BULK SALES PRESENT SPECIAL CHALLENGES. Even with printed books it can be complex. But when someone says they’d like to provide a copy of one of your ebooks to 250 individuals, that’s just the beginning of a whole conversation. Their expectations vary widely.
“I only want to pay for the vouchers that are actually redeemed.”
“Don’t make me send unique vouchers to 500 different people. Can’t I give them all the same link?”
“I want my subscribers to buy their ebooks themselves, but at a discount.”
There’s no end to this stuff. It’s like every new special sales inquiry has its own combination of funky requirements.
Our publisher services are accessible to publishers whose ebooks are offered for sale on eBooks.com. If you have an ebook sales distribution agreement with eBooks.com, then you have access to our full suite of marketing and fulfillment tools.
There are two broad ways that you might distribute bulk ebooks:
a) You generate the links, distribute them, and bill your customer. We’ll bill you a small fee for each ebook.
b) We distribute the links and bill your customer. We’ll pay you the list price minus our normal trade discount.
If an instructor, author or organization says they want to provide an ebook to 500 end users (students, attendees, employees…) simply tell us how you want it to work and we’ll make it happen for you. Once you get the hang of it, you can save time by logging in to your hub account and doing it yourself. The tools are all there for you; but we’re happy to do it for you. Say the word.
Our 20 years’ experience helping publishers deliver ebooks to the world has enabled us distill the chaos down to 3 very simple tools that enable you to catch any bulk sales opportunity that comes your way. And we’ve created a single interface for you to login and just do it.
1. Refer the customer to eBooks.com
If you would prefer not to deal with payments and managing links, etc., you can just refer the customer to us and we’ll handle everything. We will bill them for the batch of ebook vouchers. They pay us. We’ll pay you in the normal course of business, just like we do for other sales that occur on eBooks.com. The advantage of this approach is that for you, the publisher, it’s hands-off. You don’t need to manage the customer (create a new account, bill them, etc). Simply send them to eBooks.com and it’s done.
1. Send your customer to the eBooks.com website
eBooks.com enables any user to purchase bulk quantities of your ebooks, using their credit card or PayPal. Provide your customer with a link to the product page of the title they want, and they can take it from there. If you negotiated a reduced price with the customer, go to the hub and generate a special discount coupon code, and give it to your customer.
2. Refer the customer to us for personal service
Introduce the customer to your eBooks.com account manager and we’ll manage the process for them. This method gives the customer the comfort of dealing with a real person. We can also enable other options that aren’t available to website visitors, such as:
- Pay on invoice instead of by credit card online
- Use a single link instead of a batch of links
For example, an author might want 50 copies for a workshop. Rather than you having to mess with billing them and handling arrangements yourself, you would refer the customer (in this case the author) to us and we’ll look after it. You’ll get paid as always, in the normal course of business, minus our trade discount. Fifty sales will appear along with normal sales in our report.
2. Create a batch of links and give them to your customer
You can manage this easily via your Publisher Hub account. You’ll generate a batch of unique hyperlinks and provide them to the customer and bill them. The customer distributes the vouchers to their end users. We’ll bill you a small fee per unit. We’ll have no knowledge of what you charge the client, if anything.
3. Create a single link and give that to your customer
Ebook Campaigns is the system Hachette used for the recent, huge ebook give-away for healthcare workers.
In this case, there aren’t any links being sent around. Instead, the Hub system will create a landing page, like this or this, and the customer sends their users to that landing page.
This means that your customer doesn’t have to email a unique link to each of (possibly) hundreds of end users.
We’ll bill you a small fee for every redemption. You charge your customer an agreed price per redemption. That’s all.
You can set up a campaign yourself in a few minutes at the Publisher Hub. Or ask us and we’ll do it for you in a jiffy.
By using one of these simple tools, you can fulfill almost any special ebook sales opportunity in a few minutes. Feel free to contact Gia, Alex or Stephen, and we’ll be glad to talk through the best approach for any opportunity that arises.
