E-Books
The line between an e-book and a white paper is a bit fuzzy. They are both useful content designed to position you as a Thought Leader. They are both distributed as PDF downloads on your firm’s website. They are both intended to help your readers and serve your agenda, while not being sales-copy driven.
There are some common differences, though.
Length
The most usual and obvious difference is that e-books are longer. E-books tend to be over 25 pages, and 50 or more pages is certainly not unusual. They don’t have to be readable in one sitting.
Scope and Purpose
Since e-books tend to be longer, they tend to cover more topics than white papers. While white papers tend to turn data into information, e-books turn information into knowledge— providing how-tos and strategic answers to complex problems. This is partly because of their length, but it is also partly because of the general connotations of “e-book” and “white paper.”
A 15 page PDF that tracks trends in piano manufacturing over time is a white paper. A 15 page PDF on “getting the most out of your piano lessons” is probably an e-book.
Reader Perception
Readers tend to see white papers as advertising messages and e-books as products. This means you need to play to those expectations while at the same time using them to your advantage.
Since a white paper is often seen as an advertising message, it’s probably best to back off the advertising a bit. This lowers the overall suspicion from your readers, raising their trust level a bit.
At the same time, an interested prospective-buyer might actually want some more in-depth information about products and services, so it might be a good idea to have specific white-papers created for the sales process, with an interested would-be buyer in mind.
On the other hand, e-books tend to be seen as a “product,” which means, in the consumer’s mind, the sale is already over and the advertising has more or less stopped. You can reinforce that feeling by making the e-book more like a product (in content, design, promotion, and pricing). Once you do that, it’s easier to slip marketing content about your other products and services (including other e-books) in.
Of course you have to be careful. Any sales messages in an e-book needs to be natural to the content, which should be useful even to non-buyers. You do not want your readers to throw up their hands in disgust, shouting, “That’s it?! A crummy commercial?!”
Price
White papers are almost always free. E-books are only sometimes free.
Some people make a living selling e-books. Obviously, they cannot give them away free (they may give away some, and charge for others). For entrepreneurs who are using e-books as an extension of their marketing to sell some other “core” product, free might make sense. On the other hand, perceived value goes up a great deal if someone has to pay to get it.
An e-book should either be free, or over $20. Less than $20 and the perceived value won’t be high enough to warrant getting out a credit card or dealing with PayPal. Over $20, and the e-book looks like a legitimate product worth purchasing, and once purchased, read. Some e-books sell for much more than $20. I’ve seen every price point you can imagine from a reasonable $19.99 to a suspicious $55 to an outrageous $199.
And people buy them.
Distribution
Both e-books and white papers are usually available as PDFs on a firm’s website. E-books, if they have a price tag, have another distribution outlet: affiliate sales.
There are hundreds of thousands of internet marketing entrepreneurs who make a living by selling other people’s stuff online. They market and advertise using many of the Thought Leadership activities in this book, and then provide their readers, fans, and followers with useful links to products. Some third company keeps track of who referred whom to where, and pays the marketer a percentage of the sale.
If you have useful e-content, you can take advantage of these huge networks of internet marketers through a service like ClickBank. Upload the book, set a price, set a commission percentage, and let other people sell your book for you. You pocket the profits after commissions and service fees, and more people have just seen your name and logo. If your PDF has ample references back to your site, you can also use the affiliates to drive traffic. It’s a fantastic way to leverage your existing resources.
The only negative here is that you usually can’t control how the affiliates draw traffic or promote your book. Depending on the nature of your product or company brand, you may want to be judicious about how you use affiliates.
