eBook How-To: My Experience So Far | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Post edited 12:42 pm – February 2, 2012 by Larry @ The Skilled Investor

Hi Folks, I have published a paid ebook and decided to summarize my experience for anyone wanting to attempt the same. By the way, this is a work in progress. The book is done and has been on sale for a month. Modest sales have begun, but enough to see that there could be long-term success, if I keep at it.

To learn about my book, look below in my signature block. The title of the book, "Low Cost No Load Mutual Funds and ETFs" in bold in the signature block links to the sales page. Also, in my signature block the bold "Finance eBook Affiliate Website" link will take you to the self-service affiliate page, which contains everything needed to become an affiliate, including ads, book reviews, and affiliate how-to.

A WORK IN PROGRESS

• While this is my first paid ebook, I intend to keep at it and will learn more as time goes on. I am subscribed to this forum topic and will monitor questions and comments.

• This is my second ebook. The first was free and has been available for about six months. I use the free ebook to build a mailing list, by offering it in a pop-up upon exit using the OpInPop plugin. OpInPop has both a free and paid version, and the free version is enough to do what I need it to do.

BOOK CONTENT

• If you expect to get paid, you should have some depth and volume to the book content. My paid book is just under 300 pages. About 200 pages come from the web and 100 pages are new. However, the 100 pages are mostly from an internal analysis of low cost mutual funds and ETFs that I already do for clients anyway. Most of the work on the new material was table formatting in MS Word.

• If you have been blogging for a while and have covered various themes from a variety of angles, you probably already have published enough content that can be repurposed into one or more ebooks. It does not matter that most of the material is already on your site. Part of the value-added of a book is that you organize it for the reader. Websites – particularly blogs – are not well-organized. You may have many important articles on your site but few readers will take the time to find most of them.

• If you don't yet have content, you can do the reverse. You can research and write the book first. Then, you can break up the book and publish some or all of it as posts on the web, as well. Posts will get you some ad revenue. You do not have to identify the posts as being part of the book. Otherwise, you could put an ad for the book in each post and say that they article is a sample of what is in the book.

• Pick a topic or theme for the book that people care about. Do some keywords research. I use the Adwords facility. If keyword volume is low or there are not a lot of three-word and four-word keyword phrases, you either have a topic nobody is interested in or you have a promising topic, but are using the wrong (key)words when you write. Doing a quick (5 minute) initial keyword analysis for an ebook or even a post can be enlightening. Numerous times I have found that alternate phrases have ten times the search volume compared to the words that I choose instinctively. If you ignore what people search for, your posts will stay down in the SERPs weeds.

• The content must/should be valuable to the reader. Valuable enough that some will be interested enough to buy it from the sales page and valuable enough that they will not be disappointed with the actual content and ask for a refund.

• If you have decent content, do not hesitate to link out from your book. I extensively link out from this paid ebook and from a free ebook that is offered in an exit pop-up on my websites. Paid or free, links in an ebook can bring people back to your website.

PUBLISHING TECHNOLOGY

• My goal was a locked Acrobat .pdf file. I wrote and formatted in MS Word, and I was using an old version of Word. I tried the free .pdf converters, but they choked on almost 300 pages with lots of tables, links, and formatting. I had to buy Acrobat Pro X, and then I was also forced to upgrade to MS Office 2010, because of compatibility issues. Acrobat Pro X costs a lot, but there is an educational discount for anyone who can prove they go to any school or college. If you have a child in school, that works too.

• Even with Acrobat Pro X and MS Office 2010, it takes time to learn how to convert MS Word 2010 to Acrobat Pro X. This has to do with link conversions and other tweaks to the .pdf document. Editing in Acrobat Pro X is painful, so it is better to get everything right in MS Word first, and then save as .pdf. Document the process, so you do not have to relearn it, because you will end up doing the conversion multiple times for whatever reasons. I can supply my conversion process document to those interested.

SALES PAGE

• My sales page states why the book is valuable and it provides the book's detailed table of contents.

• My sales page is largely factual/rational with limited emotion. I have heard all about torqueing up the emotion and have read dozens of hard sell sales pages, but I would never buy from any of them. I figure that my target audience is mature and sensible and will not easily fall for heavy emotion. I could be wrong. Maybe I will test an alternative sales page, but that would be later. Since I am lousy at laying on the emotion, I would have to hire a writer which would add cost that would have to be recouped.

PRICING

• If your ebook is free, then the goal is volume and list building. However, if you want to get paid, I think it is more like a two layer CPC advertising model with rather low conversion percentages, but a reasonably high "pay per click" for those who actually fill out the order form and buy the book. There really are two clicks. The first is a click on an ad or book review elsewhere that takes the potentially interested visitor to the sales page. The second is the purchase click to get to the ordering page that some will complete.

• For some background on pricing strategies start at about dot com and search for "retail pricing strategies".

• The only way to figure out the price that works is to test a variety of prices. Total revenue (units times price per unit) is what counts and not some arbitrary view of pricing. In my testing it seems like $10 is a point where ebook unit sales fall off substantially above that. It is not worth arguing with the market. Part of this is consumer price resistance and another part is the power of major distributors who have reinforced the "ebooks cost under $10" mindset.

• I think my book is worth a lot more than $10, and I set a nominal price of just under $20 to indicate value. However, with price resistance at $10, I have been testing a 50% discount on orders within three hours for an actual discounted price under $10. Visitors see the time ticking down and this is designed to create some urgency. Using an HTML table setup and the Wordpress Easy Timer plugin, you can conditionally display one thing and show a countdown timer and then switch to displaying something else after that time is up. People seem to buy within three hours at under $10 or they don't buy at all.

GRAPHICS AND ADS

• You need decent graphics, but I doubt that being Matisse matters much. I have used The GIMP for graphics editing and have figured it out for relatively simple things like scaling, text overlays, etc. The GIMP is freeware and has a large user community. Google searching is a good way to learn how to use it. If you have another graphics package, use it.

• I started out with a watering can and coins photo from flickrr dot com that allowed unrestricted use with attribution.

•  There are also stock photo websites where you can buy the rights to a photo. Searching for the right graphic takes time. I found some useful royalty free stock photo sites, if anyone is interested. The photos have a modest cost, but there are no royalties.

• I used The GIMP to make a two dimensional book cover and got some sales with it, even though it did not look very professional to me. I still used that 2D graphic in the book, in articles on my website, and in sidebar ads.

• After other tasks were done, I went back to get a professional 3D book cover graphic done. You can pay $5 for a standard book cover package from lots of different people on fiverr dot com. I used Sevgraph on fiverr, who had been recommended on the Warrior Forum. Sevgraph made a fine ebook cover that was far better looking than what I had done.

• Once you have a professional looking ebook cover, you have a lot more than you think you have. If you have unlimited license rights, you can scale the book cover, add a promotional text overlay, and develop a set of standard sized ads like you will see on my affiliate website.

• When you decide to use a photo or graphic, always read the license carefully, because you may want an unrestricted high quality photo without attribution requirements in some circumstances. The photo that I used required attribution, which I provided on all my websites and within the book itself. When a blogger publishes a book review, I also provide a keyword customized and unique text review as a starter, and it includes the attribution. So far so good. Then, I realized that the book cover could also become a sidebar ad with a text overlay. The rub was that a sidebar ad would not provide attribution. I retraced my steps, wrote a nice email to the photographer and asked for permission to use his photo without attribution. I worried that he might ask for unreasonable compensation, which would have forced me to redo the graphics. Instead, he graciously gave permission. I was lucky not have been forced to redo my graphics, but now I know for the future.

TIME COMMITMENT

• This takes a huge amount of time even if you have existing web content that can be repurposed into a book. The required time is not just putting the book together, but doing all the sales and marketing thereafter. Unless you have a plan for both content and marketing and will sustain the effort, I doubt whether any ebook will be successful financially. If you are not willing to do both the content and the marketing, it is probably not worth trying to write a paid ebook.

• If you have a paid ebook that does not succeed after testing various price points, and you don't want to keep up the marketing, it might make sense to convert it to a free give-away for list building. I build lists with the phpList freeware package, but again it takes time to learn. Others use aWeber and similar email services, but they are paid.

GETTING PAID

• If you are going it alone, PayPal is fine as a payment processor. If you want to have affiliates also promoting your eBook then ClickBank is the place to go. The reason is that ClickBanks hoplinks automate the revenue credit process for vendors and affiliates. Yes, there are a lot of crap products on ClickBank, but there are some good quality products as well. I looked at Plimus as an alternative payment processor, but they did not have their act together for affiliates.

• Setting yourself up as a vendor or ClickBank is pretty straightforward, but you need to spend a few hours there to learn the ropes. If you want to just be a ClickBank affiliate, it is easy. Look at my "Finance eBook Affiliate Website," because I explain what you need to know to be an affiliate and get paid by using hoplinks. This applies not just to my book, but to any other product in the ClickBank marketplace that you want to promote. Since 1998, they have processed $2+ billion in vendor+affiliate sales.

AFFILIATES

• No matter how much traffic your website gets, you will miss all the eyeballs that never visit your site and more specifically your ebook sales page. Therefore the logic of revenue sharing with affiliates is very strong. It is better to get some of the revenue on a real sale rather that 100% of an imaginary sale that never happens. Making life easy for your affiliates will take time up front but should pay off in the long-run.

AUTOMATED DELIVERY

• If you want to get paid and not get ripped off you need to install some code provided by ClickBank that will protect access to your download page. Just trying to put your download page in an obscure location on the net with "noindex" instructions to search bots is not enough. One external link pointing to your download page can give it away. You need to ensure that only people who have completed a valid order can actually see your download page. Others just see a white page. I can help anyone interested in this.

• I use the Wordpress Download Monitor plugin to actually supply the .pdf file for downloading. There are other ways to do this, but this plugin provides monitoring metrics including IP addresses, so you do not have to guess what is happening or rely on totals from AWSTATs.

ANALYTICS

• One nice thing about ClickBank is that as a vendor, I can see analytics across all affiliates and analyze what works and what does not work. As a vendor, I do not have access to affiliate accounts and I do not even know their identities, but I can track each affiliate over time by their ClickBank nickname. Affiliates can track their own activities across multiple vendors, as well.

• In fact, for my own websites I am also an affiliate, so that I can see how my own websites perform. This is very useful for testing.

My fingers have had enough. Please let me know what you think.

This is good stuff – I think most of us have it in the backs of our minds to write an ebook – this is solid experienced based instruction.  Thanks!

Excellent work…as a post here, but also in the work you have done toward your ebook.

Sunil from The Extra Money Blog said:

very nice Larry. congratulations to you and I hope it performs well over time.  correct me if I am wrong but I didn't see much of the distribution aspect other than clickbank / your website. have you considered platforms such as Amazon Kindle?  I too have started a series on ebooks on my blog and published the first post recently. I am almost done with the second post.  in the series I will be touching upon several ways to market/distribute the ebooks once published.  would love to solicit your thoughts as someone who has recently experienced the process. what are the key challenges / concerns that most people have? I'd love to incorporate in the upcoming posts of the series. I am estimating this will be well over 20,000 words by the time I am done with it.

Hi Sunil,

Regarding Kindle, that opens up the issue of expanded marketing in general. If that is what you are getting at, then Kindle, Amazon, and other online book marketing channels would certainly be worth exploring for ebooks. You have to live by their rules and the less attractive per unit economics of these book sales channels, but the volume of these ebook channels could be (much) higher. I have not gotten around to doing this yet, but I may do so.

From a narrower sense, however, I did check into formatting Acrobat documents for Kindle, iPad, etc. I wanted to ensure that buyers of an ebook could read them reasonably well on these portable readers and tablets. The answer I found was that Acrobat translated over to these various devices reasonably well, as long a margin settings were not excessive. If Acrobat document were not automatically readable, there was a lot of software out there to make .pdf readable. Thus, I concluded that I did not have to worry about releasing a ebook version per major portable device — although ebooks in volume can benefit from per platform optimization.

One thing to note is that personal finance blogs are ready-made distribution channels for financial books and software. To get the participation of other bloggers, one needs to give other bloggers a financial incentive.That is where ClickBank comes in.

I do not think of ClickBank as an ebook channel. Instead, I think of ClickBank as a payments processor that automates the billing and payments process for both the vendor and the affiliates. ClickBank has a product marketplace with gobs of affiliates trying to make a buck. But, since they are not focused on personal finance, these existing ClickBank marketplace affiliates produce a lot of hops to the sales page that rarely result in any sales.

Book ads and book reviews on personal finance blogs have a much greater chance of attracting buyers. Thus, all the effort to not only have an ebook sales page, but also a self-service affiliate website page where other bloggers can get ads and get help with book reviews. Affiliates expand the potential buyer population and deserve a fair cut for affiliate ads and book reviews.

Another reason why I have not pursued the established ebook distribution channels like Kindle and Amazon relates to priorities. My efforts with this ebook have been a dry run for converting my established VeriPlan lifetime financial planning product into an affiliate product. VeriPlan has a 6 times higher price point and thus is 6 times more interesting to me and to affiliates from a per unit sales standpoint.

I am guessing that with this ebook, I spent three hours of figuring out what to do versus one hour of just doing it. (Not the writing — but the web promotion parts) Now, I am down that what-to-do learning curve. When I soon finish the 2013 revision of VeriPlan, I will only have to do the execution part and not the figuring it out part. Once I turn VeriPlan into an affiliate product, I will then have both an ebook and a financial software product to market. Then, I can refocus on affiliate marketing and maybe add new channels.

I am interested in what youwrite about ebook marketing and distribution. Others will be interested, as well. Why don't you post a link to your series here? If I can help, let me know.

Thanks, Larry

Post edited 5:21 pm – February 22, 2013 by Larry @ The Skilled Investor

UPDATE — February 22, 2013

It has been just over a year, since my original post that began this topic. In the past year, I have learned a lot about how to publish an ebook. I have two books available on my own websites and on all the major ebook vendor sites — one a promotional freebie and another paid. Both are many hundreds of pages long and both have stressed the ebook publication process. Here is what I learned.

* First, to be clear about my revised objectives. In addition to promoting my ebooks on my sites, I want a publication process that will allow me to publish multiple ebooks in the same manner over time and to be able to have those books be accepted on all major ebook platforms, including Amazon/Kindle, Apple/iBookstore, B&N, Smashwords, etc.

* I have learned that the Microsoft Word / MS Office to Adobe Acrobat Pro X publication process is a dead end for ebooks. This publication process is fine to yield a PDF document that will function properly on desktops, portables, tablets, and smartphones. However, the roadblock is format conversion on the major ebook publishing platforms using their converters. You develop your own PDF file, manage sales and downloading via your own website, etc., if every interested customer knows how to find you. Unfortunately, even with a high volume personal finance website, you will have only a tiny fraction of the exposure that you can get on Amazon, Apple, B&N, etc.

* The free "calibre" ebook manager system is excellent for personal use and is capable of converting across various formats, creating the necessary indexes, etc. (By the way, "calibre" is excellent and well supported freeware and for some reason they do not capitalize the first letter of the name calibre.) However, if you want to get your ebook onto all major sales platforms, this is still not an answer, because the publishing sites have their own conversion mechanisms. For example, just because you can use calibre to output EPUB does not mean that you can submit that EPUB file to the ebook publication platforms.

* So what is the answer? The answer is to slavishly follow the Smashwords Style Guide to prepare your ebook. Essentially, you (and everybody else practically) will start with MSWord, but you will do everything you can to avoid MSWord's mishmash of internal automated styles and other functionality that makes sense in a world of printed output via MSWord and/or Acrobat PDF as the objectives. Will this be pleasant? Absolutely not. If you Google: Smashwords Style Guide, you will find a horde of blogs by ebook writers that complain about the process. They are correct that it is a pain in the butt to get right the first time, but the Smashwords Style Guide is the least common denominator. If you can submit your MSWord file to Smashwords and pass through their converter, which converts into a long list of formats, then you can submit to any other of the major ebook platforms and pass through their converters, as well.

* Why bother with Smashwords conversion to get into their "premium" catalog? While Smashwords gets you onto about a dozen book publishing sites, the one that counts is the Apple iBookstore. Every ebook should be on Apple devices and you can go directly to Apple and try. However, the submission process is ugly and littered with failure. Smashwords has a multi-year relationship with Apple, and if you get into the Smashwords premium catalog, you automatically get into the Apple iBookstore — and onto the other publisher sites. For example, Smashwords can also get you onto Amazon, but you can also submit directly to Amazon and B&N, as I have.

* Making a file ready for Smashwords conversion requires stripping out all formatting that your MSWord file may already have and then using only a short list of style variations on the "normal" format. Avoid all use of bullets — don't even try. Never use MSWords automated table of contents or indexing features and instead insert all internal bookmark hyperlinks by hand. MSWord output needs to be in the older .doc format rather than the .docx format. This means that an older version of MSWord will work and you do not need to have the latest versions of MSWord. Just follow the Smashwords Style Guide to the letter

* One caveat is that Smashwords has a 5 MB submission file size limitation. Both my books are hundreds of pages long with lots of graphics and tables, which caused the file sizes to exceed 5MB. However, once I understood this problem, I was careful about .jpg file sizes while still retaining good resolution, and I was able to squeak by. Very few personal finance do-it-yourself book publishers will run into these file size limitation problems.

* So in summary, if you want to publish one or more ebooks, follow the Smashwords Style Guide and get into their premium catalog. Then, submit directly to Amazon and B&N with the same file. The first book is the hardest; the second and subsequent ebooks are a piece of cake to publish — if you already have the content.

Post edited 2:41 pm – February 24, 2013 by Larry @ The Skilled Investor

Edward Antrobus said:

Larry,

 

Thanks for your review of your experience with Smashwords. I've been following them closely for the past 2 years and I am pleased to say that they do now have limited support for uploading epub files. When I submitted my books last month, I personally went that route because I personally do not trust machine converters further than I can throw them.

 

As far as formatting a Word file, one thing that I have found works is using OpenOffice instead of MS Word. OO fully supports .doc files but produces less garbage formatting.

Hi Edward,

Yes, I agree with your observations.

One would not think that this would be so hard, but the desktop publishing and ebook models are antithetical. The new tablet / smart phone — EPUB, MOBI, PDF, and flurry of other formats that reflow entirely breaks the old desktop publishing model. However, most people still start with MSWord. I have spend endless hours (and so have all other self-publishers) figuring out the process. In the end, slavish adherence to the Smashwords style guide is how to thread the needle. Life can be challenging with technical paradigms shift.

The web has endless bickering about what is allowed to be submitted to Smashwords, Amazon, Apple, B&N, etc., since the file must pass through their automated converters and one would prefer to have a single input file across all sites. I have heard that others have been successful with Open Office documents in this process. However, I started with long and complex MSWord documents that had been developed over the years. Most others start with MSWord documents, and they try to thread the needle. Either way, you need to develop an source file for your ebook that includes appropriate (and automatically convertible) book content and table of content material.

In the end, I ended up using the nuclear method suggested in the Smashwords Style Guide. I stripped out all formatting and build out a set of less than ten styles that were all based upon the "normal" style within MSWord. These formats were simple variations to bold, center, indent, and/or change the font size of a paragraph and nothing more.

Here are a few more observations that might be useful to those attempting to self-publishing ebooks:

1) Decide beforehand whether how you want to deal with Amazon, Apple, B&N, and Smashwords. Dealing directly with Apple in book submission is reputed to be a very trying and often unsuccessful experience, so I chose to qualify for the Smashwords premium catalog, because success will get an author onto Amazon, Apple, B&N and others for a total of about ten major ebook seller websites. In addition, I chose to go directly to Amazon and B&N, since I wanted a direct account for reporting and control over how my ebooks were presented. You could just rely upon Smashwords, but that means they would control your business. Smashwords seems the sensible way to get to Apple, but I wanted to go direct to Amazon, since they are the big dog.

2) Do not wait until you are done with your ebook to test whether it will work with whatever sites you want to have a direct relationship with. With each site, your ebook file will have to pass their automated converter. On each site, you should be able to set up your book, as an unpublished draft, so that you can test earlier in the cycle whether your book will pass through each website's publication system. You can set up a "dummy" book that you never intend to publish as a dry run. Then when ready, you can set up and publish your real book.

3) If you only intend to publish one relatively short ebook you can stumble through this process relatively quickly. However, if you already have the content for numerous ebooks that are more substantial, you want to develop a repeatable process. In you are a personal finance blogger and you have been publishing good quality content over the years, you probably have already written several ebooks on various topics. You could assemble them from what you have already written, if you take the ebook editing process seriously.

4) The best forum that I have found for those trying to self-publish is mobileread dot com, since they have subforums that cover the waterfront on the various software file editing, conversion, platforms, publishing, and sales sites. (Mobileread has a subforum on smashwords.) Note that I did not find a smashwords-only forum that was useful. There is one (not by Smashwords) that uses smashwords in the domain name, but that site has a very irritating ad-based captcha system that makes it a pain in the rear to use the forum. You will understand this if you stumble upon that site.

5) When you have multiple ebooks and other products, then one of your ebooks is an excellent avenue for cross-selling your other ebooks. If you think that you are going to get rich quick with short lousy ebooks loaded with affiliate links, you should find something else to do, because ebook publishing sites have standards and will kill these crap books. However, is you have something to say with some depth, you can link to your websites within you ebooks and you can include some ads for your other books.

6) If you have an ebook that might have a long lifespan where sales could build over the years, think carefully about how you put things together. Ebook publishing success is a long-term effort, and I have yet to hear of any personal finance author without a preexisting reputation who made more than minimum wage on their first ebook. Ebooks involve similar SEO tactics as website promotion. If for example, you have an ebook with multi-year potential, you will want to plan for your URLs to be stable over time. This allows for cross-promotion on websites, within your ebooks, etc. An ebook can be updated with a new version, whenever appropriate. Therefore, don't proliferate editions across separate URLs. For example, I intend to do at least annual and perhaps more frequent updates to my low cost investment funds book. There is no reason to have different webpages for each yearly edition. I can simply upload the latest edition of this book and change the year on the cover graphic. This maintains the value of previous inbound links that build up over time.

7) Lastly, a few more quirks about MSWord:

A) Never, ever try to get bullets to work. You can try, but there is only endless pain down that road. Instead, use an indented normal style and hand edit with an asterisk or number for your bulleted list. This looks almost as good as bullets and has the virtue of actually working.

B) If you have an older version of MSWord that only supports the .doc format, use that MSWord version instead of a newer version with the .docx format. The MSWord file format that must be submitted to Smashwords is .doc and not .docx. If you use MSWord 10, you can save a .doc file, which can convert when you are careful. However, if you start to edit things while in compatibility mode for .doc, then MSWord will start do even more weird things, particularly related to bookmarks that will cause your file to fail conversion. Perhaps going the Open Office route would avoid this problem, but I do not have any experience to say yes or no. This is another reason to test conversion of a portion of your ebook before you spend a lot of time.