Selling your book online is, quite frankly, not easy. I've been selling my books since March 2011 and I think I've learned quite a lot in that time. So here are a few thoughts and tips on the subject.

Your Website

Having your own website to promote your new eBook, or even printed book, is the best way to start promoting your book. It's your shop window and if you can attract some serious traffic to 'walk' past your window then you have a good chance of selling to them. But it has to be an attractive website, easy for users to see what's on offer and above all, pleasant to look at and read. Informative websites are a must. It's not just about pretty pictures, you have to give your potential customers information on what the book is about and make it easy for them to purchase. With a bit of thought and visiting a few other sites that do something similar to what you want to do, you will soon have a great site up and running.

That's the easy part over and done with. Now comes the hard part. If you ever thought writing a book was hard, well, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Web Traffic

Getting the right people onto your website is really, really, hard. One thing I've learned, so far, is that buying into web traffic is fraught with danger, not least of which is choosing which company's service works and which doesn't. Some will offer free traffic, the vast majority of which will bounce of your site in less time than it takes to sneeze. If you purchase web traffic it can be inexpensive and it can be expensive and it may work or it may not... most of the time it will work a little bit. You can probably expect a 0.1% sales rate at best. So for every 100,000 who land on your site you may well get sales of 100 - but it's going to cost something like $250 for good US traffic. So you will need to sell a lot of eBooks to recover that outlay if you're selling at $2.99 on Amazon.

If you decide to buy into web traffic, make sure you have some sort of online stats, like Google Analytics, and only buy in one service at a time. That way you can look at the stats and match that traffic to your sales. However, even this has a hidden problem if you're selling your book through Amazon. The one thing you will never find out is if your buyer bought direct from Amazon without going onto your website first. Bit of a bummer if you've paid a fortune out for web traffic and can't prove the sales you get came from that traffic.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization

Again, this can set you back a lot of money and there is NO guarantee it's going to work. And even if it does work, you will still have a lot of work to do on your site to make it worthwhile. It can take anything from six months to a year to get traffic onto your site. If you decide to do this yourself then you will simply have to get your site registered on as many search engines as possible and have your site set up to be SEO friendly. Then you will have to go through the process all over again. This is because you are going to have to read as much about SEO as you can, and then read some more and then realise that the advice is conflicting, because SEO is something of a unknown quantity.

Nobody, except Google and the like, knows exactly what it is that makes a website successful. On my website I originally had ten keywords, these being the words Google's (and other) search engines will use to list your site. But, after setting up the site I then read that you need lots of keywords, so I did a bit more research and found those keywords. Only to be told by an SEO 'expert' that I had too many keywords. To date, I've gone through six different variations of keywords in six months and still I'm getting contradictory information from the 'experts' in this field. Maybe it's just me being a bit thick, but I do feel that SEO, if it works, is great, but you need someone to steer you through it. I'm asking my ISP, a well know company in England, to help me out... I'll let you know in a years time if it worked.

Advertising

It's expensive is all I can tell you about advertising. Tried a freebie from Facebook and got nothing. Tried another freebie from another company and the same happened. I'm looking at Google AdWords but it's expensive and complicated. Not for the faint hearted or those who don't have deep pockets. Again, there is no guarantee as you are reliant on someone noticing what it is your trying to sell on a web page that is probably full of similar ads.

Promoting On Amazon

KDP Select is an new service that Amazon offer. Make your book exclusive to Kindle for 90 days and in return it will be part of the Kindle Owners' Lending Library for the same period and you will earn your share of a monthly fund when readers borrow your books from the library. You will also be able to promote your book as freebie download for up to 5 days during these 90 days.

The lending part of it I have no problem with, one of my titles has been loaned of over thirty times in January 2012. It's the free for 5 days I have a problem with. In January 2012, I set up two of my titles free for 5 days and I had 810 free downloads. Both titles got good reviews, four and five star, but sales from that has been a handful, not even ten. However, the good thing is that over time the good reviews will help to bring in more sales.

The most obvious thing to come out of my experience is that it takes time to promote a website in order to sell books. It's a big market and the internet is a vast place, but your website is a drop in the ocean. And just to prove a point and get myself all depressed and unhappy, tap the following into a Google search, "kindle books to read" and see what you get. My results showed 888,000 and the top four were all Amazon. My website appeared on page... well, I got fed up after page ten and gave in!

Copyright (c) Tom Kane 2012