Ebook Project: Submitting the Ebook to Directories

Free v Paid Ebooks

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have not had very much success making money online so far. I was very slow to monetize this blog and it’s only been these last couple of months that have seen an income starting to trickle in.

As a result, I know that there are a lot of people out there rooting for me and urging me to create something to sell. My decision to release this ebook as a free book has caused quite a lot of people to encourage me to try and sell it instead.

However, just because the book is free does not mean that it is not making money for me! I did mention this before when I first released the book but I don’t think I am getting the point across. If somebody orders a domain via my affiliate link for BlueHost which is embedded in the book, I earn $65 commission which is a nice payout. If I had charged for the book I doubt it would have been much more than around $10-12 so I would have needed to sell 5-6 copies of the book to generate the same income as an affiliate sale.

By making the book free, I can encourage mass distribution and hopefully get it in front of far more eyeballs than would have been possible had I charged a cover price. Hopefully, some of the places to which I can upload the book will continue to distribute it for years to come.

I actually have LOTS of ideas for how to distribute this ebook and throughout the week I am going to be blogging about these ideas in detail. A great many of them are only possible because the book is free and would not be available to me if I was charging for the book.

To start things off for today, I am looking for places where I can directly upload the PDF file or submit the download link, in particular directories of ebooks.

Ebook Submission Sites

My first port of call was a nice post by my good friend Sean from Warrior Blog about writing and submitting your own ebook. In his post he lists 17 places on the Internet where you can submit your Ebook. That post was written in August 2007 so some of the links no longer worked for me but some did and I have also found other directories with a bit of surfing. Below are two lists - ones that I used, and ones that I didn’t.

Sites That I Submitted To

• http://www.free-ebooks.net/
• http://www.ebookpalace.com/
• http://www.mindlikewater.com/
• http://www.ebookheaven.co.uk/cgi-bin/suite/directory/directory.cgi
• http://www.ebooks4free.net/submit.htm
• http://e-library.net/add.html
• http://www.ebook88.com/submit.html
• http://carltonross.tripod.com/ebook_submit.htm

One thing that I noticed while doing this is that many of the places I submitted to did not want a link directly to the PDF and instead wanted a link to a download page. This gives me the added benefit of a free backlink to this blog, handy :-)

Sites That I Did NOT Submit To

Some of these directories will only list the ebooks in return for a backlink that is on the download page. I want to keep my actual download page clutter free so this silly restriction annoys me. I am quite happy to provide a backlink here but only one directory allowed me to specify a backlink URL that was different to the submitted URL.

• http://www.ebookjungle.com/ (requires a graphic linkback)
• http://www.e-book-zone.com/ebookstore.htm (submissions not accepted at this time)
• http://www.ebookbroadcast.com/submit.html (wants a press release)
• http://www.ebook2u.com/directory/add.shtml (submissions not accepted at this time)
• http://www.jogena.com/ebookdir/ebookform.htm (requires a backlink on download page)
• http://www.ebookdirectory.com/(requires a backlink on download page)

If anybody knows other directories or similar sites to submit ebooks to then please let me know in the comments. Please don’t list forums or other types of sites as I will be covering those kinds of marketing opportunities later in the week.

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