Absolutelee.com

In the post just before last, eBook Part I: The Idea and Writing It, I described how and when I got the idea to write ebooks. I didn’t even know such a thing existed back in November. I read Joe Vitale’s book, The E-Code, liked it, then wondered what I could do. After some thought, I hit upon the idea of writing a book on how to quit smoking, using the system that my dad invented. I finished the book by the end of the year.

My wife and I had been selling collectibles on eBay for a few years. I had bought an information product about selling antques on eBay from Skip McGrath and had liked it. I subscribe to Skip’s newsletter, and as fate would have it, in my inbox, I found the current issue, which had an advertisement for another book of his on selling information products on eBay. I promptly bought the book.

I was not disappointed.

Skip’s material is always very well researched. The thing about him is that he’s actually done what he writes about. He makes half his (probably very healthy) income from selling information products on the web.

I also bought a self-published book called, Millionaire’s Guide to E-Book Publishing, by Jason Farber. I found that on Amazon. Jason’s book was much less comprehensive than Skip’s stuff, but there was a lot of material there that Skip didn’t cover.

From both of these sources, I realized that I needed to save my file in .pdf format. To do this, I used primopdf.com. Here’s the website for Primo. All you do is download the software to your computer. When you want to save a file as a .pdf document, you “print” it and then choose the primo printer from the list of printers. Your file will “print” as a .pdf file, that is it will be saved as such.

Once you have your file saved as a .pdf file, you need a way for people to find your product, pay for it, and for it to be delivered to them. The appeal of selling information products via the web is setting up completely automated systems that do all of this. If you’re a geek, I’m sure this is as easy as ABC. If you’re not, read on. It’s not as hard as you might think.

There are several sites that you can upload your book to so that people can download it. I chose Payloadz.com. Payloadz intergrates seamlessly with Paypal so that once a customer decides to buy your eBook, they are taken to the Paypal site where they pay, then to the Payloadz site, where they download their purchase. Setting up the Payloadz account and especially the Paypal account is sort of a pain in the neck, but all you have to do is follow their well written instructions and in a few days, you’ll be good to go.

The main headache was that I had to have a verified Paypal account. That means Paypal is assured that I am who I think I am :). More about why I needed this in a moment. Suffice it to say that, although their instructions worked to the letter, it took a few days to go through the process. (They have to send a couple of cents to your bank account, then you have to tell Paypal how much was sent. Thus proving you are actually the owner of the bank account.)

So, at this point I had a saleable book, and I had a way for customers to pay and download. All I had to do next was get the word out, and surely people would buy my book by the thousands, making me instantly rich. This would be almost (not quite) as easy and fast as winning the megamillions lottery.

I think it was Mies van der Rohe, the architect, who said “God is in the details.” How true, how true!

How easy it is to have the blissful idea of “I think I’ll make a lot of money selling eBooks on the internet.” There are a hundred little details that have to be dealt with between the inception of the idea and its actual execution.

This is acutally a good thing, otherwise everyone would be successful, which would make life so much harder for those of us who are actually willing to work at success.

Since my wife and I had sold collectibles on eBay for years, I decided to try eBay as a marketing channel first. Well, this was another set of headaches.

You see, my wife’s collectibles business has a really great feedback rating. She’s had one, just one, negative comment in almost 600 comments. In case my eBook was a flop, I didn’t want to ruin her feedback score, so I opened my own account on eBay.

There are more restrictions on selling what eBay calls digitially delivered products on eBay than “real” products. Until recently, eBay seemed to frown on the whole idea of selling digital media. To sell on eBay you have to have a verified Paypal account, and you have to pass through the same stringent verification process with eBay itself. Basically it’s more of the same. They verify your bank account and your identity, that you are who you are and that your bank account belongs to you.

To do this eBay accesses your credit report and asks you questions that only you can answer. In my case it was where I lived about ten years ago, a former phone number, and where I bank along with what type of accounts I have. There’s nothing really hateful about the process. It’s there to protect your customers (and thus make selling easier for you). It was just another hoop to jump through.

Well, after another two or three days, I was sanctified by eBay and I could actually list my book as an online auction.

Of course it wasn’t as easy as advertised. There’s a glitch in the listing software. You are supposed to be able to click on a link that says “digital media” and get a window where you specify the location of the digital item. (In my case on Payloadz.) The link didn’t work as advertised. When I clicked on it, I got only half the window, the part with the “Save” button on the bottom was missing. So, I could enter my information, but not save it.

I was stymied.

I actually emailed Skip McGrath, who emailed me back within about an hour (very impressive customer service!). He didn’t know what the problem was. I used eBay’s help features to email eBay themselves. A day later I had the solution. Hit “tab”! Go figure!

Well, finally, I got my book listed. And…

Nothing.

Fifteen people looked at it. None bought.

In general, digital products have a 1-2% conversion rate. That means 50 to 100 people have to view the product advertisment for every person who actually buys it.

I was, by this time, exploring other avenues. One of which was Lulu.com. I’ll continue the saga in eBook Part III.

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Also, if you smoke, now's the time to quit! Buy my book, How To Quit Smoking: The Harold Cole Method! It's 100% guaranteed!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 10:36 am and is filed under Blogging, eBooks, Online Marketing, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.