Start a Business of E- Book Publication

Start a Business of E- Book Publication

       

If your are thinking of starting online business , you may want to consider creating and selling informational eBooks on your website. EBooks are generally shorter and easier to create than a traditional printed book.

What is e-book ?

An eBook is an electronic version of a traditional print book that can be read by using a personal computer or by using an eBook reader. (An eBook reader can be a software application for use on a computer, such as Microsoft's free Reader application) Users can purchase an eBook on diskette or CD, but the most popular method of getting an eBook is to purchase a downloadable file of the eBook (or other reading material) from a Web site (such as Barnes and Noble) to be read from the user's computer or reading device. Generally, an eBook can be downloaded in five minutes or less.

Although it is not necessary to use a reader application or device in order to read an Ebook (most books can be read as PDF files), they are popular because they enable options similar to those of a paper book - readers can bookmark pages, make notes, highlight passages, and save selected text. In addition to these familiar possibilities, eBook readers also include built-in dictionaries, and alterable font sizes and styles. 

Some eBooks can be downloaded for free or at reduced cost, however, prices for many eBooks - especially bestsellers - are similar to those of hardcover books, and are sometimes higher. Most eBooks at Barnes and Noble, for example, are comparable in price to their traditional print versions.

EBook Publishing for Marketing or as a Business

Even if you decide not to sell eBooks for a profit, you may want to create eBooks for free distribution to your website visitors as a way of promoting your business and capturing leads by having those who want to download your free eBook complete a form with their contact information.

If you do decide to sell eBooks for a profit, you can create an entire eBook store for only a fraction of the price of a brick and mortar bookstore. All you need is a unique information product and a target audience and, essentially, you're in the eBook publishing business. Contrast this to the many millions of dollars it would take to open a traditional book publishing business.

Creating an EBook Store

Once you have created and published several eBooks, you can create an eBook store. Those who visit your store will appreciate the options and the instant ability to download eBooks containing information they need. And, with shipping costs on the rise, free eBook downloads are a budget-friendly commodity.

Selecting Topics for EBooks

Almost everyone has some sort of knowledge that can help others. If you need inspiration or help organizing your thoughts into eBooks you can publish, you may want to consider investing in a guide that teaches you how to market your knowledge. A good guide to try isMake Your Knowledge Sell. This eBook can teach you how to develop your knowledge into an online business. You will also learn how to target a customer base and make your business succeed.

 EBook Writing Skills

If you are concerned with your ability to write eBooks and express your ideas, there are tools on the market that can help. One example is the Make Your Words SelleBook. This comprehensive guide can teach you how to write informative copy that sells.

With a small amount of knowledge and a large amount of determination, you can give your customers the ability to download eBooks that you created. And who knows, you may even make more money than you ever imagined by becoming an eBook publisher and owning and marketing your own eBook store.

Steps to an eBook Business

Step 1: Market Research

Conduct keyword research to determine the amount of people searching online for particular niches.  This will tell you how many people are searching each month for certain keyword phrases. One of the criteria is you need at least 30,000 – 50,000 searches per month (roughly) on specific relevant phrases based on Overture data before you continue the research process for that niche. This is to ensure there is enough potential traffic to make significant sales, but is only one condition that needs to be met.  

Researched and how each topic area was disqualified or qualified for the next step, based on the following criteria -

• How much and what quality is the free information already available online on the topic?
• How many competing products/books are already for sale?
• How many adwords campaigns are currently running on the search phrases?
• Is it an inch-wide and mile-deep niche?

As you can see, it’s not just about a demonstrated need in the marketplace based on search data, there is also competitive intelligence conducted way before you even start planning the creation of your ebook. 

Step 2: The Survey Site

Once the disqualification process is over based on current market conditions, next  step before investing in the creation of the ebook – a survey site.

A survey site is a one page website that asks people if they are interested in the topic they plan to create an ebook about. They use a basic namesqueezestyle page, but they don’t offer information in exchange for an email address like a traditional squeeze, instead they ask people who come to the site whether they are interested in a book/website on the topic and what is the most pressing questions they would like to see answered.

Here’s an example survey site template text:

Thank you for reaching my site.

I need your advice.

Currently I am in the process of building this site to help you improve your business and technical writing skills.

I would really appreciate your feedback and ideas on what you would like to see on this site.

In fact if you have any tips of your own that you’d like us to include please tell us about them. We’d of course acknowledge your contribution.

What do you want to see on this site?

Email:

Name:

Your comment:

If there is a good percentage of respondents to the survey site and the feedback is positive, you have an idea of what topics to cover in the book and what conversion rate to expect once the product goes live. Generally the amount of people who fill in the survey is indicative of the conversion rate you will get for the ebook. It won’t be exactly the same, but if someone is interested enough to respond to a survey they are probably interested enough to buy as well, and your sales page will pull all the right triggers to make the sale (hopefully!).

Step 3: Pay Per Click Traffic

To drive traffic to the survey site and eventually the ebook sales page.  Daryl uses Google AdWords. Daryl did a great introduction to AdWords for the workshop attendees, which provided just enough information to get a grasp of how it works.

AdWords pay per click is the main traffic source used for the survey site and about 500 visitors per day is a good amount for the purposes of collecting data. From that traffic you can gauge what the market thinks about your idea for an ebook and what sort of click-through-rate to expect. Once you have a few days worth of information, switch off the traffic and it’s time to decide whether you will create the ebook.

This extensive research process really blew me away when I first heard it from Daryl. It’s the scientific nature of the process, including the very tight real-world metrics collected, that ensures a good chance of launching a product that succeeds.

For most people, myself included in the past, you tend to think about book ideas first, then start creating one, perhaps writing it yourself, and then you launch it and no one buys. That’s because you didn’t figure out if the market had a need for it and instead you just assumed because you considered the idea good, that it would sell. That’s completely backwards.

Step 4: Creating the Product

Daryl ran through various ways they create products, but in general the process involves hiring a ghost writer/researcher and arranging interviews with experts. The ebooks are around forty pages and between ten and twenty thousand words. Writing and researching is outsourced via sites likeRentacoder.com and experts are contacted directly for interviews over the phone, which can be recorded and transcribed.

It is quite clear that the content creation step is largely in response to market needs. Once you find pressing problems people have, you search for experts that can solve the problems and compile their knowledge and expertize into a book. All that work is done by other people, you provide the strategic direction and instructions. You don’t need to find experts either, if the ghost writer can produce the book simply by conducting research online, that’s fine too – the importance concept to understand is that other people produce the content, you just need to be the driving force to get it created.

Step 5: Selling the eBook

Once the product is ready you have a landing/sales page written, and here Daryl and Andrew recommend you have a professional copywriter at least review what you or someone else have written, or if you have the money, hire the copywriter to produce the whole sales page.

Good copywriters generally charge about $2,000 for a copy review and around $10,000 for writing a sales page – so yes, this is a huge investment – but since the copy ultimately sells the product, it’s worth it. If your book starts generating $500 a day you quickly recoup your costs, even if it does $500 per week it won’t take too long to make your investment money back.

Copywriting is an art form. It requires marketing savvy, skill with persuasive words and an ability to innately understand what the consumer desires. This skillset is not common. Copy is the main interface that converts prospects into customers and if you don’t nail this part of your process you are wasting all the energy you put in to get to this point.

Daryl says to aim for a 1% conversion rate, which is not unrealistic, but may require ongoing tweaking of certain areas. The sales page is one place you can do things like split testing of headlines and other copy elements and you can do similar tests with the words in your AdWords campaigns. The idea here is to keep testing and tweaking until you break that 1% mark and then keep looking for other ways to drive more traffic to the site, which was a topic discussed on day three.

If your funds are tight you can have a go at writing the copy yourself. Just remember that if you don’t make many sales when you launch and all the metrics were good up to that point and you have lots of traffic, chances are it’s your copy that is letting you down. This might be an area where you look to bring in a pro copywriter or study some materials from expert copywriters so you can learn what works. A basic understanding of good copy can carry you very far in the Internet business world.

Putting The Pieces Together

Demonstrated various things that you need to assemble to build your ebook business. They covered many of the more common needs you have as an Internet marketer – everyone has the same issues – including how to set up survey sites (using Dreamweaver in the case of the Grant’s system), taking payments online, recording camtasia videos, split testing copy, email autoresponders, shopping carts, payment gateways, keyword research, niche selection and a whole host of other topics, many of which you will find covered in the archives of this blog. 

If ebooks are to sit along side traditional textbooks as vital learning resources, it is important to ensure they are of high quality - and to do so without compromising on digital progress. Below I've compiled some tips and best practice - for publishers and authors alike.

Topic choice

Many academics who publish ebooks have noticed a gap offered by the textbooks in their field. As a result, they choose to fill that gap by writing an ebook which is often shorter than a traditional textbook but which is makes an important contribution to knowledge. This point is reiterated byRichard Franklin, director, Abramis Academic Publishing who explains that "cutting edge" work published online often bypasses the need for the author to have an established online presence. Original or new work published as a short ebook can also help stimulate interest in the author's author work.

Multimedia

Another great way to make your book stand out is through movement and sound. Dr Chris Tisdell, a mathematician at the University of New South Wales, for example, published an ebook which includes YouTube clips where video is used to provide explanations of equations. I personally enjoy podcasts and could imagine a lecturer commenting on his/her book while the reader is going through it (of course, you should be able to turn it on and off, like with a museum guide). These elements would make the ebook memorable.

Editing and peer review

In our survey, Derek Atherton also expressed his concerns that ebooks "may not have gone through the reviewing process of some publishers". It is true that printed textbooks have quality insurance through editing as standard but it is up to ebook publishers to compete with them. One way to do this is through peer review, using colleagues within the author's department or faculty, or through one of several emerging websites on which authors can share their work for review.

Adaptability and interactivity

After the ebook has undergone peer review, it is ready to go online. The speed of transformation from concept to published material creates a dialogue between authors and their students sooner than with printed books. We ask our authors to update their ebooks every two years, at the latest. The ability to frequently revise an ebook means it quickly loses obsolete content or gains fresh content, and has a life of its own throughout the academic year and beyond.

What this encourages is listening: the ongoing success of an online publication depends on the author's ability to listen to his or her readers. In one example of how this could work, Dr Chris Tisdell told Computer World Australia that he tries to "post [his videos] as soon as possible after the lecture, as students probably see the value of course materials decline with time".

Interactivity can make students feel like they are part of the writing process. Ideally, in my opinion, every update should be accompanied by an explanation of why it is necessary. I like to think the reader then becomes more critical of what they're reading.

Presentation and format

Ebooks should be presented as simply as possible with links to new chapters which lead to other URLs. Text that fills up 100% width of screens is not desirable, especially if the reader wants to go offline. PDF is a good format, as it can be downloaded, saved, read when offline, and even printed. This allows someone who has used to print to slowly adapt to the electronic format.

To encourage academics into online publishing, it is perhaps worthwhile to redefine what a book is. Think of it this way: ebooks are not only simply books on a screen. They have their own distinct learning function and a place along side the traditional medium. Perhaps, as they evolve, they will not even be called books, but will instead have their own unique name, that recognises their unique value.

For more detail click on below link

http://myws.sitesell.com/http://digirep.rhul.ac.uk/file/bf558385-a28c-b465-582e-0e9da35be076/1/1-2-AG-Providers.pdf