How to Increase Your Ebook Sales – 5 Tips

By Ramona Tanay

Do you have a new interesting book for your readers? Great.

Do you offer it in the form of an ebook? Also great.

Do you have weak sales figures?

Not that great, but we collected the five most essential tips for you which can instantly help you increase your ebook sales.

  1. Design a professional cover

How do you know that the cover is the main reason for declining sales? The answer is simple: If your book always gets good reviews but it is not selling.

Your book cover is the first contact to your potential customers. It has to get the first interests and make readers want to look into your ebook. It should raise attention, but at the same time, the style of your book cover has to fit both to your target group’s taste and also to the content. To draw interest, you can download free icons online and use them in your book cover design. A professional-looking cover will help convince readers to buy your book.

Here are some good examples of what a professional book cover should look like:

These covers are delightful, attractive and doing a good job giving visual form to the written content in the book.

Some common mistakes to avoid when designing your book cover:

  • Too much information on the front cover
  • Long titles
  • Poor background
  • Utilization of poor images
  • Using too many colors
  • You want to do it all by yourself

Keep in mind that a good cover is an advertisement for your book, an opportunity to stand out in the crowd. So keep it simple and clean.

As a famous book cover designer, Chip Kidd, once said: “a book cover is a distillation. It is the haiku of the story.”

Finally, don’t forget an attractive book cover is an investment: hire a professional designer for it. At Dribbble, you can choose from more than 11,000 designers from all over the world, and you can define who are you looking for.

  1. Find the right price level that increases ebook sales

The production costs of an ebook are much lower than that of the printed ones. Accordingly, your sales price should also be set at a lower level. As a rule of thumb we advise you to always stay under $ 10 and use price promotions to attract new readers.

Due to the fact that selling more books doesn’t increase your production costs, you can also try out a lower price level (0,99 – 2,99 $ per book) or even there is a way to sell your book for a few days for free. Finding the perfect price for your ebook is not easy, and you can completely get lost looking through all the different kinds of ebook pricing models.

If you want to read more about the existing business models in the ebook industry, take a look at our previous blog post here, where we discussed ebook pricing models in greater detail.

  1. Sell your ebook in different online stores

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket: sell your books through various retailers globally. You can hear a lot about the big players in the industry such as Amazon, Kobo or Apple but keep in mind: there are a lot of other retailers and wholesalers in the marketplace that you might want to consider make your ebook available through.

Some retailers like Barnes & Noble, Apple or Amazon have also self-publishing services to interact with their distribution platforms smoothly.

Others, like Scribd, OverDrive, Baker & Taylor or Gardners are book wholesalers, bringing digital books into certain marketplaces. If you pick a self-publishing service to do the digital uploading to ebook sellers for you, make sure your book gets into – at least – the big players and take a look at the niche sellers as well to see if they fit your books target market.

Publishing is not about Amazon anymore, especially not in emerging markets where the growth rate of the ebook market is above 200% and the major ebook stores are not dominant. More customer contact will result in higher sales volumes, so publish your ebook on multiple platforms. However, searching for, finding and contracting new retailers takes a lot of time and so money. Use professional aggregation sites who will help you through the ebook management process as the ERP for digital publishing.

  1. Help your readers find your ebook

Writing your book is only the first step in the book making process, but hard work comes when you try to sell it to your audience. Defining your target group is not enough. You have to guide them to find your book. And how will they find your book? You need to build a strong web presence.

If you have a website or a blog use it to promote your book to generate leads and drive traffic by displaying your book on the home page.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Goodreads can help you to interact with your audience. Make sure you have regular updates on your social media sites and provide useful content to your readers.

Don’t forget to build an email list to develop your target audience. An attractive cover, the right categorization and a nice preview of your content are also essential elements in finding your audience and increase your ebook sales.

The key points are:

  • use your website/blog to promote your book
  • social media sites are valuable marketing tools
  • use SEO to build traffic
  • build a mailing list
  1. Get your ebook reviewed

A good review can make all the difference regarding ebook sales. It provides you the chance to interact with your readers and build engagement among them.

A good book review and word-of-mouth attract more customers because customers trust more on other people’s opinion than on classical company advertisement.

For that, you cannot buy reviews, but you can build out your professional partnership with bloggers who may be the right marketing channel for your readers. Give free ebook copies to bloggers who will hopefully promote your ebook on their platform. Keep in mind that sample-giving is an excellent marketing tool, but it is not allowed via your website if you want to sell your ebook also in online stores.

Instead of your homepage use the different media tools, like Facebook and Twitter to give samples to your potential readers and fans who will be grateful for them.

Improving your ebook sales take up a lot of work, and you have to put the time in to see results. These tips can help you start learning about the right techniques and methods to use when you want to increase your ebook sales. Remember always to communicate and interact with your readers, which not only can increase your sales but also bring awareness to your work.

You have additional thoughts or insights on the topic? Share it in the comments.