How can you know if your E-books Have Value?

It's been three months since I attended the PSA conference in the U.K. and the CAPS conference in Canada. And the NSAA conference in Australia is just a few weeks away!

One of the neat things about attending conferences is the chance to share ideas with other experts. And Gihan's Third Law of The Internet says, "For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert."

At the CAPS conference, I had the chance to talk at length with Dan Poynter - an expert on book publishing, who also spoke at PSA - about e-book publishing. Dan and I both presented sessions at a special workshop for advanced speakers, and he then came to my breakout session about e-books.

Dan and I have very different attitudes towards e-books, which we had the chance to discuss in depth and resolve in the Australian way (that is, over a couple of beers at the end of the conference).

His basic concept is to make his printed material available in as many formats as possible, so that readers can choose the format that suits them best. So he has published a number of e-books that are electronic versions of his printed books, and he sells them at a lower price than the printed version.

My e-book model is different. I would rather create e-books that are different from any printed book, and sell them at a much higher price than they would fetch in printed form. For example, one of my e-books sells for about £50, whereas a printed version of it would probably only get about £8! Essentially, it involves selling people on the value in the e-book rather than its size or format.

You see, people do judge books by their cover, so there's a limit to what they will pay for a printed book. It doesn't matter whether it's a trashy novel, a John Harvey-Jones business book, or the Bible - people will pay roughly the same price for it because it "looks like a £8.99 book"!

On the other hand, they judge e-books by their value. So you can charge what you like, as long as you deliver value.

For example, would you pay £1,000 for a one-page e-book? No? What if that one page had next Saturday's National Lottery numbers on it? When Robyn Henderson and I created our CD product Write Profitable E-Books, we talked about different ways of adding value to e-books - including:

1. Bonus e-books included in the package
2. A money-back guarantee
3. A certificate for a phone or e-mail consultation
4. An on-line course of supplementary material
5. A free ticket to a teleseminar on the subject
6. The possibilities are endless. It's just a matter of getting into the mind-set of value rather than cost.

I prefer my e-book model to Dan's because I think it's easier to sell a few high-price products than many low-price products. But Dan's model can work as well - it certainly does for him! So choose the one that suits you best.

If you'd like to know more about my model, I recommend that you get Write Profitable E-Books. Even though I do say so myself, it's an excellent way of learning how to create high-value e-books from your existing books or other information products.