Trying to get started

[sgt_bilko]

I am completely new to online marketing but trying to get organised so that I can start selling an ebook that I wrote on photography.



Using the link through clickbank (still in test mode) I receive the correct emails and I am able to download the PDF file without a problem and also see the thank you page from e-junkie. There are two immediate issues though which don't make sense, so I was hoping to get some kind of advice here.



I have activated the PDF stamping feature where the buyer's email and name should appear on the PDF but it's not working. I've read the sample PDF and followed the instructions, however, it isn't leading me to a page to place my details like in the sample version and the downloaded copy has no PDF stamp. I read somewhere that I should save the PDF in Acrobat for Acrobat 5 or later which I did and I have added the url to my admin account under the information url field with the password needed to make changes. Any suggestions? The file has been online for a couple of hours now.



The second issue is rather baffling. All past PDF files I have produced always open fine in Apple's Preview, but this one is suddenly opening as a blank page with a tiny central block about 2mm square, where the text & images should be. It opens fine though in Acrobat. Does anybody know why this could be happening?



Thanks



Ashley

[sgt_bilko]

I read a post which suggested changing my PDF password so I have done that and I am trying to download it again, but it's incredibly slow. According to my download window here it will take another 75 minutes to download about 30MB. From my own server it does the same download in about 1 minute.



When it's complete I'll see if it now works, but I hope it's not often slow like this. The PDF uploaded from my desktop definitely had no viewing problems inside Apple Preview, so I shall see if there is something happening via e-junkie which is changing its appearance.

[sgt_bilko]

Still no buyer id on the downloaded PDF and something is happening at e-junkie after the upload which is making the ebook impossible to view inside Apple Preview. Anybody know what is happening here? I've just tried viewing it in Skim and it had the same problem but it shows up fine inside Safari.

[sgt_bilko]

My mistake over the e-junkie making changes to the PDF files, however, by following the guidelines for PDF stamping it is making the files impossible to view inside Preview and still no stamp visible even with Acrobat. I'll try to work out what is wrong here.

[sgt_bilko]

My mistake over the e-junkie making changes to the PDF files, however, by following the guidelines for PDF stamping it is making the files impossible to view inside Preview and still no stamp visible even with Acrobat. I'll try to work out what is wrong here.

[E-junkie_Guru]

For the clearest instructions, please refer to our updated PDF Stamping help page here (rather than the older instructions in our free sample PDF):

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/selling-ebooks.htm



Our sample PDF file is free, so it uses our Free Checkout to obtain the buyer's name/email, which gets stamped on the PDF. Actual paid checkouts would obtain the buyer's info from their account with the payment processor (PayPal/etc.), so there is no need for us to ask the buyer to provide that info manually.



Are you waiting at least 15 minutes after uploading the file before you try a test checkout? Try sending yourself an (unstamped) copy of the file using your Seller Admin > "Send free download link". If that copy also has problems, then the original file you uploaded is the problem (rather than the stamping, since our free download links cannot stamp PDFs).



If this does not resolve your issue, please provide your file (and author password if it has one) as an email attachment sent to our support address listed here:

https://www.e-junkie.com/ej/contact.php

[sgt_bilko]

Yes I have followed those instructions as far as I can see and I am waiting at least 15 minutes before attempting a download.



Regarding the display issue in Preview, I am finding that any PDF saved from Acrobat using encryption is failing to display properly when viewed in Apple's Preview. Files saved with no security are fine. My problem here is that this is a book on photography, so chances are that a good 50% of the purchases will be made by Mac users and many will have Preview set as their default application for viewing PDF files.



I was able to export a PDF file from Apple Pages with the quality set as best. This document allows printing, but requires a password to edit or to open as I wanted. This document displays fine in either Acrobat Reader or in Preview, however I have no idea what sort of encryption is being used and I'd like that to be as strong as possible, having spent some 8 months to write the book. I uploaded that to the server and went through a test purchase which downloaded fine with no display issues, however, there is still no buyer stamp visible on the PDF.



I could send you the PDF as an attachment, however, it's close to 50MB. Is that too big?

[E-junkie_Guru]

To use our PDF Stamping feature, you would need to make sure your encryption/security setting (which may be a separate setting from the file's general compatibility) is no higher than "Acrobat 5.x or higher" (this supports 128-bit encryption).



That should also ensure compatibility with Apple Preview as well as the vast majority of other buyers (e.g. many of whom may never have upgraded the Adobe Reader 5 that came bundled on their computer or included on their software restore discs from the manufacturer).



If you have set an author (editor/publisher) password, bear in mind that successful stamping would always add a random authoring password anyway regardless of any author password set in your original. This is unrelated to any read-only password you might set for buyers to use, and which would be retained as-is in the stamped copies of your file that we issue to each buyer.

[sgt_bilko]

I tried every level available of encryption in Acrobat right down to 3.0 but none of them are producing a viewable document in Apple Preview and the stamping feature hasn't worked on any sample I have yet tried. I am using OS X 10.5.8 with all the latest updates.



I've heard there is an online service where you can save PDF files through Acrobat so I shall try that tomorrow just to see if there is any difference. So far the only way I can produce a file which can be successfully viewed in Preview is by removing all security or saving through an Apple application rather than Acrobat.



The secured file does have an editor/publisher password at time of saving and I allow printing but no editing or copying. Do we have any way of knowing how complex the random authoring password is? It sounds like the stamper being used is much like the one found here:



http://www.setasign.de/products/pdf-php-solutions/setapdf-stamper/features/

[E-junkie_Ninja]

If the program you are using to create PDF's is gives you a random authoring password I'm not sure how you would be able to look up what that password is. Also let us know what the outcome is of the online service you are trying.

[sgt_bilko]

Perhaps there is some confusion here. I was under the impression that the e-junkie stamping feature would create a random authoring password if none was set. That is all.



I haven't tried out the stamper from setadesign but I assume you just create your own password. I was looking at it with a view to having it run on my own server, but when I stopped by e-junkie and saw the same thing being done here it looked like a brilliant solution, so I signed up immediately. It's early days obviously but so far I am fairly impressed by e-junkie. My only concern so far is that the server downloads can be very slow from what I have seen and I can imagine buyers would find that frustrating.



The chief problems I have experienced are related to viewing issues for files saved with an opening password in Acrobat if they are opened in Apple Preview. It just doesn't work and I can send you a small sample if it's of any interest.



The online service for PDF file conversion I tried was at https://createpdf.adobe.com where you can sign up for free and convert up to 5 documents to PDF format without a charge if you want to convert a word doc or similar to PDF. I tried it without luck hoping to re-encode an existing PDF but perhaps I was doing something wrong. They can't handle files from Apple Pages unfortunately.



For the time being I am waiting for clickbank to approve the product and they seem to be rather slow. I have used the standard e-junkie thank you page for them to check, but if you click that link in clickbank it leads to a dead end with a message saying that you have to go through the website. This makes sense, however, I have removed the link from the buy button on my site because I don't want people to simply have free access to my ebook for 5 days while clickbank fiddle about before giving approval. Will they still be able to access the file or will this delay matters even further?

[sgt_bilko]

Perhaps there is some confusion here. I was under the impression that the e-junkie stamping feature would create a random authoring password if none was set. That is all.



I haven't tried out the stamper from setadesign but I assume you just create your own password. I was looking at it with a view to having it run on my own server, but when I stopped by e-junkie and saw the same thing being done here it looked like a brilliant solution, so I signed up immediately. It's early days obviously but so far I am fairly impressed by e-junkie. My only concern so far is that the server downloads can be very slow from what I have seen and I can imagine buyers would find that frustrating.



The chief problems I have experienced are related to viewing issues for files saved with an opening password in Acrobat if they are opened in Apple Preview. It just doesn't work and I can send you a small sample if it's of any interest.



The online service for PDF file conversion I tried was at https://createpdf.adobe.com where you can sign up for free and convert up to 5 documents to PDF format without a charge if you want to convert a word doc or similar to PDF. I tried it without luck hoping to re-encode an existing PDF but perhaps I was doing something wrong. They can't handle files from Apple Pages unfortunately.



For the time being I am waiting for clickbank to approve the product and they seem to be rather slow. I have used the standard e-junkie thank you page for them to check, but if you click that link in clickbank it leads to a dead end with a message saying that you have to go through the website. This makes sense, however, I have removed the link from the buy button on my site because I don't want people to simply have free access to my ebook for 5 days while clickbank fiddle about before giving approval. Will they still be able to access the file or will this delay matters even further?

[E-junkie_Guru]

For ClickBank, bear in mind that you will first need to setup your product as a ClickBank-only product (as if you weren't using E-junkie at all), which means you would initially need to setup the product with a temporary thank-you/download page on your own Web site. After ClickBank approves the product, then you can add it in E-junkie and edit your ClickBank settings to use the E-junkie thank-you/download page:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/selling-with-clickbank.htm



Within 15 minutes after you upload a file, we should have your file synched up to our Amazon S3 provisions, which is about as high-performance a download service as can be had anywhere. Bear in mind that any download can only be as fast as the slowest link in the chain, which is usually the downloader's own ISP connection.



Yes, we do add a randomly-generated authoring password when we stamp your PDF for each buyer; for security, we cannot disclose the length or character set used for that password, but rest assured it is VERY long.



We haven't seen any problems with stamped PDFs being viewable in Apple Preview, and one of our tech support people uses a Mac as his main computer, so apparently there is something odd about your original PDF causing the problem. If that Adobe online PDF creator you mentioned doesn't work for you, try searching for "free PDF optimizer" to see if there's a Web upload service that can shrink the size of your PDF and "flatten" any layers that might be in it (what you described sounds like some sort of layering jumble).



Feel free to send a copy of your original file along with a stamped copy you can't view properly in Preview to our email listed here:

https://www.e-junkie.com/ej/contact.php

[sgt_bilko]

OK thanks for your help here Tyson. I have obviously messed up here with clickbank, so I shall have to contact them with a new thank you page. I had it all set up already on e-junkie following your guidelines so I had given them the standard e-junkie thank you page for clickbank. In the test runs I did it all worked fine.



On the speed question I noticed you are using S3 who have a good reputation for reliability. In practice I have seen speeds as high as 300k per second but as low as 6k per second. Most of the time I was getting around 30k, so a 50MB file was uncomfortably slow to complete. From my own server with the same file I was generally getting around 700k per second. Clearly my own server isn't a patch on the kind of hardware that Amazon will have but it's not working at anywhere near it's capacity and I wondered if the Amazon downloads were simply overloaded with traffic.



For the PDF files I can save using Acrobat and obtain the stamp through e-junkie on the file when viewed inside Acrobat reader or Apple preview but only if the document was saved in Acrobat without the added security of a password to open the document. There are a couple of security issues I have noticed here but I shall let you know through your contact page. The size of the file itself is not an issue from from I can see but there are definitely some incompatibilities between Apple and Adobe. I think Apple are the ones at fault bearing in mind that PDF essentially belongs to Adobe, so they set the standard. I shall try searching online though and prepare a couple of files, so that you can see what is happening.



Thanks again



Ashley

[E-junkie_Guru]

Regarding download performance, you may find informative this post I just wrote:

http://www.e-junkie.com/bb/topic/3193#post11098



PDF is now an open standard (as of last year), but Adobe originally created the standard and thus knows more about it than anyone else, so there might yet be some undocumented or obscure aspects of the PDF format which Adobe products can deal with, but third-party applications compliant with only the published standard may have issues (as you have seen :^).

[sgt_bilko]

I've now uploaded a couple versions of the PDF file which were either creating viewing problems in Preview or failing to stamp properly and sent an email into support with details, so hopefully they may understand what is going on here. I didn't know that PDF is now an open standard but hopefully this will lead to improved integration in the future.



Regarding the download speeds, I have been finding that the first download is fast but successive downloads were notably slower and I could see that they were coming from S3. At the moment I have it temporarily set up to download from my server while waiting for clickbank's approval but they don't seem to be in any kind of hurry and I may look at some alternatives if they don't pass it today. Once that is sorted I shall look again at the download speeds and I am sure it will be sorted out. A while back I purchased an ebook using the e-junkie system and I remember the whole process was fast and very professional.

[sgt_bilko]

Clickbank's ears must have been burning because I had an email saying that the account had been approved about ten seconds after I finished this last post.



I have switched back to the e-junkie thank you page and run a test download which is now downloading at around 220K per second from S3 which is fine. I just found it too slow when it was around 30k and taking 30 minutes to download a 50MB file.



Now the marketing work can begin!

[sgt_bilko]

This is strange. Following approval at clickbank, I quickly set the thank you page back to the standard e-junkie url and the test transactions ran fine. As soon as I removed the test mode option though at clickbank and tried the link I was taken to a page which said the product was inactive and no longer available for sale. Reactivating the test mode allows you run through the normal procedure but obviously you can't make real sales that way.



I've written to clickbank and I just hope they don't take 5 days to reply! I am assuming this is a glitch at their end rather than with e-junkie.

[sgt_bilko]

Resolved that problem. I had forgotten to pay the $50 sign up fee at clickbank which they only allow you to do after the account is approved.

[E-junkie_Guru]

Earlier today, our Lead Developer found and fixed an issue that was causing some slow downloads since the past day or so. Let us know if you're continuing to experience any problems with download performance.



We've also received your email with sample PDFs, so we'll see what we can figure out with those.