Seeing your book in print and on the shelves of your local bookstore may be a cherished dream, but it’s also a difficult one to attain in today’s publishing climate. For many authors, both new and veteran alike, the answer lies in self-publishing and selling ebooks.

Why Selling Ebooks May Be a More Lucrative Option

Before ereader devices and dedicated smartphone apps made ebooks such a hot commodity, self-publishing was usually an expensive risk. These days, though, you don’t have to shell out thousands of dollars to pay for the first run of books in print and hope you make a profit; with relatively low overhead costs, you can start selling ebooks and earning money right away.

In addition to the lowered overhead costs, self-publishing and selling ebooks allows authors to retain far more creative control over their finished product, along with the rights to their work in perpetuity. This is especially appealing for genre authors, who may otherwise be forced to relinquish their publishing rights for years under some contracts. By choosing to sell ebooks online, you’re immediately increasing your audience reach by ensuring your products are available to readers around the world. You’re also able to control where and how they are sold, thus gaining the potential to sell more copies and earn greater profits.

What You Need to Start Selling Ebooks

It goes without saying that you need a finished product, but it’s important to keep in mind what “finished” really means. Without a publishing contract, you probably also won’t be working with an editor unless you choose one yourself. This means you’re able to control the plot details of your ebooks, but you may also miss some formatting, grammar or spelling errors, which leave your final product appearing unpolished and unprofessional to buyers. Before you ever attempt to sell ebooks online, you should make a point of securing some type of editing services.

Once you have a polished, edited manuscript which you’ve formatted as an ebook and saved in several different formats to accommodate the native file formats of the most popular ereader devices, you’ll need to set up your web store. You can do this by having a professional, ecommerce-ready website built by a professional, or you can take a less expensive route.

Rather than built-in payment processing and file hosting capabilities, consider building a full site but skipping the sales page. With the right ecommerce platform, you can use simple cut-and-paste HTML linking to turn your site into a sales portal which redirects to a managed page. Services like PayLoadz.com combine payment processing, secure file hosting and automated, instant download delivery with valuable selling tools to help you get the word out about your products.

With the right tools and services on you side, you can make money by selling ebooks without courting major publishing companies.

 

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