After you have finished researching and writing your e-book, it is time to reap the sweet fruit of your labour and make money through selling your ebook.
Ebooks are one of the digital products you can sell profitably online. But to make it a successful business, you need to get customers to trust you and plan the right business strategy.
In this guide, we will show you how to sell ebooks online the right way. Or you could watch this one-minute video to get some quick tips to get more ebook downloads:
Contents
Why sell ebooks?
If you’re an expert in your niche, writing and selling ebooks is a great way to monetize your expertise. You can put your expert views into paper, design it into a downloadable format, and put it up for sale. It’s the best product you can create out of your skills.
If you’re wondering if people would bother spending money on ebooks when lots of free content are available on the internet — yes, people still buy ebooks. For one reason, most learner look for fluff-free, genuine content that is valuable to them. So, if you’re able to convince them of your expertise, you can successfully sell ebooks online.
Another benefit of selling ebooks online is that it’s cost-effective and is a product that has high profit margins. It also requires minimal effort and you can manage all aspects by yourself.
5 steps to follow to sell your ebooks online
1. Know your target buyer
Keep your target buyer in mind when you market your e-book.
For example, the advertisement of an ebook dealing with children’s nutrition would gain no traction on a business or banking website. It would be most apt to advertise or talk about this ebook in a kindergarten or school website.
How Instamojo does it:
When our content team writes ebooks, we take a few steps back to keep in mind WHO WE WRITE FOR! Instamojo caters to small businesses, solo entrepreneurs and anyone who wants to set up an store online!
So, it would make sense to write our ebooks keeping this audience in mind, right? Take a look at our most recent ebook for proof. A major chunk of our audience are working from home or running their businesses from home, so it was only fair to write an ebook on the best way to conduct virtual events in 2020. At least, it is a good place to start.
Want to sell ebooks online with your own eCommerce store? Sign up on Instamojo for free and start selling easily.
2. Get your ebook ready for sale
Once you’ve put together the content of your ebook, you’ll need to prepare it for business. Here are some additional steps you should follow before getting it out for sale.
Formatting
Make sure your content is presented in a pleasing and easily-digestible manner. The ideal font size for ebooks is font sizes of 11 or larger. Use reasonable fonts like Verdana or Arial. Indent paragraphs appropriately and keep a decent line-paragraph spacing. Also, keep the content scannable and skimmable so that readers can get the gist easily. These are the basic formatting techniques to follow for your ebook.
Branding and cover design
Write about you or your brand and make put up logos in strategic positions.
An attractive cover design is also important for better ebook sales. You can design one yourself by using tools like Canva or get it done by a freelance graphic designer.
Here’s a cover design of an ebook from the Instamojo store:
3. Attract the buyer with a preview
How would you attract and convince your buyer to buy your ebook?
This task would be simple if you let the prospective buyer read the preface or the first few pages of the book. You could even have the buyer sneak a peek into interesting sections of the book.
How Instamojo does it:
Our idea of a preview is to work really hard on the design of the ebook! If our reader is looking for the best video marketing tools to set their video content strategy right, we make sure our design speaks volumes about the content that follows. Also, keeping your introduction short and crisp helps build enough excitement – if you word it right!
Check out our video marketing ebook below:
4. Price it right
The price of your ebook can be one of the major factors that affect its sale. It is necessary to price it right. How you price your e-book also depends on how established or well-known you are as an ebook writer. This is determined by the sale and popularity of your previous e-books.
Simply put, it all boils down to how much time, money and resources you invested into the ebook. to price it right, you need to know how much your audience is willing to pay!
We suggest pricing your e-books competitively if you are new in this industry. If you are a popular writer, chances are people would be willing to pay a higher price to read your e-book.
Got a doubt? Ask GC Mouli:
GC Mouli is an engineer by day and blogger by night! He is on a mission to retell the story of Ponniyin Selvan (English: Son of Cauvery) and is selling the ebook on Instamojo for Rs. 100. GC Mouli has finished refurbishing and translating the first volume of the 5 volume series of Ponniyin Selvan and has uploaded the ebook for readers on Instamojo.
Find out how he sells his ebooks here
5. Spread word using social media and email
It is an absolute must for every business to have an online presence these days. Speaking of e-books, when your market is online, you just cannot ignore the online platforms to market your e-book.
Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook
Use the power of the social media channels above to promote and spread the word about your ebook, even when you are in the writing process. It generates a buzz and you can gather interesting content from your readers too. For example: Here’s how you can promote your ebook via twitter.
And it is live on @instamojo as well (for Indian readers)https://t.co/d6VMSTDLib
PDF is formatted for A5 size – for ease of reading on kindle/tablets. #PonniyinSelvan #SonofCauvery #Ebook #PDF
(Appreciate the RTs 🙏 and for supporting this amateur author). https://t.co/bZlM40t8bD
— g_c_mouli (@gcmouli) July 1, 2020
Blogging:
Mention your ebook via a blog. A blog can not exceed a certain number of words (2000 words is the limit!), but if your readers are keen to know more, simply link them to the ebook!
Email:
Send your readers an email using Mailchimp, SendInBlue or GSuite with a link to the ebook. If you need to get your readers emails, here are a few lead generation tips and tricks that will help you.
6. Get an online store to sell ebooks
Convincing the buyer to make an online payment could be the trickiest part of selling online, especially if it isn’t a physical product. Having your own online store can help build trust with your customers and get you more sales.
Ahem, like us.
With Instamojo, you can not just offer the buyer a safe shopping experience but also allow them to use any mode of payment they choose to use. And you can get started in less than minutes.
Here’s an example of a store on Instamojo that sells ebooks.
You can easily collect orders and payments. With marketing tools, you can host campaigns and manage them easily under one roof. You can also get analytics of sales and store visits, which you can use to understand how well your business is doing and make informed decisions.
Other ways to sell ebooks online
There are platforms that allow creators to sell digital products online, such as Gumroad and Sellfy. You can sign up on these platforms, create a profile, and upload your ebook. The only disadvantage is that you’ll need to give away a percentage of your sales as commission.
How do you sell an ebook on Instamojo?
In 2 steps:
- Sign up on Instamojo
- Head to your Dashboard, click on ‘Add Product’ and select ‘Digital Products’. Fill in all the details of your ebook and upload your ebook file.
Super simple, right? Over 1000s’s of sellers found out how to sell ebooks using Instamojo.
2 comments
I love these strategies. Hope would be beneficial for selling books online.
Hey Anjali, Thanks for sharing such useful tips. Especially using easy payment methods.