There are dozens of examples. "Fads" begin among teenagers, who, having nothing to un-learn, quickly embrace new products, new ideas. Many fad-products are first introduced in Japan and spread rapidly throughout world.

One needs only to look at Internet, something that was very avant-garde as little as four years ago, but today it is taken for granted. While it didn't start among teenagers, nor in Japan, its world-wide growth has been explosive!

What brought about this phenomenal acceptance - and how can one profit from it?

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Once upon a time, there was a colony of 100 monkeys that lived next to a stream, which coursed through jungle. The trees bore abundant fruit and monkeys were well fed.

But monkeys, like some of their human cousins, were sloppy eaters. They frequently dropped their food to jungle floor where it got dirty and insects pounced on it almost as soon as it hit ground. A monkey who dropped his food and retrieved it had to eat it - dirt, insects and all, or pick it clean before he could resume his lunch.

There came a day when one little monkey dropped his morsel. When it hit ground, it bounced into stream. The monkey scampered down from tree and grabbed it back out of water. Voila! No dirt, no insects. It was tasty indeed! Soon, whenever he dropped his dinner to jungle floor, he was taking it to stream and washing it off instead of picking off insects and dirt as did his brethren.

Monkeys are not stupid people and others learned very fast from example of one who first discovered that food tastes better when it's clean. Soon they were all taking their dropped food to stream and washing it off. In fact, they started washing it even BEFORE they dropped it!

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Some e-books are sold where as others are given away freely. Those who download free e-books are encouraged to give them away to their friends or business associates. The "give away" part is what makes e-books such a powerful marketing tool. Also known as viral marketing, when done right your book can be passed around to thousands of people all over world.

For this reason it is my opinion that e-books work best when there is no charge involved. Think about it: Who doesn't like getting something for free? So if you've been thinking of jumping on "e-book bandwagon" my advice is to give it away and let it do what it does best: Generate traffic to your website.

Once your book is written, it has to get out into mainstream of Internet. You need to heavily market and promote book yourself to get ball rolling so it can do its magic. This is where a lot of folks get stumped.

I have written two e-books myself, so I've done a lot of research and have found out what works and what doesn't. If you have included any other websites in book, your first step is to contact their owners and let them know about it. Also, tell them it would be great if they offer book from their site or mention it in their newsletter. Most will be happy to comply; since their names are in book, they benefit from promoting it as well.

If you have sold banner ads in e-book (which is a great idea), make sure you supply your advertisers with text link ads and/or graphics they can use to help get word out. Your job is to make it as easy as possible for them "to pass word." This is viral marketing at its finest.

Your next step should be to add a page on your site where visitors can download book. If you have any graphic skills at all, whip up a book cover to add along with a description that stresses benefits they'll receive from reading it. If book's content is good (and it should for all of this to work right!), you will soon receive feedback in form of compliments. Make sure you put them on this page as well. Testimonials are very powerful.

If you publish an ezine you can use book as a bonus for your subscribers.