Mistakes You Might Make When You Set Out to Earn Money with EBooks

Mistakes You Might Make When You Set Out to Earn Money with EBooks

When you are in the phases of planning, writing, or publishing and marketing your eBook, you are bound to make some mistakes which can cost you good money in the end. If you want to earn money with eBooks, here are some the most common errors which you are prone to make. We have also offered ways to avoid each of them accordingly.

Planning Your EBook

1.Poor Topic Selection

Before even writing a single word, you generally start out to plan your book. The topic, title, genre or chapter by chapter divisions are included in the planning step. Check out some of the mistakes you can make in this phase:

If your selected topic is too difficult for you to write about, you will soon be standing in the middle of nowhere. Many writers are unaware that if they make an error in judgment in this first step, all the rest of the hard work could go waste.

How to avoid it?

You can avoid this by selecting a strong title and an eBook genre in which you are sure you can give your best. Select a topic on which you feel you can write expertly.

The key to gathering sales with eBooks is to always settle for a compelling title, one which pulls readers towards the book. Your title selection will play a major role in boosting your eBook sales.

2.Not Focusing on the Readers

Another common mistake many authors make is that they assume a lot on behalf of their readers. Your book is being written by you, but you are not writing it for yourself. People assume they will write on a topic and the readers will want to buy it.

You want to earn by selling your books to others—so you will naturally have to write a book by keeping the readers in mind.

How to avoid it?

Spend time in researching and carrying out public polls and surveys to see what readers demand. Look at the topics which are among the top 20 best sellers and try to figure out why they are making money. Visit the Amazon Kindle Bestseller’s List to see what’s hot and why. Also, check out various reviews and comments to see what the audience is reacting to.

3.Not Being Exclusive

Writers are very vague when selecting a particular genre. They don’t dig deeper to come up with exclusive stuff. As a result, they lose many potential readers. Why would the audience want to buy a book which has content that is easily available on other free sources?

How to avoid it?

You will need to work hard on your eBook's exclusivity. Be sure to give the readers your personalized version of the topic you have selected. Also, don’t try to be the jack of all trades by throwing in a little bit of everything in your eBook. It’s also recommended to add an "About the Author" section inside your book. A reader will feel more connected to you after reading it.

Writing Your EBook

When you're done with the planning, you might feel a bit overwhelmed and hence, entering the writing phase might be a little difficult. But once you begin, here’s what to be careful about:

1.Taking Too Much Time to Plan

The execution of the eBook gets difficult when you spend too much time in planning out the minor details. If you spend more time in planning rather than researching and writing, your book’s deadline will suffer. Besides, if you are a start-up writer, you will have to write more in the future and this practice might have a negative effect on your writing speed.

How to avoid it?

To avoid this, make a timetable along with a mind map, one which will tell you how much time to spend on each phase. You don’t have to immediately start writing the opening or the plot, but you have to start with the first drafts soon. Start writing the way your chapters will unfold.

2.Putting Everything You Know in a Single Book

Some writers have the "Kitchen Sink Syndrome". They keep on stuffing small details in their content until the point that it succeeds in becoming a burden on the readers. In today’s world, people are so exhausted from working that they want less sweat while they’re reading. Too much information leads to a sensory overload, which will encourage the audience to leave your book for a later date.

How to avoid it?

You can write your eBook in parts or multiple editions. This way, you will be able to happily give all the valuable information, at an even better advantage of selling them at varying prices. On electronic bookstores, a specific series under your name on a particularly favorite topic will have more chances of bringing you profits.

3.Procrastinating and Taking Long Breaks

You will never be able to pocket money from your eBook if you’re a lazy person. Yes, quality does matter, but if you're spending 20 minutes on deciding between a comma and a semi-colon—you have a problem.

How to avoid it?

To avoid this, give yourself a deadline and try to complete your target chapter by chapter. You have to be smart and active throughout your writing phase. Otherwise, your disinterest might reflect in your content.

Editing Your EBook

Although your writing phase will be more important to you than editing, this is the part where your book actually takes shape. Some of these editing errors can make your eBook a certain failure:

1.Editing Your Own Work

A big no—you simply cannot risk being that overconfident. When you're working on the same material for weeks, detecting your own mistakes can be impossible. These minor mistakes upon being published have the power to make your eBook look unprofessional, and will ultimately lead you towards losing your potential readers.

How to avoid it?

Take a week or a two off before you pick up your book again to review it. Hire a good editor to read your final drafts. Try working positively in a team. Ask your editor to leave comments where necessary to help you in making the relevant changes.

It won’t hurt to ask various bloggers and authors to read your work and make suggestions.

2.Poor Proofreading

It’s considered a big insult for writers if their book is found published with a typo.

How to avoid it?

Hire someone who is a professional in the art of proofreading books. If you can’t do that, ask a friend who has brilliant proofreading skills.

3.Juggling Between Writing and Editing

Several writers commit the mistake of writing and editing their work at the same time. When they juggle these two separate phases in this manner, their work never seems to stop. There will always be another mistake which will halt their writing process.

How to avoid it?

Leave the editing part until after you finish writing. Don’t write and edit at same time. It will drain you out and leave loads of incomplete work at your end.

Designing and Formatting Your EBook

The design and format of your document plays a vital role in making you earn money with eBooks over the long haul. Make sure you're not doing the things mentioned in this section:

1.Cutting Back on Design Investments

You gave all your hard work, passion and money into the writing and the editing step but now you are holding back your wallet on the design investments. Unless you're a professional designer yourself, this practice can cause you to lose a lot of readers.

How to avoid it?

Where you have taken so much pain to execute your content, take some more and hire a good designer who can design the look of your eBook expertly.

2.Selecting a Random Book Cover

The mistake of settling on a random front page for your book can come in between you and your eBook sales. Believe it or not, even in today’s digital world, people still buy books by judging them from the look of their covers. They don’t want to invest their time and energy in a cheap looking book.

How to avoid it?

Ask your designer to create an engrossing book cover for your eBook. Make sure your title is complementing your cover. Randomly selected book covers may give even a well written book an amateurish look.

3.Formatting Errors

While writing for online audiences, people get confused over the various eBook formats and stubbornly settle on a single PDF version. This is an error you would want to avoid at all costs because there are readers who will inquire from you about the various formats. For instance, if you fail to provide a kindle version of your eBook, many people will avoid buying it.

How to avoid it?

Though it will be a long process, but take time in formatting your eBook for various electronic versions. Make it available on Kindle, Nook, iPad, Kobo and so on.

Publishing Your EBook

Publishing an eBook can be a tricky step for most. First time writers can make various errors in this phase, such as:

1.Being Confused Between Paid and Free EBooks

If you are confused between making your book available for free, and asking a price for it, you’re simply delaying its publishing.

How to avoid it?

Once you know your target audience and the place where you stand in the eBook market, this decision will be easy to make. Well established writers sell their books at high prices. If you are one of them, go ahead and demand a higher price. Many junior writers though, usually prefer to make their initial books available for free. If not that, they offer them at a very low price which encourages buyers to buy them.

2.Offering an EBook Which Is Too Expensive

If you want to make your book available, but have kept an unusually high price for it—its likely to give you very little profit as there are millions of other books available for free online.

How to avoid it?

Try settling on a low price, especially if you’re a new eBook writer. The cheaper your book is, the more it will be bought. Amazon Kindle allows you to sell an eBook for as little as $0.99 in the US. In the UK, you can sell your eBook for as low as £0.75.

3.Hosting Your Own EBook

Once you finish writing, you might be tempted to pocket all the profit by hosting your own eBook, but that’s also one mistake you should avoid.

How to avoid it?

Don’t try to ignore the surge of buyers on some of the well established eBook stores. Publish your eBook on Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Nobles, and Google eBooks. Some of these stores also recommend you to unknown audiences if you have various sets and volumes written on a particular subject.

Marketing Your EBook

Even the best written eBooks can die without proper marketing strategies. Read below to see what mistakes you can possibly make in this phase:

1.Trying to Earn Money with EBooks with Little or No Marketing

When you are lazy in marketing yourself, you can lose ALL your potential buyers in the blink of an eye and all your effort will be seen tumbling down the hill.

How to avoid it?

Never settle for little or no marketing. Write proper descriptions for your eBook and put them up online. Place the first few chapters of your content for free as a preview and urge buyers to come for the rest of the book.

2.Not Taking Social Media into Account

Online book stores take 24 hours before they allow your eBook to be available online. Many authors consider this as job done, which is another mistake. If you’re not marketing on social media—how can you even expect your eBook to be noticed by anyone?

How to avoid it?

You have to build social media strategies for proper marketing in order to make money with eBooks. Start tweeting and posting thumbnails of your book cover, trend your eBook title with a hash tag and see how people are responding. Leave teasers on social media platforms along with links. These will direct readers towards your eBook.

3.Avoiding Reviews and Influencer Insights

If you're shying away from asking people to comment after they have a peek inside your work, it’s a bad idea.

How to avoid it?

Don’t be ashamed to ask for favors from the experts who love to read. Ask them to leave reviews about your eBook on their public platforms. They can help you build a readership by suggesting your book to their fans.

On the whole, although writers are always in a rush to get their work published online, they don’t seem to grasp the dilemma—a poorly composed book which has the mistakes mentioned above, present inside it, will never earn them good money. These mistakes must thus be avoided if you want to earn money with eBooks.