Many ebooks describing how to get started selling ebooks greatly under-play the amount of time you need to get started.  I'd like to detail for you some of what is needed, as well as the time involved, so that you can have a more accurate idea of what is needed.

I started my plans to begin an ebook business on Ebay with perhaps more tools that the average person - I already had over 1,400 in feedback, with over 3,000 sales on Ebay - so I already have a good grasp on what is needed from an Ebay point of view.  However, my Ebay store needed a radical overhaul, and many other things had to be accomplished first.

The first thing I did is purchase many of the "How to sell Ebooks on Ebay" ebooks that are offered by different sellers.  I knew in general how to go about the business, but nothing beats what an experienced seller can tell you.  Sadly, the majority of ebooks I purchased were quite useless to me - I only found a couple of them that gave information that I was previously unaware of. (I'll certainly write my own ebook in the future...)

I also purchased a few ebook packages, only one of which proved to be worth what I spent.  This particular package had 50 ebooks, of which I determined that 43 of them were worth selling.  I won't sell anything that I think isn't worth someone's time, so there were a few ebooks that I would not sell out of that package - but they all came with 'resellers websites', which I used to create my auction listings.  I also belong to a few 'membership' website clubs, (in fact I actually run a membership website) I have a good selection of other 'resell' ebooks that I can sell.

A major goal that I needed to accomplish was to determine how best to deliver the ebooks - I knew right away that I wanted everything to be as automated as possible, yet have enough security so that I could eventually sell ebooks that I wanted to write without anyone being able to pass around a download link.  That requires a decent PHP script running on your server to handle these functions.  Automation is important, all the work is done upfront - and then all you need to do is answer emails, and add new ebooks from time to time.  I only have a limited amount of time, and automation allows me to 'multiply' the amount of time I have - since work I once did long ago is still earning me money!

Already being a webmaster with a number of websites was a great help - as I already had a web hosting package, as well as an unused domain name.  I long ago decided that having the domain name that was identical to my Ebay name would someday come in handy - and sure enough, it has!  I wanted an website ebook store that was outside of Ebay in order to eventually double my traffic - Ebay sending people to my website, and search engine traffic to my website being able to send people to my Ebay auction listings & Ebay store.  My website also hosts all of my ebooks that I'm selling, as well as all of the photos used in my listings.  No reason to pay Ebay extra for photos!

One thing I knew right away is that the garbage many people sell on Ebay for 'ebook stores' wasn't what I wanted.  Has anyone here ever tried to purchase an ebook from an osCommerce store?  While I'm sure that osCommerce must be capable of being set up so that customers don't have to enter an account name, address, credit card, etc - I haven't seen it.  Plus too, I'm a firm believer in looking at what successful sellers are doing.  Who's the most successful Ebook Seller?  Many people would immediately think of 'PlanetSMS' - and guess what?  He doesn't run an osCommerce ebook store - his is a 'hand-crafted' original website store.  So I looked around, found a nice '3-column fluid' template, and put together my website store.

If you go to my website - you'll discover that you can click on any ebook for more information, or you can click once to order it, and click a second time to go to Paypal and pay for it.  Simplicity, speed, and ease of use is what I want, and I'm sure that others appreciate such ease as well - never make it difficult for a customer to purchase from you!

Next, I took a look around at scripts to automate my ebook delivery - I didn't consider for even a minute the silly scheme that you can still find being sold about using Outlook...  there's far too many problems with such a solution.  There are at least a half-dozen good scripts, but I finally settled on 'EW Portal' - as it does what no other script does - it allows you to change your auction titles to anything you want without updating its database.  This script relies on a small snippet of code that you put inside your auction listing.

It verifies that someone has paid at least as much money as you specify - so you can change your price anytime you wish, as long as it's over the minimum that you've told your script.  It allows a single destination for all ebooks - the URL you send your customer for product 'A' is the same URL you send them to for product 'Z'.  In fact, you can figure out what my website address must be (Ebay forbids me from linking to it here), or go to my About Me page to find my website, then add '/portal/download.html' to my website URL, and you'll see the exact same download URL that is given to all of my customers.  You'll note that they are asked to enter their primary Paypal email - and then the program checks it's database to see if Paypal has told it that this customer has paid, and if so, for what.

While there are other 'download solutions' available - this one is by far the best, in my opinion.  It also handles sales from my website, or indeed, from anyplace - as long as the payment processor is Paypal.  That perhaps, is it's only limitation - you can't use multiple payment processors as you can with other script solutions.

Most other download handling scripts rely on the 'auction title' of the item you're selling...  change the title, and you have to change your database to reflect it.  Nothing wrong with this, it's just that the script I finally settled on does the things I want in a smooth and effortless way.  It even allows me to cost out my products in several different currencies, so if I expand to other Ebay sites around the world in the future, I'll already be set to go.

I also installed the 'Peel-Away' Ad script - which I purchased on Ebay for a few dollars.  I'm always looking for ways to 'upsell' a customer to buy more products, or to join my mailing list, and the 'Peel-Away' ad script is a pretty slick piece of work.  It's really nothing more that a 'pop-up' ad, but it teases the customer's curiosity, and many people will click on it just to see what it does.

While examining other ebook sellers, I discovered one quite successful lady who uses a comic character to 'brand' her auctions and store - I thought that this was a brilliant idea - and after a great deal of looking around, finally settled on purchasing a comic character for $29.  (None of the free stuff was worth what it cost).  So I now own the non-exclusive rights to the 'Dibber Dare' character.  Check out my About Me page, and move your cursor over the graphic to see an interesting effect I created just for the fun of it.

I'm not a believer in figuring things out myself...  if someone is selling hundreds of ebooks each month - I'm more than happy to copy what I see them doing.  Why bother to re-invent the wheel?  Look for successful sellers, see what they are doing.  Sometimes however, it's a smart idea to order from them, because not everything a successful seller does is immediately visible. You might think that an Ebay seller is losing money - but after ordering from them, you discover that they are 'upselling' customers to higher end products.  Never trust what you see completely - feedback never gives the total number of sales, and prices might not be what they seem.  But still, you need to watch what others are doing in order to learn.

Setting my website up, installing the server scripts, and filling up the 'EW Portal' database with 43 preselected ebooks took me about three full days of labor.  Considering that I'm quite competent at putting together websites in raw HTML, and have installed many scripts before - the average person could well double or triple that amount of time.

I already had a good autoresponder script, EmaPro - and naturally, my ebook selling business is set up to entice my customers to join my list - for the real money is made by upselling and reselling to your mail list - not all those '.99 cent' ebooks you'll be selling!  (If you get nothing else out of this guide, please make sure it's my last sentence that you understand!)  So I put together a good landing page to use for my download URL which fed into my autoresponder - and set up a package of over 30 Ebay Selling Ebooks to use as an incentive to join my list.

I spent another day or so (actually, an entire weekend) - putting together the graphics and layout of my Ebay store - along with the 'header' and 'footer' for all of my auction listings.  I'm no graphics artist, and I seriously considered purchasing the services of a good graphics designer on Ebay - but most serious graphic artists will tag you with a several hundred dollars to do a decent store - and I figured that my time was worth what they were charging, so I did it myself.  Nothing fancy - but it works.

Next of course, was testing. I should have tested with just one listing - but noooo...  that would be too easy.  I put everything into Turbo Lister, uploaded everything into my store, and then I discovered that I'd made an error on my code snippet, one word was supposed to be 'ebidpal' and I'd typed it in as 'ebidpay'.  This was the code snippet that 'EW Portal' needed to send the right file - so my automated downloads weren't working!  That error cost me a few hours of rework.  I hope you learn from my mistake, and test everything thoroughly with just one listing...

I set up my account with 'Seller's Manager Pro' - which, as of the time of this writing, costs an additional $15.95 each month.  But the amount of time it saves is well worth it - the automation features, and automatic feedback handling capacities have to be seen to be believed!  Another feature I really like is the automatic sending of an additional email 'x' number of days later to remind your customer to leave feedback.  If you want to sell ebooks, my personal opinion is that both an Ebay store, Seller's Manager Pro, and your own website are a necessity.  As well as a good autoresponder and download script.

It took me several hours to figure out how to upload my listings to Seller's Manager Pro.  Each time I tried uploading my listings - it kept kicking back that my location wasn't valid.  Turns out that digital items (which ebooks are), require the 'location' field to be a 'custom' field.  It took an email to Ebay Customer Support to discover the answer to that particular problem.

So here I am - approximately 35-40 hours of work later - finally ready to list and sell.  This is quite a bit more time and labor than you'll be told about by any of the "How to Sell Ebooks" ... But people rarely sell ebooks based on their advertisement of how much work is going to be involved - they sell ebooks based on how 'easy' it's going to be.

By the way - why am I writing this guide?  While researching the successful ebook sellers, I occasionally came across those with a 'Top 5,000' Reviewer icon...  clicked on one of them and discovered that one particular seller had written a guide, and had just under 6,000 viewers in the past year...  now, how many of those 6,000 viewers clicked over to the author's auctions? Who knows...  but even a low percentage would be sending traffic that you'd not ordinarily have.  So I sat down and wrote this guide, and hopefully, I'll write a few more too.  After all, if writing guides seems like a good idea to long-time ebook Powersellers - why wouldn't it be a good idea for me as well?

I do hope you liked this information, if you're getting started in selling ebooks, perhaps you've picked up a trick or two.  Good luck!

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