You just had your print edition converted to ebook editions, meaning ePub and Mobi formats. Now what? You need to upload the file to online retailers who will provide you with their digital rights management. However, before uploading the files, you’ll want to preview them and see how the print edition has translated into the ebook format so you can request changes if necessary.
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Viral Marketing with eBooks
Rather than asking the question: How can we market ebooks? I’m going to discuss using ebooks as a marketing tool. Sometimes an ebook can be more valuable when it is given away. If you need to promote your brand or your business products and services, free ebooks can be very costs-effective advertising. Any book, product, or business, can be promoted with free ebooks or eguides.
The method is called “viral marketing.” In the case of ebooks, an author, publisher, or business, creates an ebook or eguide that contains within it a brand and/or product. People download the ebook from the sponsor website or social media profile and pass it along to others.
The key to successful viral marketing with ebooks is to be sure that the ebooks offer readers something of value, such as useful information or instruction. If it is creative, well-designed, clearly written, or even humorous, people are more likely to share it. The more the ebook is shared, the more people get to know your business’s products and services. Ultimately, ebooks can help you build your brand and expand your audience.
When you sell your ebooks through online retailers such as Amazon, Barns & Noble, or Apple iBooks, a percentage of what you make goes to pay for the Digital Rights Management (DRM) and tech support they provide.
Just as software companies want to protect their intellectual property and monitize it, many authors want to do the same. To make this possible, online retailers, such as Amazon, Apple, and Barn & Noble, have created DRM (Digital Right Management) software that allows readers to buy and transfer ebooks from the internet to special devices or to desktops that run their software.
While some people point out that this software can be hacked, most consumers use the software legally and authors are able to receive a royalty payment for their work. And some authors have done very well making money from ebooks.
Enhanced PDF eBooks and How to Use Them
The term PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It is a file format that captures all the elements of a digital document so that you can view it, navigate it, print it, and easily share it online. Many software programs allow you to convert files into PDFs, such as Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, Apple Text Edit, and many others.
A book that has been beautifully designed for print can be saved as a PDF, and the PDF will—if created correctly—preserve all the book’s features exactly as they are. In many ways, such PDFs are a type of eBook, and the most economical type to create, provided the print book already exists.
The two most popular ebook formats used by publishers and online retailers are ePub and Mobi. Because some retailers carry only ePub ebooks and others carry only Mobi, most publisher will publish two ebook editions, one for ePub and one for Mobi. Both of these formats offer essentially the same appearance and functionality.
Both formats allow the book page to take the shape and size of whatever screen they are displayed on. Likewise the type can be scaled by the reader to suit personal preferences. These two features enable ePubs and Mobis to be read confortably on numerous devices including cell phones.