Jason Matthews - How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks - All for FREE: Ebooksuccess4free

How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks

All for Free

by Jason Matthews

This ebook is licensed for your personal use only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author. Copyright 2010 Jason Matthews, updated Sept. 2011. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Okay, you've written a book or are in the process of writing one. Congratulations! I don't say that lightly either. As an author of two full length novels I know writing a book can be one of the hardest things you'll ever do, especially if you've put the effort and dedication into writing a great book and not just a bunch of fluff on pages.

But what next; what do you do once it's written? Have you heard the saying, that writing the book is half the battle while marketing it is the other half? When I first heard this comment, I was nearly finished writing my first novel. I thought, that's crazy because writing this book has taken me years. No way can marketing it be as difficult. Unfortunately I was in for a surprise in the form of a hard lesson as they usually seem to be in my life. Advice like this came and I thought, yeah, maybe for someone else, but mine will be a success right out of the gates because my book is really good.

And I still believe success is coming. It's just the "right out of the gates" part I've come to realize was painfully inaccurate. Many of us like to think our words are golden and when we finish writing our books, our certain best-sellers, that they're going to fly right out of our hands and into the eyes of readers around the globe. Agents and publishers will beat a path to our door to whisk us off our feet with huge advances, offers for sequels and world tour book signings. Movie producers will fight over the rights to make the next Oscar winning best picture. We may even imagine what we'll wear on the red carpet at Oscar night and how our award speech will go thanking the little people the tear-filled pause etc.

It's a great dream, one that I've been dreaming for several years. I haven't given up on the ultimate goals of the dream, but I have altered my timeframe for all of this to happen. It came not by choice but out of necessity.

And please know this; I'm not here to squash anyone's dream. In fact, just the opposite. I encourage everyone to dream big. Hopefully your book, or books, will be tremendously successful and touch the lives of millions of readers. What I am here to do is share what I've learned along the way , advice that will save you vast amounts of time, money and frustration and also help you avoid many of the costly mistakes that I made after finishing my first novel. Because I found out the hard way there are dozens of things that could have been done FOR FREE that would have been more effective for marketing and selling my books than the things I did.

(Side note; this advice is not about how to write a book. I'm assuming you've already done that or are nearly finished. This is about what comes next and how to maximize results with minimal effort in the shortest time frame with the least amount of money from your pocket.)

Let me share a little background about my experience.

Back in 1990 I graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in RTVMP (Radio, Television and Motion Picture). I moved to Los Angeles and got some entry level jobs at film industry companies. The jobs weren't exciting. I mostly drove around the LA highways as an errand runner or PA (Production Assistant) and cursed at the congestion of traffic.

Like so many people in LA, I also wrote a screenplay on the side. I believed my idea was terrific, and if I could just finish my screenplay and get it into the hands of the right person, voila , everything would fall into place.

Of course it didn't happen that way. After a year of constantly driving, my car's engine died. I then lost my job, went broke and left LA for the mountains of Lake Tahoe to become a ski-bum and re-evaluate my life mission. When I wasn't skiing I worked as a snowmaker in the winter and a house painter in the summer. On the side I managed to finish that screenplay but trying to find an agent from Tahoe wasn't easy, especially before the internet, and the agent I signed with probably had little to no real connections.

Years passed. Nothing happened. I got very good at skiing and painting houses, but my story just existed in some pages on my shelf and in my head. My agent disappeared.

More years passed. By 2000, a voice from within started screaming, hey, you've still got to write this story and get the movie made! I knew it was correct but didn't know what to do. Fortunately, I'd read a few books that had great story lines but were poorly written. The crazy thing was that they became best-sellers. It made me think I could do it too.

Near the end of 2000 I began writing the novel version of my screenplay. I worked with it on and off, sometimes being diligent and sometimes not. It took several years, but I eventually wrote a full length novel and people liked it. Originally it was called The Big Bang: Notes from Looking Within . Not wanting to repeat the hassle of agents and publishers, I self-published it POD style (Print On Demand) in September of 2005. The title changed to The Little Universe and I also began writing the sequel, Jim's Life .

Looking back on the past five years, I did two things for my writing career. I wrote a second novel and marketed the first one in all the worst ways possible. It was so easy to spend thousands of dollars on things that sounded good but just didn't work.

Recently after finishing the sequel I realized a great truth. There was no way I could afford to market my books anymore with expensive ideas and no guarantee that they'd work. I made a firm decision for promoting the sequel. This was the concept;

I will only market my books in ways that are free or extremely cheap!

Guess what? The free stuff actually works better than the expensive stuff. Who knew?

The Wrong Ways to Spend Your Money

The following is a list of things I tried that either didn't work or were not cost effective. There are plenty of things I haven't tried, but anything that requires a fair amount of money with no guarantee can go here too.

Printing and Shipping.

I spent hundreds of dollars each year printing copies of my screenplay and then novel and sending them to agents and publishers. Each copy cost around $12 to $15 to make, plus the shipping to get it there and the SASE (Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope) to return it when they eventually would. So each package totaled close to $20 with the shipping, and I felt bad knowing I cost at least one large tree its life with all that wasted paper. Months later I'd invariably get my work returned with a note from the agency/publisher that read something like this;

Thank you for your interest in our agency/publishing house. We have reviewed your materials and determined that it doesn't meet the criteria of what we're presently looking for. We wish you the best of luck in your endeavors as we know how nearly impossible it is to get published. Hahahahaha.

Of course I've embellished on the ha-ha-ha part as they were always polite, but that's how it felt at the post office after reading those rejection letters that were probably mailed by the same twenty-year old intern who passed on my novel. (Clearly not bitter about it, am I?)

Print On Demand (POD) Publishing.

I went with Authorhouse. They were the biggest outfit and really sucked me in. I went with a fairly extensive package of bells and whistles, including the editing and some of the marketing services. I spent around $3,200 just to get my initial run of 100 paperback books made. After that I could order more paperbacks for around $9/apiece for print runs of 200 copies or more. Knowing I could only sell my books for perhaps $15, I soon realized this was going to be an extremely difficult way to earn any real money. And coupled with the fact that I gave away so many free copies for reviews in the hope that new readers would generate more readers and someday orders, I sold far fewer than I needed to turn any profit.