Making Ebooks as Marketing Tools

Creating a book can be a time-consuming and iterative process. Along the way, your work evolves and benefits from feedback and input. Generating an audience early locks in customers for later. While print books are long and monolithic, creating ebooks for each completed or in-progress chapter draws your followers into your creative process and generates an opportunity to gather feedback early on. You can serialize these books as free content and then charge for the print version at the end. Ebooks self-published with Blurb can be linked for download on your website, social media or distributed to any ebook marketplace.

Kickstart Your Book

Crowd-sourced fundraising services, such as Kickstarter, are great ways to finance a self-publishing project. As your project evolves, you can distribute ebooks to your donors to keep them in the loop with relatively minimal cost and effort. Your book isn’t vaporware! You can generate buzz and interest by offering ebook copies as rewards for your pledge levels. Many Kickstarter project owners have a hard time fulfilling and distributing rewards. Ebooks are incredibly easy to distribute because you can embed a link in an email for download. This takes some pressure off the timing of creating the print version, printing, and shipping.
Blurb’s book-making tools make it easy to simultaneously create the ebook version at the same time as the print version.

While print books are long and monolithic, creating ebooks for each completed or in-progress chapter draws your followers into your creative process and generates an opportunity to gather feedback early on.

Now that your book is in print, you can offer a lower-cost version of the digital work to appeal to a broader market. You can list this book for sale in most popular digital markets. And because Blurb doesn’t take any royalty, all the profits are yours.

Blurb offers fixed-layout ebooks which are great for art, photography, and other visually rich content.

Blurb’s authoring tools make it easy to simultaneously create the ebook version at the same time as the print version.

Sell Yourself

There’s another side to ebooks too. Sometimes it’s not about selling the ebook, but using an ebook to sell you. If you’re an entrepreneur, motivational speaker, or subject expert that cares more about being booked for speaking engagements than selling actual books, an ebook can help build your case as an authority. Ebook creation with Blurb is pretty low cost, basically $9.99 the first time you create it. So, you can decide to offer it for free with the hope that it’ll help build your brand.

The rules on ebooks have yet to be written. So, go ahead, be inventive and use the economics of digital media to propel you and your work forward.