Seven Secrets to eBook Success

One of the best places out there to learn about publishing an ebook is Smashwords.com. Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, recently wrote an article giving the seven secrets to eBook success. Here they five of them, which I found on the blog of Tony Eldredge: Marketing Tips.

1. Write a great book – If you don’t honor your readers with a great read, they’ll either give you negative reviews (an instant book killer) or they’ll punish you with the worst fate any author can experience – they’ll ignore you. Readers are in control here. If they love your book, they’ll talk it up to their friends and that will drive sales.
2. Write another great book – Each book you publish affords you the opportunity to reach new readers, earn their trust and admiration, and introduce them to your backlist. Make sure at the end of every book you provide a hyperlinked summary of where fans can discover your other books.
3. Maximize distribution – Get your book in as many retailers as possible. Retailers spend millions of dollars to attract readers to their stores, and all the majors, including Apple, Sony, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Amazon and Diesel, welcome indie ebooks. Don’t limit your distribution to only one or two.
4. Have patience – It can take months or years to build a readership and build sales. In the old traditional print world, if your book didn’t immediately sell through within a few weeks, it was forced out of print. With ebooks, you never go out of print. Your book is immortal. We’ve had authors who experience very slow sales at first, but then they increase over a period of years, and then suddenly their book pops into the best-seller lists at a retailer. Often, these books will pop at one retailer but not another.
5. Marketing starts yesterday – Don’t wait until your book is published for the marketing to start. Instead, start your marketing with social networking the moment you decide to write a book. Build your social network, and most importantly, contribute to the network. If you add value to your networks, and if you help your fellow authors succeed, they in turn will help open doors of opportunity for you. Authors need to help authors. Your fellow authors are not your competition, they’re your partners.

Want more tips and suggestions on publishing an ebook? Check out this guide to writing and publishing your ebook.