ePublishing

by | Apr 12, 2011 | Scribing

So you’ve written your ebook but how do you get it out to the world and even start making money from it?

Option 1: PDF

Well the simplest way is as it has always been – to create a PDF file. This not only preserves the formatting of you source document but ensures it can’t [easily] be tampered with.

Most word processors have “Save as PDF …” as standard nowadays. If you don’t have one, there are loads of free or cheap plugins and online conversions tools. I won’t list any as they change all the time, just do a Google search.

Armed with a PDF, you can upload it to your site and make it the landing page for a Buy Now button or an email sign up form.

Option 2: Syndicate your PDF
There are many sites where you can now post your PDF to give it a wider readership. Here’s a few with some tips on what they are best used for.

www.bookbuzzr.com – upload PDF (with selective page control) and generate a page turning version of your book you can embed in any site

Here’s one I did earlier – Goal Setting that Works

www.issuu.com – this site allows you to embed selective pages from you book in external websites like Bookbuzzr but more geared to magazine-style formats

Here’s an article I wrote for WeCollaborate

www.myebook.com – this site doesn’t do embedding but has the amazing ability to include audio and video. This is a great way to storyboard a book before you convert it to be an Enhanced Edition book for iPad. Myebook also allows you to sell access to your book and make a controlled number of pages free as a sample.

Here’s an example of a free one I did to market test an idea I had for a book on writer’s block called Wordlube

Option 3: ePublish your eBook
The third, and most exciting and profitable method however, is to create an ebook you can sell via one of the online stores like the Amazon Kindle and Apple iBookstore.
As I mentioned in the earlier articles in this series, some years ago a PDF was synonymous with ebook but now an ebook refers to a book you can read on an ereader or iPad. Just to confuse matters, you can read PDF’s on all ereaders and tablets. There is nothing to stop people copying and forwarding ‘PDF ebooks’. If however you convert upload your book to the Amazon Kindle Platform or the Apple iBookstore, they add copy protection in the form of Digital Rights Management.
This means the reader can read it on any of their devices but can’t share it with others. For this service, and others, Amazon and Apple retain 30% of the revenue.
Note that anyone can easily get an account with Amazon Kindle but only publishers of many titles can get Apple iBookstore accounts. The best route for the latter is to use an assisted or traditional publisher or an aggregator like www.smashwords.com or www.lulu.com. Of course, they will take additional margin from sales for providing this service.

Get your free Amazon account here

There are a few hoops to jump through to professionally format books for ereaders and tablets which anyone with reasonable IT or HTML skills can master.

Alternatively, you may also like to look at a wonderful new UK-based company called CompletelyNovel who have a fab and inexpensive service for both print and ebook publishing.

Finally, if you want your ‘book’ to have real go-faster stripes, you can create a dedicated app for iPhone, iPad or Android. Here you can embed rich functionality by giving the user the ability to interact with the book. For example, you can include user input into the book in the form of journalling or even interaction with the author. Content can also be dynamic where external ‘live’ content such as news feeds or geo-coded information. The limits are ones of imagination and budget.

Also see Do iApp or do iBook? for more information and watch this video which is almost vintage being a year old but still shows some of the possibilities available very well …

Related posts

eReading

eWriting

Do I App or do iBook?

by | Sep 3, 2010 | Scribing

Soulwave iPhone appApple announced recently that they’ve followed Amazon’s lead and iBooks can now have audio and video embedded in them.

See the blog on The Bookwright site Do iPad or do I Kindle for more on this …

So with increased functionality in iBooks, I thought it worth pointing out the pros & cons of publishing your ‘work’ as an iBook or as an App.

Why iBook?

If your content is essentially uni-directional – i.e. read, listen or watch only – then iBook is a good route. It is worth doing a Kindle version too though to get on both platforms at not much extra complexity or cost.

The production costs for a text-only iBook are in the low hundreds of dollars and for a multimedia iBook (if you have the assets), about 20% of the cost of producing an app. This means you will be able to get your investment back quickly for a reasonably popular title.

At the moment, authors and publishers need a US Tax ID to submit self-published works – this will change shortly.

Note that Storyist software is brilliant at generating compliant ePub files as is now Apple Pages.

Note also that various aggregator sites, like Smashwords and Lulu, allow international self-published authors to submit to the iBookstore. They will have to catch up a little to support the new format though.
See this blog from Bubblecow for How To Publish Your Book On Kindle and Ipad

Why App?

An app is a completely different kettle of bananas. When you build an app, you can access all the features of the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad operating system.

Apps are interactive and bi-directional. In my opinion, they should be used to either augment a conventional or ebook OR to extend the idea of what a book is about in the first place.

For example, see these App Books and note their main features:

140 Characters – embedded discussion forum for author and readers to interact and inclusion of live Twitter stream based on keywords, Twitter handles and hashtags

Kryo Pro – card set and book integrated with auto-switch between four languages – English, Russian, German and Spanish PLUS ability to email or Tweet a sample card

The Elements: A Visual Exploration – incredible multimedia experience with 3-D rotating graphics

Top 10 City Guides – geo-coded information, latest news via live RSS feeds

Now before you get excited, your investment in an app like these starts at a few thousand dollars. Get it right though and you have access to tens of millions of owners of a device.

Even if you give your app away, the exposure alone can be worth it.

Note also that the other advantage of an App over an iBook is the separate listing on the iTunes store on the web, as opposed to within the iBookstore which is only accessed via the device at the moment. Your app also appear as an icon on a device as opposed to a book inside an app.

This is perhaps not of great significance but you do have your own App URL and it seems to get great Google rankings too.

Note also that as Apple and others allow more features of HTML5 to be introduced, this gap will narrow even more … watch this space … ePub2 will be with us before you know. Great time to be an author and a publisher.