

Ask HN: How do I bootstrap selling an E-book - jmeyers

I have a niche site in home wine making, www.frugalwinemaking.com. I have also been teaching classes on home wine making for about 2 years now. I've decided to create an e-book on how to make wine and would like to sell it from my site.  My hosting provider wants 49.99\month for a package to sell E-books.<p>I've been following the discussions here on selling e-books (sorry don't have the link), which is part o the reason I'm doing this, but now that I'm thinking about implementing it I have a couple questions?<p>1. Is there a better, less expensive way, to start selling an E-book?<p>2. Do I need to set up a company to start selling e-books? (I'm located in Pittsburgh, PA USA)<p>This site is something I do to try and "find my passion". It is built on Wordpress. I don't have any illusions that this will make me lots of money, but I'd be happy if I could make enough to cover my hosting costs.<p>Thanks in advance for any advice!
======
mikecane
eBooks are my thing so let me save you time and energy: Format it for Kindle
and sell it via Amazon, PERIOD. That's where people go to buy eBooks, period.
They have at least 80% of the market and it's not worth it to try to fight
that. Most of your customers are bound to have Kindles too.

~~~
jmeyers
Excellent idea, it never occurred to me to try and sell this on Amazon. I
think in the spirit of "bootstrapping" this would be step 2 or 3 on the list
due to the start up costs.

~~~
ScottWhigham
It never occurred to you to sell your ebook on Amazon? I'm not trying to be
disrespectful or anything but whoa.

~~~
jmeyers
No offense taken.

I will be the first one to admit that I don't know everything. It never
occurred to me, in part, because I had misconceptions about the barriers to
entry. Those misconceptions have been corrected because of this post.

Simply put, I thought it would be more expensive to publish on Amazon. :)

~~~
mikecane
You were probably thinking of print, not eBook.

------
bakbak
Try payloadz.com - they auto-link to paypal, basic account is free and your
customer will be able to download book automatically, it cant get better than
this :-) you can go on vacation and dont even have to check emails but pls
keep checking bank account :-) --- alternatively you may also try selling your
ebook thru clickbank.com ... GOOD LUCK

------
mootothemax
Surely the cheapest way would be to create a sales button in PayPal (Log in,
click "Profile", click "My saved buttons") and then email the book to anyone
who pays. If your book (I hope!) turns out to be a seller you can invest the
money, otherwise do it by hand :-)

~~~
jmeyers
Would there be a way to set up Paypal to auto email the book to the customer?
If I were a paying customer, I'm not sure I would want to wait to get my book.
I think the expectation of buying an e-book is to get it instantly...

~~~
mootothemax
Yeah totally possible. PayPal supplies an HTML form as part of the code they
give you. All you need to do is add a hidden element with a name of notify_url
and set the value to a PHP script on your site. PayPal will do an http post to
that script and one of the fields they post is payer_email, so you could set
up a PHP script to email the ebook to that email address.

Now, this is all horribly insecure - if someone discovered the name of their
script you can see how easy it'd be to get it to email the ebook to whoever -
but for no-cost boot strap solution, it'd do the job initially.

I'd happily lend you a hand getting started with this stuff, my email address
is in my profile.

------
swalberg
ejunkie.com is a lot cheaper. Darren Rowse over at problogger.net has done
several successful ebooks through them, and there are several Wordpress-
ejunkie tutorials out there.

I'm not an accountant, but I'd imagine that you'd declare this as self-
employed income.

~~~
nhangen
Correct, E-Junkie is $5/month and works for 99% of uses.

------
the_unknown
As mikecane pointed out - get your book on Amazon. I've found that 80% of my
book sales come via Amazon - if possible put out an ebook version and a
publish-on-demand through them as well as people still do go for the physical
book often enough to make it worth the small investment in time to get both
set up.

You do have to deal with Amazon taking their cut of the sales but they have
the market size to more than make up for this.

ebook: <http://dtp.amazon.com> publish-on-demand: <http://www.createspace.com>

------
jmeyers
Thank you everyone, I think I have a rough draft of my plan now.

1\. Sell my book via either payloadz or ejunkie. I want to investigate the
reputation of each service, but I like the free account to start on payloadz.

2\. If sales can cover my costs so far, and can pay for the cost of moving to
Amazon, sell on Amazon.

3\. If sales on Amazon cover my costs, add paperback print on demand.

How does that look for a business plan?

~~~
ncash
Combine steps 1 and 2. It is free to list your book with Amazon, so go ahead
and do it from the start in addition to selling on your own site.

Alternatively, you can use a distribution service. I run Book Hatchery
(www.bookhatchery.com), a web service that helps authors publish their books
digitally. You can sign up for free and we'll format your book and get it
listed on Amazon, B&N, and Apple. We also have a paid plan at $25/mo that
provides you ISBNs (which normally cost $125 and required by Apple and some
other ebook retailers), print on-demand help, and some other features. We are
a startup working with an alpha product, so our service is constantly
evolving. Of course we'd like all of the feedback we can get, especially from
authors :)

Also, regarding question #2, that choice is up to you. For most authors
selling ebooks you can simply operate as a sole proprietor (no fancy/expensive
legal work required). If you ever make some reasonable money from your books
you might consider forming an LLC.

------
byoung2
I'm not sure what you get for $50/month, but I had an ebook site a few years
ago, and I wrote a custom script that automatically watermarked the PDF with
the PayPal email address of the buyer. It was just plain PHP so I could host
it on my $6/month unlimited domain shared hosting along with 50 other sites I
had there, making the cost negligible.

------
michael_dorfman
If the $50/month package does what you want it to do, it sounds like a great
move to me. Unless you are going to seriously underprice your e-books, you
only have to sell a couple each month to make your nut.

Have you done a dry test to gauge the interest out there?

~~~
jmeyers
I have not done testing to gauge interest yet. I was looking at what else is
out there and the sites I have seen look like they are just there to make
money. The material I looked at doesn't cover what I go over in class, so I
think I can offer something new.

So how would I go about testing interest??

~~~
michael_dorfman
Well, the classic way is to set up a web site describing the book, which has a
"Buy" button. If/when people click, you explain the the book is not available
yet, and collect their email address to notify them when it is available.
Then, you pay for some Adwords traffic (say, $25 worth) to drive people to the
site, and see what your Conversion Rate is.

In your case, though, if you already have a website in that niche that gets
decent traffic, there are probably simpler ways to take the pulse of your
current readers.

