how do you put your ebook on your sbi website ?

by ellis dehaven
(aiken, sc)

Ellis, my way was pretty makeshift.

If I were selling my ebooks for a higher price, I'd probably use Clickbank. This would give me the added advantage of other Clickbank publishers being able to sell my book for me from their sites!

But at a price of 3 bucks, and with Clickbank taking a buck off the top, plus a percentage, the other sites and I would be getting less than a dollar each for each sale.

So I cobbled a structure together, using a Paypal Merchant Account and uploading PDF versions of my book using the Special File Manager in Site Central of SBI.

Paypal buttons lead to Paypal, which you can customize to approximate your site's look and feel, but which is quite limited in that you really can't instruct your customer while they're on the Paypal site. You just hope that they pay and find their way back to your site for the download.

It was all quite detailed and I couldn't have done it without a lot of help in the SBI forums. (There's one with "ebooks" in the title.)

If I were more technically adept, I would probably get some kind of store software, which would improve the ebook buying experience. But it'd cost an upfront and probably a monthly of some sort for credit card processing outside of Paypal, and at 3 bucks a book that's just hard to justify.

Make sure you've structured everything in a way that makes sense before getting too far into it. The forums also taught me that I want to keep my ebooks from getting indexed and that there's meta coding I need to add in HOPES of making that happen. I've also given my ebooks some nonsensical urls to keep cheap surfers from intuiting how to find them.

I also created html versions of each book for people who didn't want to tangle with a download. Just like with the pdf version, they don't receive a link until they pay and Paypal returns them to the site.

Read the stickies in the forum! I suspect I got onto some very useful information that way.

Good luck. I couldn't have done it without all that wonderful SiteBuildIt traffic!