E-Book Sales as Core of Your Books’ Marketing Plan by James Wells

The eBook market is a huge opportunity, especially for indie authors.

If you’re not focusing on eBook sales as a core part of your marketing plan, you’re missing out.

When I published my first novel The Great Symmetry, I printed a few hundred copies and imagined that it would be a great success if I sold them out. I had no idea where I would find the vast majority of my readers.

Just a year later, about 95% of my sales are eBooks. Every day, readers are buying my book on Amazon and other sites from all over the world.

To get traction in the eBook market, I tried out new things, made plenty of mistakes, and then had a series of increasing successes. I’m grateful to the authors who helped along the way. Now I’m distilling the most important lessons to help other authors.

At the upcoming Chanticleer Authors Conference, I’ll be presenting a series of three sessions about eBook publishing. The content won’t focus on mechanics like eBook file formats – that’s boring and you can figure out that stuff easily. Rather, we’ll dig into the most important decisions facing an author in the eBook market. The sessions are:

• eBook Publishing 101: Designing your points of sale (such as your Amazon page) to convert browsers into buyers.
• eBook Publishing 102: Getting readers to your points of sale. We’ll emphasize the most cost-effective tool around – the discount promotion.
• eBook Publishing 103: Advanced topics such as series planning, reader magnets, and more.

An overarching theme of all of these sessions is that your eBooks are a central part of your offering.

For some types of book (especially genre fiction by indie authors), it’s the most important channel for you. This means you should plan ahead for your eBook. For instance, some cover designs look wonderful in print, but are failures online – we’ll discuss how to avoid that pitfall. There may even be reasons to modify the text of your novel to sell well as an eBook.

It’s ironic because I don’t even like reading eBooks myself. I only just gave in and bought a Kindle last week. But my preference doesn’t matter to the market – your priority as an author should be to make your book available, and well positioned, in the channels where the readers are found. These days, that means eBooks.

Note from Kiffer Brown

James R Wells, Science Fiction Author

I would like to thank James R. Wells, the author of The Great Symmetry for sharing his knowledge and experience with the Chanticleer Community.