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

14 points by jmeyers ↗ HN
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.

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?

1. Is there a better, less expensive way, to start selling an E-book?

2. Do I need to set up a company to start selling e-books? (I'm located in Pittsburgh, PA USA)

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.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

23 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 58.0 ms ] thread
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.

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.
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.
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.
dwc
Do you have advice on publishing elsewhere in addition to Amazon? Specifically, are there exclusivity restrictions that must be negotiated away, etc.?
mikecane
The only exclusivity Amazon demands is price-matching. You can't sell it lower than Amazon, period. You can still put it at Barnes & Noble, if you want, or the iBookstore. Note those are ePub, not Kindle, formats. But if either of them drop the price, Kindle will too.
dwc
Hey, that sounds quite reasonable. Thanks.
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.
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.

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
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.

dholowiski
Hi there. I wrote an ebook and sold it on clickbank for two years. I believe there was a $50 'approval' fee, and then they just took a small percentage agtrrthat- no monthly fees. They don't host your file - I did that on my own web server, and used a program called dlguard ($99 when I bought it) to securely deliver the ebook to my customer.

I did print on demand, and got on amazon for free. I'm not sure if they do it but lulu has a 'published by lulu' option where your ebook gets an isbn (required to sell a physical book most places) for free. Also, after a number of months you get put on a list that makes you available on amazon and from other major booksellers. This all cost me exactly $0. The lulu plan I would recommend also has no monthly fees, and they do take a higher percentage since they're actually printing a book for you.

Monthly fees are a killer, and will make you more likely to give up quicker if sales are low.