The Ebook Tipping Point – 3 Ways to Leverage the Coming Wave

There is one more day left in my Amazon KDP Select “give your ebook away” experiment, and I’ll be sharing the results of that promotion very soon. In today’s post, I want to talk about the Ebook Tipping Point and why this is vital to the plans you have for marketing your business in the coming year.

I’ve written elsewhere why you should self-publish on the Kindle, but I want to explore in more depth this concept of the Ebook Tipping Point and more importantly, what steps you need to take right now to make sure you are riding on top of this wave and not drowning underneath it.

Unless January 27, 2011 just happens to be your birthday or your anniversary, this date was probably just another day for you. But for those of us who are coaches, consultants, authors, service professionals and anyone who calls themselves a small business owner, the day marked an incredibly important milestone.

This was the day that Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, announced sales of Kindle ebooks had overtaken sales of paperback books, with books in the Kindle format already surpassing hardcover sales some six months earlier.

This amazing fact, coupled with the phenomenal number of Kindle ebook readers sold by Amazon over the holiday season (and I’m not even counting sales of all the other ebook readers such as the Nook), makes it safe to announce that ebooks have gone mainstream.

Amazon announced in the weeks before Christmas they were selling Kindle Fires at the astounding rate of one million devices a week! And on a more personal note, In the days leading up to December 25th, the Barnes and Noble Customer Service rep who was demonstrating the stores’s various Nook models was absolutely mobbed with customers who were trying to determine the best model for their needs.

OK, so now you are convinced that this Ebook Tipping Point is real. Now what?

What concrete, practical steps should you put in place to make certain you are leveraging this tipping point to your advantage?

Here’s what I advise:

One: If you don’t have any of your content up published on the Kindle, then make up your mind, right now as you are reading this, that you will get something published in the coming weeks. (If you already have some content published, then get more of it out there. Every piece of content you have on the Kindle platform is a potential ongoing source of leads, money, branding and visibility.)

Two: Don’t worry about multiple publishing platforms right now. Amazon is the dominant player in this industry at the moment, and from my research, accounts for the majority of monies made by those who sell their content cross platform. This one-shop publishing strategy allows you to concentrate on just getting it done, without having to worry about formatting your digital content for multiple platforms.

Three: Use your existing content. Don’t waste valuable time writing something new. Combine several blog posts into a special report. Take a look at how you can repurpose already written articles into an ebook. How about all of those audio transcriptions of interviews you have done that are just taking up space on your hard drive? I think you get the idea. When you run out of content you already have, then write something new.

My friend and colleague Denise Wakeman, Online Visibility Expert and founder of The Blog Squad, is a fine example of someone who has used this strategy. Take a look at some of the digital content she has available on Amazon’s Kindle platform to get ideas about what you can do in your own business.

For those of you who like to get your hands dirty, I’ll be providing you with some DIY Kindle publishing instructions very soon, so stay tuned!

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photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevharb/5146785495/

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