Articles
The Author of 101 Ways to Promote Your eBook-for FREE! Reveals How to Sell Your eBook by Chopping it Up!
By Rusty Fischer
While promoting your eBook may seem like a daunting task, the following marketing tip is one option that was put into place the moment you finished writing the book!
BE A LUMBERJACK!
Let’s say you’ve writing an eBook on gardening. Let’s say you named your eBook “Gardening for Goofballs!” Let’s say your eBook, Gardening for Goofballs, is 50,000 instructive words designed specifically to draw out the green thumb in all of us. How do you promote it? Sure, you can throw up a Website, pay for advertising in a hundred different gardening newsletters, or put up a billboard on I-95! Or, you could simply revisit your manuscript and begin chopping it up!
First things first. Take out that contract you signed with your ePublisher and read it carefully. Somewhere buried within the percentage of royalties you’ll receive on CD sales and the term of the contract, you will find a stipulation allowing you to post up to a certain amount of the book on the Web for promotional purposes. I’ve worked with several ePublishers by now, and this is pretty standard fare. My current contract says I can post up to 30% of the manuscript for promotional purposes.
CRUNCHING THE NUMBERS!
Hey, it may not sound like much, but let’s do the math. At 50,000 words, your gardening opus is a fairly large eBook. Cut away 30%, and you’ve got 15,000 words free and clear before your ePublisher picks up the phone and calls Ed Bradley! And, since most Website, newsletter, and zine editors prefer articles that are below 800 words, that’s almost 19 whole articles you can pitch! Not bad for a day’s work.
BACK TO THE BASICS!
First, revisit your manuscript and look for stretches of your writing that can lend themselves naturally to nice, 800-900 word articles. Something like “how to buy ten pairs of gardening gloves for a dollar” or “where to get great seeds half-price,” would make any gardening Website editor drool. Cut and paste those 800 words into a separate document and give it a snappy title that will really turn reader’s heads, such as “Go Glove Crazy!” or “Save on Seeds!”
Just as important, give each and every one of your articles a subhead, such as “The Author of Gardening for Goofballs Reveals How To Get More Gloves For Less Bucks!” This brief blurb establishes you as an expert immediately, and if you can manage to work the title of your book into your article once or twice, it also establishes your title in the reader’s mind.
EASY FORMATTING FOR eSUBMISSIONS!
Next, format your new articles for easy eSubmission. This involves getting rid of paragraph indents and putting a space in between paragraphs instead. Lose all that fancy formatting like bold and italic type, and use ALL CAPS for emphasis instead. (But not too often, as it gets REALLY annoying!) Save the files in an easy-to-remember format as well, such as “Cheap Gloves–Author,” in case an editor asks for an attachment. This gives her the title and your name up front, in case she forgets what it’s about a week or two after you send it. Great, now you’re ready to go.
BOOKMARK THIS!
Now, run an Internet search for compatible keywords, such as “garden,” “gardening,” “plants,” “flowers,” etc. Bookmark the sites that either run gardening columns, articles, or ideas, until all of your search terms have been expired. Chances are, you’re going to have a pretty big list! With your articles eFormatted and saved accordingly, start with the first site in your bookmarks and contact the editor. A name is good, it sets your submission apart from the daily amount of Spam most editors get, and keep your opening short and brief.
I usually say something like this:
My name is Rusty Fischer and I am the author of 101 Ways to Promote Your eBook-For FREE! I found your site both interesting and useful, and was hoping your visitors might enjoy the 800-word article that I’ve pasted below. It is about promoting your eBook and I think it is both entertaining and educational. I hope you agree. Thanks in advance for your time and consideration and I look forward to hearing from you.
Then I include my contact information, a few asterisks to separate it, and the entire 800-word article which has already been formatted for easy eSubmission. That’s it. Once you write the first one, simply copy the entire message from your “sent mail” folder and paste it into a new email for each new editor. Before you send it, type in the appropriate editor’s name and ship it off!
PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE!
Chances are, you will probably tire of sending off articles before you run out of bookmarks! After submitting to all of them, however, sit back and see what happens. Many will respond, some will not. Most editors in today’s fast-paced world are looking for something to fill their sites, newsletters and zines with, and find quality articles by experts to be few and far between. You may not be offered any money for these articles, but you will almost always get a three to four sentence byline after the article, complete with a hyperlink to, what else, the ordering information for your eBook!
Putting back on your accountant’s cap, you can see just how profitable those 15,000 words can be. What will most likely happen is that you will settle in with a friendly group of trustworthy editors who enjoy your work and want to help you help themselves! You will farm out your 19 stories to them over time, complete with numerous references, not to mention hyperlinks, to your gardening book, and eventually establish a Web presence that you were formally lacking.
Who knows, Gardening for Goofballs just could grow as big as Jack and the Beanstalk!
*****
Rusty Fischer is the author of FREEDOM TO FREELANCE: The Editor of The Buzz On Series Reveals How To FIND, GET and KEEP Your Next Freelance Job, available for sale as an eBook from www.athinapublishing.com/fischer.htm.
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