eBay is not only a place where people buy and sell their phones, laptops, designer clothes or CDs. There is also a smallish but busy market for ebooks on there. It's fairly easy to put your own ebook together and sell it in one of the largest marketplaces in the world.
* First you'll need an idea for your ebook. It can be more or less anything you like. But I wouldn't recommend you publish fiction as an ebook. There's not much money in that. Ideally, you should choose a fairly specialist non-fiction subject. Think about picking some skill or talent you have. Anything from car repairs, to gardening, to DIY, to dressmaking, to bookkeeping, to cookery or badminton. Draw on your experience to create a simple 'how to' ebook.
* If you don't want to write your own ebook you can instead lift some information from the public domain. The Gutenberg library has 33,000 public domain books you can cut-and-paste. It's perfectly legal to do this by the way.
* Put your book together and turn it into a PDF file. Good tip - include as many illustrations, maps, tables, charts and so on as you can, plus your own photos. Apart from looking nice these are easy to do and make your book look more valuable.
Now you're going to need to sell your books. There are a few ins and outs to it you need to know:
* On eBay.co.uk you can't sell books in the normal auction format. You can only sell them as 'Buy It Now' in the fixed price format, using a classified ad.
* Sign up for an eBay seller account in the normal way. If you haven't got one already it's very simple to do.
* Now write a listing advertising your ebook. Don't give people just the title. Write 300-500 words explaining what your ebook offers. Include lots of key words in the title so that people looking for that kind of information can easily find it in searches.
* Be sure to list multiple copies for sale... say 10 or 20 not just one. Then you won't have to keep relisting when books sell.
Now there's one little snag I need to tell you about... plus how to get around it.
eBay.co.uk don't let you sell ebooks as a download, ie. delivered by email. So when a book sells you'll need to burn your books onto a CD and pop them in the post to the buyer. Shop around with stationery suppliers. You can buy CDs very cheaply now and it only costs the price of a normal stamp to post them out.
(By the way, when I sell my ebooks on eBay I also email buyers a copy of the ebook the same day AS WELL, as an extra courtesy. Your customers will be a lot happier if they can get the book straightaway.)
One thing: There's a limit to the amount people will pay for an ebook on eBay. I don't know why, that's just how it is. So ideally you need to price your ebook cheaply, at around £3, £5 or £10 at the very most. (Your costs will be low so this still offers a decent profit margin.)
Actually, I know a way to make a LOT MORE from selling your ebooks on eBay!
The way to do this is to use a two stage marketing system: First, create some small, cheap ebooks and sell them for a pound or two on eBay. Collect the names and email addresses of buyers and compile them up into a mailing list. (Ask people if they want to opt out.)
Next, create some longer, higher priced ebooks on the same and similar subjects. Good quality ebooks that will justify a £10 or £20 price tag.
Now send details of these more profitable ebooks out to your mailing list.
As you know for a fact these people are interested in purchasing information on that subject (because they've already bought once) and they already know and trust you, you should get a good sales conversion rate.... and could make hundreds or even thousands of pounds from each mailing. (This will be outside of eBay so you won't have to pay their fees either.)
Why not have a think about what sort of ebooks you could write and sell on eBay?
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