How to sell an ebook on Instagram

An ebook is one of the best things to sell on Instagram, because the whole sale fits on a phone. Somebody reads your post, taps your link, pays with the card their browser already has saved, and the file arrives. Nothing to post, nothing to keep in stock, and it works just as well on the hundredth sale as the first.

Here is the whole setup. Give it an afternoon the first time, and expect most of that to go on writing the words rather than on anything technical.

What you need first

• The finished file. A PDF is the safest choice, because every phone opens one without installing anything.
• A Stripe account. Free to open, and it is what turns a card number into money in your bank account. You will need your bank details and some form of ID.
• A page to sell from. Somewhere the buy button can live, with a web address you can put in your bio.

Step 1: Get the file ready to read on a phone

Most people will open your ebook on the same phone they bought it on, so set the page size for that. A portrait page with generous type beats a document designed for A4 and pinched to read.

Name the file properly before you upload it. Ten Weeknight Dinners, by Sara Whitfield.pdf sits in somebody's downloads folder and still makes sense in a month. final-v3.pdf does not.

Put a cover on the front. It becomes the picture on your page, the thumbnail in the buyer's files, and the thing they screenshot when they recommend it to somebody else.

Step 2: Build the page

You are writing a page with one job, so keep it to five cards in this order.

1. The cover and the title. What it is, in one line.
2. Buy. The price and the button. Second card, every time. Somebody who is already convinced should never have to scroll to find the way to pay.
3. What is inside. Chapter titles work well here, because they are specific and they are already written.
4. Who it is for. Two sentences. Being clear about who it suits sells more copies than trying to suit everybody.
5. About you. Why you are the person writing this.

Step 3: Connect Stripe

Stripe is the part that takes the card. Connect your own Stripe account rather than selling through somebody else's, because it means the money is paid to you directly and the customer relationship is yours. You will see each sale in your own Stripe dashboard, and payouts land in your bank on Stripe's normal schedule.

Stripe charges a processing fee per transaction, which every card payment on the internet involves. Beyond that you keep the whole price: IG Websites takes 0% of what you sell.

Step 4: Choose a price

Two things decide this, and neither is how long it took you to write.

What it saves the reader. A recipe book saves somebody a weekly decision. A training plan saves them guessing for three months. Price against the value of that, not against the page count.

What your audience already spends. If they buy your prints, they will buy a guide at a similar price without thinking about it.

Start at a round number you can say out loud in a story without hesitating. You can raise it later, and a first price that feels slightly too low is a much cheaper mistake than one that stops the first ten people buying.

Step 5: Put the link in your bio

One link, straight to the page. Say in your bio what is behind it, so the tap is a decision rather than a guess. Here is where the link field is if Instagram has moved it since you last looked.

Step 6: Tell people it exists

The page does not sell on its own, and the first week matters more than the rest of the month.

• Post a page from it. A real page, readable, not a mockup. It proves the thing exists.
• Put it in a story with a link sticker, then save that story as a highlight.
• Answer a question with it. When somebody asks the thing your ebook covers, answer properly and mention that the long version is in your bio.
• Say when it is out. A date gives people a reason to look now.

What you keep

Selling files is on the Pro plan at $6.99 a month, and there is no commission on top: every sale is yours apart from what Stripe charges to process the card. Sell three copies of a modest ebook in a month and the plan has paid for itself. The full pricing is here.