Distributing
Your Ebook

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Ebook Distribution

24 July 2006

Whether you are selling your ebook or simply giving it away you need some means of distributing it and this, of course, is one of the areas where electronic comes out way on top of paper and ink. No need for warehousing, expensive postage or shipping. Your ebook can be distributed at the click of a mouse and often at virtually no additional cost.

If you just want to pass your ebook on to a few friends and colleagues then maybe email will do. Or you might copy it to disk and distribute it that way. If you want to distribute to a wider audience and maybe sell your book online then you might choose to upload your file to a server from where others can download it. You might want to use a digital distribution service or online bookstore to help you do this.

• If you are planning to distribute your book as an email attachment then you need to take account of the file size. You might be able to send your ebook over a broadband connection but will all of your recipients be so fortunate? Will they have to wait 15 minutes for your file to download? Should you zip it? If you are selling your ebook then your customers will expect a reasonable turnround time - 24 hours is the longest most will expect to wait. Will you be available to respond quickly on each and every day?
  
  
• Sending your ebook through the postal service on disk or other electronic media is feasible and is certainly one way to deal with problems of size. But posting your disk worldwide means you will have to be up to speed on postal rates and delivery times and options.
  
  
• How about uploading your ebook to your web space and allowing recipients to download at their leisure? If you have the necessary software - such as FTP - and enough web space then this is the easiest way to go. But beware - some hosting services do not allow downloads in certain circumstances so you need to check this. Another problem here might be how to prevent people who have not paid for your ebook from downloading your ebook for free - see our 'security' page.
  
  
• A good solution to the distribution issue is to make use of a specialised service which allows you upload your ebook and leave your service provider to take care of the downloads. Your ebook would sit on a server and be made available to anyone with the right download address. This is a bit like having the ebook in your own web space but with additional features - like security and logging - provided by a third party.
  
  
• Take it one stage further and you can upload your ebook to a distributor with its own sales front. Here you ebook is marketed and sold as well as being distributed. This can make things very easy from your point of view but you might have to sacrifice a little control and flexibility as well as paying more - although the extra cost could be made up in extra sales.
  
  

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© Trevor Womack 2006