It’s a fact that piracy thrives on the internet. People are copying songs without permission of the copyright holders. People are playing videos online that they have no permission for. And if you write an ebook then some people are going to steal that too. You can’t completely illuminate this no matter what measures you take to do so. The highest level of thieves will always find a way to circumvent your protection. But generally, there are ways around making it easy for people to steal your ebook and ways to capitalize they do, so, I’m going to go through some of these in this article for you today.
The first thing you should do is not make it easy for people to get hold of your ebook. Don’t just put it up on an unprotected directory on your website, because then, once people get hold of the link, they can just give it to their friends and anyone can download it. This is not good for your long-term business. After all if this ebook is available for free, not only is it allowing everyone to read it, but they can also access it for you onsite. Which means you will be incurring bandwidth costs for every person who is downloading that. Depending on your hosting plan, this could add up to be a substantial amount – no good – when not only are you losing money with your ebook, you’re also being charged for it.
A good immediate solution for this is to use a download protection service – the scripts that will give a once only use link to somebody who buys your product. This is all handled on your server using some program code in the background. By using a download protection script or a download protection service, you can avoid people getting the chance to give out your link. They have an exclusive link which is for them only.
A second way to avoid people stealing your ebook is slightly more radical, and that’s to reconsider how you present it by putting it inside a membership site. A membership site is protected by user name and password, and you can give one of these out to each person who buys your ebook. This can be done automatically through software as well.
You may wish to review the format you placed your ebook inside the membership site. For instance, you may split it up into chunks, which is posted on a daily basis, rather than simply giving it to the downloadable occupant. By using a membership site, you make it much harder for people to republish that information and you can track the login details to check that no extra people are getting into the site who you don’t expect.
As well as protecting your download, you should be working at end ways to capitalize on your ebook if it is stolen, because there is no reason why you only need to make money in one way from an ebook. You should incorporate secondary income funnels into your ebook. That way if people do steal it, you still stand to make a bit of money off of them. Maybe not as much as if you sold it to them, but sometimes this can be a valued strategy in itself. One sensible thing to do is to include a Resources page at the end of your ebook with details about your other products and services. You may find somebody who still wishes to get the service from you even if they’ve sold your ebook.
You still have to give details about where to legitimately get the ebook, that way if they have stolen it they may end up with a guilty conscience and still go ahead and buy it regardless. Then they also wish to buy it on the prospect of getting updates from you in the future. Something that pirated version wouldn’t allow for.
Generally, you can’t stop people completely from stealing your ebook. People always find a way to do it. But you can make it more difficult for them and capitalize if they do steal it. Work on how you’re going to provide your ebook to your customers. You can use a download protection service or script, or you can reformate your ebook and put it inside a membership site. This can sometimes be sold for more than the ebook would be as people see a membership site as being a higher value item.
Do make sure you include income getting opportunities inside the ebook just in case it is stolen. That way you are likely to get the best of both worlds.