Have you ever held a belief so strongly that it resonated deep within your core, even when everyone around you disagreed? I'm currently in that situation, and have been for years. The belief? That ebook fiction won't sell. It's a common belief, and you probably share it too. After all, people love to curl up with a physical book to read fiction. But I love fiction, both reading and writing it. I've even sold a novel, "Fatal Games," in 1989. I'd love to write another, but I don't want to bear the cost of printing. So, I'm considering an ebook.
I'm going to try creating an ebook, despite my reservations. The risk? About 40 hours and $40. I have a great story ready to go. Sure, it might all go down the drain, but at least I'll know for sure. There's a slim chance that some people will read fiction in ebook format. So, I'm going to give it a shot.
I'll be using BizMinisites.Com, which offers a great plan for mini-site builders. For just $9.95 per quarter, you get 500K of disk space and lots of supporting extras. It's a smooth-running service with great download times. You don't even need a domain name, but you can use one if you like.
Next, I'll use the keyword suggestion tool at GoTo.Com to find relevant keywords. I'll start with "male fiction" and "male adventure," as these are the categories my story fits into.
This step is crucial, as there's no point optimizing a page for keywords nobody uses. I'll then head to Google to enter my keywords there, hoping to find some with low competition.
This is where the time may fly. It takes a while to figure out what to write about. Topics that work well with the keyword phrases selected. The home page will be the sales presentation, with the major content that blurb you see on the backs of some paperbacks in bookstores. Something to hook the reader into wanting to read the book.
The goal is to have all pages point directly to male adventure or male fiction, thus creating a small theme site, currently popular with some search engines.
Once the pages are uploaded and double-checked, I'll submit them to the search engines. Then, I'll wait. It takes a while these days to get listed.
I'm going to use an approach that again is not supposed to work with fiction. However, it works great with How To titles, so I'll give it a try.
I'll let visitors download the book and read the first 50 to 60 pages or so. They will order only if interested in reading the rest of it.
With the above, the site purpose becomes very simple: Generate a download of the book. This is a lot easier to achieve than actually closing the sale. Given any hits at all, the effectiveness of the site in getting this job done will be easy to measure.
If sales occur, I'll know the number of hits to get a download, and the number of downloads to get a sale. Thus I'll know the value of a hit. If it seems likely that I could make $100/month, with upside potential, I'll launch more sites.
If this works, I'll have a site that cost many hundreds of hours to put together, particularly when you add in some scheme for deciding upon new titles to offer and converting them to ebooks. Dollar costs might be more than $4000. But it will be a winner, for I will have demonstrated at every step along the way that there are enough people who will read ebook fiction to make it fly.
Building a site from scratch and then accepting failure a year out would be a disaster. But with the minimal risks in putting together that first mini-site, this is going to be fun. I can easily afford a little time and a few bucks. And what if it pays off?
What crazy idea do you have down deep inside that makes people chuckle or laugh every time you bring it up? However wild it may be, no matter how many scoff at it, risk a little time and a few bucks. You may be able to demonstrate you were right after all. And you'll be on your way to success. And if it flops? No problem. Just try an even crazier idea. Keep it up, and you'll find gold. Lots of it.
Never, Ever Release Any Of Your Rights To Anyone
One of the grandest scams on the Web, which goes largelyunnoticed, is for a web-based bookseller or publisher to requiresome rights to your work in exchange for the service to beprovided. Many demand the electronic rights, for example.
The Hits That Matter Most
So you know what hits mean. Unique hits or user sessions,I mean. And you know what CR means. Right? If so, you're ingreat shape, for many people don't. They think they do. But they've got it wrong.
Customer Personality Types: Does It Matter?
Marketing types are fond of classifying people intocategories. Here are four which I took from "Differentiate OrDie," by Jack Trout with Steve Rivkin. (John Wiley & Sons, NewYork, 2000, p15.) Only the first few words of each are includedhere.
