This article is 11 years old. I wrote it about selling novels via cyberspace. My philosophy is still the same … I’ve updated this article a bit in 2015 to explain how I sell a novel now.
On the Web, it’s a challenge to sell digets.
Digets (rhymes with widgets) are anything with digital content — a book, a software program, information, art, music, etc.
Cottage industry digeters are usually happy with a five or ten dollar sale. Heck, even a buck often looks good.
Since we love to share our ideas, many of us would rather have a thousand customers each pay us five bucks to access our book, music or software, rather than sell one diget to one reader for $5,000.
The problem: How to collect numerous tiny or large payments? Merchant accounts are costly and tedious.
Amazon has it figured out and seems to be taking over the world of on-line marketing. And might succeed if it were not for Google. One of the cleverest companies the internet ever hatched.
Or you can use Paypal.
Or eBay.
Here is a novel I am marketing. Go to the end and you will see I will give you the novel if you write a short review.
Am I trying to hustle you into buying a hot and sexy e-novel about a detective or another novel about a befuddled Mormon Missionary?
Guilty!
But I’m also showing you how easy it is to earn bucks from the digets you worked hard to create.
Consider this….
You can set up (for free) a page for your digital work on Amazon. Amazon does your bookkeeping, collects your cash, and shows your customers where to get your digets through its Honor System.
My novel is not wrapped in cyber cuffs. Any encryption I could protect my book with could easily be cracked by hackers. I make it easy to access my work (and in the process, easy to steal).
Can you stop a thief?
What will I do if someone hooks my work off the internet? The same thing I do when someone reads a copy of one of my novels that a friend has purchased.
Nothing.
Lots of people pay $4 for a book that took me a year to write so why worry about the small percentage of goofs who are thieves?
The digital world ….
1. Saves trees.
2. You can read a synopsis or opening chapters of a book from any place you happen to be with a computer and wifi access…and then you can start reading the entire book within seconds.
3. You can use hyperlinks. For example, if you want to market your digets like I’m flogging my latest e-novel, just click on: Amazon. They’ll tell you how to do what I’m doing. (This is, of course, an example of a hyperlink and it allows the reader to leap to a different area of your mind on the world wide web. Great, huh?)
Things are getting better….
In times past my publishers gave me a paltry ten percent of what they sold my books for and they owned my books for years. Or longer when I was too stupid to read the small print.
Amazon has some drawbacks.
In short, Amazon provides digeters with a beautiful solution for collecting a few bucks for an electronic file — a file we can market a thousand or (gasp) a million times.
Remember, after your digital sale, you may still retain your digets and you have more digital content because you have the stats on your customer. And you can take that to the bank. Peter F. Drucker pointed that out long ago.
So how do you manage to let people know about your digital information? How about through a network of friends?
For example Facebook.
And YouTube.
And this.
…to be continued
