Publishing Your E-Book on Different Platforms

The e-book market has grown rapidly over the past few years, which has brought a sometimes bewildering array of ways to sell your own e-book. You can sell copies of the same edition of a print book in multiple bookstore chains, but you’ll find that different stores and publishing platforms require differently formatted e-book files. This section presents an overview of the ways in which you might want to sell your e-book. I cover all of them in more detail. Hosting your e-book with E-junkie One simple way to sell your e-book is to use a shopping cart site. It hosts your e-book file for you and, when a reader buys your book, delivers it automatically. You can choose among dozens of shopping cart sites and solutions, but I recommend E-junkie because it’s easy and inexpensive. If you sell your e-book via E-junkie, you don’t even need a website of your own. You can reach potential readers on Facebook or Twitter or by e-mail and give them the link to buy your e-book. Selling your e-book from your own website Many authors choose to sell their e-books from their own websites. This option is helpful if you have a blog, because your readers are likely to become loyal customers. Selling your e-book from your own website also means that you keep all profits — no retailer takes a cut. You can also provide your e-book in any file format you want, and you can even package extras (such as MP3 recordings) with it. In the online marketing world, a specialized e-book is commonly sold from a sales page. This type of page, which typically explains the scope of the e-book and the benefits of reading it, often includes testimonials from satisfied customers. If you’ve written an expensive e-book for a specialist audience, this is a useful way to sell it.