I confess I get a buzz when I see my eBooks on sale at Amazon.com, Barnes&Noble.com or at the iTunes Store. I would like to see the hardcopy editions on the shelves of every library and bookstore around the world but that isn’t going to happen anytime soon. The buzz for most is ‘buzzier’ when your name is on a printed book you can pick up, hold in your hand, read and lend out. The thing is you can do all of that with eBooks albeit not without some help from an eReader or other device. Whereas the book has some advantages over the ‘e’ version, the eBook has its own set of pros to balance the cons. You can send a copy to anyone with an email account, anywhere in the world. In fact, you can send it to their mobile phone or iPod-like device, Kindle or similar reader. If you lose a book it is gone. You can always download your eBook from wherever you store it or purchased it if you accidentally wipe wherever it is you are currently reading it from. Amazon’s kindle store lets you download to your PC or Mac as well as your Kindle and if you lose a title you can always download it again for free.

While there is no doubt a lot of the current crop of eBooks are pretty much rubbish when it comes to layout, formatting and even basics like spelling and grammar let alone plot and so forth, the fact is a ton of books of equal or worse quality made it into print over the years and then filled the bargain bins outside barely getting by bookshops. The media is not the problem although today, with eBooks still in their infancy, there are a lot of people clambering aboard who barely have a grip as the juggernaut pulls out of the station. Do not worry, they will fall off enroute. Already in the eight years I have been publishing electronically I have seen the means to achieve this become more and more simple and accessible for all, just as my own skill and ability to produce a decent looking eBook has come along in the proverbial leaps and bounds.

Right now I am switching from a traditional ‘membership’ model of selling my range of Philippines eBooks to what I call the ‘Amazon’ model. Rather than charge $29.99 a title and offer freebies and personal advice via email and so on, I will now sell the same titles for just $9.99 via the major online eBook distributors. I make less per sale, sure, but then I don’t have the hassle or the overheads. No need to worry about the software we use to accept sales and deliver the download dying on us at 3a.m.. No need to try and push the web sites where we advertise the books, not to mention the costs in owning and operating those web sites. On the plus side, those major distributors already get more ‘untargeted’ traffic than we could ever whip up in targeted traffic, without doing anything. If we focus the effort we have already expended on the many web sites we use to support the sale of the books into making people aware of the books being available at amazon.com et al, we will surely increase volume and eventually exceed current sales.

I have been selling the eBooks via Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing for a year now and watched sales steadily grow despite zero promotion. It is at the point where they match the numbers of books sold via the ‘membership model’ given the drop in sales there in recent months. The bottom line is simply this. The paradigm has shifted. The whole online book buying marketplace has changed and if I don’t change with it I will be left behind and in the eCommerce world this is instant death. If it doesn’t work out we can always return to the membership model and for some niche products that is still the ideal model but I think we need to get with the mainstream and utilize social networking media like Facebook and Twitter and replicate what the big sellers of eBook fiction are doing to turn over some huge numbers. Time will tell and I’ll tell it here so you can share the knowledge.