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    How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks All for Free
    How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks All for Free
    How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks All for Free
    Ebook163 pages2 hours

    How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks All for Free

    By Jason Matthews

    2.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Have you written a book? Are you weighing options of what to do next?

    Then consider creating ebooks, because ebooks and the devices that read them are the fastest growing sectors in the publishing industry. The tips within will save you money, time and energy while putting you on the fast track to selling ebooks. You'll learn to:

    • Build and Maximize Social Media and Online Platform
    • Create a Professional Blog Site
    • Design effective Ebook Covers
    • Format and Upload for Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, iPad iBookstore and other Retailers
    • Convert your Documents to any Format (epub, mobi, pdf, lrf and others)
    • Create a Professional Website
    • Utilize SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to rise in Google-Yahoo-Bing rankings
    • Sell ebooks with PayPal from your own Sites
    • Use PR (Public Relations) to Drive Traffic to You

    …and much more. Plus you're going to do all these things for free!

    The book is packed with tutorials and over 150 links to sites and software that will help you accomplish these goals. Simple enough for beginners and relevant to experts who could use extra guidance.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherXinXii
    Release dateMar 31, 2011
    ISBN9781452402406
    How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks All for Free
    Author

    Jason Matthews

    Jason Matthews was an officer of the CIA’s Operations Directorate. Over a thirty-three-year career he served in multiple overseas locations, spoke six foreign languages, and engaged in clandestine collection of national security intelligence, specializing in denied-area operations. Matthews conducted recruitment operations against Soviet–East European, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Caribbean targets. As Chief in various CIA Stations, he collaborated with foreign partners in counterproliferation and counterterrorism operations. His first novel, Red Sparrow, won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel and was made into a major motion picture starring Jennifer Lawrence. He continued the Red Sparrow trilogy with Palace of Treason and The Kremlin’s Candidate. Jason Matthews passed away in 2021.   

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    • 1/5
      This guy stole the book from Jason Mathew, he also has book with different title but same content inside. Seems China based publisher. What’s going on? Doesn’t Scribe check for cheats or does this china publisher own rights, which seems unlikely as not much profit in this book, unless they copied thousands of books.

    Book preview

    How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks All for Free - Jason Matthews

    Author

    Introduction

    Okay, you've written a book or are in the process of writing one. Congratulations! I don't say that lightly either. As an author of two full length novels I know writing a book can be one of the hardest things you'll ever do, especially if you've put the effort and dedication into writing a great book and not just a bunch of fluff on pages.

    But what next; what do you do once it's written? Have you heard the saying, that writing the book is half the battle while marketing it is the other half? When I first heard this comment, I was nearly finished writing my first novel. I thought, that's crazy, because writing this book has taken me years. No way can marketing it be as difficult. Unfortunately I was in for a surprise in the form of a hard lesson, as they usually seem to be in my life. Advice like this came and I thought, yeah, maybe for someone else, but mine will be a success right out of the gates because my book is really good.

    And I still believe success is coming, it's just the right out of the gates part that I've come to realize was painfully inaccurate. Many of us like to think our words are golden and when we finish writing our books, our certain best-sellers, that they're going to fly right out of our hands and into the eyes of readers around the globe. Agents and publishers will beat a path to our door to whisk us off our feet with huge advances, offers for sequels and world tour book signings. Movie producers will fight over the rights to make the next Oscar winning best picture. We may even imagine what we'll wear on the red carpet at Oscar night and how our speech will go… thanking the little people… the tearful moment… etc.

    It's a great dream, one that I've been dreaming for several years now. I haven't given up on the ultimate goals of the dream, but I have altered my timeframe for all of this to happen. It came not by choice but out of necessity.

    And please know this; I'm not here to squash anyone's dream. In fact, just the opposite. I encourage everyone to dream big. Hopefully your book, or books, will be tremendously successful and touch the lives of millions of readers. What I am here to do is share what I've learned along the way, advice that will save you vast amounts of time, money and frustration and also help you avoid many of the costly mistakes that I made after finishing my first novel. Because I found out the hard way that there are dozens of things that could have been done FOR FREE that would have been more effective for marketing and selling my books than the things I did.

    (Side note; this advice is not about how to write a book. I'm assuming you've already done that or are nearly finished. This is about what comes next and how to maximize results with minimal effort in the shortest time frame with the least amount of money from your pocket.)

    Let me share a little background about my experience.

    Back in 1990 I graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in RTVMP (Radio, Television and Motion Picture). I moved to Los Angeles and got some entry level jobs at film industry companies. The jobs weren't exciting, as I mostly drove around the LA highways as an errand runner or PA (Production Assistant) and cursed at the congestion of traffic.

    Like so many people in LA, I also wrote a screenplay on the side. I believed my idea was terrific, and if I could just finish my screenplay and get it into the hands of the right person, voila, everything would fall into place.

    Of course it didn't happen that way. After a year of constantly driving, my car's engine died. I then lost my job, went broke and left LA for the mountains of Lake Tahoe to become a ski-bum and re-evaluate my life mission. When I wasn't skiing I worked as a snowmaker in the winter and a house painter in the summer. On the side I managed to finish that screenplay but trying to find an agent from Tahoe wasn't easy, especially before the internet, and the agent I signed with probably had little to no real connections.

    Years passed. Nothing happened. I got very good at skiing and painting houses, but my story just existed in some pages on my shelf and in my head. My agent disappeared.

    More years passed. By 2000, some voice from within started screaming, hey, you've still got to write this story and get the movie made! I knew it was correct but didn't know what to do. Fortunately, I'd read a few books that had great story lines but were poorly written. The crazy thing was that they became bestsellers. It made me think I could do it too.

    Near the end of 2000 I began writing the novel version of my screenplay. I worked with it on and off, sometimes being diligent and sometimes not. It took several years, but I eventually wrote a full length novel and people liked it. Originally it was called The Big Bang: Notes from Looking Within. Not wanting to repeat the hassle of agents and publishers, I self-published it POD style (Print On Demand) in September of 2005. The title changed to The Little Universe and I also began writing the sequel, Jim's Life.

    Looking back on the past four years, I did two things for my writing career. I wrote my second novel and marketed the first one in all the worst ways possible. It was so easy to spend thousands of dollars on things that sounded good but just didn't work.

    Recently after finishing the sequel I realized a great truth. There was no way I could afford to market my books anymore with expensive ideas and no guarantee that they'd work. I made a firm decision a few months back. This was the concept;

    I will only market my books in ways that are free or extremely cheap!

    Guess what? The free stuff actually works better than the expensive stuff. Who knew?

    The Wrong Ways to Spend Your Money

    The following is a list of things I tried that either didn't work or were not cost effective. There are plenty of things that I haven't tried, but anything that requires a fair amount of money with no guarantee can go here too.

    Printing and Shipping.

    I spent hundreds of dollars each year printing copies of my screenplay and then novel and sending them to agents and publishers. Each copy cost around $12 to $15 to make, plus the shipping to get it there and the SASE (Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope) to return it when they eventually would. So each package totaled close to $20 with the shipping, and I felt bad knowing I cost at least one large tree its life with all that wasted paper. Months later I'd invariably get my work returned with a note from the agency/publisher that read something like this;

    Thank you for your interest in our agency/publishing house. We have reviewed your materials and determined that it doesn't meet the criteria of what we're presently looking for. We wish you the best of luck in your endeavors as we know how nearly impossible it is to get published. Hahahahaha.

    Of course I've embellished on the ha-ha-ha part as they were always polite, but that's how it felt at the post office after reading those rejection letters that were probably mailed by the same twenty-year old intern who passed on my novel. (I'm clearly not bitter about it, am I?)

    Print On Demand (POD) Publishing.

    I went with Authorhouse. They were the biggest outfit and really sucked me in. I went with a fairly extensive package of bells and whistles, including the editing and some of the marketing services. I spent around $3,200 just to get my initial run of 100 books made. After that I could order more books for around $9/apiece for print runs of 200 copies or more. Knowing I could only sell my books for perhaps $15, I soon realized this was going to be an extremely difficult way to earn any real money. And coupled with the fact that I gave away so many free copies for reviews in the hope that new readers would generate more readers and someday orders, I sold far fewer than I needed to turn any profit.

    The other bad thing about POD publishing, and this is the part that the companies don't tell you, is that large book stores don't buy POD books. They just don't. It's like an unwritten rule. If you get one of their buyers on the phone, they'll tell you it's because they can't get them at a 40% discount rate. Instead it's just 35%. But there's more to it than that. Large publishing houses spend big bucks on advertising, including location. Location is everything in book stores, and the big publishers pay to make sure that their books, and not those of POD or independent authors, will have the best shelf display and placements.

    My advice is to stay away from POD unless you absolutely must have some print copies made. And if you do, do it for free (CreateSpace). We'll get to more on that in a later section.

    Webdesigners.

    I spent thousands of dollars on two different professional webdesigners. In each case they did their best to interpret my concept and come up with websites that worked for me. But ultimately the pages did little to advance my career and book sales, plus I could have created them myself for free. I just didn't know that back then. Had I known how easy it was to create my own websites for free; it would have saved me massive amounts of time, money and frustration. And the other thing about hiring a webdesigner is the wait. Often it takes days or even weeks to get a few simple words changed or added.

    Imagine not wanting to email your designer and ask them to add a paragraph because the last time they did something like that it took six days and cost $50.

    Advertising.

    It's easy to spend huge dollars on advertising whether it's radio, TV, magazines or newspapers. To get any kind of decent coverage, the amounts they'll demand will be outrageous and the results won't have any guarantee whatsoever. I ran a radio ad that broadcasted in my hometown and beyond for about $500

    which aired a few times a day for three months. That resulted in a couple of sales. I also ran a small magazine ad for about $100 that I believe added up to zero sales. And it would have been easy to spend much more than that on major newspaper or magazine ads. The simple fact of advertising this way is that it's grossly expensive and probably only makes sense with a book that is already successful and known.

    Book Stores.

    Another of my horrible ideas was to send a free copy of my novel to bookstores across America. I figured someone there would read my book, realize how good it was, start selling it and order more copies. So I researched bookstores across the states and mailed 150 copies at costs to me of $9 apiece plus a few dollars for shipping. I spent close to $2,000 on this half-baked idea. Did any of these book stores ever contact me for more books? Nope, not one. Did a bunch of copies show up for sale on Amazon for one penny? Yep, a huge number of them. The rest probably either got sold at a major discount or simply thrown away. It makes me sad to think how many of my books have been tossed in the garbage, and yet it was entirely my fault for not going about things smarter. In hindsight, if I

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