Selling ebooks through your own website

Publishing is a risky and not particularly profitable business even without piracy. But it is not quite that simple. There are many vocal anti-DRM voices on the web. Granted, most of them have no skin in the game: they argue from abstractions, having not spent years in writing the books in question or invested in their publication. Here are the arguments against DRM and my personal take on them:. Reading an eBook by its nature is like reading a cheap mass-market paperback, which is basically disposable.

Nobody is buying eBooks to put on a bookshelf to treasure forever. And finally, the argument that the results of intellectual labor ought to be free just because the cost of reproducing it is low is persuasive, I think, mainly to those who build empires on revenue generated by free content or by acquiring customers via free content to sell them something else think of Apple or Amazon —or perhaps to academics whose salaries are paid by other means.

So, I am generally pro-DRM. For a publisher selling eBooks direct from their own website, however, DRM is a challenge. ACS4 is not a standalone system, so you have to build your own accounting and content repository and integrate them with ACS4. All before you sell the first eBook.

An alternative is to sign up with an eBook fulfillment service using ACS4 such as the one we provide. An iconic example is when s title The Mystery of the Iron Mask , which sold 11, copies , ramped up its sales to 30, copies after revamping the title to The Mystery of the Man in the Iron Mask.

Need a little more direction? Try incorporating these five attributes as you create your potential title list. People forget about boring titles. The renowned author of 4-Hour Workweek and leading entrepreneur, Tim Ferriss , said this about the title of his work:. Title and subtitle your ebook with a phrase that gives your audience a clear picture of what the book pertains to.

So if you want your book to fly off the proverbial shelves, make sure your title -- or subtitle -- paint a clear picture about who the book is meant for and what it does. Ambiguity is not your friend in nonfiction. Self-publishing company, iUniverse, recommends sticking to five words or less for your book title.

And for those of you having a difficult time shortening your book title, you can also include a subtitle as you saw in the above examples.

Subtitles help you keep your title short while still fitting pertinent information onto the front page of your book. It naturally made the top 10 most sold books on Amazon Charts. This is when you go through your content with a fine-tooth comb and catch any errors or typos and put in the finishing touches.

If you skip this step, you could put yourself at risk for some embarrassing mistakes. Check out these two examples of published books gone awry:. Missing a single letter can also change the whole dynamic of a sentence, and in this case, your meal:. You can name your chapters and sections and add some images.

Plus, it delivers a downloadable format with a table of contents and terms of use included. A few reasons are:. Images can increase your reading comprehension. People follow instructions with text and illustrations do 3x better than people following directions without illustrations. With ebooks, you can stand out even more and include a video or animation.

Heads up: The more images and graphic content you add to your ebook, the larger your file size will be. So add them, but be thoughtful in how many and where you add your images. Canva - Canva allows you to choose from a wide range of book cover templates sorted by genre and format including photography, fiction, novel, nonfiction, collages, romance, thriller, illustration, business, fashion, and et cetera. Here are a few template samples:. Venngage - Venngage offers a handful of ebook cover and individual page design templates.

You can simply download and insert your chosen high-resolution images into your ebook cover designs. Generally, you should aim for a resolution size of 1, pixels wide by 2, pixels tall.

As you can see, except for Amazon, this is the recommended size for the other major sellers:. Keep in mind that ebooks are typically downloadable within a few minutes , for optimal user experience, and higher resolutions will take longer to download by increasing overall file size.

Conveniently design a professional-looking ebook cover by using free online tools. They can make the design process so easy any novice can create a polished ebook cover with numerous templates. And that takes care of your ebook from cover to cover. Your next step is to seal the deal with a proper ebook file format. To help you decide which format to go with, here are the most widely used file formats for ebooks , plus details on ebook reader compatibility in the chart below.

A few other free popular converters worth exploring include Calibre and ZamZar. Here are four tips and guidelines to consider when pricing your ebook. If you're looking for something less high-level, check out this step-by-step guide on how to price your ebook. Ebook pricing is highly elastic -- in other words, pricing greatly impacts your sales response -- and you can easily update your price as your goals change. In that case, your pricing should start at the lower end. Then, as your readership grows, you can increase your price point.

Take advantage of the flexibility that comes with selling an online product and adjust your price to fit your goals.

Research your genre online to gauge what competitors are charging. Some pricing guidelines to consider according to the length of your ebook are:. Again, these are just some guidelines to consider, rather than follow to a tee. The most important takeaway is to test your pricing to see what resonates with your audience while taking into account your goal i. With pricing covered, you now officially have all of your ebook components prepped and ready for publishing on your site.

Finally, a store on your site saves time for your readers. Imagine they discover their book through your website and decide to buy it. They must click the link for Amazon, get redirected, then log in, then click again to buy. Here are a few alternatives:. Handles digital products, back-end adjustments, and payments as well as any competitor. However, they too have monthly charges.

Worth a look, but worth researching further, too. Turns out they have web-based solutions, too! No fees to set up or maintain, and they offer the same generous transaction fees as WooCommerce 2.

All these solutions provide free trials. A grammar guru, style editor, and writing mentor in one package. Try it for free! When you sell eBooks from your site, assigning the correct tax is up to you. Before we proceed, let me be very clear: I am not a tax expert. I hope they help get you started, but please consult a tax expert for the final word. In the U. Some states enforce a tax on digital products, while others do not.

Tax nexus is basically a series of conditions for every state. If you meet them, you must enforce sales tax on customers residing in that state. The simplest version of tax nexus is physical presence, which is exactly what it sounds like. If you live in a state, you have nexus in that state. But there are other kinds!