How to Sell eBooks Online for Free: Step-by-Step Guide

Selling eBooks has been a challenging step to deal with, especially if a person has the mentality of selling an eBook to make money. As a result, these people perish on the way, having written an eBook with high-quality content. This has happened several times to people selling eBooks online, and guess what? They quit completely.

Don’t worry about that, I’m here to help you so that you may not fall into the same mistake. Also, if you are just starting, then better for you. In the article, I will take you through some key areas you need to know for you to be able to make your first sale.

I will guide you through starting from selecting a niche for your eBook, choosing a platform to sell, designing your eBook, to marketing it to generate sales.

What is Your Niche?

Selecting a niche is very important, especially when you want to sell to people with the same interests. Your first question should be, “Why would the buyer be interested in my book?” It is simple; the answer is that you have offered a solution to their problem.

Therefore, if you want to make money online selling eBooks, you have to solve people’s problems. It’s the problems that bring money. Narrowing down to your niche, it must be groomed to solve the needs of the people you want to sell to.

People are advised to sell eBooks that are around these three niches: finance, health, and technology, because their demand is high. At some point, this is true and also false; it depends on your audience and marketing strategy.

My advice is that you can shine in any niche as longer you target where your right audience is. After identifying a niche that suits you, you can choose a platform where you can sell your eBook.

Choose a Platform to Sell

In this step, we want to choose the right platform to sell our eBook. Let’s not complicate the process by signing in to all platforms; this will make the process hard for us. Remember that we are starting, and we have not made our first sale.

You can choose the platform that interests you from the list below:

• Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Amazon KDP is a popular platform for selling digital products around the world. Its popularity has led to its competitiveness because there are many sellers on the platform. Amazon KDP is the best platform so far in the world to sell your eBook, but you need to know their rules and regulations to avoid account termination.
• Selar. This platform enables you to sell to some popular African countries and Western countries. It offers some African countries like Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya, a chance to sell their digital products online. Selar is also taking a step to ensure that African countries have access to digital products by paying for them using their currencies.
• Gumroad. Digital creators use this platform at large to sell their digital products. You can upload your eBook there and share the link to your audience for them to buy. You can withdraw your money through PayPal and bank transfer for supported countries, and PayPal for unsupported countries.
• Draft2Digital.

• Nuria Kenya. It is a platform based in Kenya that enables you to sell your digital products, including eBooks, through a payment processor called M-Pesa. If you are a seller that is targeting the audience from Kenya, it is good to sign up on their platform to ensure that your buyers can pay for the product with ease.
• Website. Some people choose this option because they have linked a good payment integration to their website. Having a website helps people to build and showcase their brand, and it is also possible for you to sell both physical and downloadable eBooks.

Design Your eBook

No one wants to buy anything that does not appeal to their eyes. As a seller, you must brand your eBook to look attractive to people for you to sell. Therefore, you have to make sure that four things are well structured. These things are as follows:

1. Manuscript. Ensure that your manuscript is well formatted, and also the layout size of your manuscript should be that of an eBook. Usually, the most common sizes of an eBook are 6 by 9 inches and 5.5 by 8.5 inches.
2. Cover. The most commonly used dimensions for the cover are 2,560 pixels in height and 1,600 pixels in width. Don’t forget about creating a clean and attractive cover so that it may increase the possibilities of selling your eBook online.
3. Description. Write a good description for your eBook. Tell people what they will get when they read your book. Basically, if you want to solve their problem, you should highlight how your eBook is going to solve the problem in the eBook description. Don’t tell people about the stories in the eBook and things you have written in there; instead, tell them the problem you have covered in the eBook and assure them that if they buy the book, they will be able to solve their problems.
4. Keywords. Don’t use keywords that do not match what the eBook is talking about. This case usually happens to sellers who use self-publishers like Amazon KDP and others who require keywords to rank their eBook. Remember that you want to sell to the right people who require your help; therefore, don’t sell to the wrong audience that doesn’t require your eBook, because you will sell nothing. This is essential to ensure quality marketing.

Marketing Your eBook

Uploading your eBook to any platform that you feel is appropriate does not guarantee that you will make a sale. Many people think that way, and they make no sale. What you have to do is create awareness of your eBook among the people so that they can buy it. This can be done through marketing.

The following are two ways of marketing your eBook:

1. Free Marketing. This involves promoting your eBook through free options like social media and websites. Choose a social media platform that you know your audience is on, it can be one or two social media platforms at the start of the process, then share quality information on these media, linking them to your eBook. This process is not immediate for you to start earning; it takes time.

Some of the social media platforms to sell on are Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Medium, LinkedIn, Reddit, and TikTok, among others. Some websites offer free forums to promote your products without spamming.

2. Paid Marketing. This involves running ads on preferred social media to make a sale. Before you start marketing, it is appropriate to identify the social media platform where your audience spends time.

Paid marketing requires a bit of study, which you can get by accessing some free tutorials and courses on YouTube.

This method is fast as compared to free marketing; it is easy to generate sales, but expensive since it requires money to run ads.

Conclusion

Having learnt all these, you can understand that marketing is the only crucial part of the article. Therefore, ensure you master how marketing on each social media is done, not forgetting other areas that we have discussed along.

You can brainstorm over the article and ask yourself a question like, “What if I start a new business, whether online or offline?” It will be new and hard to make a sale. What do I need to do to sell my products?