So you’ve got an ebook to sell? Great!
Now what?
We hit our nose up against that same brick wall a couple of weeks ago. Psyched about putting together a fantastic resource for beginning freelance writers, we assumed selling our book would be the easy part.
Not so, Tanto. Finding a way to deliver and sell our ebook has been one of the most challenging phases of this crazy ride to date. Why? Because we want to set up an affiliate program.
Here is what we learned about affiliate programs and ebooks:
- You have three options for affiliate programs: managing the program and affiliate payments yourself or signing up with a web-based affiliate manager.
- Affiliate managers handle everything for you for a fee or commission. No hassles, no work on your part. Affiliate tracking software for managing your own program ranges from $50 to $2k. Web-based tracking options cost upwards of $20 a month.
- Web-based affiliate program managers don’t always allow you access to your affiliate contact information. In fact, they’re not your affiliates. They’re affiliates of the affiliate manager. What good is that if you want to follow up to see if clients liked your ebook?
- Some affiliate managers control many aspects of how you’ll sell your ebook, requiring that you create and use specific sales and landing pages.
- Many affiliate programs only pay sellers according to certain schedules. Don’t expect instant money in your bank account, and be prepared to wait for your profits, sometimes up to a month.
- Reputation means a lot. We liked the options of one affiliate manager, but the company weren’t as familiar a name as Clickbank or Commission Junction. People may trust recognizable names more than other names.
- Big-name affiliate managers tend to have a ton of offerings – and a lot of junk. Do you really want your ebook sitting next to one called “Ten Easy Steps to Picking your Nose in Public”? On the other hand, plenty of affiliates browse these warehouse-style sites to find good products to sell.
Are we any farther ahead with our choice? Not really. We ended up overwhelmed by the options and finally sat down together to decide why we wanted an affiliate program in the first place.
Will we have one? Sure. We want to share and give back as much as possible to other writers and people who support us. We feel an affiliate program helps achieve this goal. And when we settle on which option to choose, we’ll let you know.
In the meantime, tell us about your affiliate stories. Know any good websites for affiliate programs? Hear about any horror stories? Want to share a great experience? Let us know!
Have you looked at e-junkie.com? I don’t have any experience with their affiliate management program, but I like their great – and reasonably priced – shopping cart for digital products.
This is great information. I have wondered what people use to sell their e-books. I’m going to stumble this page because I bet a lot of people have the same question.
Woot! Stumble away!
I was pretty surprised to find that actually selling ebooks wasn’t a simple thing. While it can be done fairly easily using a PayPal button for simple sales, there are many other considerations. Copying, printing, file sharing, affiliate programs, returns, shopping (for multiple offerings), programming concerns, site setup… ouch.
I’ll share more about our experience with this as we go along and learn. Hopefully we’ll save someone else some trouble and effort!
I Stumbled across this post, and was happy to see it. I have a couple e-books I plan to begin offering soon. And this post hits the nail on the head in terms of where I am. My content’s done. Now, I need to figure out the best way to sell it. I’m looking forward to seeing how this thread develops.
A couple questions I have:
– I’m inclined to sell my material as PDF’s, without any copy protection. I figure if someone really wants to copy it, they’ll figure out a way to do it. But I’d be interested in experiences others have had on this front.
– If I use ClickBank or someone like them, I assume I’m still free to market and sell my material myself directly through my website. Is this true? Or will they claim a commission on those sales, too, since one of their requirements appears to be that I maintain a web page promoting the material?
Hi Jerry, and good to see that we’ve come to a common ground.
As far as I’m aware, Clickbank does not restrict outside sales of your ebook. They are an affiliate program and hold some control on the management of that selling aspect. You need to create a promotional web page and thank you page according to their specs, but I don’t believe anything stops you from selling outside on your site or elsewhere.
Selling via PDF with no copy protection isn’t how I would go about things. PDFs can be locked and copy protected to some extent, offering some form of protection. If you have Adobe potential already, why not go one step further?
Another problem with straight PDF delivery is how you’ll actually deliver the goods. Via a download link on a web page? People can accidentally stumble across that page. Your link can make its way across the net from there and you could lose sales simply by a good search finding your page.
If you choose to email links, that does work – but how will you automate the emailing of the link after someone has purchased from you? Manually sending out emails isn’t effective because of the potential time lapse involved – what happens when you sleep? eat? go out?
Lastly, we’ve done some research into ebook software – no big advantage there, in our opinion. Even those that offer password protection require a delivery method, often sold separately for $$$.
PDF seems to be widely accepted as a format, but you’ll need to consider how you’ll distribute your product. We’re working on this and will have more posts about it this week – in the meantime, we welcome anyone’s comments and suggestions!
I have a four-part series about e-books on my blog – it can be accessed from the Series page. I talk a little about formats and delivery, though I have no experience with ClickBank or any or distributor.
An update:
E-junkie wins the gold prize for being the cheapest, fastest, most complete affiliate program manager that I’ve ever seen. It’s got a ton of options available and it’s sleek and professional. We love e-Junkie and fully recommend it.
I have just written my own ebooks and am doing my own affiliate management but am also looking for others to work with.
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