You wrote an e-book, having spent countless hours researching, writing, editing, and producing it, and now it's posted in website advertisements and sitting in shopping carts ready for sale, but what if someone steals it? What if someone downloads it for free?

First, if someone wants to steal your e-book, you have at least one thing going for you and probably more. The thief values your e-book enough to want to steal it in the first place. This means you have written enticing sales copy, your subject is desirable, and/or your name is known well enough to be an author whose works are sought-after. All of these are good signs, so be thankful for any or all of them!

Still, theft is wrong. You are probably thinking that however thankful I am telling you to be, you are still going to lose sales and revenue if you e-book is stolen. This is not necessarily true. It's more likely that if forced somehow to buy your e-book or be prevented entirely from downloading it, potential thieves will simply abandon their plot, which means they're not really potential customers at all; simply, they will not buy your e-book anyway.

As enticement, just as you would want to do with a free e-book, fill up your cost-worthy e-book with hyperlinks to your website. You can frame these in terms of offering the most recent copy for the book and the most recent and largest list of resources about the topics in your book. In this way, you are not only selling a "living" product, but you are driving traffic to your websites and to those of your affiliates. And as another perhaps obvious benefit, driving traffic to your affiliates is going to make you money, regardless of how these customers get there through your links (i.e., whether they buy or steal your e-book).

There is at least one thing going for you, if you use a good shopping cart system. The download links that your customers use to get your e-books are usually good for a limited time only, such as for 24 hours. So even if someone were to grab the link and post it to a discussion board somewhere, the link will become inactive after expiration and anyone who clicks on it after that will render an error page in their browser.

So relax. Focus your attention and your efforts on making your e-books and then selling them in the right places in the right way.