Kindle store. Add to that all of the ways readers can buy Kindle ebooks even without owning a Kindle and you can believe Amazon’s claim that Kindle ebook sales have surpassed sales of print books.

All you need to buy ebooks from Amazon without a Kindle is one of the many free Kindle reading apps available. Start by going to Amazon.com. In the left navigation, click on Kindle, then Free Kindle Reading Apps. On that page you will find links to download the Kindle reading app for the Windows PC, Mac, iPhone and iPod Touch, iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7.

With the app installed you can download free and paid ebooks from the Kindle store and read them on your favorite device. (Because of a recent change in the terms of service for Apple apps, ebooks can not be downloaded via the Kindle apps running on an Apple device. However, ebooks can be purchased through a web browser and delivered to the Apple device.)

Even if you own a Kindle, you may want to use one or more of the Kindle reader apps. Using an app on a mobile device allows you to buy from anywhere, and read anywhere, even if you don’t have your Kindle with you. Most people have their phones with them wherever they go, so anytime you have a few spare minutes you can read a bit of that novel you are having a hard time putting down. Any of the Kindle ebooks already in your library can be transferred to other devices, and the ebooks can be accessed from more than one device. For example, I have some of my Kindle ebooks on my Kindle, my PC and my iPhone.  Read more... (514 words, estimated 2:03 mins reading time)

I often wondered how people were extremely successful marketing information products on the internet. I honestly thought the web was for the younger generation and the computer savvy ‘Gurus’. Boy was I wrong. My previous purchases and studies have educated me on that.

I am a self publisher of a few books and ‘a wanna be’ bestselling author. So I decided to seek out self published bestselling author’s websites to see what they were doing to earn their stripes. How come they had best sellers? What were they doing that I wasn’t doing. I read books just as good as theirs, and in some cases better on authonomy.com, where authors upload their manuscripts in the hopes of a publisher or agent discovering them.

I wanted to find out how they structured their websites so I could do the same and hopefully sell a few books via the internet without going library to library and bookstore to bookstore.

I purposely followed a trail of information websites and took relentless notes. My investigations took me deeper. Why were these writers on the best seller list? You probably already know this, but I certainly didn’t, I discovered that all kinds of people, both young and baby boomer era, from all walks of life, were creating wealthy lifestyles from a simple information ebook.

With a little insight into the internet and understanding how the web weaves, it is easy to see how the savvy internet marketers accomplish great successes. Basically, if a person can write well and use a computer they can take advantage of the world-wide-web, jump on board the digital era and make money with ebooks in a relatively short period of time.  Read more... (413 words, estimated 1:39 mins reading time)