The Ease of Publishing an Ebook

ISoldat53 writes "This article describes how easy it is to publish an ebook. The author details the costs to the writer for a major publishing house to publish a book and the savings to the writer by self-publishing. He looks to make the same profit selling the book at $2.99 on Amazon as he would going though a traditional publishing process. The book is formatted only for the Kindle right now, but the author explains how it can be converted for other readers, since there's no DRM."

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Just did it, here's my thoughts

[dmorin]

It may be a little late for me to weigh in on this one, but I've just published an ebook (http://www.hearmysoulspeak.com) on Kindle within the last couple weeks, so I figured I'd offer my own experience from a different angle.

I'm not a traditional published author. This is my first book. Using the logic that an ebook has numerous formatting considerations that make it easier (far less worry about page numbers, page size, left/right concerns, etc...), I decided to go with the ebook in the hopes of making enough $$ that it'd be worth my time to properly format a print book.

The book is about Shakespeare (specifically, a collection of Shakespeare wedding material), and I knew two things - I should have some sort of credentials in the area I'm writing about, and some sort of way to market. I run a number of Shakespeare sites (http://www.shakespearegeek.com primarily among them), and have done so for a number of years. They've got a pretty good following. I thought I'd be all set there, at least as far as getting a jumpstart goes. I'm also a web guy for a living (though not a designer), so arranging a domain and getting some content on it was not much of a worry (http://www.hearmysoulspeak.com did I mention that?) My strategy has been "Have something acceptable up, then drive traffic, and then once you've got traffic up, worry about making a prettier site."

I did have an editor. You need an editor. You will make stupid typos, if nothing else, and you'll need another set of eyes to spot them. An editor also serves as your first reader, and can say things like "This part didn't make sense to me" or "You said the same thing here that you said over there." Get an editor. I lucked out, one of my regular readers who happens to be a college professor said he'd do it for me, and was very helpful.

The publishing part is actually the easiest. There are a zillion "ebook converter" apps out there. But instead of doing that, just go straight to Calibre (http://www.calibre-ebook.com), as it does everything. I originally started mine in LaTeX, because I was heading for print. Then I switched to PDF (easily converted) until eventually ending up with EPUB since it seemed popular. EPUB, for the curious, is basically just a zip file of HTML with some organizing context thrown in). See below, though, for thoughts on how to handle multiple formats.

Here's the tricky part of publishing, even if you do crank out multiple versions of your book : a) every publisher wants a different one, and b) you have to do it individually for each. I started out on Lulu, because that was the most efficient way I saw into the iPad store. iPad wants EPUB. Fine. But then I wanted to release a PDF version as well, to cover the wider case for people reading on a PC. Lulu can handle that - but it can't apparently associate them both on a singe page. So I'll forever have two products in their catalog. I can live with that.

Aha, but what about Kindle? Kindle has its own store, for one. And, it wants MOBI format. Ok, did that. Now I've got to maintain my book in two places.

Guess what happened last week? Barnes and Noble opened up their Pubit! store for the Nook. Yayyy, three places to maintain my book. I hear Borders has a project in the works as well.

I generated every format (EPUB, MOBI, PDF) of my book in Calibre, and then tweaked them by hand until they looked the way I wanted (or at least, as close as I could get). Although all of the ebook stores will do automatic conversion for you, keep in mind that your copy will end up looking terrible.

Your pages on all these stores will also look very plain, until you get some reviews. Seriously, go get some reviews. Give away as many copies as you can, and beg reviews. This is the stage I'm in now. I've got web reviews, but I'm trying to get people to take the time and go give Amazon or iPad reviews. They help. Nobody wants to feel like they're the first one taking a chance on what could be a piece of garbage.

Lessons learned so