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.

The Options
The following outfits are the larger outfits that are ultimately the most cost-effective, easily distributable and pay out the greatest percentage of royalties.

Amazon
There are two ways that you can publish your eBook through Amazon: through an eBook aggregator or by doing it yourself through Amazon’s DTP service or CreateSpace. You may need to hire a professional to make the job of creating your eBook (table of contents, converting your MS Word file to Amazon’s AZW format), unless you want to try the conversion and formatting yourself. At the end of the day, the choice lies with you. Should you choose to go the lone wolf route, after creating your cover follow it up by converting your Word file to .mobi/AZW through the free Mobipocket eBook Creator which will also embed a table of contents into your book.

Smashwords
Smashwords was one of the first of its kind and gives full control of all operations to the author where users upload their cover images and Word documents and upload it to the “meatgrinder” where the information is processed and assembled into an eBook. What format you choose to go with is entirely up to you. After, you have the option to either have the eBook sold on Smashwords.com and/or have it placed in the listing of prominent eBook stores including Apple’s iBook store, Sony, Stanza, Kobo and Barnes & Noble’s eBookstore and Amazon.

While this outfit doesn’t provide an end product, that is up to the calibre and professionalism of authors when they upload their ebooks to smashwords, the result will satisfy most readers. Take a look at their guidelines, which will help you output a fairly decent eBook although it won’t look like traditionally published eBooks with lots of formatting.

An important aspect of Smashwords’ deal with their authors, is that they retain only a small portion of your royalties and they let you have your own ISBN number, which is a unique identifier for traditionally published and electronically published books.

Due to the wide array of platforms it publishes your eBook to, there are different royalty cuts for different platforms; for instance, in the iBookstore Smashwords retains 10% of the retail price while the writer earns 60%; at the Barnes & Noble’s eBookstore an author retains 42.5% of the retail price while Smashwords gets 13%, etc.

Scribd
Look at Scribd as the YouTube for documents and eBooks and provides the easiest ways to get your work distributed online. Upon creating an account all that’s needed is converting your .doc to a PDF file including the cover image, and uploading the complete PDF to Scribd. The inbuilt software converts your manuscript into a format easily readable on an iPad and other portable devices, including PCs.

Suffice to say that although it gets your work and name out there, it doesn’t pay you royalties and doesn’t ask for payments (free service).

Lulu
One of the oldest names in self-publishing, Lulu allows its authors to solely publish an eBook although it does not allow for flexibility in pricing—it sets the price—this will change in the near future, it is expected. The books themselves are distributed through its own bookstore and the iBookstore and is an Apple approved aggregator.

Although its terms and conditions concerning the iBookstore might read confusing, the author retains 56% of the retail price and Lulu rakes in 14%. Should you choose to sell your book through Lulu.com, the company charges a production fee of $1.49/book. And this is on top of taking 20% of the retail price and not allowing authors setting their own prices so basically, if your book is selling at a low price you won’t end up seeing much of the profits.

FastPencil
In terms of royalties and profits received there is a very minor difference between this outfit and Smashwords ($0.11) although the discrepancies increase should you choose to sell your eBook through the iBookstore (14% of the retail price versus 10% for Smashwords). FastPencil in itself is basically an eBook aggregator and distribution channel to places like the B&N eBookstore, the Kindle store, Sony Readers and Ingram’s Digital Network.

That said, it does offer a few self-publishing packages inclusive of both print and electronic publishing and only eBook publishing. It offers a free option to try out its template based eBook publication system where you can create your eBook, with the options of either keeping it private or putting it up for sale. The latter will involve a one-time fee of $9.99. The complete option costs $149 and involves wide distribution as indicated above where its template-based system involves cutting and pasting your Word document into different places for formatting. However, if you have your own pre-formatted PDF manuscript this can also be directly uploaded to FastPencil.

All in all, there are quite a few charges with regards to FastPencil that makes using the service for first time authors, a troubling experience.

AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Xlibris & various other POD outfits
Many of the larger self-publishing companies normally tend to offer an eBook conversation service and it sometimes comes bundled into a print publication package. Be warned: authors are generally left with fewer percentages of royalties and aren’t often allowed to set their own prices. However, for authors who aren’t concerned about generating as much money per sale or who are expecting their books to sell anyway, the arrangement can work out well. But always step in with caution and read the terms and conditions of each outfit.

In conclusion, it’s important to remember that every author comes to self-publication with a different agenda and different ideas and different outfits will appeal to different authors, based on the sort of book you’re writing, selling and marketing. If you’re looking to use your book to get yourself out there, aggregators are a great way to do that for a convenient cost. There are no do-this-than-that rules, however—you tend to make them up as you go along—whatever works is the only “rule”.

Share this post