Best way to release a book using a content website

Hi all,

I am planning to use a website I own to sell my book on Amazon. The book is technical and is 100% relevant to the website.

A few questions:

1) What is the best way to reduce piracy -- releasing the book in hard copy only? Presumably selling it as a PDF is the best way to have sales destroyed by piracy?

2) Can you offer tips on persuading the website’s readers to buy the book? Again, the book is 100% relevant to what the users want, and almost all users find the website with an organic web search. Would a lightbox boost conversion?

Many thanks!

One more question -- which is better for selling a book: Amazon or Lulu?

Thanks.

 

Well pdfs getting pirated is a fact of life and Amazon can't really do much about it. Only thing that can really get your ebook piracy-proof is by embedding it in an .exe file + making a password for it + after people buy you manually send them a unique activation code to your ebook which then expires and makes the book unshareable.

That's doable but I guess you wouldn't really be for it as this will significantly reduce any automation there is to selling an ebook, putting it up on Amazon and just making money on autopilot because now you'd have to send each and every buyer an activation code etc etc which would be extremely time consuming to ALL do.

And anyway you can't put such .exe files on Amazon so yeah, I recommend you stay in the pdf zone. You'll still make money whether your ebook gets pirated or not and that really should'nt be a problem since the only ebooks that get pirated most of the time are the VERY popular ones so your case shouldn't be that much problematic.

I'm not trying to kill any of your hopes right here, I just showed you the only REAL piracy-proof method to have an ebook protected from non-buyers but I also told you that this isn't recommended as you'd lose a lot of sales if your intent is to sell on mass exposure sites like Amazon etc. Hope that helps out.

 

Many thanks, Sarah and Mark -- all very helpful, especially the exe file tip!

I have modified my plan slightly and want to sell the e-book directly on my website -- can you share further details on using that exe file expiration technique?

Thanks again!

 

Yeah, protecting textual content via DRM is quite tough, because it's one of the easiest mediums to copy and distribute. If you don't want to go to the hassle of implementing a complex protection scheme as described above, just learn how to track your work among the most popular file-sharing websites and aggregators, and issue DMCA removal requests as applicable. Once it's out there you can never truly keep it out of the hands of pirates, but you can make it tougher for them to access.

You might also want to think about using piracy as a means of promoting your book; create a "demo" of the work (perhaps the first chapter or two) and distribute it to file-sharing networks yourself, disguised as the complete book. Include a "readme" in the zip file with info about the work and where to buy it. This is becoming more and more popular as a means of promotion, as well as simply distributing the entire work and reaping the benefit of word-of-mouth... (Again, it's a little tougher when it comes to content like books, but hey, you might as well take advantage of the publicity it can provide.)