Creating & Promoting Your Ebooks For Knowledge Commerce: Guide

 

Ebook creation is now ultra-easy thanks to some excellent resources and tools

Remember, ebooks are amongst the most popular knowledge products. Most marketers like to begin with these. Ebooks allow Knowledge Commerce entrepreneurs to cut their teeth in the business without much risk.

We’re talking here of books to sell through your own site. We're not including books for Amazon Kindle which are a whole different ball game.

To learn how to make a success of ebook creation and promotion ... read on.

 

 

Planning and writing your ebook - what you should be aiming for

The first tenet is to choose a topic that aligns with your target audience’s needs or pain-points. Your ebook should be a “deeper dive” into some subject of your niche that calls for a depth of understanding.

Writing an outline for your ebook is the easiest thing to do. Go to Amazon and look up a lot of books on the same or similar topics. Amazon allows you to look inside books at the Table of Contents, right? See the flow of chapters and the sequence that other writers have followed. That should start shaping your own thoughts into some structure.

Very few good writers write in an unsystematic way. You need a clear pattern and consistency in your writing.

What is a consistent pattern to follow? There is no one ideal pattern. What is important is that you follow some pattern that readers can get familiar with. You too can use and reuse that as your template for future ebooks.

The human mind likes order and arrangement. Writing to a pattern thus helps the reader’s mind. His mind doesn’t have to try and create order and arrangement out of your information.

 

Designing your ebook - remember people judge books by their covers

Fortunately, you don’t have to do the whole design of an ebook's look and feel from scratch. The Internet is choc-a-bloc with ebook design templates. Each of these ready-to-use solutions comes with examples and detailed DIY instructions.

Regarding use of colors, recent studies show that psychology of color can instigate very specific user behaviors. They can even push people to click on the “Buy Now” button. There are lots of books on the psychology of color on Amazon, so pick up one or two of the latest ones. Blend the recommended colors for audience-behavior-shaping with your own brand colors.

When using charts and graphs from various sources, it’s hard to find consistency. But even if you cannot alter their colors and contents, you can bring in your own standardization. Make them an even size, or give them all your "branded" border.

Also, intersperse your writing with source-attributed statistics and quotes. Do not forget to add Calls-To-Action (CTAs). They are critical to leading people from the ebook to take some next action on your site.

 

Protecting your ebook - stay a step ahead of the clever pirates and plagiarists

We all find it easy to convert our ebooks into PDFs. They also provide ease of customer reading on different devices. But we can also see that PDF-encryption-hackers are enjoying themselves.

DRM (or Digital Right Management) provides digital content protection. DRM can help prevent downloading, uploading, accessing or lending. It can control how many devices you can download the ebook onto. It can also restrict the copy-paste feature.

Unfortunately, DRM has not been as successful as expected. Just Google the search keyword “DRM cracking” and see how many tools there are now to make mincemeat of DRM. But don’t lose heart. As I said, I have found the near-perfect psychologically-discouraging way to protect my ebooks.

In my search for a near-foolproof PDF protection system, I came across this absolutely nifty WordPress plugin. It's called the WP PDF Stamper Plugin …from the company TipsAndTricks.com. Look at the clever little idea it uses.

When a person buys your ebook from your site, you can get his postal and email address, right? Just before the ebook download, the PDF Stamper stamps the bottom of all the pages of the ebook, in unobtrusive font, with the buyer’s address and email ... in the clever guise of licensing the book to him. Tell me, who’d ever want to “lend” this book to random friends, when his personal details are stamped on every page?

 

Pricing your ebook - it's tricky but you can gradually discover the right price

Value in ebooks is different from price. People must believe that the value of your ebook is far greater than the price of your ebook. An example? Let's say you sold a book of $2.99 showing the location of a treasure trove of $100,000. Is there any doubt that the value of the book is greater than its shelf-price?

Every ebook, no matter how similar to another, has its own price vs. value balance. It depends on the value that audiences perceive in the ebook, and not what the author thinks is "value".

To discover what the price vs. value balance for your particular book is, try to "increment" the product contents and price. Keep the price and contents small, to begin with. Then add more content as you gradually increase price.

Soon, you'll get to discover the optimal price for the value your readers want. Most writers think audiences want a lot of content at a low price. This needn’t be true. People want optimum content at an optimum price.

Defensiveness about your content is what makes you either under-price (out of guilt) or over-price (to artificially boost the perception of value).

 

To learn even more of this topic, read on ...