In other words, you can create PDF versions of your first five e-books for free. Once you’ve burned up those five samples, you can either pay 10 bucks for your next e-book ... or download PrimoPDF, a free program that does much the same thing.
The book itself doesn’t have to be anything too complex. While pictures and graphics will make the book easier to read and appear more professional, they’re not strictly necessary. If you can do it, then your readers will appreciate it, but if you’re no designer and don’t want to pay for one, then you can skip those extra bits and focus only on the text. Your customers will be paying only for the information and, more important, what that information is going to do for them. If a design element looks good but doesn’t actually contain information that will help buyers achieve their goals, then you don’t have to sweat too much about leaving it out if you’re struggling to work it in.
What you should include are a table of contents so that people can see what the e-book contains, page numbers so they can find the information they want quickly, and a footer with a link to your web site.
That’s crucial. In theory, no one should be able to read your e-book without having paid for it first. In practice, your e-book is going to fly around the Web and be seen and used by all sorts of people who didn’t pay for it. The more popular your book, the more valuable it is to your market and the more people are going to pass it to their friends. While you should send rude e-mails threatening legal action to anyone selling your e-book without your permission, you’ll gain very little by raging against those who share your file for free. Including a link to your site on every page will let you offer more products, and ads, to every reader—even the ones who didn’t buy.
As we’ve seen, the length of an e-book can vary. Anything longer than a blog post can be turned into a PDF document and made available for download without users wondering why they can’t just read it in their browsers. Once you get to about 3,000 words, you’re either going to have to break up what you want to say into different pages—which gives you more opportunity to serve ads—or put it in a PDF e-book and let people download and read it when they want. You can find plenty of very short documents of even 10 to 12 pages on the Internet calling themselves e-books. Those kinds of very short documents are best used for viral marketing. You can offer them for free to people who sign up for your RSS subscriptions, or you can just distribute them as additional content that shows the value of your information. As people share them and talk about them on their own web sites, they’ll send you some useful extra traffic and help to brand you as an expert.
When you’re looking to sell an e-book, you’ll really want at least 50 pages. That’s still much shorter than any book you’ll find in a bookstore, but perceived value does still have an effect on sales. Fewer than 50 pages and customers will begin to wonder whether the e-book will contain enough information to have a meaningful effect on their lives. That’s the impression you’re always looking to create.
The same is true of maximum length. For print books, the more pages the book contains, the higher its apparent value. That holds true online as well, but be aware that when an e-book gets very long—more than 200 pages, say—readers stop reading and start dipping. They look at the table of contents for the particular information they want, turn to that section and pluck it out. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as they’re still buying the book, but if you are writing something very long, try to break up the sections so that they can stand independently. It’s likely that many of the people reading Chapter 7 of your e-book won’t have read Chapter 5.
When it comes to length, you have all the flexibility you could want. When it comes to pricing, you have more flexibility than you could want. If customers are prepared to pay $77 for a 60-page e-book about AdSense what would they pay for your e-book?
It would be great if you could price the book in the same way as any investment. If you knew that people implementing your strategies were going to add $12,000 to their income at the end of 12 months, then you could charge $1,000 and tell people that they’ll get their money back within a month.
But it doesn’t work that way.
While you can estimate what someone might make by implementing your strategies, you can’t predict their future earnings. Everyone will act differently, grow at different speeds, and see dif ferent levels of success. Try to claim a typical rate of return, and it’s just possible that you could even have the Federal Trade Commission on your back. More realistically, buyers won’t believe you. They understand that the amount they can earn after buying your e-book will depend on what they do with it. Charging a high price on the basis of predicted earnings could result in fewer sales.
So, be modest ... and look at the competition.
Even though your product should offer unique strategies, plans, and ideas, it’s unlikely that you won’t have any competition at all. You should read those other e-books that are available in your field to see what they contain, understand how the authors arranged their ideas, and stay up-to-date. Pay attention to the pricing of those books. If you charge twice what your competition is demanding for a book that
