Online Article Directories Should Get Into the E-Book Business, Let Me Explain

With the deluge of information, it is getting harder and harder to find the information you need, or the information you seek regardless of the area of human endeavor. If you are in business for yourself you need this information to make good decisions, and you need to stay up on everything and ahead of your competition when any new innovation comes into your field.

This is why most business people like myself have virtual radar for information in their sector, take Google News alerts, and surf the news in their industry almost on a daily basis. Wouldn't it be better if we can get all of this information consolidated and available to us so we can read it all at once? I believe so, therefore I would like to display a new concept I have, but before I do I would like to enlighten you as to how I came about this thought.

You see, there was an interesting article published on October 15, 2012 in The WRAP (covering Hollywood) titled; "Chicago Tribune Launches Ebook Initiative - but L.A. Times Opts Out," by Alexander C. Kaufman which stated;

"Tribune Company has kicked off an ebook initiative in partnership with Agate Publishing, collecting stories and photos from the Chicago Tribune and two other newspapers and selling them as digital long-form features. Tribune, has already released about two dozen e-books since spring, has strung together archived work from its namesake paper and the Orlando Sentinel and sold the e-books for $4.99."

Is this a viable concept? Sure, and I believe they should be taking this to a whole new level. You see, I myself clip articles out of magazines, newspapers, and save electronic news articles to my "favorites" or "plus them" on Google for instance. Now then, for my e-reader wouldn't it be nice to pick all the articles with certain key words and then have them compiled for me into an eBook format on my topics? It's a natural.

What if the top online article directories which had over 1 million articles on a multitude of different subjects allowed an e-reader customer to specify certain authors, in certain categories of subject matter, along with certain dates to search through their directory and collect all the articles which fit into that criteria, and then make them into an e-book. What if each title of each article became a chapter on the table of contents, and each article was listed in the e-book, perhaps 100 to 150 articles in each e-book?

What if they sold those e-books for $2.99 in formats which might be available on Kindles, Nooks, tablets, or iPads? Wouldn't that be a good idea, and solve the problem which I discussed in the first paragraph? Wouldn't that be an excellent business model to pursue? How hard would it be? The whole thing could be automated. People could order an e-book on demand with the information that they wanted, leaving all the other debris behind. Please consider all this and think on it.

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What Should You Charge For Your E-Book?

Now that you have spent valuable time and effort creating and writing your e-book, you will now be wondering how best to price it. Some writers feel they have to sell their first e-book at a low price, just because it's their first attempt, but you need to consider that a low price can give the impression that it is of little value. You know that is not the case, so think carefully before you set a price.

When planning the marketing stage of your e-book, take time to carefully consider this crucial step. Try not to under-price - as I said in the introduction, readers will perhaps judge the value of your book because of its price. Some sellers suggest that you start with a fairly high price, then embark on your marketing campaign and promote it at every opportunity available to you.

A well-known strategy used is to do your own type of survey. Some sellers survey their customers directly regarding pricing. If they have already bought from you, their opinions are valuable and realistic. Others test prices by creating a few sales pages, all running at the same time, but displaying different prices. Each sales page would contain exactly the same sales copy - the price would be the only difference. This then allows you to check and compare the conversion rate between visitors and sales for each price. Many find this an easy way of working out the optimum price for your product and this is a method you may want to put in place.

Because the e-book is a digital product, it can be particularly difficult to actually put a price on it. When you buy a printed book, it is a hard copy you can read and pass on to others and its cost is determined by paper, design, printing and production costs as well as marketing. These costs are not reflected in the production of an e-book as readers are downloading them digitally. However it is important that you do not underestimate the value of the time you spent collating your ideas and the quality of the information you have produced.

A lot of successful information products provide readers with solutions to their problems and they are willing to pay for this service with the facility of being able to download it right away. If they see that you are providing realistic, valuable and informative material, you will find that they will order from you again and again. Don't forget to capture their details to form your own mailing list which you can use for further promotions.

Quite a lot to consider when pricing your e-book!

I wish you every success.

Self Publishing for Book Publishers With Print-On-Demand   2 Ways To Monetize Your Ebook   Have You Thought Of Creating Your Own Information Products?   A History of E-Books   How an eBook Makes You an Expert in Your Field