The Association of American Publishers has just reported a jump of 176.6% in ebook sales in 2009!

“E-book sales from the 13 publishers that report figures to the Association of American Publishers soared 176.6% in 2009, to $169.5 million, the AAP reported Friday. The jump in e-book sales coupled with a slight decline in sales of print trade books increased e-book’s share of trade sales from 1.2% in 2008 to 3.3% in 2009.”  (Publishers Weekly)

If you would like to see a ten-year historical chart on ebook sales click here.

This is really an exciting time for ebook authors.  There is enormous growth in the ebook industry and this is an ideal time to get involved.

Write an ebook. Publish it. And start selling your ebooks in 2010!

Writers can easily generate their content and convert it into whatever format they want so that it can be read on Kindle or other ebook reading devices.

It’s no coincidence of course because there two trends are directly related. But it’s all good news for ebook writers and the ebook publishing industry.

Here’s an excerpt from the Guardian in late December:

“Spare a thought for the humble hardback this Christmas. It seems the traditional giftwrapped tome is being trumped by downloads, after Amazon customers bought more e-books than printed books for the first time on Christmas Day…” (Guardian, 28 Dec 2009)

Read more here

And another publisher Little, Brown announced this week they will publish an e-book only update to the 2007 book “The Vaccine Book”, by Dr. Robert Sears. In the e-book exclusive, Dr. Sears has updated the flu chapter to contain the latest information about H1N1 and seasonal flu diseases and vaccines.

Read more on this here

According to a September 2009 survey by the Frankfurt Book Fair of 840 international industry experts, the year when digital sales will overtake sales of traditional books will be 2018.

Now if you had any doubts about which way the ebook industry is going, that should clarify it for you. That’s industry insiders who were surveyed. At a traditional book fair.

Although the majority of respondents estimated that less than 10% of their revenue would come from digital sources this year, 38% estimated that more than 25% of their their total revenue would come from digital sales in 2011.

Now that’s a huge increase… and it reflects the exciting growth that the ebook industry is currently experiencing.

Just how much revenue do you think a best-selling ebook can generate in a year? Twenty thousand dollars? A hundred thousand? Three hundred thousand? How about twenty-one million dollars?

One of Clickbank’s publishers has revealed that their account generated twenty-one million dollars in retail sales during a twelve month period. Apparently they even obtained permission from ClickBank’s senior management staff to print this sales figures on their information page for affiliates.

This figure is gross revenue before refunds and chargebacks, but hey, I don’t mind refunding some of that. Even if they had a high refund rate of 20% that leaves a tidy $16 million to pay the rent.

I have said before that selling your ebooks through Clickbank can be very lucrative and this success story is a testimony to that.  Now we must be able to learn from this. So who did it? And what is this product?

Fat Loss For Idiots Generates $21 Million Revenue

The product is Fat Loss For Idiots and it is basically an ebook and diet system. Customers receive “The Diet Handbook” and they gain access to an online diet generator.

I strongly recommend you take some time to study this product, their web site and promotional materials.

Even taking a quick glance a few things stand out immediately.

1. This ebook provides a solution to an everyday problem that millions of people are concerned about. If you want your ebook to be a best-seller you will need to do that too.

Some examples of other products at ClickBank with very high popularity rankings are “Earth 4 Energy – Renewable Energy Solutions”, “Truth About Six Pack Abs” and “The Magic Of Making Up (Get Your Ex Back)”. All of these products also address popular, everyday issues.

2. This product is more than just an ebook. Your own ebook might be more popular if it promoted as more than an ebook. Call it a system. Call it a training course. Maybe you can add audio cassettes or videos. Perhaps you can provide some online tools or a forum for customers in a “members only” area.

3. This product upsells. The basic product of Fat Loss For Idiots sells for $39, but just before making payment the customer has an option to add a dieting system “Beyond Calories” for an additional $16.95.

Some publishers do this after payment, by taking the customer to a special “One-Time-Offer” page where they can buy something else, usually at heavily discounted rate.

4. This ebook includes a guarantee. Many ebooks come with a satisfaction guarantee and it is mandatory for ebooks selling through ClickBank. Fat Loss For Idiots comes with a Weight Loss Guarantee – if you don’t lose weight you can request a full refund.

5. This ebook has a ton of affiliates. The gravity rating of this product at ClickBank is currently over 500, which means that there is a huge number of affiliates who have earned a commission by referring this publisher’s product in the past 8 weeks. You should work hard to recruit affiliates to promote your ebook.

6. The sales page of this ebook converts. And they have a number of different landing pages to suit various affiliates. A good publisher knows that they must continually split test and improve their sales copy in order to bring in the most sales.

Affiliates will appreciate this too. They will soon stop promoting your ebook if your sales page does not convert well.

Those were just a few quick observations and they are just the tip of the iceberg of what has contributed to this product’s success. You should take a closer look now at what they are doing to make their ebook a bestseller.

You can visit the web site for “Fat Loss For Idiots” here.

About The Author

David Goldsmith is the owner of WriterIncome.com and author of the popular e-book “25 Ways to Write for Money“. You can download a copy of his e-book today at http://www.WriterIncome.com

Please note this is for print books, not ebooks, but I know many of you have self-published books in both electronic and paper formats.

There are entry fees, but there are also some good prizes.

One Grand Prize Winner will be awarded $3,000 cash and promotion in Writer’s Digest and Publishers Weekly.

10 First-Place Winners will receive $1000 cash and promotion in Writer’s Digest.

Winners will also receive additional promotion as their books will be given some excellent exposure. See their web site for further details: http://www.writersdigest.com/selfpublished

Viral marketing is advertising that propagates itself. It is built on the concept of a message spreading by ‘word of mouth’. Two common examples of viral marketing online are “Recommend a Friend” forms, and viral ebooks.

The idea with viral marketing is to induce visitors or readers to pass along your message to other sites or people, creating a potentially exponential growth in your message’s visibility and response.

So in reality if you use this technique you will most likely have two ebooks. The first is your main ebook, which you are selling. The second is your viral ebook to “spread the word”.

The viral ebook will probably be much smaller than your main ebook. It may be a related special report, or perhaps a sample ebook containing the first few chapters. Whatever content you put in your viral ebook MUST be very useful, related information, so that people will want to read it AND so they will be very eager to pass it on to their friends and associates.

Normally with a viral ebook you use special software to make the ebook “rebrandable”. In a rebrandable ebook, certain parts of your ebook are set up for customization. By doing this you enable your partners to insert their own business name, web site links, or even their own affiliate ID into your ebook. This gives them an additional incentive to pass on copies of it, since they can earn money by passing it on and YOU can ultimately promote your ebook get more visitors to your sales page.

So when planning your marketing for your next ebook, don’t forget viral ebook marketing. If you do it right, it’s incredibly effective. You can get everything you need, including the best software, at
http://www.publishyourownebooks.com/i/viralpdf.htm

If you have tried to make PDF ebooks without using Adobe Acrobat then you have probably encountered some of the typical difficulties. You usually end up with a poor quality PDF file that has:

* No Bookmarks
* No Web Hyperlinks
* A Table of Contents that is not hyperlinked to any pages
* No Security to prevent people copying your content!

Your new PDF file looks amateurish…even if your content was terrific!

Now there’s a solution. Easy PDF Templates integrate seamlessly with the free Open Office Writer software. So you simply:

- select one of the templates
- open it up in Open Office Writer
- add your content
- convert it to PDF using the special menu option.

Now that’s better than paying $300 for the original Adobe Acrobat software!

Further details are at http://www.EasyPDFTemplates.com