Selling Ebooks Online: Guide, Inspiration, and Benefits

The ebook market continues to grow and is expected to reach$20.74 billion by 2028, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.78% during the forecast period 2023 to 2028. This shows that selling ebooks online is a great way of earning passive income.

Source: unsplash.com

Many sell digital products nowadays due to the convenience it brings to the merchants — no expensive production cost, storing fees, or the hassle of shipping physical items. When it comes to ebooks, although there are tons of free items that offer a good deal to the subscriber, in which all they have to do is exchange their email information for the download, priced ebooks are still in demand, with191 million ebooks sold in 2020.

In this article, we will help you learn the guides to selling ebooks, their benefits, and some store inspiration for an advantageous start.

How To Sell Ebooks Online

Choose a good topic that is relevant to your target readers

Souce: Unsplash

Money-selling ebooks all have one common ground, which is the ability to connect to their readers. Of, course, to make money from ebooks, you need to stay interestingly relevant to your target audience.

Select a topic that will urge the readers to take notice, and buy your book. It is important to choose something that hasn’t already been written about by other writers or publishing businesses. For instance, if you decide to write a non-fiction ebook, your aim should be to incorporate value or teach the readers new ideas or conclusions. One way to achieve this is to draw upon personal scenarios or experiences that set you apart from other writers.

Meanwhile, if you are writing a book related to starting a business venture, you should avoid focusing on generalized guides that can be easily found using Google search. Instead, try to go into the step-by-step process of how you begin your own blogging journey as well as essential things you have learned through your experience.

Brainstorm with your team, or if you are alone, try to ask questions from your bookworm family or friends, to get a good plan going. You can also use tools like Google Trends, SEMrush, and Reddit to find out what people are searching for in topics you genuinely know about.

Create your eBook to a high standard

Souce: Unsplash

Online courses and blogs, like this, are available online for you to be familiar with the basics and advanced tools needed in creating high-quality ebooks online. The more time, research, and effort you put into your ebook, the better it will be.

You might spend months or even years of writing, proofreading, and editing multiple drafts until you reached the standard you set. You can download tools that will help you with these, Grammarly, for example, which can assist you in checking all spelling and grammar.

Don't forget the cover design, most people still judge a book by its cover, so better ready your ebook inside and outside. Your cover should be eye-catching, professional and builds curiosity in order to attract more readers. You can use online graphic design software to design your book cover and select from a wide range of free and professional templates.

After all the content and graphic-related procedures, convert the file into a PDF or epub file. When the product's all set, it is time for publishing and promotion.

Research the best publishing platform

Souce: Unsplash

Sell your ebooks through your online store or other platforms accessible to many like Amazon, Sellfy, Apple Books, and more.

Suppose, you build your own store through Shopify, you can freely utilize the Digital Downloads app to sell digital files like e-books, digital art, and more. The app integrates seamlessly with your Shopify store, making it simple to add digital files to new or existing products, whether physical or not.

Quick Read: Sell Digital Products on Shopify Like A Pro In 2024 (Bonus Section Included)

Decide on the price

Souce: Unsplash

You can start by looking at how much other writers are charging for their ebooks on similar topics. You can also consider your chosen publishing platform and look at how much they take as a service fee. Also, compute the total marketing cost you are willing to spend and the number of books you would like to sell and adjust the final pricing. Mark up the price to a point where you can make a profit.

Try PageFly’s product selling price calculator and discover a profitable average selling price range for your products or services. This tool employs a cost-plus pricing strategy, which will help you in calculating the final selling price through adding a percentage markup to the total costs of the production of your product.

Develop a marketing strategy to sell

Souce: Unsplash

The goal is to get the word out there. Social media is a strong marketing tool, so why not set up a professional account across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram that will be focused on introducing and promoting your published ebook? Establish different strategies like posting about day-to-day life as a writer, the process of creating your ebooks, or quotations from your book that can hopefully lead to sales.

You can also launch a website with your writing portfolio that links out to where to buy your ebook. On top of that, you could also reach out to book clubs to see if they would be interested in reading your text on their events or gatherings at a discounted price.

Ebooks Stores on Shopify For Inspiration

Devotion Ebook Emporium

Source: devotionebookemporium.com

Devotion Ebook Emporium focuses on true romance and love. They are very clear with their target audience, you can see that even by just making a few scrolls on their website. The business was inspired due to the journey of the owner's friend, from being the not-so-romantic type of person to a believer in love romances.

The very reason for how the business started already has the ability to find its way toward the readers. Devotion Ebook Emporium is a newly launched ebook store with one book available for sale.

If you will notice, they also offer a wide mode of payment for their consumers. This promotes accessibility, giving your shoppers a shopping experience full of ease.

Taaraverse: Siya Taara Books

Source: taaraverse.com

Siya Taara, the author and the owner of the shop explores different kinds of emotions through the medium of poetry. Her poetic odyssey has been known to showcase the beauty of individuality. Through Taara's works, readers could immediately see a glimpse of the kind of person she is, giving a sense of knowingness that may help her be relevant among her target audience. Her niche stands as her advantage in the competition.

Aside from her own website, she also sells her books through Amazon, making use of different channels to reach wider readers. She opens a pre-order option for her upcoming books, which is another great strategy to accommodate and take care of her loyal readers.

Benefits of Selling Ebooks Online

Inexpensive to make

Compared to traditional self-publishing books, where merchants are encouraged to print over a thousand copies as bulk printing leads to lower production costs, ebooks publishers are not bound by conditions like that.

Once they publish one copy, the same ebook can be downloaded several times. Updating ebook is also more hassle-free as they can just edit it via computer and such. By operating an ebook store, publishers can totally eliminate inventory and warehouse costs. You can actually check Shopify’s book business process that requires only five steps before your final launch.

Wide eBook-selling platforms

Aside from selling and marketing your books through your own website, you can also list them on well-known online marketplaces, such as Amazon, eBay, Apple Books, Google Books, and more. The power of promotion can be fueled by the channels you choose, so being able to list your books on several sites at the same time will surely increase the chances of you being noticed.

Note that even those publishers who released printed copies of books can make online versions and make use of different platforms for wider reach.

Flexible pricing strategy

The ebook industry has an accepted norm to place different prices for the same eBook, unlike traditional book-selling. Each website has its own techniques of making revenue, some can charge a price a bit higher than the original market price for the same eBook, especially when it is offered as a relatively informative product from a company. However, most ebooks are being sold at a significantly lower price than the printed market cost. This simply means you can price items based on the circumstances you are in, including the platform and regulations you have to impose when using them.

Quick Read: How to Use Shopify for Digital Products - An Easy Guide

Conclusion

All ebook sales depend on many factors such as the platform you use, strategies you try to execute, and more. As a publisher, you can try to host your ebook store on an independent website or integrate your store with e-commerce platforms like Shopify. Aside from that, the entire pre-production process of creating an ebook requires a lot of effort and research. Though it might be a lot more convenient when viewed from a bigger angle, you must be very detailed in creating one as it will also reflect your entire brand voice and image.

We hope the above guide helps you decide and navigate your ebook-selling plans to establish a venture that will be timely, relevant, and successful in the long run.