Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How do I bootstrap selling an E-book

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 24 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do I bootstrap selling an E-book

#11

Post by mikecane »

dwc wrote: post #9
mikecane wrote: post #8

eBooks are my thing so let me save you time and energy: Format it for Kindle and sell it via Amazon, PERIOD. That's where people go to buy eBooks, period. They have at least 80% of the market and it's not worth it to try to fight that. Most of your customers are bound to have Kindles too.

Do you have advice on publishing elsewhere in addition to Amazon? Specifically, are there exclusivity restrictions that must be negotiated away, etc.?

The only exclusivity Amazon demands is price-matching. You can't sell it lower than Amazon, period. You can still put it at Barnes & Noble, if you want, or the iBookstore. Note those are ePub, not Kindle, formats. But if either of them drop the price, Kindle will too.

Re: Ask HN: How do I bootstrap selling an E-book

#12

Post by bakbak »

Try payloadz.com - they auto-link to paypal, basic account is free and your customer will be able to download book automatically, it cant get better than this :-) you can go on vacation and dont even have to check emails but pls keep checking bank account :-) --- alternatively you may also try selling your ebook thru clickbank.com ... GOOD LUCK

Re: Ask HN: How do I bootstrap selling an E-book

#13

Post by the_unknown »

As mikecane pointed out - get your book on Amazon. I've found that 80% of my book sales come via Amazon - if possible put out an ebook version and a publish-on-demand through them as well as people still do go for the physical book often enough to make it worth the small investment in time to get both set up.

You do have to deal with Amazon taking their cut of the sales but they have the market size to more than make up for this.

ebook: http://dtp.amazon.com publish-on-demand: http://www.createspace.com

Re: Ask HN: How do I bootstrap selling an E-book

#14

Post by jmeyers »

mikecane wrote: post #8

eBooks are my thing so let me save you time and energy: Format it for Kindle and sell it via Amazon, PERIOD. That's where people go to buy eBooks, period. They have at least 80% of the market and it's not worth it to try to fight that. Most of your customers are bound to have Kindles too.

Excellent idea, it never occurred to me to try and sell this on Amazon. I think in the spirit of "bootstrapping" this would be step 2 or 3 on the list due to the start up costs.

Re: Ask HN: How do I bootstrap selling an E-book

#15

Post by jmeyers »

mootothemax wrote: post #10

Surely the cheapest way would be to create a sales button in PayPal (Log in, click "Profile", click "My saved buttons") and then email the book to anyone who pays. If your book (I hope!) turns out to be a seller you can invest the money, otherwise do it by hand :-)

Would there be a way to set up Paypal to auto email the book to the customer? If I were a paying customer, I'm not sure I would want to wait to get my book. I think the expectation of buying an e-book is to get it instantly...

Re: Ask HN: How do I bootstrap selling an E-book

#16

Post by jmeyers »

Thank you everyone, I think I have a rough draft of my plan now.

1. Sell my book via either payloadz or ejunkie. I want to investigate the reputation of each service, but I like the free account to start on payloadz.

2. If sales can cover my costs so far, and can pay for the cost of moving to Amazon, sell on Amazon.

3. If sales on Amazon cover my costs, add paperback print on demand.

How does that look for a business plan?

Re: Ask HN: How do I bootstrap selling an E-book

#17

Post by mootothemax »

jmeyers wrote: post #15
mootothemax wrote: post #10

Surely the cheapest way would be to create a sales button in PayPal (Log in, click "Profile", click "My saved buttons") and then email the book to anyone who pays. If your book (I hope!) turns out to be a seller you can invest the money, otherwise do it by hand :-)

Would there be a way to set up Paypal to auto email the book to the customer? If I were a paying customer, I'm not sure I would want to wait to get my book. I think the expectation of buying an e-book is to get it instantly...

Yeah totally possible. PayPal supplies an HTML form as part of the code they give you. All you need to do is add a hidden element with a name of notify_url and set the value to a PHP script on your site. PayPal will do an http post to that script and one of the fields they post is payer_email, so you could set up a PHP script to email the ebook to that email address.

Now, this is all horribly insecure - if someone discovered the name of their script you can see how easy it'd be to get it to email the ebook to whoever - but for no-cost boot strap solution, it'd do the job initially.

I'd happily lend you a hand getting started with this stuff, my email address is in my profile.

Re: Ask HN: How do I bootstrap selling an E-book

#18

Post by ScottWhigham »

jmeyers wrote: post #14
mikecane wrote: post #8

eBooks are my thing so let me save you time and energy: Format it for Kindle and sell it via Amazon, PERIOD. That's where people go to buy eBooks, period. They have at least 80% of the market and it's not worth it to try to fight that. Most of your customers are bound to have Kindles too.

Excellent idea, it never occurred to me to try and sell this on Amazon. I think in the spirit of "bootstrapping" this would be step 2 or 3 on the list due to the start up costs.

It never occurred to you to sell your ebook on Amazon? I'm not trying to be disrespectful or anything but whoa.

Re: Ask HN: How do I bootstrap selling an E-book

#19

Post by ncash »

jmeyers wrote: post #16

Thank you everyone, I think I have a rough draft of my plan now. 1. Sell my book via either payloadz or ejunkie. I want to investigate the reputation of each service, but I like the free account to start on payloadz. 2. If sales can cover my costs so far, and can pay for the cost of moving to Amazon, sell on Amazon. 3. If sales on Amazon cover my costs, add paperback print on demand. How does that look for a business…

Combine steps 1 and 2. It is free to list your book with Amazon, so go ahead and do it from the start in addition to selling on your own site.

Alternatively, you can use a distribution service. I run Book Hatchery (www.bookhatchery.com), a web service that helps authors publish their books digitally. You can sign up for free and we'll format your book and get it listed on Amazon, B&N, and Apple. We also have a paid plan at $25/mo that provides you ISBNs (which normally cost $125 and required by Apple and some other ebook retailers), print on-demand help, and some other features. We are a startup working with an alpha product, so our service is constantly evolving. Of course we'd like all of the feedback we can get, especially from authors :)

Also, regarding question #2, that choice is up to you. For most authors selling ebooks you can simply operate as a sole proprietor (no fancy/expensive legal work required). If you ever make some reasonable money from your books you might consider forming an LLC.

Re: Ask HN: How do I bootstrap selling an E-book

#20

Post by jmeyers »

ScottWhigham wrote: post #18
jmeyers wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent idea, it never occurred to me to try and sell this on Amazon. I think in the spirit of "bootstrapping" this would be step 2 or 3 on the list due to the start up costs.

It never occurred to you to sell your ebook on Amazon? I'm not trying to be disrespectful or anything but whoa.

No offense taken.

I will be the first one to admit that I don't know everything. It never occurred to me, in part, because I had misconceptions about the barriers to entry. Those misconceptions have been corrected because of this post.

Simply put, I thought it would be more expensive to publish on Amazon. :)

Post reply on HN