How to create an eBook
An ebook is an online version of your book that can be downloaded from your web server to another computer. To give you an idea of how you could market your ebook, visit my page on MacGregor's War. Here you will be able to see an excerpt from the book as well as what the download pages will look like. There are quite a few advantages to this, no paper cost, no ink cost, no publisher cost, no book number needed.......in other words, it is just a file that anyone can download and you can do it with minimal cost. You can also sell your ebook for much less because of all the cost savings. The main problem with this approach is that it is very hard to get your book recognized by the audience that would most likely purchase your book. As an example, my book "MacGregor's War" is a WW2 Novel so if you were to put "WW2 " in Google and do a search, up would pop lots of sites devoted to WW2.
So now the problem becomes, "How do you get recognized in Search Engines such as Google." Search engines like Google are called crawler based engines and they send out "crawlers or spiders" to search the internet page by page recording data such as content, images, links, meta data description, keywords, language etc; this data is fed into a database so if you were to search for "WW2 Books", the search engine will pull up everything it has in the database on that subject.
You will need to spend quite a bit of time setting up your web site so that you can take full advantage of what the search engines are looking for. The first place to start is with Keywords. You first have to find out what keywords will draw people to your web site. A good place to check out keywords is here. Just copy in a word or so that matches your page description and you will instantly see how many hits those words got in the last month. Another option for you to try is Google AdWords. Once you have compiled a list of the best keywords you can find for your web site, you need to integrate them within the body text of your page, your meta tag keywords, and your meta tag description. The text within your web page may need to be re-phrased to accommodate the keywords
You will also fare much better if the
title of your book contains some keywords relevant to the
content. As an example, suppose your book was a
murder mystery with the real title being "The Last Seven
Days". You can see that all the words in the real
title have nothing to do with what the book is about.
If someone is looking for murder mystery books, they would
more than likely use those three terms for the search so try
"Murder Mystery Books" in Google and see what you get.
Setting up your Web site to be crawler friendly is very
important if you ever hope to get your book recognized.
The main dis-advantage to an ebook is popularity. Not too many people can get used to the idea of reading a book on the internet. In an attempt to answer this problem, several companies have developed ebook readers. Some of these are hand held devices about the size of a book that will allow people to read an ebook in bed just as though it were a published paper book. Whether or not the actual book can be replaced with a device has yet to be determined. The Sony reader is one such hand held device but rather pricy in my opinion. Like most other electronic devices, competition will drive the price down over time
More to come here.
