Is it Difficult to Sell an Ebook Now?

When I published my first book, I managed to get 2,000 sales in my first week. Every single one of those sales were for completely free, so I didn’t even make a penny from them. Since then, I have made a little more than that from my books, but I am not a millionaire. Here’s a quick answer for those of you who don’t want to stick around:

Ebooks are difficult to sell in today’s market without experience. However, they can be much easier to sell if you know what to do or put enough effort into it.

But what influences how difficult they are to sell?

There are hundreds of factors that go into the difficulty of selling an ebook, but you can only change some of them. So what can we actually do to increase our sales? Here’s a list:

1. Your book itself. If your book is bad, then you are going to find the marketing and selling for it much more difficult. To make a better ebook, you should follow some simple guidelines, such as keeping the use of AI to a minimum, editing your ebook, and seeking some reviews before publishing it.
2. Marketing. Marketing is possibly the most important factor that goes into whether or not your ebook will succeed. But it’s not easy, often taking far more time than actually writing the book. Luckily for you, I created a useful guide for you, which you can find right here.
3. Your publishing location. If you have a lot of competition and not a lot of customers coming to your publisher’s site, then it probably isn’t a good idea to publish on it in the first place. Therefore, you really should be trying to publish in the best places for your book. Lucky for you, I made an in-depth guide to where to publish your ebook.
4. Your niche. If there is a ton of competition in your niche, it’s going to be tough to get noticed. So make sure to pick a niche without too many people already in it.
5. Your description. If your description is bad, nobody’s going to buy it, even if your book is top-quality. So you need to absolutely nail your ebook’s description the first time around. You don’t get a proper do-over.
6. Your ebook cover. Think about it: this is the first thing that every customer is going to see, apart from possibly your title. It’s the thing that makes you stand out. Yet many authors put hardly any effort into it, which gives you the edge. Put some time into your cover. Make it perfect, or if you don’t fancy it you could try a freelancer on Fiverr.
7. Your title. The reason this isn’t top of the list is because almost every author puts a fair amount of thought towards this. So there probably isn’t that much that you can do.

In short, no ebooks are definitely not harder to sell than normal books. In fact, they are about the same, but maybe a little easier. This may not be the case in a few years time though, so you’d better get writing quickly!

I think they are probably easier to sell because there is significantly less competition. Amazon KDP, which sells 85% of all ebooks, also offers the ability to sell paperbacks and hardback versions of your ebook. This means that the amount of normal books is rising at a significantly faster pace than ebooks, so there is actually less competition than other markets.

This is despite the smaller size of the ebook market compared to the normal book market. There are so many more paperbacks and hardbacks that I believe the size of the market is almost irrelevant. At worst, they cannot be more difficult to sell than normal books.

This is great news for you! You are on the right side of the market, as you are writing your ebook. But you can also easily enter both markets on launch day because of Amazon KDP.

Yes, the place you publish does change your sales! It changes them a lot! So you need to make sure that you put your ebook in the right places. Doing it wrong could really mess up how it sells. Here are some of the worst places you could put it on:

1. Nowhere. If you never publish it, then that’s a lot worse than anywhere else.
2. A site you don’t like. If you don’t like the site, then why should anybody else like it either?
3. A site that you don’t know, or somebody else, that you know, knows. If you’ve never heard of this site before, then it probably isn’t getting much traffic. If it’s owned by a person that you know, ask to see their analytics data before you publish. If they are getting less than 300,000 pageviews (sometimes called views), then it probably isn’t worth your time. That is, unless they can do some serious promotion for it.
4. An unsecured website. If it isn’t secure, there is no way that any customer is going to pay on the site. This is especially concerning considering how easy it is to get an SSL certificate these days. It means that the site is also quite old and not very up-to-date.

For a full guide on where to publish your ebook, including some of the best options, you should visit here.

Does the format I upload my ebook in affect sales?

In short, no, the format that you upload it in, such as a PDF or ePUB is not going to make a large difference, if any to your sales. The success of your ebook is reliant on the effort you put into marketing, your experience and the quality of your content.

The most that a different format does is make it less likely that a glitch will occur, which may be useful to minimize negative reviews. You should ideally use an ePUB, as that is the format that most e-readers prefer. PDFs are fine, but ideally you should not upload a DOC or DOCX file without converting it first.

Thank you for reading this article. I hope it was useful to you and your self-publishing journey. For additional information, please have a look at my blog, and good luck!