If the goal of your white paper is to spread a message, then you want that message to reach as many places as possible. So why limit your white paper distribution to your website? Or make it available only in PDF format?
Regardless of whether or not you want to call a white paper an eBook, the millions of Amazon Kindles, B&N Nooks, Sony Readers, and Kobo eReaders, not to mention the literally millions of iPad, iPhone, Android, PC, and Mac devices with reading software electronics. -are a “read-friendly” market for your white paper content. (We’ll call the devices and software “eReaders” in this article.)
What makes e-readers so ideal for reading? Here are four important features white paper authors benefit from:
- Your readers can share passages with Twitter followers and Facebook fans.
- Your readers can highlight and save passages for repeated reference.
- You can follow the passages that your audience finds most interesting (great market research!).
- Your readers can annotate passages by adding notes.
(Also, have you tried reading a PDF on a smartphone?)
Several non-traditional publishers have already discovered the benefits of publishing internal documents as eReader-compatible eBooks.
central point Y MarketingSherpa, two B2B marketing services companies, are offering their thought-provoking articles for sale on Amazon’s Kindle Store. It’s the same content available on their website, but by offering it for sale on the world’s largest e-commerce site, they’re reaching a completely different audience, someone who probably wouldn’t have found their website otherwise.
Not suitable for sale? You can still create an eReader eBook file for your audience to upload to their eReader. mailchimp.com does exactly this for its free email marketing guides by providing leads and clients with three files: PDF, Mobi (Kindle), and ePub (Nook, iBookstore, etc.).
Here’s how to convert your white paper to eReader format:
- Use Word and follow best practices for formatting your document. Use style sheets, avoid extra lines, and don’t use spaces for tabs. Please read the Smashwords style guide for further guidance.
- Download a copy of Caliber, a free eBook library manager (donations accepted). This tool will help you convert your document to Mobi and ePub file formats.
- Save your Word document as a filtered HTML file. If your whitepaper has images, you will need to combine the HTML document and the images folder into a zip file before importing it into Caliber.
- Invest in a professional looking book cover. It’s true what they say about judging books by their covers. Buyers usually do.
- Take time to compile your metadata, also known as “information about information.” This is your title, description, keywords, categories, and other elements that rank and help you sell your ebook – this is SEO for books. Google’s keyword tool is helpful in this regard.
- If you plan to sell your white paper eBook, now is the time to set up your account. Visit the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) desktop publishing portal or Barnes & Noble’s Publish to do so.
That’s it, you’re done. You can check them by downloading one of the free software eReaders from Amazon or Barnes & Noble or loading them into your eReader to see what they look like.
By the way, still wondering if anyone will buy an e-book that contains information that would otherwise be freely available? Last July, Ars Technica sold 3,000 copies of its Kindle eBook Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: The Ars Technica Review in 24 Hours. That’s a net income of $10,500 for something they were giving away for free on their website.
There’s no question that offering your white paper in three file formats is extra work. But that extra work can make all the difference in generating interest and exposure for your message. Who knows, you might even earn some money.