My name is Alice Lund, owner of Aluminous Publishing, a craft ebook company. Many people have asked me how I started my e-business - what worked for me and what didn’t work. I hope the information I present to you will be helpful in your endeavors.

My goal was not just to make money on the Internet but also to NOT go in the hole trying. Many small businesses do not survive the first few years. This should not discourage you, just advise you to be patient. Start small and keep trying to expand with time. Your business has to be something you enjoy. Your product has to be something you are interested in so you will know why your product will interest other.

I dabbled in art and crafts for years. I made craft projects all year and sold them at craft shows. I sold enough to cover my cost of materials and the cost of the booth. I never really made any money. I never made enough to cover the time I put into make all the wreaths and ornaments. I always had ton of crafts left over with nowhere to store anything. At Christmas, everyone received a nice craft project for a present. I remember one craft show where a lady was selling a cactus made of fabric and stuffing in a beautifully painted clay pot. It seemed, of all the booths in the show, this lady was the only one making any real money. The next year, many of the craft booths were selling stuffed cacti. However, they were now not the new trend and did not sell as well. I realized the other craft venders bought many of the cacti sold the first year, so they could copy the ideas. I often went to craft shows to see what was new out there to get ideas. Over the years, I found I was not interested in making a million of one or two things any more. I had to come up with new ideas every year because I could not give the same Christmas present to the same people. I liked creating the new ideas. There are a wide variety of tastes. If I liked my ideas, I knew there were more people out there who would like them too. Therefore, I decided to put my ideas in a book. After all, I already had a $2500 computer, printer, scanner and digital camera. I thought I should put them to good use.

I created 100 craft projects, wrote the instructions, took pictures, scanned patterns. I paid a friend to edit my book. No matter how good a writer you are, you need an editor. Spell check will not pick up everything you need to make your book a seller. I sent a copy to the Copyright office.

To find information about the publishing industry I visited my local public library. The library has books listing publishing companies, editors, and agents. Some companies will not publishing certain kinds of literature, such as poetry. Some publish only one kind of literature, such as science manuals. If you do art and crafts there are a few that only publish craft books. One publisher only publishes quilt books.

It is very difficult to get the editor of a publishing company to even read your manuscript. Unless you are Stephen King or famous in your field, it is very hard to be noticed by the publishing industry. An agent may be a good way to go but there are fees and percentages involved. Most large publishing companies want to own the rights to your book. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to give up my rights.

A few years ago, I was helping set up booths at a quilt show in the Convention Center. I meet a lady selling her own published quilt books. She had developed a new technique in appliquéing flowers on quilts. She told me an editor from a quilt publishing company approached her at a quilt show and wanted to turn her techniques into a book. However, during our conversation, she informed me she receives very little money from the publishing company, only 5% of the price of the book. Even though she is a published author, she was not impressed with her experience. It wasn’t a bad experience, just not a profitable one. I have since seen her on Simple Quilts, a TV show on the HGTV cable channel. Even though she may not make much from the sale of her book, it does help promote her quilt business. She uses her book to teach her techniques.

I still wanted to see my book in print. I found a Print on Demand Company on the internet. This type of company would let you keep the rights to your book. I thought it was the better way to go. Everything sounded so wonderful. This company wanted only $399 down, which was not too much to invest. It would also make my book into an electronic book to sell on line. However, this company also kept 95% of the price of the printed book and 60% of the price of the ebook. I thought, “Some money is better than no money.” I was close to making the decision but I though I should ask a few questions first.

I found there were many other fees connected with promoting the sale of the book.

• $200 for paperback distribution
• $100 for a back cover, which is usually where you place your book reviews
• $300 promotion package
• Media Alerts $450
• $100 for Newswire
• $2350 to place an ad or review in a large newspaper like the New York Times. $1950 in the Los Angeles Times. This is for a just business card size ad 3 x 1 space.
• $650 for an ad in a magazine.

But it was not just the money invested. These Print on Demand companies do not print in color, and they print the book in a 5 ½” x 8 ½” format which is not usually good for a craft book. One company charged a fee for each picture, more if it was color. If your book does not sell at bookstores, the cover of the book is torn off and returned to you and you return their cost of the book to the bookstore. You do not get the opportunity to resell those books unless you went to every bookstore and purchased them back yourself. I found this to be outrageous and wasteful, especially since I am a recycle artist. Even though I know I have a good product, I am not that much of a gambler.

Still determined to sell my book, I thought that if the Print on Demand company was going to sell my book as an ebook, I could too. I turned again to the library to find the information I needed. After all, I already had $2500 worth of computer equipment that I used to write my book. I thought I should put them to more good use.

I had to figure out how I could put my book into a format that everyone could read no matter what computer he or she used. I downloaded an Adobe PDF Writer program (portable document file) to create the electronic book. Most people have an Adobe Reader on their computer if they had ever downloaded a government document or form. If the customer did not have it, they could get it free from the Adobe Website.

Next I had to create a webpage. The Internet uses a language called HTML, which allows all the different computer systems to communicate. I did not know anything about HTML. I checked out some books from the library and began to read. My friend Bret gave me a HTML book he had bought while taking a class at the college. It gave a step-by-step instruction on how to write Html. Whether you take a class at the collage or learn it on your own, the best way to learn is to just do it. It is very easy and fun. Even if you hire some one to create your site for you, I recommend you still learn how to write HTML. You will be constantly changing your site, adding products, pictures, links and new pages. You will not want to pay or wait on someone else to do the work. There maybe many others things you might need to pay a techie person to do for you. You can buy a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) program like Front Page. They seem to cause more problems when loading new pages and pictures. They use more storage space. I recommend designing your own site. It will help you better understand what you are doing especially if the website is the main part of your business.

Now I had my book in a PDF file. I created my webpage off-line in Notepad. I purchased a domain name, which is the name of my business on the web. Sometimes it is hard to get the domain name you want. If you are serious about doing a website but do not know when, pick the domain name as soon as you can. It does not need to be the same as your offical business name, but it would be preferred. I registered my business name with the county clerk and paid for a business license with the city. Your City will list you in a business directory. If you have no employees, you do not need a Employees Insurance Number.

If you are in the business of selling information, you may not need a tax number. If you do not sell a tangible product, which is a product you can hold in your hand, you do not need to collect sales tax. If you sell your ebook on a CD, then you will have to collect sales tax.

Now I needed to put all the pieces together. I needed a host, which is an internet server that will store the website on line so it can be viewed by your customers. The first company I contacted was a local company advertising on TV. I brought them a CD with my book and webpage. I was looking for some one that would show me exactly what to do. The webmaster wrote an estimate of $100 an hour plus $25 a month. In addition, I would have to purchase a merchant account from another company costing $1300 to be able to receive credit card purchases. His idea was - after the customer purchased my ebook and the card was approved, I would receive an email. I would log into my email a few times a day. Send the approved customer an email with a password, which would allow them to login in to the server to retrieve the book. It didn’t sound very efficient. It sounded expensive and confusing. To prevent the customer from giving the password to other people, I would have to rotate passwords and eventually create new ones. I will tell you my decision to use this company was made for me when the tech lost my CD with the book and webpage. I had it saved on my computer, but I did not wish to do business with someone so irresponsible.

Even though I felt I hit a block wall every now and then, I did feel I was gaining some headway in understanding how it all would come together. I found a company to help me bring it all together. His total price was $440 dollars and it was worth every penny.

I signed up for a business account with Paypal, which is a company owned by EBAY to receive the credit card information. It was painless and free. The computer wiz recommended Ipowerweb to host my website. Hosting means providing space on their server to load your website. Ipowerweb hosts my sight for $7.95 a month – less than $100 a year. Ipowerweb gives step by step instructions on their site on how to load your webpage on to their server and provides other great features such as guest book, a rotating banner, chat room, a search bar, a counter that records your visitors and hits, and a statistics complier, which gives you lots of useful information.

The computer wiz found me a Perl script created my Jim Melanson, which basically is a program to send the book to my customers. It is loaded in a CGI-BIN on the server. This is how the script works:

• My customer gets a Paypal account for free.
• They register their email address with Paypal.
• When the customer purchases the ebook, Paypal approves their credit card or debit card within a few seconds.
• Paypal sends the customer a notice of purchase and sends me a notice of purchase.
• Then Paypal sends the customer an email with an attachment containing the Ebook and sends me a confirmation of purchase and delivery containing the price and item purchased, the customers name, address and email address for my bookkeeping records. And it is done.
• I RECEIVE NO CREDIT CARD INFORMATION. The customer's credit information is secure with Paypal.

My website is a breeze when it works correctly. However, I have hit a few snags. When a customer uses an Internet provider that will not deliver large attachments, I get a notice from their provider that they could not deliver. I ask the customer to use a different email address. Free email providers such as Hotmail or Yahoo do not deliver attachments over 2 or 3MB. I can refund the purchase instantly through Paypal without any fees. Any of the problems I have encountered selling my book on line were never the fault of Paypal or my web site but the internet provider the customer used.

I sell two larger books for $14.95 and three smaller books for $5.00 each and single craft projects for 99 cents. Paypal receives 2.9% of the price of the item and 30 cents is paid for the credit card transaction. I receive 95% of the price of my book because now I am the publisher.

You will have to register your website with the search engines. The first search engine to register at is DMOZ.com It is free and most of the large search engines gather information from DMOZ. There are two kinds of search engines. Web crawlers like GOOGLE want just your website address. They crawl the World Wide Web and find the information on your site. So, it is very important to optimize your webpages. To do this place key words on your web page that a customer would use to find your site. If someone would type fragrant candles to find your site, have the words fragrant candles in your Meta tags and somewhere on your Main page. The other kinds of search engine will ask you to describe your site. Be short with good sentence structure and exact with as many keywords in your description as possible. Most good search engines like Google are free. Many have a fee you pay per hit or click. It can get very expensive to pay for them all. I good way to avoid this it to link to other sites. Find sites similar to yours with a link exchange program. You put their link on your site and they put your link on their site. The more sites you link to, the more often you come up on the search engines. You will come up on the pay for search engines through the sites that contain your link. Link to sites that use text links. Provide a well written description of their website on your website also. A banner is a good way to get noticed but you need the words in the text link to be picked up by the search engines.

There are so many new avenues available in today’s computer age. However, the computer industry in not the answer to all the problems, but a tool to make your business better. You still have to advertise your site in different ways other than the internet. You will be a global company but one in a billion sites on The World Wide Web.

My business is still a work in progress. I am Webmaster, Craft Designer, Photographer, Author, Publisher, Bookkeeper, Janitor and Owner of Aluminous Publishing. The best thing about doing it on your own is the satisfaction of even the little successes and what you learn on the journey.