What's the best process to sell an Ebook?

I assume that you are new to all this. So what I suggest is to take it slow.

If you haven't made PDF ebooks before you should make a small one, 10-20 pages and give it away on Warrior Forum (or similar Ebook directory) and see how it works.

Now to have it designed, you can hire some help from WF classifieds or odesk/elance.

Then comes payment: I have sold simple ebooks with just a PayPal button. They pay and get to the download link!

You can even use a third party service like eJunkie or click-bank and let them handle the payment and affiliate terms.

For promotion you can use everything you got, affiliates, classifieds, ads and social media.

If you have some really exclusive stuff, why not make a video series on it? That will make it look even better?

If you need some help with the tech stuff, I can help you with that just PM me!

Most important question of all is what your market and ebook topic will be - that impacts whether it will sell far more than any of the other questions you have listed.

So, making sure your ebook is targeting a market that is insanely passionate about achieving a desired transformation in their life that your ebook will help them with is critical.

From there, you will find many MS Office/Open Office templates for ebooks around that include proper formatting of front matter, chapter headings, header/footer, etc... Pretty basic stuff.

For images, you can either outsource the formatting of your ebook on odesk, freelancer, etc...or do it yourself - your images can come from royalty free image sites, some of which are free (with fairly open terms and conditions) whereas others are paid (ex istock). I wouldn't go too crazy with images unless the ebook you are writing depends highly on visuals (Ex cookbook)

Pricing your ebook is a topic in itself depending heavily on the value you are providing, your overall business strategy (is your ebook the front of a sales funnel with back-end emphasis or is it your only source of income), how you package your offering (instead of an ebook it could be a guidebook, course, home study program, etc...), what your competition is doing and how you fit within that ecosystem, etc... Your ebook should really just be one product in part of a bigger information publishing business plan

I would go with either Clickbank (they manage affiliate program) or Ejunkie (incorporates affiliate management, but you pay your affiliates) as your payment processor, other options include Paypal, 2Checkout or your own merchant account

Ideally you begin building traffic flow, a following and yes, a list before you launch. You can use blogging, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, or ideally, a combination of these to begin generating traffic and interest. You should also work on securing some early affiliates/partners that can help endorse and promote your ebook when it launches - you can do this as you are writing your ebook (give them early reviews, form relationships, etc...)

Advertising can be done via Facebook, Adwords, Solo Ads, offline ,etc... Depending on your target, any one of these can be very effective.

Jeff

If you need a professional ebook designer, I'd like to throw my hat into the ring...My URL is the same as my username, but with a .com on the end

A lot of the answers to your questions are going to depend on what your topic is about, but:

1) You can save a file as PDF in the most recent versions of Microsoft Word. I think OpenOffice will also let you save as PDF. They also have good templates that carry over well to PDF format.

2) I would say Clickbank, as it does the payments and affiliate program together.

3) No one really wants to subscribe to a "coming soon" page...I would build the list by offering a free chapter from your book. If people are really interested, they'll definitely want to check it out.

4) Again, depends on the topic, but there are plenty of forums, blogs, communities and Q&A sites out there with established audiences that could fit your niche.

Hope this helps!

1. You'll have a difficult time with outsourcing if you don't choose your own images and have some clear direction about how you want the document to be formatted. I would recommend finding an ebook that you really like to give as an example.
2. I haven't seen JVZoo or Zaxaa mentioned...they're worth checking out. Have you considered a Kindle book?
3. I agree that you could use a sample chapter to build a list.
4. You need to advertise where your target audience "lives" on the Internet.

Good luck!

Here is what I have so far that I will need:

1. Ebook written ( I have content and may even make it with Open Office)
2. Sales page (Use Leadpages)
3. Capture page (Use Leadpages)
4. Autoresponder (Getresponse)
5. Affiliate program (Not sure yet)
6. Traffic (various methods like Social media, niche forums, etc.)

Most of the stuff I can manage or hire someone to do it. How can I setup an affiliate program without having to create a separate page for affiliate materials (like you would have to do with Clickbank)? I just need a service that would give affiliates their links and some promotional materials such as banners and emails to send out (these I would create). Any ideas?

#1 A large percentage of people who read e-books are extremely price sensitive,be careful
#2 Try to sell on ebay,amazon websites,or create your own blog
#3 Create in forums like warriorforum discussions like that.Promote your ebook in this way
#4 Discover who would need it,i mean try to think who would have interest for that.
#5 Get traffic to your blogs,websites where are your ebook and also make more backlink
#6 More traffic = More sales

Email Marketing may be the best way to sell your eBook. You can do solo ads for doing that.

Looks like you are getting close to figuring it all out :-)

I would recommend a few additional things:

1. I would go with OptimizePress rather than Leadpages - OP2 does a great job of facilitating OTO - in fact overall sales funnels from Squeeze/Landing page to sales page to OTO

2. For your affiliate program, you can still go with Clickbank - they will take care of giving your partners their link, you set the commission. It's up to you what you share with your affiliates in terms of resources. You can simply give them the link, you can place banners (that you can have created for $10-$20 for 2-3 professional looking banners), you can go crazy and give them other tools such as solo ad, classified ad copy, articles to post to their blog, etc... Totally up to you. CB is about as seemless as it gets for managing affiliates. I also use E-junkie (alternative to JVzoo) and really like them - they also offer encrypted, one-time download links for your ebooks if you want to use them.

Jeff