eBay Home Business Tutorial: Is Creating Ebooks With Adobe Professional A Good Idea?

In my previous eBay auction tutorials, I talked about how someone - a lot of someones - are willing to pay for your knowledge, whether it's a soup recipe, bowling tips, or just about anything!

Selling ebooks means that you don't have to spend a lot of money for inventory, and you can "deliver" your ebooks via email immediately after someone purchases them, which is a very big selling point.  What you do have to decide upon is the format in which you're going to create your ebooks.  As I mentioned in my last eBay auction tutorial, using a word processor program such as Microsoft Word isn't a good choice, since this allows a buyer to share your ebook with anyone they choose - and that takes money out of your pocket!

A format that's worked well for me in the past is creating an ebook in Portable Document Format, or PDF.  PDFs are created with one of several Adobe products, and PDFs are very professional looking.  You can create the ebook itself in MS Word, and then use Adobe Professional to create a PDF from that document.  The purchaser can then use a free program, Adobe Reader, to read the ebook.

Adobe Professional does have its drawbacks, the major one being that while you can set a password for the PDF, it's going to be the same password for all copies of a given PDF.  For example, let's say you write an ebook packed with recipes.  When you run Adobe Pro, you'll have the option to set a password, but it's going to be the same password for all copies (unless you compile it every time you sell a copy, which you don't want to do).  I can tell you from experience that people share passwords from everything to their computer to bank accounts, so having a single password for your ebooks is just about like having none at all.

Adobe Professional is also a little pricey at $450. I'm definitely not dumping on it.  Actually, I've got a copy on the computer I'm writing this article on!  However, it comes with a great many features that most likely you'll never use for creating ebooks, so why pay for them?

Adobe Pro isn't a bad choice for selling your ebooks on eBay, and if you have a copy of it already, you may choose to use it!  From my eBay ebook selling experience, you will need a more reasonably priced program that will allow you to use different passwords as well as potentially automating your entire process - and in my next eBay auction tutorial, I'll review that product's pros and cons for you.  Until then, get started on your first ebook.  I don't care if you write it in Notepad for now, just get started and give yourself a raise by selling on eBay!