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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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Pricing the ebooks you write yourself: don’t set your price too low

July 20th, 2007    Subscribe To Our Feed

You’ve written an ebook, or you’re in the throes of writing one. And your biggest question is: “How much do I charge for the ebook?”

If you’re a new ebook writer, this question can tie you in knots if you let it. Relax. The prices you charge are up to you, and if they don’t work, you can always change them.

Ebook pricing tip - the $7 craze

There’s currently a craze for “$7″ ebooks. While this is fine for some ebooks, it may not be right for yours. If you have valuable information that’s proprietary to you, and which is available nowhere else, then it may be horribly WRONG.

How much is the information worth to your reader? If the information is valuable, then you may be doing both your potential readers and yourself a disservice by pricing your ebook too low. Low-priced ebooks are not valued or respected - so you’re likely to make fewer sales than you would if you were charging appropriately. People who need the information will ignore your ebook because the low price puts them off.

Include promotional costs in your pricing

To sell a sufficient number of your ebook, you’re going to have to promote with advertising, so you need to factor in an advertising budget. The days when you could sell ebooks without any promotional budget at all are long gone.

Even if you’re using “free” promotional tools like a blog, the time you spend blogging is not free - it has to be paid for by the ebooks you sell.

Decisions, decisions…

Set a price, and then see how many sales you make. You can always change the price, so don’t sweat it.

Write And Sell An Ebook Online: Avoid These Two Traps For The Unwary

May 14th, 2007    Subscribe To Our Feed

Writing and selling your own ebooks is one of the easiest ways to make money online. However, there are a couple of pitfalls that you should be aware of before you start writing an ebook.

If you stumble into one of these traps, you won’t have the success you should have.

The traps are simple. Here they are, with tips on how to avoid them.

Trap One: Not Checking That There’s A Market For Your Ebook Before You Start Writing

The old saw: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink” applies here. Unless there are people who are hungry for the information you provide, no one (or very few people) will buy your ebook.

There are thousands of topics on which you could write. However, to write successful ebooks, focus on the topics which solve problems - and for which people will pay for solutions. For example, when I switched from a Windows computer to a Mac, I was desperate for a simple ebook which would help me to become familiar with the Mac interface. After much searching, I found ONE. Only one ebook, and yet thousands of Windows users are switching to Macs, so it’s a hungry market.

The easiest way to check that there’s a market for your ebook is to type “topic +ebook” into a search engine (without quotes.) If there are lots of ebooks, assess them. The fact that there are many ebooks need not put you off - it shows that people are willing to pay for information on this topic. Make your ebook a little better, and your ebook will sell.

Trap Two: Failing To Promote Your Ebook

You’re not done when you’ve written your ebook. In a sense, that’s when the fun begins - the fun of promoting your ebook.

Ideally, you’ll start promoting your ebook (by advertising, with a press release, or with any other marketing strategy you please) before your ebook is complete. If you choose to promote your ebook with a Web site, that site takes time before it’s indexed via the search engines, so create the site as soon as you start writing, and developing a mailing list so that interested buyers can sign up for notification when you publish the ebook.

Promotion is vital for your ebooks, so start promoting early, and keep promoting the ebook after it’s released.

When you combine a hungry market with consistent marketing efforts, your new ebook will be a roaring success.

Want to add a great income stream to your writing career? Consider writing ebooks, and you’ll never run out of eager buyers. Angela Booth’s “Write and Sell an eBook: Every Writer’s Quick-Action Guide To Writing Ebooks” shows you how to write ebooks quickly and professionally.

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Angela Booth, Veteran Writer And Author

Copyright © 2007 Top Ebook Writer

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