Rules to sell thousands of copies of your ebook

The promised five rules about selling thousands of copies are contradicted by three to four of them:<p><i>Rule #1: No publishers. Publish the book yourself.</i><p>A publisher usually has marketing and distribution options at hand that you could only dream of.<p><i>Rule #2: No 3rd-party sales channels. No Amazon/Kindle, iBookstore, etc.</i><p>If your goal is to spread it as much as possible than you've got to use any possible option.<p><i>Rule #4: Publish as a PDF. Optionally also as EPUB, depending on topic/audience. No dead-tree version, please.</i><p>To sale thousands of copies you should try to offer a diversity of formats. While there is no reason why you should not print the book to sell to those who prefer it, a "dead-tree" book is no ebook and thus the submitted post is correct that you should avoid that when trying to sell your ebook. I guess.<p><i>Rule #5: Price high. Price for the value you provide, not for what feels right.</i><p>To sell thousands you should probably not use a high price, but price rather low.<p>I pulled my answers out of the air just like madrobby. Yeah, I am getting sick and tired of these marketing fluff unscientific best-practise posts. Same level as the usual life improvement blogs for me.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of the book and blog post.<p>I've been asked on Twitter about student discounts, short answer is don't do it. Long answer: if you have a book specifically targeting students, price it so they can afford it, otherwise don't bother as it's more work for you and they probably won't buy it anyway.

To Thomas Fuchs: How would you modify your tips for those publishing non-fiction e-books?<p>I work for a company that publishes non-fiction in the major digital marketplaces, and we're doing fine right now. One of the major perks that we see with using these marketplaces (ex: Kindle) is that they provide perks which we could not provide had we been selling e-books ourselves and asking our customers to sideload content to their devices. For us, we see the royalties to them as necessary costs.. or investments to make buying and reading content as convenient as possible.<p>Love to hear your on this Thomas. Thanks.

Isn't distributing your ebook as a simple pdf an invitation for people who don't want to pay for it to copy and circulate it for free? How do you get around this?