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Ebooks: Finding Ebook Ideas Which Sell

February 14th, 2009    Subscribe To Our Feed

Looking for ebook ideas? Ebooks can make a very profitable online business. However, to make money, you must have eager buyers.

Take your time when deciding on an ebook idea. Collect lots of ideas, and test them. You’ll spend a lot of time in writing your ebook, and later in selling it, so the time you spend on research will ensure that your ebook is a success.

Here are five of my favorite methods for finding ebook ideas.

1. Read the News

If it’s in the news, people want information on that topic. Read online and offline newspapers, especially local news. Local newspapers will often show you the birth of a trend.

2. Write to Order for Businesses: Custom Ebook Publishing

This method works best for business writers, who are writing for a stable of businesses. Ebooks make great promotional tools, so keep your eyes open for ebook ideas you can sell to your clients.

You’re looking for ebook ideas which will help people, while subtly promoting your client. For example, green energy and energy saving looks set to be in the forefront of people’s minds for years to come.

Suggest these ebook ideas to your clients. You’ll get paid for writing the ebook.

3. Read Forums

Rather than browsing forums for fun; browse them for ideas. People have the same kinds of challenges month after month. When questions are asked again and again, they contain the nuggets of ideas for ebooks.

4. Read Letters to the Editor

If you enjoy reading magazines, read the letters to the editor. You should get at least one ebook idea per magazine. A writer friend told me last week she found a great ebook idea in the letters in an old magazine at her dentist’s.

5. Study Amazon Bestseller Lists

Whenever there’s a bestselling book on a topic, it may well prove to be a brilliant idea for an ebook.

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Ebook: Build a Bestselling Format

November 5th, 2008    Subscribe To Our Feed

Want to write an ebook? Ebooks sell well online; you can even build an entire home business on a single ebook. Here’s how to ensure your ebook sells, when you build a bestselling format.

1. Focus — Your Ebook Must Have a Slant

The more tightly you can focus your ebook, the better it will sell. Let’s look at some examples.

“Beauty” is too wide a focus. If you’re not a celebrity, an ebook with such a broad focus is unlikely to sell. However, “Instant Acne Cure” is a sharp focus, and if you deliver on the promise, this ebook will sell.

Similarly, “fix your PC” is too wide a focus. “Optimize your PC: Windows XP Under the Hood” is tightly focused. This ebook should sell well for years to come.

It’s worth spending time to get your focus exactly right. If you want to get your ebook written and selling within a month, spend the first four weeks thinking about your focus. Yes, it’s that important.

Here’s another way to think about your focus: it’s a way of targeting exactly those readers who MUST buy your ebook, as soon as they learn of its existence. With a sharp focus, you know without a doubt that your ebook will sell.

2. Promise and Deliver

Now you’ve got your focus, realize that the focus implies a promises, or several promises to your reader. I read many ebooks which although competent, never fulfilled the promise. This is sad, because had the ebooks fulfilled the promises they made, they would sell many thousands of copies over many years.

Make a list of the promises your focus implies.

Now turn that list into ebook chapters. This is the simplest way of outlining your ebook. It shows you exactly what to include, and what to leave out.

I’ve seen way too many ebooks which include information which is totally irrelevant. A history of your topic is rarely relevant, yet many ebooks include a history.

Remember that ebooks are meant to be read on the screen. They’re short. If your ebook is over 100 pages, take a close look. Are you delivering on promises, or just waffling to increase the page count?

3. Evergreen Content Sells for Years: Ensure Your Content Is Timeless

Finally, bestselling formats are evergreen. The information is useful not just this year, but for years to come.

Let’s look at our two examples.

“Instant Acne Cure” — this will sell for decades. With an updated edition every couple of years, this ebook will bring you a steady income.

“Optimize your PC: Windows XP Under the Hood” will also sell for years. There are millions of PCs running Windows XP. Businesses and home users are wedded to this operating system; this kind of book will be a gold mine for you.

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Ebooks - Plain or Fancy?

August 2nd, 2008    Subscribe To Our Feed

When you’re writing and selling ebooks, do you really need all the trimmings? You may think that fancy graphics and ebook templates are vital, but my own research suggests that they’re not. Information is what your buyers want.

I’ve been selling ebooks successfully online for years, and contrary to what some people will tell you, it’s NOT necessary to create or buy fancy graphics and templates for your ebooks. In fact a gaudy template may lead to refund requests because the template makes the ebook impossible to read in comfort.

A couple of my bestsellers are plain PDF files, with text only. The sales pages for these ebooks are equally plain. I created the ebooks when I saw a need, so I wrote them and got them online and selling quickly.

Ebook Templates - the Latest Gaudy Trend - Can Lead to Increased Refunds

There’s currently a trend online for ebook templates. These templates have images on the top and bottom of each page; sometimes they have background images for the page as well. Not only do the images make it hard to read the ebooks, because the graphics are distracting, these gaudy productions look horrible when printed.

It seems I’m not the only person who hates the new ebook templates trend.

One of my students recently published an ebook. I saw a draft of the material and though it was excellent - it provided great information.

However within a couple of weeks of publication I got a frantic email message from the student about her refund rate. I was shocked, because I thought the material was great. I asked her to send me a copy.

I saw what the problem was immediately. She’d used a gaudy template. Someone had told her that using an image laden template was “more professional.”

I advised her to publish the ebook as a plain PDF ebook - without any template at all.

Her results? Once she’d published the new version: not a single refund request.

When you sell an ebook, you’re selling information. Your buyers neither want nor need fancy graphics - all they want is the information you promise in your sales page.

So if you’re new to ebook publishing, you may want to reconsider using graphics-heavy templates. Never use graphics unless they’re an essential part of your offering.

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Angela Booth, Veteran Writer And Author

Copyright © 2008 Top Ebook Writer

Credits: Angela Booth's Writing Blog | Fab Freelance Writing Blog | Fab Web Writer Blog | Matteo Turchetto | Andreas Viklund