Designing and producing your first E Book

For almost every blogger who intends to earn money from blogging, writing an E Book is the first step in that process. It could be a book to give away – with the aim of increasing subscribers, or just to get some brand awareness going, or it could be something you’re going to charge for.

Image: Francesco Marino / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Let’s take a look at the elements of a successful E Book:

Content

Always start with the content. It needs to be on topic – it’s no good writing a book about fishing if readers come to your blog to learn about cars. It might be useful to some, but save that one for a fishing blog!

It should cover something that you know to be of interest to your readers, and you can find that out by asking them with a survey, and often by seeing which posts create the most interest and follow up comments.

To add real value, the book needs to take that topic several stages further than you’ve already gone in your blog posts.

Size

If people are going to pay and not be disappointed, they have to receive value in terms of size. This is a tough call, and one I’ve struggled with.

I give away the case study on Lanzarote Information to anyone who joins the community here – that’s 4000 words and 20 pages long. My next smallest product is The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter, which is 5000 words and 30 pages long.

At the other end of the scale, both Beyond Blogging and The Beginner’s Guide to Blogging are 250 pages long!

My view is that around 5000 words should be the minimum if you’re going to charge for a product.

Design

It seems weird to create a 3D design for the cover of an electronic book, but it really does add to the perceived value of the book, and you should either invest in the software to make the cover, or pay someone to do it for you. It simply works.

Many people fall down on the design of the book itself – simply creating a document and then exporting it to PDF. Think about layout, colors and ease of reading on screen, in your design. If you can afford it, then pay a designer – we had so many great comments about the fabulous design of Beyond Blogging, and I’m sure that was a major contribution to the fact that people felt it was good value for money.

Price

It’s so hard to decide on a price! There are many factors to consider. How many are you likely to sell? How much time did you put into it? Are you paying commission to affiliates?

I charge $12 for the Twitter book, and $47 for the two larger books. Don’t be afraid to experiment with pricing. Over time you’ll discover the pricing sweet spot – the point where sales tick along quite well, and give you a reasonable return on your time invested.

Bear in mind it’s a long term game. I wrote the Twitter book almost a year ago, and my only work with it now is to keep it up to date as things change on Twitter. I was really disappointed with sales in the first couple of months, but over time it has gained traction, and I passed the point where I’d earned my time investment back some time ago, so each sale is essentially pure profit now.

Selling it

As with everything on the internet, the secret is traffic! You’ll need a sales page and then you’ll want to get as much traffic to it as you can. There has been a lot of debate about long versus short copy sales pages, and I’m not going to resurrect that here – you need to decide what you feel is the best way to present your product. One key point to remember is that you should optimize the sales page for people who don’t regularly read your site – so you need to add some information about yourself and why they should buy from you.

Sales pages typically convert at less than 5%, once the initial flurry of your regular readers has died down. Think about that for the moment. If you’re getting 500 unique visitors to your site each day, how many of those will actually visit your sales page? 20? 30? If that’s the case, you may sell one book a day.

That’s why most people use affiliates to offer their products – it’s simply a way to get more eyes onto the sale page. And that’s the secret to long term success – to continue to build traction for the product and drive as much of it to the sales page as you possibly can.

What would you add? Are you working on an E Book?