

Ask HN: Best ways to promote an ebook? - peacemaker

Hi guys,<p>I wrote an ebook about creating Wordpress plugins a couple of weeks ago and sales haven&#x27;t been great.  I&#x27;ve followed the usual advice of social media, creating a landing page, telling everyone I know, but so far it&#x27;s been quite slow.<p>I know a few of you on here write and sell ebooks for a living.  Do you have any advice for a first time author?  It&#x27;s my hope to continue writing books but I need to learn the marketing side of things before my next book I think.<p>Advice, help and suggestions much appreciated!
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Arjuna
Here are a few resources that might be helpful:

 _Ask HN: Has anyone here self-published a book? Any advice?_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6052075](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6052075)

 _APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur - How to Publish a Book_ by Guy
Kawasaki and Shawn Welch

[http://apethebook.com](http://apethebook.com)

 _Authority_ by Nathan Barry

[http://nathanbarry.com/authority](http://nathanbarry.com/authority)

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peacemaker
That other HN thread is great, thanks for that link! The books both look
interesting as well

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rk0567
TLDR; move away from amazon, setup a website/landing page with some helpful
articles on wordpress plugin development (apply some seo techniques and drive
some organic traffic to those articles), increase the price ($30 or more) and
sell it in pdf (use gumroad).

~~~
peacemaker
Yeah, that looks about right!

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peacemaker
PS. you can check it out for free here:
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EG7BMVY](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EG7BMVY)
any feedback would be extremely useful.

~~~
patio11
Sell it for yourself at a price of rather north of $5. It is a revenue-
generating asset for the right people, right? $40 is very reasonable if it
helps someone ship a Wordpress plugin that goes for $25 to $50 a pop, helps
them deliver client work, gets them a new job, etc.

The single best way to sell virtually any sort of educational content is to
give some amount of education on the topic away for free, collect email
addresses, and then explicitly sell to the people over email. Read Nathan
Barry/Brennan Dunn on the topic -- their blogs go over pretty much every
element in detail.

~~~
peacemaker
Hey Patio, thanks for the advice (I'm a subscriber to your emails as well
which are great)

Selling for myself was my initial thought but my weakest point is driving
traffic/marketing. Amazon brings me the traffic I could never hope to get
myself. I can code with the best of them but when it gets down to the actual
process of getting people onto my website, I have no idea.

I've been learning what I can about SEO, social media marketing, using adwords
and so on but I still feel like I'm missing a trick. These so called 'internet
marketing' experts tell you they can drive masses of traffic but I just don't
see how!

Anyway, I completely agree with your point about giving away some of the topic
for free and I've read a lot of yours (and Brennan's) articles on doing that.
I shall look into it in more detail, thanks!

