14 Day E-book Writing Challenge - Day Thirteen

You’ve written and edited your e-book, and you’ve prepared some marketing materials to get you ready for launch. Now it’s time to prepare your e-book for distribution.

Reminder: Visit the official challenge thread to access all of the pre-challenge reading on e-book publishing, and for a running list of daily challenge tasks. If you can’t participate during these 14 days, you’ll be able to use the information in that post at any time later to challenge yourself as well.

Task Summary:

• Upload e-book / Setup distribution system
• Setup affiliate program (optional)

Distribution Setup

If you don’t already have a distribution plan in mind, now is the time to decide on one. You can choose manual distribution (people pay you, and you email them the e-book - I made this mistake the first time around, and don’t recommend it), you can upload your e-book to your hosting account / server and deliver with a download link on payment, or you can use distribution services like ClickBank and E-Junkie.

I can’t give you specific instructions, as the process is going to be different for everyone. Distribution services are my own option (I’m going to be going with E-junkie), but your process could involve as little as uploading your file and putting a “buy now” button (from Paypal or another payment processor of your choosing) on your sales page - on that note, if you haven’t put your sales page online yet, you really should get on that today.

No matter what method of distribution you choose, you should have a few things done today: your sales page should be up, you should have a purchase option available (technically people can buy if they want to, although we’ll “announce” its release tomorrow), and your file should be online or otherwise ready to go to buyers (or be distributed for free).

Affiliate Programs

Personally, I’m not launching an affiliate program until at least a month after launching the e-book. I’m doing that for a few reasons, including the fact that I can keep all profits resulting from my own initial marketing and that it will give me time to build a separate affiliate page and extra resources (which you don’t need, but which I consider a good idea).

If you do want to set up an affiliate program up front to help you drive e-book sales, I would strongly recommend going with one of the distribution services that lets you  directly incorporate an affiliate program (easier than setting your own up independently and dealing with all admin work yourself, and you may have a built-in marketplace of potential affiliates - again, I would recommend looking into E-junkie or Clickbank).  Other options would include services like Commission Junction, affiliate marketing / tracking software (I don’t endorse this software; just giving you an example), or even (while not really an affiliate program) using pay-per-action ads through Google Adsense.