6 Unskippable Steps To Sell E-Books [+ 8 Resources to Get Started Today]
Bella Rose Emmorey
book editor, rogue behaviorist, digital marketer, writer, brand builder, plant aunt, and cheese enthusiast.
E-book production and sales are continually on the rise because of the vast accessibility they afford authors and readers. Unlike physical books, you don't have to figure out a way to get e-books printed and shipped, which is often the biggest hurdle for a new author.
Now, you just have to write a quality book and learn how to sell the e-book version of it—the online resources we're about to discuss make this infinitely easier to do, so keep reading!
If you’re here, you know it’s possible to sell e-books online (you're probably even seeing a few ads for people trying to charge you big bucks claiming to make you rich doing so), but you might have no idea how to go from writing the book to making money off it.
Do you need a website?
How will people pay you?
Is Amazon your only option?
Fortunately for you, $ I have over 4 years of experience$ selling hundreds of thousands of dollars of e-books online, and I know there are many ways you can do it—whether you have a strong understanding of the digital marketing world, or none at all.
How to Sell E-Books: The Only 6 Steps You Need to Make Money from E-Books
It doesn’t matter why you’re selling e-books. Maybe you want to use a low offer e-book to grow your email list. Maybe you want to make it your primary form of income. The process is relatively the same either way.
You need these few things to sell e-books online:
1. A quality book
2. A well-formatted e-book
3. A place to host the book & sales pages
4. A payment processing platform
5. A way to deliver the e-book (this is often included in the payment processing platform)
6. An e-book marketing plan that works
There are resources and software to help you sell e-books. Amazon’s KDP, Smashwords, and others make it easy to upload and distribute, but that still requires a few steps you can’t miss.
So let’s break them down by the steps above.
1. Write a quality book
You may be able to sell a few e-books that are written terribly. But then the reviews come in, the word gets out, and they stop selling—even if you have a quality marketing plan (which most authors don’t).
If you’re trying to sell e-books to make a quick cash grab, that’s not reality.
Whether you’re writing a how-to style e-book, a short story or novella to grow your fiction email list, or just your memoir—quality matters.
How do you know the book is of quality?
First off, if you’ve put in the time to make it so. Most people can’t whip up a book in a tiny amount of time, no matter the topic. It requires time to plan or plot, draft, revise, self edit, and professional edit. If you think you can skip some of these steps because "it’s just an e-book," prepare not to sell many copies. When you charge people for a product, that product should be quality.
Secondly, if the book has been consumed by someone other than you. Have a friend, critique partner, or beta reader go through your book and give their feedback. You can even send a questionnaire to help clarify what type of feedback you’re looking for.
If more people than just you say your e-book is ready to sell, then you can feel more confident that you've written a quality book.
2. Format your e-book
The term "e-book" itself will give you a clue about the formatting. But did you know there are over five different formats of books that can be read online?
These are the most common available formats for e-books:
• PDFs
• Mobi
• EPUB
• AZW
• TXT
The file type you use depends on your goals and the platform’s requirements. For example, if you’re selling a kindle on Amazon, it requires an EPUB file type because it can be resized per device, text size, and other customization options available to Kindle users.
But if you’re selling an e-book through your website with a third party payment processor that delivers the e-book through email, you can use a PDF instead.
So how do you take your draft from your writing software and turn it into the file type you need?
Most writing software has a way to export your work to different file types. With $ NovelPad$ , we make this easy with a quick export button and the options to turn your draft into a DOCX file (that Microsoft Word uses), markdown, or EPUB file.
The choice here is simple: download as EPUB since that’s a widely used and accepted e-book format.
If you want to get a PDF of your e-book (or another file type) from $ NovelPad $ or another software that doesn’t have that option, try downloading the DOCX (even if you use a Mac that doesn’t have Microsoft Word, it will open with Pages). Open that file and export it as a PDF by going to "File" then "Export To" and selecting "PDF".
3. Decide how you want to host your book
You can, of course, sell e-books on Amazon. You can also sell them on several other platforms where your job is simply to upload the information and let the website take care of the rest.
But with "taking care of the rest," you can expect to pay for it.
Amazon can take as much as 65% of your royalties if you sell your e-book there, and your payments get a bit more convoluted if you choose their Kindle Unlimited route (though it can be very profitable for fiction authors).
Using something like $ Koji $ is not as massive as Amazon, but if you have a platform of any kind and want to use your existing audience to sell to, it has a much smaller fee-per-transaction at 5%.
But giving up a percentage isn’t the only choice.
There are three options for selling e-books:
1. Host your e-books on a big platform that takes a royalty of every sale:
• Amazon
• Koji
• Shopify (this also includes a set fee to use + royalty)
• Smashwords
2. Host your e-books on a platform that you pay a set fee to use (these usually also collect email addresses for your list):
• ClickFunnels
• ThriveCart
3. Host and sell your e-books directly on your website using a third party software you pay to use:
• WooCommerce
• OpenCart
There are pros and cons to all of these, like the fact that the customer reach potential using Amazon is very high, but they take a cut of every sale.
There’s much more freedom in how you sell by hosting on your own website, with more control (and email collecting options!), but you can't rely on an internal algorithm to help you sell books.
Choose which is best for your goals and purpose of selling e-books.
Do you want a wider reach and potential for new customers (and to sell books for a living)? Then Amazon makes sense.
Do you want to use a cheap e-book to grow your email list? A set-fee platform might be more fitting.
As always, do your research before paying for anything.
4. Get a payment processing platform
This is specifically if you choose to host and sell your books from your own website, or if you just want to cut out the middleman and keep the bulk of your earnings. Here, you won’t use Amazon or Smashwords.
You’d instead use something like Flodesk, ClickFunnels, or WooCommerce to collect payment.
But you need some way of collecting payment that’s secure. Nowadays, people won’t enter any credit card or link any Paypal account if they’re even a little uncertain their information will be safe.
That’s why there are so many payment collection softwares out there. We mentioned several above and will have more details in the section below to help you decide.
5. Deliver the e-book
As mentioned, many of the payment processing platforms will deliver the e-book for you. Readers click a link you promote in your marketing plan, enter their payment information (including email), and the e-book is delivered either in email or directly on the purchase thank you page.
Or they’ll purchase through Amazon and have access to their e-book on their compatible device.
Most of the time, this process is automatic. But if you want more control over how your e-book gets delivered (and to collect email addresses for your list), using a fee-based software will make that an option.
For example, if you use ClickFunnels to collect payment information but your email list is hosted through MailerLite, you can use a software called Zapier to integrate those two.
Then, when someone makes a new purchase through ClickFunnels, you will automatically have their email added to your list.
WARNING: prioritize collecting email address information you can use to later market to and sell additional e-books or other products. Do not just sell e-books without this step—you will be wasting opportunity.
6. Create an e-book marketing plan
Simply listing your e-book online will not sell copies. That’s just not how it works—otherwise everyone would be selling e-books all the time! Even if you sell your e-book through Amazon, you still have to inform people of the opportunity to buy your book and convince them to do so. That’s marketing.
Amazon won’t market your book for you.
You are the primary source sending people (traffic) to your purchasing page.
Writers with blogs, YouTube channels, and other social platforms have the most opportunity to do this.
But if you're a brand new writer with no platform at all, that's fine!
Here’s how to build an e-book marketing plan to sell:
1. Know your ideal audience: The genre and content of your book will dictate who your audience is. You don’t need to market your YA princess novella to middle-aged male plumbers (or maybe you do! Who knows!). But you would market your e-book of plumbing solutions to that man.
Who is your ideal audience? How old are they? What do they like? What pop culture are they invested in? What causes do they care about?
2. List the online places your audience spends time (or use the platform where your existing audience is): A $ gen-z audience might be more into video platforms$ like TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram reels, whereas an older audience may take to Facebook or Pinterest to find inspiration for e-books. Knowing where to focus online depends on your audience (unless you already have a strong platform—just use that).
3. Determine your e-book’s primary selling point: What problem is your book solving? Even a fiction novella solves a problem, like your audience wanting those "deleted" chapters of extra spicy fun between the main characters. In order to sell it well, you have to know how your audience will justify purchasing it. What’s in it for them?
4. Build a sales page: Your sale page should have a primary hook, reasons to buy, what is included in the e-book, what problems it solves, along with a visible button readers can click to buy that takes them to the payment options.
Your hook should be the primary pain your book solves that speaks directly to your ideal audience. Make sure to edit the link so it’s easy to remember, instead of the native one created when you make the page.
You can make sales pages inside some payment software like ClickFunnels or $ Flodesk$ , or you can set up the page on your own websites.
If you have your own website, use your own domain for the link and create a 301 redirect (this can be done inside your hosting provider or a plugin like $ Pretty Links$ if you use Wordpress). This allows you to use something like YourName.com/e-book instead of larger URL.
5. Create marketing ideas: The objective here is to list as many ideas as you can think of for the platform(s) you’ll market on. These can be social ideas, blog posts, Pinterest concepts, YouTube videos, TikToks, etc.
Focus your marketing on content within your book, not just telling people to buy it. If your e-book is a short story epilogue connected to a series you have, make content ideas about characters, quizzes to determine which character a reader is, recipes for a drink or meal featured in the short story, etc.
6. Build a marketing schedule: Consistency is the biggest factor for selling your e-book. By promoting content regularly, you’ll grow followers and traffic that will eventually lead to sales. On most social platforms, you’ll want to post every day and engage with followers and commenters. On YouTube, you can post once or twice a week. Find a posting schedule that realistically works for you, and work to maintain that regularity.
7. Bulk create content and schedule them out (or set reminders): If you don’t want to pay for a social schedule app, you don’t need to, but you should at least set reminders for what to post, when, and where. You’d be surprised how quickly you can forget and a week will go by with no traffic to your e-book sales page. Otherwise, use a scheduler to create all your content in bulk and assign out so you can "set it and forget it".
8 Resources to Help You Sell E-Books Starting Today
We’ve listed a few methods for selling e-books above, but we’ll recount a few of them and give you additional options.
Selling e-books takes time to set up correctly, but once you’re selling and collecting email addresses, the potential to make a living from your e-books is real.
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