Self Publishing Kindle Books

The Kindle, Amazon’s digital eBook reader, and the associated Digital Text Platform—the user friendly tool that helps writers upload manuscripts and then put them into the Kindle Store for direct sale—has helped writers wary of the insanely difficult to break into traditional publishing business. Along with immediate publication, writers earn 70% royalties on their work.

So how do you go about this? We’ve broken things down into 10 easy-to-follow steps:

Publishing EBooks on Amazon

As the world steadily shifts from paperback to electronic books and readers becoming more familiar with formats, ebooks are finally becoming main stream. Add this to the fact that devices likes the nook, Kindle and iPad are becoming more popular every day and you’ll find that ebook publication are becoming a lucrative opportunity for writers. The best thing: it’s very easy. The steps below detail all you need.

How To Self Publish Your eBook

Before getting into the nitty-gritties of things, it’s important to remember a crucial aspect of the online book publishing business: the pace of things and of everything still to come. An increasing number of online self-publishing outfits are now providing built in packages for publishing eBooks in addition to their print publication deals. As a result, it makes it difficult to evaluate where everything stands so take these passages that follow with a certain grain of salt, and always keep yourself up-to-date on current trends.

This post is divided into two principal sections: A list of pre-publication suggestions and detailing the current options available. Please know that this is by no means an exhaustive list.

Pre-Publication Suggestions

• Quality. What goes for traditional print publication so it goes for eBooks—the quality and standard has to be good—if you want to sell.
• Great Cover Design. For eBooks in particular, it’s all about the presentation and in order to get a reader’s interest peaked, your cover needs to a , b) be eye catching and c) be professionally designed. The best thing about eBook covers are that they’re easier to produce than traditional covers: JPEGs with decent resolutions make for passable covers, but to truly compete with print books, your cover needs to meet the standard.
• Don’t be Greedy. Pricing is one of the most important aspects of your eBook—try to keep the price somewhere between $0.99 and $2.99—the most success found with writers. Anything below $4.99 works for an eBook. You also have to take into account what your ebook distributer is going to take for royalties when pricing your book. Amazon, who promise 70% royalties, only applies this to Kindle books priced between $2.99 and $9.99. For everything else, the rate is knocked down to 35%.Ignore book publishers that don’t allow independent price setting. If you want to set your book for $0.99 then you should be allowed to set it at $0.99. Any self-publishing outfit that doesn’t allow for this, should be avoided.
• Pimp your books through social media. Marketing books is almost entirely about creating awareness and hype about the book—identifying that it exists is a great place to start—from passing out fliers, blogging, tweeting or using other social media tools.
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How to Publish your eBook to Smashwords.com

If you’re a self published author, and you haven’t heard about smashwords.com, them its time you did. Smashwords provides an excellent opportunity to distribute their books in multiple ebook formats. Interested readers can then buy and download your book from Smashwords in whatever format is compatible with their digital reader (like the kindle). Smashwords also distribute your ebook to platforms like Apple’s iBook Store and BARNES & NOBLE . They do all this for only a small cut of what you make on the sale of each book, so it’s really a win/win situation for both the author and Smashwords.

Unfortunately, because of the multiple formats that Smashword converts your ebook into, the source file you upload to Smashwords has to very basic in its formatting. In this video, we’ll review the basics of formatting your manuscript for publishing to Smashwords, alone with tips on the cover and a complete walk through of the upload process.

Get the official Smashwords style guide.

Publishing an eBook on the Apple iBookstore

EBook readers like the Apple iPad and Amazon Kindle are changing the way books are published and moving the model from a traditional one to something more attainable and maintainable for new and established authors. By giving the control back to the authors, instead of having to pass through the barrage of agents, publishers and editors, authors can create just what they envisioned for the reader.

To publish your work in the ipad, all that’s needed is a Mac and a word processor—with a little patience, you can convert any file into the .epub format and upload it for sale and reading—directly onto the Apple iBookstore.

The steps below show you just how simple it is and can be for you. But remember: the downloadable books will only be available to users who already own an iPhone or iPad. You will also need an Intel Mac running OS X 10.5 or a later version, enough hard disk space and a high speed internet connection.