Aiden Roberts

Me again with my big ideas

I have a couple of sites and at least one idea that IMHO would be ideal for selling an ebook, more specifically and ebook that I want to write but here is the problem:

How do I write an ebook?

Before you start telling me to get off my arse and do my own research; I have G'd it and got the usual spivs wanting $99 off me but if I signed up today they would let me have it for the special price of $29.99 with 3000 bonus ebooks about making cookies and soap in my grandmas shed.

What I want to know is are there any free ebook writing software packages out there, is it basically a pdf or something else?

Once I have written my books for my websites(wordpress) if I want to charge for them how would I go about it, PayPal and download from somewhere or is it worth selling them through affiliates eg clickbank, how easy is it selling through clickbank, are there alternatives to clickbank?

Has anyone here on Acorn any experience of writing and selling ebooks good or bad?

I appreciate there are a lot of questions in here but your thoughts would be useful in helping me decide the validity in the idea.

Thanks in advance

Aiden

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tifosi

Probably best to have a word with http://www.acorndomains.co.uk/members/diablo.html

cc976a

It really surprises me how many apparent sales come through those nasty one page sales pages

Basically for writing just Word and PDF convertor. This will produce your ebook.

As for sales you'll want an automatic electronic delivery / access to secure page only accessible once confirmed payment through PayPal (check out PayPal IPN)

I've built sites selling these, with secure area for downloads, but not done so through Wordpress - sure there must be a theme or plugin that will allow you to sell ebooks and auto-deliver?

Not sold through Clickbank but if your book is open to an international audience then why not. There is an army of people in the states marketing peoples products. Make the sales page inviting and keep commissions generous.

seemly

Hey Aiden,

Unfortunately, I cannot help you beyond this point, and even others may be able to point you in a better direction than this, but...

If you want to create a text based pdf with no/minimal imagery, then I am pretty sure you can save out word documents as a pdf? If not directly from the version of word you have, then google docs can export/save as pdf.

If you want more of a design feel to your PDF, then adobe indesign would be the obvious choice, as it is the industry standard (in the design world) for things like this.

An open source alternative to indesign seems to return results for:
http://www.scribus.net/canvas/Scribus

Alternatively, get writing the document itself, go to freelancers.com or similar and pay someone to smarten it up nicely - making it seem more of a nice, quality and worthwhile purchase.

Just my 2 penneth.
Best of luck with your venture.

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Blossom

http://easydigitaldownloads.com/

Aiden Roberts

Brilliant info, thanks. I am getting quite excited about the whole project and it fits in with the sites I have and want too build.

Thanks again!

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The Perfect Blog - Yes you can still make money blogging!

Aiden Roberts

Great advice tifosi and I loved his book.

Cheers

OhNoNotHim

Why not write the content THEN look at turning it into an ebook?

Aegean

This blog is quite an informative read:

http://bloggingwithamy.com/how-to-wr...ook-the-guide/

SamSites

A lot of Ebook publishers end up creating ebooks from content. A nice example would be George from entrepreneur.co.uk. It's a blog and going back most post's form chapters, derived near exactly from each of his blog posts. Maybe he planned the book all along, but blogging or writing content is a nice and easy way to start of before setting up a ebook.