Darren Rowse, founder of Problogger.net, has written an enlightening article about how he launched his e-book called The Essential Guide to Portrait Photography. This article is a good opportunity to see how it is done from a leader in the business of making money on the Internet.
I’ve previously mentioned one way to create an e-book by using Lightning Source to generate the e-book from a conventional book. Darren chose to produce his e-book electronically without the intervention of a publisher/printer. That is the cheaper option and only involves creating a PDF from your original manuscript in a word processor such as Microsoft Word.
I admire his whole approach to the production of his e-book since it appears that he did not spend an exorbitant amount of time and effort to create the e-book. How can I tell ?
- The e-book content largely came from existing posts on his photography blog
- He interviewed expert photographers to enhance his e-book content
- He hired a professional designer to layout the book and proofread it
- He is using a 3rd party called e-junkie.com to sell the e-book
So you can see Darren has a nice “set it and forget it” model here, especially since “setting it” (creating the e-book) was not too burdensome for him to do.
His e-book promotion strategy is also enlightening. He used Twitter to do a pre-launch and was able to pay for his e-book costs. Incredible! Of course, Darren has the luxury of having a couple hundred thousand subscribers, so getting attention is not too hard for him.
Still, tweeting on Twitter is a good way for the rest of us to get our message out quickly and get quick feedback from “followers”. Darren says that even if you only have a few hundred subscribers, you can still make a couple hundred dollars a month from e-book sales.
Here’s where building your list of subscribers really pays off (as it did for Darren). He is able to promote his e-book to 200,000 plus subscribers via email. These subscribers are people already receptive to his message and they trust in what he says due to the relationship of trust he built through his blog.
He is also using Facebook as well as through selling through affiliates. E-junkie.com facilitates selling through an affiliate program. Another nice feature about e-junkie is that it will prompt buyers of his e-book to sign up as subscribers to his blog, building his customer list of follow on products.
He also generated initial excitement by discounting the book 25% for a limited time, illustrating two of the 12 persuasion techniques that I have previously discussed — generate urgency and creating scarcity. In fact, Darren’s promotion campaign uses many of the 12 techniques talked about. You can see why the sale of his e-book has been so successful in such a short time.
When you get a chance, check out his e-book and book:
