Okay. You have been blogging for a while now. The AdSense checks may or may not be rolling in. You have a growing fan base. You can claim somewhat to be an growing expert in your niche.
Now how do you turn all that hard work into steady income? Easy. By creating and selling your very own eProduct … in this case, eBooks.
PromotionWorld.com has an insightful article - How to Write an eBook - with four points of interest…
Interesting conversation going on in a previous post - Price Points: $47… , and it’s an issue that all information publishers must eventually face: How to price your eBook.
So of course, in my quest to gain as much knowledge on this as possible, I went trawling across the web and came upon an article titled (take a guess) … How to Price Your eBook.
In a New York Times article (registration required, annoyingly) - Digital Publishing Is Scrambling the Industry’s Rules - there is some good food for thought.
The article looks at what has happened to the music industry over recent times and talks about the future of publishing - will it head in the same way.
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Have you noticed the pricing of so many eBooks are $47, $67, $97 and so on. Why is that?
I guess it basically comes down to how any standard becomes the … standard. As with any product or service, many price points are tried and tested and once accepted they’re pushed hard onto the consumer. It eventually builds on itself and sure enough it becomes the standard by which everybody goes by.
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When I first started thinking about setting up ePublishingDaily.com - during the silly season - I went through the whole research phase that every startup goes through.
I outlayed some hard-earned money (not everything’s for free on the Web) to conduct various surveys and focus groups on the eBook industry to help me get a clear picture.
One of the questions was: How do you Read your eBooks?
Computer Monitor: 63%
Laptop: 19%
PDA: 8%
TabletPC: 7%
eBook reader: 3%
The survey size was 496.
A few thoughts:
I was surprised by the low number of eBooks read on PDAs.
What didn’t surprise me was that the vast majority read their eBooks on their computers.
I wonder with all these new eBook readers being released this year what the results will show in 12 months time?
An upcoming article at BusinessWeek takes a look at eBooks and the talk (buzz, even) is about how they’re about to take off.
Many experts are convinced that digital books, after plenty of false starts, are finally ready for takeoff. “Every other form of media has gone digital — music, newspapers, movies.” … “We’re the only industry that hasn’t lived up to the pace of technology. A revolution is around the corner.”
Can I join that revolution? ;-) Oh … I already have!
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(via JKOnTheRun)
Indulge me just a little as I explain my views on AdSense and eBooks and monetization and … deftly introduce an upcoming free e-course. ;-)
Blogging is a phenomenon - in just a matter of a few short years blogging has grown and grown and … grown.
Technorati, the leader in monitoring the blogosphere, recently stated that it is now monitoring a whopping 27.2 million blogs - 60 times the amount from 3 years ago.
But what has turned blogging from a relatively underground/cult experience to one that the mainstream have embraced?
The answer, of course, is: Google’s AdSense!
Awesome! An easy-to-use publishing medium (blogging) together with an easy-to-use advertising medium (AdSense). Cool! Awesome … You start up your blog in your niche, slap on some AdSense ads in all the right hotspots, and bam … watch the money rolling in.
And then you wake up from your “passive income” dreaming and to the reality that it’s not money rolling in … it’s a few dribbles of coin.
The reality is, you’ll be lucky to cover your online expenses with AdSense, let alone make a decent living from it.
Oh, it can be done (see ProBlogger.net), but at the end of the day, you are living on a thread and on the whims of advertisers and Google. Think about it: One slight change of direction from Google in regards to AdSense could criple the whole professional blogging scene.
What happens if click fraud gets out of hand and advertisers start knocking on Google’s door? What happens if the only way to make decent money from AdSense (ie: blogs on products) become so over-saturated that they dilute earnings for all? What happens if Google does some dance moves and all your hard seo work goes backwards?
What’s happening is that most bloggers have placed their eggs in the one basket: AdSense.
So, how can a blogger, who’s picked a niche, made themselves somewhat of an expert in it, monetize their blog?
Well I’m about to turn this whole thing on its head - forget about monetizing your blog via AdSense - think of a product, a digital product, and how to use your blog to market it - in other words use your blog as a marketing tool. Think: digital product first, blog second.
That product is an eBook - also known as an information product, a digital book or an ePublication.
My theory on blogging is that the vast majority of us are simply banging our collective heads against a brick wall trying to make our fortunes with AdSense - because without the numbers, AdSense on your blog is next to useless.
So, my theory is that bloggers have more chance of making a decent living by building their credibility and reputations via blogging and then developing and selling eBooks in their niche.
And further to that: I believe that blogging is the best way to market and sell your eBook(s).
With that in mind, I’m developing an introductory e-course titled “Forget AdSense, Go with eBooks”.
The free email course is in 10 parts and will be launched on March 15th 2006.
I’ll have a dedicated page set up for the course by this weekend,which will provide more information.
And a note: there will be no selling of products, no affiliate links, no advertising whatsoever.
Thanks for indulging me … and keep on reading.
Big-time publisher, HarperCollins has announced the first free Web-based, ad-supported, full-text business book.
From Information Today:
Citing the desire to create new revenue streams for authors, mega-publisher HarperCollins (http://www.harpercollins.com) has announced the first free Web-based, ad-supported, full-text business book. Go It Alone! The Secret to Building a Successful Business on Your Own by Bruce Judson is now available on the author’s Web site , where an affiliate link to Amazon, not the publisher, can also be found. Not only can the book be read at the site, but it can also be searched. HarperCollins Publishers is calling the project a test of a new business model. Some self-published authors also offer ad-supported books online, but HarperCollins’ move is the first by a major publisher.
The 229-page book is being supportered by contextual advertising from Yahoo with the advertising revenue to be split between author and publisher. Rather than being published in the traditonal PDF format, it’s being offered up in basic html - 229 of them.
It’s an interesting way forward for publishing, and this test case is being watched closely by all those involved in publishing.
A spokesperson from HarperCollins says:
The results will be measured by the income generated through ads, number of page views and visitors to the site, and by sales of books from the site.
Information Today continues…
As Web users have embraced the idea that “information wants to be free” and have resisted paying for digital content, businesses and even individuals with Web sites have increasingly migrated to the ad-supported model.
This will be interesting to see where it goes, but from first looks at the online book I must say I was slightly disappointed with the overall design: extremely poor, even non-existant navigation system and what’s the point of having an index at the back of the book that’s not clickable.
The good thing, in my opinion, is that the book is spread out over many pages (229 of them) in small chunks. This is good for the reader and good for the author/publisher as printinig the whole book out would be just too time consuming.
At least big publishers are thinking and it’s a step in the right direction, but I can really see this being of ultimate use by small publishing firms and self-publishers.
What’s your view on such an inititative?
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(via: Make You Go Hmm | Information Today | SmartTechWriting)
From all the negativity something good comes from it.
What am I talking about? Well, any dedicated (aka blog addicted) blogger worth his salt would no doubt have seen the frenzy over at 9rules this week. Wow!
Well earlier today I was happily having my lunch scrolling through some of the comments that’s been flying thick and fast and I come across one trackback that caught my attention.
Paul Stamatiou casually lets out that he’s finishing up a paper on eBooks. Hello! This I am interested in … so off I go to his site, dropped him an email saying I would be very interested in reading his piece. Within minutes he had sent it to me. What a guy!
Now it’s not often I come across a well written, thought-provoking piece on eBooks and the eBook industry and this, I’m happy to say, was one of the them - so I shot Paul back an email: Can I pdf it, post about it and offer it for download to whom ever may be interested. Five minutes later: no problems. Did I say I love this guy!!!
Paul has written a short paper titled “The Rise of eBooks”.
In the paper, Paul asks:
What ways are traditional books exceptionally better than eBooks in their current form? The only issue regards the fact that eBooks require a device, a high-tech medium, to display their contents. This device then requires some form of electricity to power it. However, rapidly advancing technologies are making this a non-issue.
Talking about ePublishers and more so, device manufacturers (he discusses a little about the recent unveiling of the new eReader from Sony - big post coming on that one next week):
Massive changes are emerging as eBooks are on the forefront and brink of a born-again digital revolution.
Paul hits the mark, because we are at the forefront of a new push with eBooks. I know of a number of device manufacturers coming out with eReaders during the year and if you add the great technology that’s finally getting due recognition, e-Ink, Paul is onto something here.
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Download the 5-page paper, The Rise of eBooks (PDF - 14.7Kb)
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So who is this guy Paul Stamatiou?
Paul is a 19 year old sophmore attending the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. He writes on tech at PaulStamatiou.com and is a member of 9rules - I read on his blog that he has aspirations of being a tech writer one day. All the best and remember me when you become a famous columnist at MaximumPC or some other high-tech magazine. :-)
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