Should I offer a physical version of my ebook?

Here are a couple of titles one author recommended, I couldn't find a newer one...

BNB Print On-Demand

Self Publishing, Book Printing & eBook Publishing | Lulu.com

There's some publicity payoff for having a physical book published on Amazon (I'm hazy on it now), though you will need to purchase your own ISBN number, and this might get you scanned into google books as a side effect.

One huge selling clickbank product automatically sends a physical version at near cost to any buyer who complains after mistakenly thinking they would be getting a real book, he finds these people become loyal customers. Far cry from the service some CB products give.

Amazon's Createspace will be the most cost effective unless you are willing to set up a publishing busines (business checking account in the name of your publishing business, vendor's license, tax ID, your own list of ISBNs) and use a POD (printing on demand) company like Lightning Source Inc.

Sometimes Createspace is a little lower in price than LSI (Lignting Source), and Creatspade does print on a little heavier paper stock than LSI.

LuLu has its books printed by LSI and adds a markup. For example a friend of mine self-published a 250+/- page, hard-bound book through LuLu, and pays LuLu $17 for each book. I use LSI for my POD printing, so when I checked to see what my friend's book would cost at LSI, it was $7. So LuLu is adding $10.

LSI is owned by Ingram - the largest book distributor, and gets your book into bookstores as well as into Amazon. With LSI, however, you must do all of the book layout, typesetting, cover design, and use Adobe InDesign or Adobe Acrobat Pro to create the special .pdf necessary for CMYK printing - PDF/X-1a [2001].

With Createspace you can write your book in Word and upload from that. Both Createspace and LSI provide a template onto which you set your cover design. You then upload the template for printing.

Createspace will supply an ISBN for you, but that does make Createspace be listed in Books In Print as being the publisher.

With LSI you supply your own ISBN, and that makes you be the publisher.

Read "POD For Profit" by Aaron Shepard. He walks you through the process.

Here is Aaron's site *Self Publishing* AARON SHEPARD'S PUBLISHING PAGE *Online Book Marketing on Amazon, Print on Demand by CreateSpace and Lightning Source, Do-It-Yourself Book Design, Amazon Books, POD Publishing, Publish Your Books*

And here is his blog Aaron Shepard's Publishing Blog (Amazon.com, Lightning Source, CreateSpace, Microsoft Word, Aiming at Amazon, Perfect Pages)

I am not an affiliate. I happen to know Aaron from talking with him at a publisher's newsgroup.

I hope this helps.

:-Don

You can also just use a fulfillment company to do this... We print and ship a 200 page manual for $12 and there are no minimums.

Used create space and they are pretty good

yes you can..

I have used lulu before, but not createspace though..

but before that, what is the thought process and objective of creating the book?

I use mine basically to get leads for my offline workshops and to build my brand as published speaker..

At the end of the day, ask yourself this question:

Does it add REAL value that your customers need (not nice to have)? if Yes, then go for it! :-)

why not offer 2 options!

ebookt for certain price and physical version for the extra cost to produce and send it! i bet most sales are the ebook! lol

even better market it at such a price for the physical product and offer for example $3 discount for receiveing electronic only