Part of being a self-published author is figuring out ways to get as much mileage as you can out of everything you create. Producing your book is a time-consuming effort. It pays to look for ways you can repackage, tweak, pare down, extend, translate, or extend the content for greater reach and greater revenue.

One repackaging tactic is to sell downloads of individual chapters, on top of making the full book available. The thinking behind the strategy is to appeal to people who might want to explore only one or two specific tactics in a book, or who might want information immediately through downloading.

This past year, Random House began selling individual chapters of Made To Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath for $2.99 a pop. Made to Stick had already sold 220,000 hard cover copies before the single chapters were made available. It’s hard to say whether sales of the printed book would have been cannibalized by offering the single chapters earlier. My guess, however, would be that selling single chapters would only boost sales. The low price encourages readers to take a nibble with minimal risk. As more and more people download a chapter and share the content with others (yes, it will happen — so embrace it), the more your book buzz is spread.

Selling by the chapter is not quite the same thing as serialization. Publishing a book as a serial implies that readers will eventually read the whole book through installments that are delivered in sequential order. By-the-chapter sales allow a reader to buy one chapter, with no commitment to buy any others.

Selling single chapters works best for non-fiction since each piece has to more or less stand on its own. Travel publishers, for example, can benefit from selling sections on specific cities or areas from within full country guides. Lonely Planet is already doing this through what they call their Pick & Mix menu. Other topics that lend themselves to single-chapter sales include business (one strategy, idea, or tip explained), essay or story anthologies, cooking, and fitness.

Parallels have naturally been drawn between publishing and the music industry. In music, we have seen a shift from full album sales, purchased on recorded media such as a CD, to individual song downloads. In publishing, while I doubt that piecemeal downloads will eclipse sales of the full product, I do think it likely that individual chapter downloads will increase in popularity.

Chapter pricing is still very much up in the air due to its relative newness. Random House charges $2.99 per chapter for Made to Stick. Lonely Planet charges $2 to $5 per chapter, basing the price on the length of the chapter and the price of the book from which it was excerpted. If the music industry can again be looked to as a sign of things to come in publishing, we may see chapters eventually priced at $.99 each.

Are you an author or publisher who has tried single chapter sales? As a reader, what are your thoughts on buying one or two chapters from a full book?