How to Publish an E-Book

How to Publish an Ebook

By: writefuljoy

Writing an ebook is one thing Publishing is another. Quick and easy way to publish ebook.

I'm not going to tell you how to write an ebook. If one can write, then there's no big deal to writing anything. It's the same process, regardless of its length

Conventional Publishing:

I suppose you could first approach a traditional publishing house, wait for them to print it, and then convert it to an ebook. However, I assume you're reading this because you want to self-publish and not wait on tenterhooks for a couple of years while you find an agent who will find a publisher...

Self-Publishing:

You can either self-publish at no cost doing everything yourself or you can pay a self-publishing company to do it for you. You can do the prior if you have the skills and the latter if you don't. Neither guarantee that you will sell the book. I know far too many people who wrote the book, published the book, and then were bewildered that nobody had any interest in buying the book. It is a fact of life that not even mainstream publishers know what will sell and what will not. So before you pay the big bucks for having the book published by one of the many vanity publishers, consider if you're okay with losing the money if the ebook doesn't sell.

Where can you publish without paying?

There are several vendors who provide tools for self publishing. These include Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and itunes. Amazon and Barnes and Noble have 95% of the market, while several smaller booksellers comprise the other 10%. (itunes is included in that 10%.) In addition, Smashwords will also give you the tools to self-publish without payment. However, they are a distributor. You can read my review of their services elsewhere.

Kindle - The Amazon Ebook Publishing Arm:

Amazon has two publishing arms. One is Createspace which is the print arm but also offers an ebook option. However, if you use Createspace to publish your ebook, you will pay a fee. If you use Kindle, no fee is involved.

The steps are fairly simple. Create a Word document. Create a book cover. Upload the book cover. Upload the word document. Fill in the required fields like tags, blurb, price, and author. That's it.

Pubit - Barnes and Noble Publishing Arm
This works in the identical fashion to Amazon. The differences are cosmetic.

itunes:

My only experience of itunes is through Smashwords and while I've tried to see how to publish on this group, they don't make it easy to find out how. So, because itunes holds only a very small percentage of the ebook market, I'm okay with not publishing there.

Smashwords:

For the supposed extra 10% coverage you get (itunes, Diesel, Kobo, Sony), it somehow adversely affects your sales. I don't know how and why that is, but I sold more in two weeks on Amazon than I did on Smashwords in six months. Same thing happened with Barnes and Noble. Incidentally, Smashwords does not sell on Amazon. It merely allows those with Kindle to download on the Smashwords site. It's a bit misleading for them to mention Amazon at all!

Formatting:

Formatting is very easy at both Barnes and Noble and Kindle. It is a nightmare on Smashwords. The reason for that is that Smashwords has something called the 'meatgrinder.' They try to make it all things to all men. It doesn't work. Instead of being able to design a kickass format that everybody can read, you are now stuck with having to compromise so that the formatting can be used for every ebook publisher in the Smashwords stable. So, for example, if one of the vendors has antiquated software and can only accept single spacing, then Smashwords requires you to format everything in single spacing. As it happens, one and a half line spacing works better for ebooks.

Book Covers:

The cover of a book is very important. It appears that these days, books are definitely judged by their covers. Most supposedly ebook cover designers buy a photograph off the web, and then they type the name of your book and your name on the cover. You can do that. You don't need them to do that. So if you hire someone to design your book cover, ask them what software they will be using, and also ask them what level of proficiency they have.

I spent some time haggling with a guy over a book cover. I asked him to remove a certain angle - very, very simple in photoshop. He promptly tried another photograph. Same story. In any event, eventually, I just made the book cover myself. I eventually realized that the guy didn't know how to know imaging software.

If you are familiar with layers and can't afford photoshop, paintnet will do the job. You can find it at www.paintnet.com.

Pricing Your Ebook:

It is generally accepted that to get into the ebook market, you sell them at 99 cents. Presumably, this will introduce you to your ebook readers and they will continue to buy your more expensive ebooks from there. This is not entirely accurate. There are people who sell ebooks for $200 because it contains information that is highly desirable. You will need to do your normal market research on this one! Be aware that Smashwords pays the best percentage for books sold at 99 cents when they are sold on the Smashwords site. Amazon and Barnes give you something like 35%, and that doesn't include other costs. You can land up earning 21 cents per book, and when you've spent months writing the book, it's not a very good return. Both booksellers encourage you to sell at $2.99 when the percentage is considerably higher - between 65% and 70%. Of course, costs still come off, so you don't quite get that.

Elements of Success for Your Ebook:

There are three aspects to success for your ebook. The first is that the book is well written and it is a good story. The second is that it is priced right. The third is that it is marketed well. The last one is the nightmare of every single writer I know!

Good luck with publishing your ebook.

You can find my ebooks at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Smashwords.


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