I would like to start selling original poetry and short stories on eBay. Help?
I need to know about how to protect my intellectual property rights before I start selling my own original writings via eBay. I know there is a market out there, but I need tips from smart folks!
Any tips please?
Meg..and why not, miss Meg smartypants??
Meg isn’t too far off the mark. 90% of sales on eBay is done through searching for items. If I’m looking to buy a book I put in the search engine what I’m looking for. Usually by author. Look up some books on eBay and see what they are going for. Even big name authors don’t necessarily sell well.
I’ve walked down that path in the past. You may sell three or four copies…. eventually. But the time and money you have to spend hardly makes it worth the effort. Realize that eBay has fees for selling and PayPal also takes a chunk. Price your work high enough to actually make a profit and no one bids.
eBay also has strict rules about digital delivery and how such items can be listed. I take it you will try to sell ebooks? Put them on disk if you plan to list them on eBay. If you offer to email them to the winner then you have to list them as a Classified Add by eBays rules.
Protection? Forget about it. You can put copyright notices all over it and someone will still copy it and put it on the web somewhere.
It’s not IMPOSSIBLE to make money with a story you are selling yourself but it’s hard. I sold around 200 copies of a story I wrote on eBay but in order to sell it I had to change the entire story and list it in the adult section before I got a single sale. After sales began to drop I did a search and found my story had been posted on a dozen adult sites. I didn’t even bother to demand they delete them. I’d sold all I was going to at that point. I only averaged $1.02 per sale after all the fees.
Did I make a little money? Yeah, but just a little. And I had to completely rewrite the story and ruin it just so I could sell it. It also took about seven months to sell that many. I listened to my greedy side and pretty much destroyed a good story with unneeded sex just for money. I won’t be doing that again. I had to do a lot of work and lower my standards considerably for very little profit.
I know you think you can do it so give it a try. Just don’t be too disappointed if you don’t sell any copies. I have included a link to eBay’s listing policy for digital media.
You can’t really sell your stories on ebay. Try selling your stuff through the Kindle store and in other e-books markets.
References :
Meg isn’t too far off the mark. 90% of sales on eBay is done through searching for items. If I’m looking to buy a book I put in the search engine what I’m looking for. Usually by author. Look up some books on eBay and see what they are going for. Even big name authors don’t necessarily sell well.
I’ve walked down that path in the past. You may sell three or four copies…. eventually. But the time and money you have to spend hardly makes it worth the effort. Realize that eBay has fees for selling and PayPal also takes a chunk. Price your work high enough to actually make a profit and no one bids.
eBay also has strict rules about digital delivery and how such items can be listed. I take it you will try to sell ebooks? Put them on disk if you plan to list them on eBay. If you offer to email them to the winner then you have to list them as a Classified Add by eBays rules.
Protection? Forget about it. You can put copyright notices all over it and someone will still copy it and put it on the web somewhere.
It’s not IMPOSSIBLE to make money with a story you are selling yourself but it’s hard. I sold around 200 copies of a story I wrote on eBay but in order to sell it I had to change the entire story and list it in the adult section before I got a single sale. After sales began to drop I did a search and found my story had been posted on a dozen adult sites. I didn’t even bother to demand they delete them. I’d sold all I was going to at that point. I only averaged $1.02 per sale after all the fees.
Did I make a little money? Yeah, but just a little. And I had to completely rewrite the story and ruin it just so I could sell it. It also took about seven months to sell that many. I listened to my greedy side and pretty much destroyed a good story with unneeded sex just for money. I won’t be doing that again. I had to do a lot of work and lower my standards considerably for very little profit.
I know you think you can do it so give it a try. Just don’t be too disappointed if you don’t sell any copies. I have included a link to eBay’s listing policy for digital media.
References :
http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/downloadable.html