Opting For Pay by Chapter Is Lucrative For Author
Posted by AxelPrice on April 20th, 2014
Having written an ebook and sold it on one of the global e-commerce sites, many authors move on to write their next book not realizing that it is possible to derive further monetary benefits from the same digital volume. The task entails breaking up the entire literature chapter-wise and then putting up each chapter for sale as a stand-alone unit. Referred to as a pullout in ebook-related jargon, it fetches an additional income for the author in form of pay by chapter. However, this strategy is applicable solely to non-fiction books since breaking up fiction stories into pullouts and selling them would mutilate the entire plot.
The concept of pay by chapter is unique to ebooks only and as such came into being when reading books in digital format became an accepted norm the world over. In its traditional form, selling a book as per individual chapter is not just unheard of but bizarre and expensive too since it would require printing each unit from scratch. On the other hand, this process is convenience personified in case of an ebook since all that is needed is to segregate each chapter without any printing issues by the click of the mouse. Pullouts are then sold as individual entities and boost the author’s income by a significant amount.
To be able to earn from the pay by chapter concept, the onus is on the author to craft his creation in such a way that segregation at a later stage will not distort its meaning. One of the ways of ensuring this calls for packing all the information pertaining to a single topic under one chapter heading. This might cause the word count to spiral and in such a situation it is up to the author to decide whether he would like to have everything under one umbrella or split the content under two different headings without the quality and logic being affected. Therefore, writing an ebook with pullouts in mind from the beginning is essential for this scheme to work.
What are the monetary implications of writing an ebook with pullouts in mind? On completion, the author would put his creation up for sale and earn whatever amount it fetches. After a month, he can segregate it into several pullouts and then sell each one of them as a separate package thus accruing additional income without having to invest any extra effort at all. As long as the pullout by itself is comprehensive in terms of the information that it offers, pay by chapter would continue to pour in and prove the commercial viability of smart work over hard work.
Do people buy stand-alone chapters? Like the manner in which the concept of ebook was immediately embraced by this tech-savvy generation, the ‘pay by chapter’ scheme also gained instant popularity. After all, not every e-reader might have the patience to read the entire book and in that case just acquiring the chapters that appear to be most useful would suffice for the purpose. Cost-wise, pullouts are definitely cheaper than the entire book and hence can be purchased one at a time as and when required. Therefore, this concept offers a win-win situation for both sides namely the author as also the reader.
Saga of making money from an ebook does not come to an end by simply selling the book in its entirety. Thanks to a fairly recent concept namely pay by chapter it is now possible to multiply the income manifold.
