The rise of eBooks (a.k.a. e-books, electronic books) online has been one of the great successes of the Internet as it has made it possible for all web users to become authors and publishers of their own work. To help the avid author/publisher, an industry has grown up surrounding the ways to publish your book to the internet. This article will detail the options available for publishing your book to the internet along with the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.
The options each have control, security and cost implications. Some of these constraints can suit individual book author depending on the level of involvement they wish to have in the sales and download process.
Online Third Party Sellers
This is perhaps the most common scenario for selling e-books online. The author uploads their book to the vendor\’s website who then take control of the sales and marketing in return for a commission on each sale.
The vendor looks after processing payments and dealing with the credit card companies/Paypal. In general terms, the author is allowed to provide a book description or synopsis but they have no control over their book\’s marketing on the vendor\’s site so their book may appear on a page surrounded by competing advertisements or competing books.
When a book is purchased from the site, the vendors is responsible for controlling if the book\’s download link has a time limit or if the number of downloads attempts is restricted (to protect it from being downloaded by several people).
One disadvantage of using a third party vendor is that the author cannot compile a membership listing of previous purchasers so they miss out on the potential of future loyalty purchases. This could affect publishers who intend releasing several books and wish to build upon a customer base of previous customers.
Password Protecting Public Folders On A Server
This is an old approach to distributing eBooks whereby you make a public folder on your web server and configure it to be password protected. When a customer purchases a book via your site you send them details of the password and URL/folder for the download.
One advantage of this is that there is no cost involved, except for your time, but you will still require shopping cart software to manage the purchase.
One big disadvantage (and the reason this techniques is not used to any great extent these days) is that the security is weak since the password can be freely distributed with other people who could then freely download your book.
Digital Download Management Tools
This is the independent way of publishing e-books that involves installing software on your own server to manage the shopping cart process, download link security, compiling mailing list information and communicating with purchasers (emailing them the secure links to the e-book download).
In this scenario, the author can compile a mailing list of customers and has the freedom to configure how secure the download links are, including how long the links are to be made available for.
After the software cost, the only other cost is the commission to the credit card processor and the sole operational overhead is the application set-up and handling refunds.
In conclusion: Each of the options have benefits and constraints which specific types of authors will be drawn to/put off by. If you plan to sell multiple eBooks then choosing a Sales Management and Distribution Tool is the best option for retaining control over your book\’s marketing and mailing lists. If you only have one eBook to sell, don\’t wish to capture purchasers in a mailing list and want zero involvement in the set-up, marketing and sales of your eBook then using one of the many online vendors should work well for you.
Discover a simple way to sell ebooks – Read Alan\’s review of DLGuard, software for digital download sales management over at http://www.sellebooksandsoftwareonline.com.