eBooks Are Real Books…in Electronic Form

When people come to me to learn how to write an eBook, they often say something about finally deciding to write, even if it isn’t a real book. An eBook is a real book, just not in the traditional way we may think about it.

We all grew up with hardback books, and eventually many of those books were available as paperbacks, making it much less expensive to produce and distribute them. Paperbacks were also more convenient for us to take with us. I can remember ordering books in elementary school for about thirty cents each. They were all paperbacks, and I took good care of them so they would last. When I was older I would always purchase a couple of paperbacks to take with me on a vacation. I never thought of them as having any less value than a hardback book.

eBooks are not new. In fact, there have been eBooks available online since the middle of the 1990’s. Mark Joyner and Joe Vitale are credited with putting some of the first ones online back then. These were books that had not been previously published in the traditional sense. They became so popular and so many copies were sold that many more people were then willing to do the same exact thing. This is a form of self-publishing.

If your book has already been published by a traditional publisher, check to see that you still have the electronic rights to the material. If so, you can set up a simple website and sell your book as an eBook. You will make much more profit this way, and many more people will have access to the content in your book.