Children's Book Ideas Ebook Package

by Steve Barancik
(Tucson, AZ)

An author's unique angle on children's book ideas

My websites talk to me.

That can happen when you have a website with a lot of traffic. Your visitors contact you, or they post, or your site statistics tell you what they're interested in and what they'd like more of.

On my children's books site, my stats were telling me that many of my visitors were aspiring authors. And my advertising revenues were telling me that they were hungry for information on writing to publish.

So I started thinking what I might have to offer them. That's how it works when your website speaks to you. Your site suggests writing assignments and you know there's a waiting audience. (To my mind, that beats the heck out of trying to figure out what an editor or publisher might want and then setting out on the query letter treadmill!)

So I started thinking maybe it was time to write a children's book writing ebook or two. But what was going to be my angle?

Well, I know a lot of writers, and I know myself as a writer. I know my strengths and my weaknesses. One strength I have is the ability to twist a story in a new and interesting direction. I learned that skill while serving time in Hollywood. I decided it was a skill I could write about in the context of children's books.

To my mind, saleable fiction results from a combination of good writing and exciting choices. So here was my ebook notion: write a couple books about generating more unique children's book ideas.

I set to work.

The result was two ebooks, composed in Word and turned into PDF files:

-44 Ways to Fracture a Fairy Tale
-22 Ways to Re-Think a Story

Both books were based on the notion of re-imagining the story of The Three Little Pigs. In the first book, I described 44 different takes on that single fairy tale. In the second book, I described the techniques I used to dream up all those different approaches.

I wanted to prove to aspiring authors that one-of-a-kind children's book ideas are closer than they think.

Then I set about packaging the books. I used Make Your Knowledge Sell - a great download on crafting and marketing ebooks - to guide much of my work.

One of the things the download urged was to do a goodly amount of test marketing. Groan. Of course it's always more fun to offer your goods for sale immediately and wait for the rush of customers to your door...except that that never happens.

So I dutifully began test marketing. Here's how...

-I wrote a sales page.
-I gave it the file name childrens-book-ideas.html because my keyword research showed me that was a popular search query
-I began steering traffic to it by featuring links to it on popular writer pages on my site. (Remember all those statistics speaking to me!)

I wanted feedback from buyers of the book so I could gauge the worth of the books in their eyes and whether they needed improvement.

I decided to sell the books for a dollar. Everything I've read about marketing is that you have to charge something, otherwise your research is tainted by people who never buy anything.

So I set up a Buy Now button using PayPal.

But now the question was how was I going to get feedback from my buyers? You have to incentivize that, otherwise no one is going to bother. I needed to know whether they felt the books were actually helping them generate better children's book ideas.

So I created a little add-on, a three page print out that summarized all the "re-thinking" ideas from the 2nd book. If you wanted the add-on, you had to complete my survey. Also...

Truth be told, I wanted feedback, but I wanted something else from these buyers as well. I wanted quotes. I wanted testimonials.

So once someone bought the books for a buck, having gotten their address from PayPal, I mailed them a link to my survey. Once they took the survey, the Thank You page connected them to the add-on.

(Does this all sound incredibly difficult to accomplish? My web host gives me the ability to accomplish it all with point and click. No coding.)

Voila! The books were on sale, I steered traffic to them that I already had, as well as getting new traffic from having created new content, and the feedback started rolling in. Here's what I asked on my survey:

-Did you enjoy the books?
-Did you enjoy one more than the other?
-Would you recommend them to others?
-How much would you have been willing to pay for the books before you read them?
-How much do you think they're worth now that you have read them?
-Where are you in your writing career and why were the books of interest?
-How could they be improved?
-What other kinds of writing books might you be interested in?
-Feel free to write something nice about the books!
-May I quote you?

About half of my buyers responded, and all of them took the survey quite seriously. Can you see where this would lead to a treasure trove of valuable information? And quotes praising the books?

Ready to REALLY sell my children's book ideas ebooks

I knew I wanted to sell my ebooks on Clickbank. They handle your transactions for a fee that's not that onerous, but that's not their true appeal.

Their true appeal is that their network of "publishers," i.e. websites looking for product to sell, can become your sales network, multiplying the traffic you can drive toward your ebooks. Here's how it works...

You set your price for your package - Clickbank urges you to keep it under $50. Your network can drive people to your sales page, and if one of their visitors makes a purchase, you share the revenues with them. (You get to determine their share, just like you get to determine the price.)

Here's one place my research came in handy. Visiting the Clickbank marketplace, I could see that publishers were drawn to books in the $25-30 price range. But my research told me that my buyers thought my children's book ideas package was worth more like $15. I needed to add more to my package!

I let my site speak to me again and came up with a neat idea. I called it The Annotated Tale of Peter Rabbit. I took Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit - it's in the public domain - and analyzed the heck out of it, as a college prof might. The notion was to help aspiring writers see all the craft that goes into a successful children's story.

(I know from the quality of story submissions to my site that a lot of authors could use this kind of guidance. Like I said, my traffic speaks to me.)

Now I was confident I had a writing package that justified the price tag, a veritable e-writing course. I reformulated my sales page in accordance with the new book and the new price, went through the considerable rigamarole of having it all meet Clickbank's standards and tech (nothing compared to hard copy self publishing though) and I was good to go.

See what you think! See the sales page:

Steve's children's book ideas writing package at Best Children's Books.

Read my review of ClickBank's affiliate program.