Effective E-books
by Alyice Edrich

Marketing E-books Offline

Marketing e-books can be a bit tricky. After all, browsers can't pick up a book, skim the pages, and decide it's the right choice. So aside from offering an excerpt from the e-book, what can you, as the author, do to market and promote your e-book? Use cross-promotion.

While cross promotion can mean partnering up with other businesses to help promote each other's products, it can also mean building and establishing a demand for a product or service through alternate forms of advertising. An online business, for instance, can cross promote by going offline. And that's just what you'll need to do with your e-book!

Below are three ways to increase the sales of your e-book through fun and exciting offline cross-promotion techniques:

1. Host a mini-conference.
You don't have to fly several states away to participate in a major conference. You can host a mini-conference in your own town. All it takes is a little strategic planning, the booking of a local conference room, a few press releases, a couple of classified ads, and word-of-mouth.

What will you teach? Not how to write an e-book, that's for sure! Your goal as the speaker of the conference is to sell your e-books; therefore, your conference should instruct attendees how to do whatever your e-book talks about.

If, for instance, your e-book tells locals how to grow a thriving winter garden indoors, your conference should be held in the dead of winter with a demonstration on how to plant and care for a mini-indoor garden. If your e-book discusses the proper way to train your new puppy, then a trip to the local humane society to "borrow" a puppy in need of training is in order.

The key to a successful conference is to give away a secret that helps sell your e-book. Once the conference is over, have several copies of your e-book for sale on disc, with a coupon for a friend. The coupon should offer ten percent off the download version if purchased within ten days from the conference.

2. Host a mini-workshop.
The mini-workshop would follow the same plan as the conference above, but with one slight change. Instead of just showing your attendees how to do something, you allow them to learn by doing; in other words, you provide hands-on training. The key is to charge a reasonable fee upfront to pay for the supplies and earn the real money through selling your e-books at the end of the session.

Let us assume your e-book was written to teach women how to mentor the younger generation through the use of "Crochet Circles." Your workshop would start out by telling the women what a "Crochet Circle" is and how it got its start. Then you'd explain what a traditional gathering would be like from start to finish: mingling, snacks, crochet instruction, and fellowship techniques. Once you've explained the process, you'd invite the women to experience the "Crochet Circle" first hand—complete with a project designed to be finished in under an hour and donated to a local charity. (i.e. a baby blanket for unwed mothers).

Or let us assume your e-book was written to teach fathers how to bond with their sons through woodworking projects. Your workshop would include pre-cut wood pieces, glue, hammer, nails, and whatever else was needed to remain safe while putting the project together. Your goal is to make the experience so fun that the attendees can't wait to buy your e-book, where they'll learn many more fun, inexpensive projects.

3. Become A Mentor.
While you could volunteer to mentor your target audience, that's not what I'm suggesting. Think in terms of protégés. Your goal would be to train others in your area of expertise. Depending on the type of e-book you've written, you could be paid to train people in person, or via the phone, email, or an online chat room.

As a way to give back to the community and increase their income, many successful freelance writers and novelists have opted to provide mentoring by email. You can do the same thing by using your e-book as a course workbook.

Similarly, several photographers provide "shadowing" programs designed to give wanna-be photographers the chance to follow a professional around for the day. If your career allows, you can do the same thing. At the end of the shadowing program, you can provide a list of optional resources to help further things along, including a list of your topic-related e-books, complete with a discount coupon.

Besides the above hands-on cross promotion techniques, you can also promote your e-books offline by placing classified ads in a topic-related magazine, picture ads in your local newspaper, and by writing topic-related articles for paid magazines—just make sure they mention your e-book's title in the byline.