Enter e-Junkie. For $5 US a month, e-Junkie provides you with an online shopping cart, storage for digital downloads, order processing, inventory management, email autoresponders, and a lot more.

Let’s say you’ve written an e-book. You upload the file to e-Junkie, write a sales page on your own site, and insert e-Junkie’s code to place a “Buy it now” button on your page. When visitors click through to buy your e-book, they’re directed to your e-Junkie shopping cart, where they can pay via PayPal or Google Checkout (or a couple of other services) and instantly get a download link.

e-Junkie will also handle physical products — it works the same way, except that when an order is placed, you get an email with the details so you can fulfill the order yourself. You can offer several variants — say, a paperback and hardcover of the same book. e-Junkie will even calculate the shipping costs and sales tax (where applicable).

What makes e-Junkie especially compelling is the ability to set up affiliate programs so that other people can promote and sell your product. You choose how much you’d like to pay per sale — say, 20% of the sale price — and e-Junkie will provide your affiliates with a tracking code they can use to send sales your way. e-Junkie doesn’t administer the affiliate program; at the end of the month, you’ll get a tally of affiliate sales and you have to pay off your affiliates (via PayPal, usually).

Of course, you can always join the affiliate program of any of your fellow e-Junkie sellers. Signing up is easy — find a product you like in their affiliates directory (under the “Affiliates” tab), and click the link at the bottom to join their affiliate program. You’ll get a choice of either a text link to customize or a “Buy Now” button you can put on your site — the idea is, you write your review, sales page, blog post, or other copy, and the author pays you for your help.

Although e-Junkie allows sellers to market a wide range of products, it seems designed with e-books and software — downloadable products — in mind. Tough luck for everyone else, but good news for writers!

Go check out e-Junkie. As far as I’ve seen, they’re the only ones offering this kind of service, and they do it very well.

1. Vision: A Resource for Writers
   PDF downloads of every issue of the online magazine for writers.Topics covered in a recent issue (January 2008) included motivation, publishing vocabulary, submission tracking software, and more.
2. Mugging the Muse: Writing Fiction for Love and Money
   This massive (209 pp) e-book by novelist Holly Lisle covers the ins and outs of writing, from creating good dialogue and fleshing out your characters to finding an agent and keeping your writing career moving.
3. 60 Effective Strategies for Selling More Books
   Best-selling author Scott Jeffrey offers some effective strategies for boosting your book’s sales and building up your reputation as a writer.
4. Plug Your Book! (sample chapters)
   Steve Weber is one of the masters of online book promotion. Here, he discusses using Internet social networking to build up word of mouth about you and your writing.
5. The Easy Way to Write Short Stories That Sell!
   A good-sized (49 pages) piece on the art and craft of short stories. Opens with several pages about getting in the right mindset to write well (e.g. time management, etc.). Email list subscription required.
6. Organized Writer 2008 Calendar
   Not an e-book per se, but a downloadable 2008 calendar with quotes, highlighted dates, and todo lists especially designed to keep writers on track.
7. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Getting Published
   A collection of articles by Writersville authors about the trials and tribulations of getting published.
8. How to Write a Great Query Letter
   No surprises here; this one’s about writing great query letters. At over 100 pages, though, you can bet it’s a great deal more detailed than the typical “research your market, hook your reader, be polite, and spellcheck” howto.
9. Book Writing for Fun and Profit
   Brian Scott walks you through the process of writing and selling a book, from picking a subject and creating a title to getting an ISBN number and selling your work as an e-book. It’s loaded with ads and the layout is a little ugly, but there’s some good information in here.
10. Unleashing the Ideavirus
    Seth Godin is one of the premiere marketing experts, and writes in a clear, engaging style. Not strictly for writers, this e-book is about spreading your ideas, and is sure to help you figure out how to market yourself and your work.

Several free programs have appeared in the last couple years that take advantage of the relationship between the PDF format and printing. These programs install a virtual printer on your PC, allowing you to “print” to a PDF file instead of to a physical paper-based printer. All you have to do is select “Print”, and when the print dialog opens, select your PDF printer from the drop-down menu. A save-file box will open, allowing you to select a folder and a name for your PDF; when you hit “Save” the file will be saved as a perfectly formatted PDF file.

There are dozens of free programs to create PDFs. I recommend PDF Forge’s PDF Creator because it’s open source (meaning nobody “owns” the code and anyone can develop it further or modify it) and works well. To edit PDF files directly, you have to use commercial software like Adobe Acrobat, which costs several hundred dollars — instead, make sure you keep your source files (the original word processor file) and make any changes in them. Then, simply generate a new PDF for free.

First of all, make sure it’s featured prominently on your site. Write a post about it, making sure to use all the important keywords you think people doing a Google search might use to find information like yours. For a while, at least, it’s a good idea to put a blurb about your e-book at the bottom of every post you write, too — make sure our existing readers know about, and keep telling them about it!

Contact anyone you have any connection with on the web and ask them to link to your e-book, too. Send them a copy and ask them to review it. If it’s for sale, offer free copies for a giveaway on somebody else’s site. If you’re using e-Junkie, set up an affiliate program and give people a piece of the action in exchange for their promotional efforts.

Insert a link to your e-book into your signature block on your email and in any forums you frequent. Add a link to your profile on any social networking sites you belong to. If you’re giving it away, add it to directories of free e-books (Google “Free e-book directory” for some ideas).

If you’re selling your e-book, make sure you add it to Amazon’s Kindle store through their Digital Text Platform. You’ll have to reformat it for the Kindle’s screen (which is black-and-white and about the size of a pocketbook page), but you’ll get your title in front of thousands of Kindle users — a number that’s hopefully going to grow a lot. You can charge whatever you want for it — the average price at the moment seems to be $9.99 US — and you get 35% of the sales revenue.

Be creative with your promotions. Make up business cards or bookmarks with the URL of your e-book’s page prominently featured, and hand them out wherever you can. Put up flyers on bookstore bulletin boards. Buy Google Adwords or advertise in literary magazines. Obviously, don’t spend a fortune — and if you’re giving it away, it’s probably a good idea not to spend anything at all — but if you think you can make it back, putting a little money into promotions isn’t a bad idea.

Well, that depends on your ultimate goal. Are you planning to give your e-book away, or do you want to sell it? Let’s look at both options separately.

Giving it away

If you’re going to give your e-book away, you could just upload it to your site, add a link to the sidebar, and be done with it. We’ll talk about promoting it in the next post, but for now, make sure it’s clearly marked (the word “FREE” in all caps, bold-faced, in giant red letters never fails to attract attention!) and why people should want to read it.

A better bet might be to give it its own page. Write up a short description, add some testimonials if you have them (and update the page if you get any), and add the page to your site’s main menu.

Or maybe you want to give it away but still get something in return. You could offer the e-book as an incentive to sign up for your newsletter, if you have one — attach the file to the automatic reply they get when they sign up. Or you could use it to drive subscriptions to your RSS feed — Remarkablogger shows you how to add a link to your e-book that only shows up in your RSS feed. Tell them they’ll get the link once they’ve subscribed.

Selling your e-book

Selling an e-book takes a little more work — it is, after all, a business endeavor — but, of course, you get paid for it. If you already have a shopping cart on your site (we’ll talk about that in a future post), you could sell it directly. That’s probably more than most writers are willing to deal with, though, so here are a couple of third-party services that can handle some or all of the details of the sale for you.

• PayPal: If you don’t mind doing the order fulfillment yourself, you could add a Paypal “Buy Now” button to your site. Every day, log in, see what new orders have been placed, and email them a copy of your e-book.
• Lulu: If you expect to sell more than a few copies a day, you’ll want order fulfillment along with payment processing. Lulu is a print-on-demand service that also offers e-books; you’ll need to create an account, upload your e-book, and charge enough to cover Lulu’s per-book fee and commission. Your buyers will receive their e-book directly from Lulu. Lulu does paper copies, too, so you can offer your work in both formats if you like.
• e-Junkie: It’s not free, but for $5 US a month, e-Junkie will host a shopping cart for you and handle the order fulfillment, providing your buyers with a download link to get the e-book from after they’ve paid. E-Junkie offers other useful services for that $5/month, including the ability to create affiliate links so other sites can sell your e-book — for a cut, of course.

I’m sure there are other services I don’t know about, but beware, too — for some reason writers have always been seen as likely targets for scams. Make sure that a) you don’t have to pay for services you don’t need (like editing or layout), b) you aren’t turning over any copyrights and you retain full ownership of your e-book, and c) you aren’t required to pay for a certain number of sales until they’re actually made. Thoroughly research any e-book publisher or distributor; Googling their name plus “scam”, “fraud”, and similar words will likely turn up what you need to know about any shady dealers.

Instead, I suggest saving your file as a plain-jane pdf file. While you could use professional layout software like Adobe’s InDesign and Acrobat to produce your final text, these programs cost hundreds of dollars and are difficult to learn. Instead, I recommend using your word processor of choice and a free pdf creator(I recommend PDF Forge’s PDF Creator; some word processors, like Word 2007 (using the “Save as pdf” addon) and OpenOffice.org can save pdfs themselves.

You’ll need to set up your pages with the end result in mind. Wide text columns can be harder to read, especially on screen, so set your page sizes to something more book-like. I set my pages at 6” wide by 9” tall, with a 1-inch margin all around. This allows me to easily use the files with print-on-demand publishers like Lulu, and allows my readers who’d like to print the e-book to print 2 pages per side in landscape mode without hurting the layout — saving paper and retaining readability.

You’ll probably also want to put page numbers, chapter headings, the title, and your name into the headers and footers. Since this is a full book and not just a manuscript, you’ll need a title page, copyright announcement, and table of contents at the front. If you have any graphic design skills, you could also add a nice cover, though that’s not essential — your e-book will never be sitting on anyone’s shelf in need of a cover to attract attention. You can also sprinkle graphic elements throughout your text to give it a professional look and make it nicer to read.

When your text looks the way you want it, do yourself, me, and the world a favor and proofread it. Remember, you don’t have an editor — this is a one-person show you’re putting on. It’s a good idea to have a few people read it and give you their opinion, and take their feedback seriously.

Finally, save the file as a PDF. If you have the option, add thumbnails so your reader can easily select specific pages. Make sure you say “yes” if you’re asked to embed fonts, to be certain your e-book looks the same way on your reader’s screen as it does on yours. You can choose to password-protect your file, but I think that only adds complexity for the reader without adding any real security to protect your content. Accept that some copies will get copied and sent to people who didn’t pay you; learn to find satisfaction in the fact that people are reading your stuff.

Lots of writers have written and distributed e-books, for various reasons:

• To make money: Since an e-book (unlike a website) is a discrete unit, it can be sold.
• To offer samples: Many writers give away a few chapters of their work to get people “hooked” and convince them to buy their book.
• To build awareness: Authors have given away e-books to win fans — hopefully they’ll buy your next book.
• To spread information: Sometimes you have a topic that you want to write about that isn’t worthwhile to publish — it’s either too short to make a full book worthwhile or the audience is too small. E-book costs are lower (often zero) so publishing via e-book often makes better sense.
• To show reader appreciation: Some writers publish e-books as freebies to thank their readers for their patronage.
• To promote other products: E-books can be filled with links to your website, to your other books on Amazon, or anywhere else on the Web.
• To get numbers: An unestablished writer looks good if s/he can go to a publisher showing that they’ve sold 10,000 copies of their e-book.
• To have control: An e-book allows a writer to control the presentation of their work in a way that posting it on the web doesn’t.
• To self-publish cheaply: With their low investment, e-books are an attractive alternative to traditional self-publishing.
• To supplement paper publication: Many authors offer the choice f an e-book alongside their traditional paper copies, for readers who use e-book devices, prefer to read on their computer, or just want the instant gratification of downloading a book instead of waiting for it to be mailed.

I’m sure there are other reasons I haven’t even thought of, too. The main point is that producing and distributing e-books is fairly cheap, and can make you some money either directly (through sales) or indirectly (through promoting your “brand”).

Just as there are a lot of reasons to write e-books, there are a lot of things to write e-books about. Of course, you could just transform any unsold book-length manuscript into an e-book (I say “unsold” because you probably don’t want to compete with the publisher of your paper books — and may no have the legal right to according to your publishing contract). But the e-book format is ideal for shorter works, too — a 30-page “how to” book, a sampler of short stories, a short personal narrative, or a collection of travel photos.

An e-book is an opportunity for you to establish your expertise in your field or niche without replacing your “bread and butter” writing. Think about the things that you do well and offer up a representative sample. Just like writing a traditional book, the choice of topics is limited only by your knowledge and taste and the demand you are trying to fill. If there’s a topic you’ve always thought about writing on but couldn’t imagine filling 250 pages with it, consider writing an e-book instead.