The mainstream and niche ebook writing worlds are starting to dovetail.

I just read a great article about the likelihood of advertising starting to appear in Kindle ebooks.

Internet marketers have long (well long in internet terms at least) used ebooks as promotional tools. Often giving the books away for free, they include prominent links to their website or larger advertisments.

It’s a great system as it’s win-win for customer and author. The customer saves money, and the author gets the chance to build a relationship with the customer as well as promote themselves.

Now it seems the mainstream ebook world may be moving towards this model. Every day it seems there is a new ebook reader coming onto the market, and every month a new major ebook store. Think Amazon, iBooks and Google editions.

All this competition will likely drive down the price of ebooks. Given that profit margins are already being squeezed by the low price of ebooks, publishers will be looking to make more money.

So advertising in ebooks is likely coming our way. What forms will this advertising take? There are lots to choose from. Full page ads appearing periodically. Smaller popup ads. Text only ads appearing in a subsection of the page.

It’s likely Amazon will attempt to customize ads based on what you have previously purchased at their store.

Will this advertising lead to product placement? I’m thinking not so much characters drinking a certain brand of cola, but characters using a certain type of object (sweater, knife, computer) and the reader being offered the chance to buy that object at a certain discount price.

Want to buy the same T-shirt as Lisbeth wears from the Dragon Tattoo books? Maybe soon it will be very easy to do.

Whatever may happen the development I think is good for product creators. The more creating profitable content becomes mainstream, the greater the market for us ebook writers becomes.

Incoming search terms:

• shirt that lisbeth wears