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!
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.
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
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 :-)
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.<p>I'm not an accountant, but I'd imagine that you'd declare this as self-employed income.
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.<p>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.<p>ebook: <a href="http://dtp.amazon.com" rel="nofollow">http://dtp.amazon.com</a>
publish-on-demand: <a href="http://www.createspace.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.createspace.com</a>
Thank you everyone, I think I have a rough draft of my plan now.<p>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.<p>2. If sales can cover my costs so far, and can pay for the cost of moving to Amazon, sell on Amazon.<p>3. If sales on Amazon cover my costs, add paperback print on demand.<p>How does that look for a business plan?
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.
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.<p>Have you done a dry test to gauge the interest out there?