Never Forget E-Book Packaging - Appearance Counts! by David Bynon

Whoever coined the phrase "Don't judge a book by its cover" didn't live in the Internet Age. The fact of the matter is that most people take appearance into consideration in just about everything they buy. A book with an ugly cover won't exactly fly off the shelf. Attractive packaging helps people make their buying decision.

Let's face it, your e-book, audio book or video course had better be properly packaged or your sales are going to suffer. Plus just because you're selling a download product doesn't mean that packaging is any less important.

Good packaging -- in both the physical world and online -- is part of a strong psychological force in the buying process. It's crucial to your sales success but it's not just about a pretty cover. The inside needs to be attractive, too, and that means you're going to need a few basic tools to do the job right. These basic tools include:

1. E-Product Cover Design Software
2. E-Book Template
3. PDF Creating Software

Designing Your Book Cover
When it comes to designing a cover the gold standard for the industry is Cover Action Pro. The results are simply unmatched by any of the stand-alone products available. However you do need to have and know how to use the industry standard Adobe Photoshop (CS2 or better) to use it.

If you want a product that's easier to use and far less expensive than Cover Action Pro, and one that does not require Adobe Photoshop, then look no further than eCover from GeneratorSoftware. I like this product because it's fast and easy. In less than an hour you can have really nice looking packaging. It offers dozens of book, pamphlet, DVD and software box style templates. All you need to do is add text and choose the format to create a basic design. You can also make a 100% unique design by adding your own graphics.

Formatting Your Book
As with your book's cover, the internal formatting is also very important. Everything from the content, to the usability, to the appearance is crucial to the overall experience. If you want your buyers to come back for more, you must do this properly.

As you may have noticed, all ClickBank information products come with an unconditional, money-back guarantee. No matter how you sell your information product this is expected. Most people simply will not purchase without this guarantee. That's why you want everything to look great. You need to take away all of the reasons for a buyer to refund. This starts with a professional design.

From a file format point of view the only universal standard is PDF. I made the mistake of selling my first e-book as a Windows executable file and it irritated a lot of Macintosh users. I don't recommend making the same mistake. There are other ways of protecting your rights including PDF file passwords and stamping your PDF with the buyer's name.

If you have priced the PDF creation software from Adobe you already know that it is very expensive. The last copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro I purchased was a hefty $449. Don't sweat it because there are a number of other companies that make tools to convert your Microsoft Word documents to PDF files. PDF-Creator is one such product and it's less than $30. You can also take the same route that I have chosen and switch to OpenOffice. The OpenOffice suit has PDF compatibility built in and I find that it is both easier to use and more stable than Microsoft Office.

Once you have the ability to create a PDF file you're going to want to make it as attractive as possible. For years I have relied on ebookgraphics for basic Microsoft Word templates. Since year 2,000 Neil Tarvin has been producing clean, easy-to-use templates that save time and money. His most recent offering for Microsoft Word has twenty great formats. For less than $20 his templates can't be beat. For OpenOffice templates you can simply search the OpenOffice website.