eBook Publishing
Picking a Platform for EBooks: iPad, Kindle, Nook or Kobo?
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With the rise in different eBook readers, the choices of
selecting one, instead of making life easier for publishers and authors, it has
them scratching their heads, wondering what platform they should go with.
Does it have to be a choice?
Apple’s iPad captured 22% of the eBook market within days of its release and authors were eager to get their books published onto the iBookstore. But while the iPad is all well and good, the fact is Amazon with its Kindle Reader has had three years to iron out the kinks of eBook publication that Apple and Barnes & Noble are just discovering. But the iPad has one important advantage over the Kindle—sheer number of eyeballs—the iBookstore is available on 3 million (and growing) iPads combined with all iPhones running the new iOS4, to a combined total of 40 million people across the world. That is not a small number. And if you factor in the fact that Barnes & Noble has started on its own eBookstore platform, that could well bring in the total readership to 100 million people.
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
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.