Ebooks are really good marketing tools. Since the beginning of the internet people have used them as a way to build personal brands and to fill niches in their readers minds. In fact, they have been so effective that in the last years bloggers have started to use them intensely as another tool to build their readership, and they have showed to be useful in that area too.

Until now, the kind of ebooks used by bloggers to build their readership have been small pieces of text, with no more than 30 pages, that usually list some ways to do something (usually how to get more readers ;)). This is not making money directly for them but it’s fine since it’s a way to get more readers and ultimately make money from the large amount of eyeballs watching their blogs. Anyway, they would have a hard time trying to monetize a 30 pages ebook because it’s just too small, and writing a full and complete book is just out of question because not much people has the time nor experience to write 300-400 pages about some topic.

If you are considering to write an ebook to build your reputation I congratulate you, but you should know that it’s possible to make money writing ebooks and without having to write a long treaty. How? Some publishers have started to sell small ebooks, with no more than 100 pages, as cheaply as $10. The idea behind this new publishing mode is to encourage people to write about very new topics that have not sufficient information to write long traditional books, and to offer buyers the possibility to constantly receive updates on their ebooks given that’s easier to put new editions on short ebooks rather than in long ones. This is very interesting because it’s in the middle between always updated blogs, and always outdated books.

So if you were planning to write an ebook now you can consider making money from it. Two publishers that sell small ebooks are Pragmatic Programmers with their Pragmatic Fridays and O’Reilly Media with their O’Reilly Short Cuts. Both initiatives sell small ebooks with less than 100 pages for $10, and both initiatives requires writers to share revenue with them. I’m not aware of O’Reilly treat with short cuts writers, but Pragmatic Programmers offers a 50-50 deal. Of course you can always go independent and try to sell them by yourself so you don’t have to share the revenue, but unless you have a high-traffic blog it’d be more difficult to make a significant amount of money alone rather than going with an established publisher.

Now that you know how to sell small ebooks please consider subscribing to Roberto Alamos dot Com by email or RSS. Lots of good business opportunities here ;). Thanks to brappy! for the pic.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Entrepreneurship, Make money online, Online business, eCommerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.