In recent years, the ebook publishing market, which has literally exploded in the secular world, is also rapidly becoming an emerging Christian book market. While recent trend of ebook sales may have seen intermittent decline at specific quarters within the past years, ebook sales have also during other quarters reported dramatic increases (1) and experts are still optimistic that ebooks are the future direction; that is in the long run. Some analysts have suggested that any decline of ebook sales seen this year may be attributed to the flooding of the ebook secular market with many low quality materials; this is pretty obvious and one does not need to be an expert to observe this. Others have suggested that much of the information that many ebooks offer are easily obtainable at no cost on the Internet (2); that is with a little focused search on the Internet.
Logically, if you simply follow the surging trend of the technology of electronic devices and the expanding daily use of the Internet, coupled with environmental issues with regards to exploitation of trees for paper printing and other paper products, one can only deduce that the need for ebooks would only increase in the future. The way I see it, ebooks are critical not just to the secular world, but also to the Christian world. We need an inexpensive electronic book publishing outlet, such as the ebook outlet, to augment our current teaching and preaching of the good news of the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
So, if you are already a Christian writer, or you are an aspiring Christian writer, whether you have published a book in the past or not, now is a ripe time for you to start thinking about writing, publishing and possibly selling your own authored ebooks. Just in case you are not familiar with this term, an ebook simply means an electronic book. An ebook can be downloaded and read on an electronic device such as a desktop or laptop computer, or an ebook reader device, a device that is specially made for reading ebooks.
With the rapid Internet and technology device advancement, ebooks are already been published and made available in different formats such as: Adobe PDF or ebook Reader format, HTML format, which is a Hyper Text Markup Language, that combines text and extra information about the text (en.Wikipedia.org), the same format that website pages are created and published, and in Microsoft's LIT format, exebook (an executable file format) and other formats. You would need to spend sometime on the Internet reading information on different possible ebook formats that I cannot begin to list here. Just know that the same possible ebook formats being used by the secular world is also applicable for creating and publishing Christian ebooks. Likewise, Christian ebook promotion and marketing would also mirror the same approaches as the secular ebook market, only that our ebook content, writing approach and target market may differ. However, be aware that there are a lot of low quality ebooks circulating on the Internet, especially product and website promotional ebooks. You as a Christian writer should strive to write, publish, promote and market high quality ebooks, both in content and design.
There are many uses of ebooks to the Christian world. First, ebooks can be used as a powerful tool for teaching and preaching the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If you have a ministry, a church, a Bible Study group or a faith-based organization, ebooks are an excellent, very cost effective way to produce reading material or cheap books for your members to read. Ebooks are excellent for Christian reading book clubs, youth ministry, and other church groups, especially the evangelism group. Ebooks are in fact a very powerful tool for evangelism.
Now, is the time for a Christian writer, or aspiring Christian writer to start gaining indepth knowledge about how to write, publish, and promote and market ebooks. You could in fact sell your ebooks either for profit, or use your proceeds to support various church ministries or Christian faith-based organizations.
There is no one stop resource center for learning about ebooks. There are in fact numerous good Internet-based resource centers that can furnish you at no cost very detailed information on how to write, publish, promote and sell ebooks. Also, you should strongly consider setting up your own website, if you don’t have one already. A website provides you an Internet base for people to get to know you, your organization or company, the work you do and the products you offer for sale. For example, you may choose to sell your Christian ebooks, or simply make them available for free download at your website. You can also create a Christian content-rich website where you can provide Bible-based information in the form of articles, ebooks or both, as well as other writing works such as Christian ePoetry.
The process of writing, publishing, promoting and marketing ebooks have become a huge area that requires one, especially Christian writers and publishers, to really make time to learn and understand it. Again, there are numerous content-rich websites that provide very good information. So, take advantage of the free, highly informative and educational material that they offer. But be careful not to be quick to purchase ebook-related products, for example, ebook creating software, before you understand what the product really offers. Ask other individuals who have used the product for their honest product review. Blogs on the Internet are great avenues for sourcing people’s opinions about ebook software and their recommendations based on their use of the software. Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet. There are many scams on the Internet and you must be careful, as you take the first step into starting to gather and read information on how to write your first Christian ebook.
References:
1. “Publishers Report Increases in eBook Revenue and Units Sold in Q1 '05” by the International Digital Publishing Forum (www.idpf.org/doc_library/statistics/Q12005.htm)
2. “The Paradigm Shift Of Internet Marketing: The Transition From Ebook Marketing To Software Marketing” by Melvin Perry (Internet entrepreneur), copyright 2005
Jacyee Aniagolu-Johnson, PhD is the author of an upcoming Christian non-fiction book release, “Rays of Victory: Nailing Racism to the Cross.” For more information about the upcoming book release by Marble Tower Publishing, LLC please visit http://www.marbletowerpublishing.com
I grant permission to anyone who wishes to reprint and distribute this article on the condition that it is reprinted and distributed in its entirety, including all specified links
© Jacyee Aniagolu-Johnson 2006
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By Jacyee Aniagolu-Johnson
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