Sharp Business Practice in Ebook Sales

Today I’d like to tell you a short story about a product I brought and my experience of the process.

I’m not going to name the product or the marketer behind it, just the general principles, which I hope are ones that most people reading this will not try to emulate in their business.

The product was a bundle of fresh PLR e-books, put on sale for the first time. Something like 30 of them in different categories, with a selection of Internet Marketing Titles being of the most interest to me.

The price itself was pretty cheap and the e-books were each advertised as being around 30 pages long, so this looked to be a pretty good purchase.

Upon download, this proved to be rather stretching the point.

Each 30 page e-book contained various filler pages at the start and end, promoting products for the benefit of the author which would have to be edited out.

Beyond this, it was split into chapters. Now, I’ve seen various methods for sectioning a document before, but never one quite like this. The first page of each chapter was just a large numeric graphic. The second page was a one sentence summary of the chapter. As chapters were only three or four pages long, essentially this meant that two thirds of the product was content less.

What’s more, each chapter was essentially an article, so these books lacked the overall coherence which is what makes an e-book saleable (and, perhaps more importantly, is what can give you repeat customers).

Now, despite that, I am convinced that I’ll get value for money out of the e-books. I’m going to use some of them to give to my list (there’s nothing wrong with the information) and I have a few other ideas about what to use them for. But a number of people who purchased will be disappointed and I imagine that the refund rate will be high.

Next time, I’ll tell you a further story about the overall purchase process for this product, something which again didn’t impress me even before I managed to get to the downloads.

Do you agree with this method of providing e-books? Use the reply box and give your opinion.