Public Domain

Alright so your e-book based on a public domain work is selling, but you find that it is not selling fast enough. What to do?

In the world of business, one of the best tested methods of achieving success is to sell and sell it fast, before others decide to join the bandwagon and you find yourself dividing the market among yourselves. Well, that is probably inevitable, but if you want to get the best slice of the cake, you need to be quicker than the rest.

Think on your toes and always, always look for better alternatives that promise bigger profits.

The same thing goes with e-book reselling. If you want to make maximum profit out of your hard work, look for other alternatives. Most successful e-book resellers have turned to affiliate programs to generate more income. They use these programs as another avenue to increase their products’ exposure and hopefully turn more people into potential buyers as a result.
 
You can do this, too.

Basically, affiliate programs work this way: You offer your public domain-based e-book as a reseller or affiliate program. When someone else comes along and decides to purchase a copy of your e-book, he can then sell the e-book for an unlimited number of times. And because the work is sold under his own name, he gets 100% of all the profits.

But what about you?

Well, you do not have to worry because when he purchased your work, you already gained your profit. This method is also called “franchising” or “turnkey” and it can be very rewarding if you play your cards well.

Generally, if you make an initial investment in a reseller or affiliate program, it will cost you anywhere around a hundred dollars. Once you have laid down the ground work, at least in terms of finances, the only other investments you have to make are time and energy.

Selling and marketing your product by yourself is going to be very difficult. That is because the market is so huge it is a lot like standing in a room full of crowds. There is no telling buyers will even notice where you are standing and get interested in the product you are selling. You need to take the active part.

Give yourself an edge in sales and marketing by using a franchising operation with the following added tips:

• Charge less than the average selling price of the product. This is one sure-fire way to undercut the competition and thus give your product a boost in terms of buyer attractiveness.


• Make sure your sales website looks professional and clean. Avoid any clutter. Your product description and all text found in your site should be easy to read and offers fresh content.


• Under no circumstances should you make any blatant marketing hype in your website. This will only sour the costumer’s opinion of you, considering how many scams and con artists profit by fooling their clients with too much hype.


• Create an e-book from another public domain work, preferably on a related or similar topic, then offer it as a free bonus alongside the affiliate product.

If you do all these things, your buyers are going to think they hit the jackpot, and they sure did if you play your cards right. And in the mean time, you are sitting back and reaping the rewards for all your excellent business sense.

Besides modernizing public domain text, another alternative you have is to recreate copyright-free images. Again, you do not have to be an artist to do this sort of thing. You do, however, probably need to know a little about digital art software like Photoshop or Corel Draw.

With the help of a good image editing software, you can make alterations in a public domain image, depicting tired old works like the Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Picasso’s Woman in front of the Mirror in a humorous twist.

In fact, there may already be several funny depictions of these works circulating the net – propaganda posters like the US Government’s We Can Do It!, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Vetruvian Man, and many more. These images are in the public domain so they are free for use by the public any which way they want.

And once you have a collection of these “modernized” public domain images, you can group them and then publish them as themed calendars, posters, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, or other gift items. You can even print your products and sell them online as t-shirts, hats, book bags, cards, and more.

There are two ways of going about this. You can either hire a company that specializes in promotional products. Have them make an inventory of all your altered public domain images so you can store them and ship them whenever a buyer decides to purchase from your site. Or, you can enlist the services of a Print on Demand company like Café Press or Lulu and let them reproduce or reprint copies of your public domain images.

Have you noticed how successful companies these days keep on packaging and re-packaging their products over and over?

Essentially, it is the same product but because of the face-lift, they somehow get it into the minds of their consumers that it is a wholly new and different product.

Walt Disney even made use of this great business strategy. He came up with a new way of telling old fairy tales, giving the stories a wholly refreshing feel to them. You can do this, too, with an old public domain story.

Just choose the public domain work you want. Create a revised edition of it and then sell it as your own. Or, make as many revisions as you can until what emerges is a product that is so completely radical from the original though both are still essentially similar, then file for a copyright notice, and the work becomes another original.

Sell this new work as your own and earn royalties from distributors. Additionally, because of the copyright protection attached it, no one else can copy your ideas. This means the work is completely yours – free for your use, private or otherwise.

Giving public domain works a face-lift does not take a creative genius to do it. So do not feel intimidated by it all.

The whole thing can be simple; just change the format of a work by doing any or all of the following:

· Make the type face cleaner;

· Make the text more attractive by arranging them into sidebars and tables. This would make the content so much easier to read than blocked text arranged in a boring, monotonous paragraph;

· Add graphics, headings, or color texts;

· Make a few actual changes to the text, either by adding new material or subtracting unnecessary lines.

After all that, your book or e-book is now considered officially “revised” and you can start redistributing them through your own website or webpage or through large publishing sites like Amazon.com.

**NOTE: If you only made minor revisions to a public domain work and did not make any actual changes to the context, then it is not advisable to file for a separate copyright notice for the “new” work. If you must protect your product, then use the protection feature that most e-book creation software offer – one that makes it possible for you to protect your files from major theft and tampering.

One of the easiest ways to earn money from public domain e-books, duplicating the exact content of public domain works and re-selling them can be a great way to start your business. You essentially do not have to spend a lot on material.

Since the product is already in the public domain, there are no royalties and no worries about copyright infringement. You do not even have to get permission from the original author in order to excerpt, reprint, or advertise their products.

You can make as many copies as you want of the original public domain work, convert them into downloadable e-book format (See previous section for instructions on how to create an e-book) and you would be all set to start re-selling, re-distributing, and reaping in the profits.

All in all, it sure is one easy way of earning money, literally without spending a cent.