How to Sell an e Book Using Free or Low Cost Marketing Techniques!

Selling an e book has to be one of the most difficult parts of fiction book writing and publishing. Though almost everyone in the world reads, everyone has a slightly different taste for fiction than everyone else. To help you sell your fiction, I have put together several resources on how to sell an e book. Use all of them to jump start your book selling success, first online, then offline.

The first rule of thumb when starting to sell your book, no matter what media source it is published in, is to NOT give away copies of your book. It is very tempting to give your book away to family and friends, but let me tell you, when you are first starting out, your friends and family are your best customers. The key is to make money with your book, not to pay money for people to read your book. Think of it this way, the money you make from your friends and family will help you reach out to more people.

However, giving your book away is not all that bad in some ways. If you do, I highly recommend asking them to provide you with feedback or a review so their words will help sell your book to other people. This is primarily for news and marketing outlets who will write something up on your book.

The first and foremost method of how to sell an e book, or any book for that matter, is by the use of word of mouth advertising. Word of mouth advertising is simple: Tell everyone you come in contact with about your book and ultimately give them your website so they can buy it. A great way to do this is with the use of business cards with a link to your web site.

It's easy to talk about your book. It is yours! You intimately know every word in the book and you should be very passionate about your work! Personally selling your book is simple! People find it fascinating that they personally know an author and thus can't wait to buy your book.

Search engine submission will happen automatically when your web site is searched and found by search engine spiders. However, this process can take anywhere from a couple of days to quite a few months. There are a few tricks to get your website on a search engine a lot faster.

The first thing you should do is create a blog for your book! This is a great way how to sell an e book and is essentially free advertising. This is an area people can make posts about your book and where you can put links to your book or your author web site in the blogs.

Search engines are continuously spidering blogs and they spider all of the links within the blog. This is a fast way to get your web site on the map, but it can still take a little time and only spiders that one page.

A faster way how to sell an e book is to jump start this process by "Adding Content" for your blog to a MyYahoo or MyMSN page. The content you add is called your blog xatom address. Search engines like yahoo continuously spider their own pages. Same with MSN. You can also add each of your web pages to your Yahoo and MSN home pages for effective results.

Submitting your author or book web site to online directories is a great way to improve your site popularity, traffic, and exposure. This is called an incoming link!

Submit your site to AllTheWebsites.org to start getting your site recognized right away.

Most Popular Websites is another great directory resource that will add value to your site in the form of traffic and link popularity.

Once you are finished setting up your account and submit your site to these two directories, look for more online search directories using the major search engines. They are a dime a dozen, so look for the very best ones to link to your site. Make sure to check the Alexa ranking of the site you want to link to to make sure it is worth linking to. A lower number is better. Linking to too many lame directories will actually lower your link popularity since most of them ask for recipricol links back to their website.

Another common method of how to sell an e book is getting your word out to the world using targeted traffic and email marketing. There are thousands upon thousands of sources of this type of marketing, so I can't list them here. But all you have to do to find them is to search the net for "targeted email marketing" or "unique targeted visitors". Most of these sources cost money and a lot of them do not produce the awesome results you'd expect for their price. Just be careful with which companies you work with.

Try to find sources that target fiction readers of all genres or your specific genre. If you write science fiction, you don't want to target romance readers.

For the targeted visitors, simply supply your home page URL. For email campaigns, use your sales letter that you worked up for your home or start page.

There are also hundreds of free methods for driving targeted traffic to your site such as traffic exchanges and banner exchanges.

There are several online bookstores that deal directly with e books and hard copy books. The best way how to sell an e book using these sources is to do a little research and find book selling sites that allow you to submit information about your book.

A great place to start is eBay.com which is an awesome tool for selling anything. You can start your own store through eBay that links your products to their list. Or you can set up a link every 7 days with a set price after your set up an eBay account.

Amazon.com also offers ways to sell your own books on its site. This is where well known publishers have a better advantage since they have their own submission methods to get your book to their sites. But this does cost a pretty penny and most of the profits go to everyone but you.

Another way how to sell an e book and to drive traffic to your site is to have your link placed in web sites that relate to your book or that link back to your book. These sites can be fiction related or content related. You can use search engines to find such web sites that either allow you to link to them or exchange links (you put their link on your site, they put your link on their site).

If you review someone's related fiction book or add a post to their blog, you can add your link back to your website in your signature block. You can even add your website links to such places as MySpace, Facebook, or your very own blog you write for you book.

Linking is usually free and can really drive a lot of traffic to your site if the site you are linking to receives a lot of traffic every month, something to consider when linking. You want sites to link to you without having to link back to them that are related in some way to your book.

A strong advantage of publishing your book through a publisher is that they submit your ISBN to all of the major bookstores throughout the country for you. They already have the contacts and methods in place to do this very easily.

It takes a lot of research to learn how to sell an e book, but you too can submit your books to these major bookstores by contacting those bookstores to see how to do this. You want to target bookstores that sell similar books to yours, otherwise you will be wasting your time.

Before publishing using a large book reseller source, you should first ensure your book is of highest quality possible. Remember, as a self-publisher, you are judged on your book content as well as layout, correctness, and proper format.

I have chosen a personal favorite company that makes publishing your book easy and doesn't cost you a penny out of pocket to actually publish a book. Learn how you can publish and how to sell an e book through a secondary source to boost your book sales.

So, once you've learned how to sell an e book and and have actually made some sales, try your own Fiction Book Marketing System to start selling your book!

Jason W. Moser is a self-published author and master niche website manager. He has published several books and self-help articles for fiction writers including How to Sell an e book Using Free or Low Cost Marketing Techniques!. Jason has retired from the Navy and now lives in Chesapeake, Virginia with his wife.

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