Tutorials
How to use metadata to sell ebooks
You'll hear the term metadata a lot in book marketing. It used to be referred to as bibliographic data, back in the days when its main users were humans, like booksellers and librarians. But these days we use the term 'metadata' which is more widely-used in the...
SEO for books: Search and the keys to discoverability
SEO for books and ebooks is the key to 'discoverability' — making sure online searchers can find them. A technique borrowed from the web, search engine optimization (SEO), is arguably the single most important skill to acquire to sell books online. We'll look at how...
How to work with ebook conversion services
The surge in digitisation of publisher backlists has spawned an industry, much of it based in India, which specialises in converting printed books into ebooks. In this tutorial, we'll look at what you need to supply to a conversion service, how they convert a book,...
Using Facebook to market ebooks: How it works, how to get started
With almost a billion users, Facebook is likely to be part of your marketing mix, especially if your books are aimed at the general reading public. But Facebook isn't just big in numbers. It offers a large and often confusing range of features and applications to help...
Tune your website for digital marketing
In spite of the hype surrounding social media, a website remains the central hub for most digital marketing. But its effectiveness depends on it being properly set up for this purpose. Often it’s not. So here are a few ways to make your website more effective as a...
How to produce illustrated, multimedia ebooks
The original Kindle and EPUB formats have shortcomings when it comes to dealing with complex layouts and rich media such as video and audio. These more advanced digital publications are often referred to as enhanced ebooks. We'll take a brief look at some of the more...
What is DRM (digital rights management)?
A discussion of ebooks wouldn't be complete without considering DRM — or Digital Rights Management. This is a so-called technical protection mechanism that uses special computer code to stop users from copying or changing an ebook. Publishers and authors insist on it...