1. Introduction: The internet has made it easier than ever to share large files. Here are the secrets to e-book publishing
I’m a big fan of the e-book industry, and I’m always interested in learning about new techniques for the publishing side. I had the chance to read an article today by Ben Hammersley at All Things D about how you can publish your own e-books on Amazon. Well, if you go to Amazon, you can buy a book with ISBN 1769053064 which is 895 pages long (including indexes) and sells for $19.99. You print it out, shrink wrap it and ship it off to Amazon where it sells for $9.99. This is a pretty sweet deal.
I was wondering:
What are the rules? Are there any special considerations around e-book publishing? If so, what are they? Is there anything else we should be aware of?
Any advice or comments on how to do this would be greatly appreciated!
Sharing large files using the internet has made it easier than ever to share large files (think pictures, documents, etc.). The internet has also made it much easier than ever before to sell these files as e-books (yes — even PDFs). But there are some requirements that go along with selling your ebook: price (the most important), page count, and distribution method(s) that have to be met before you can sell your ebook (or have someone else sell it for you). Most people don’t think about these issues until something goes wrong in their experience with an ebook publisher or another distributor (the saddest part of this scenario is usually when things don’t work out well).
Now that everyone knows about Amazon being able to sell ebooks at $9.99 ($19.99 for hardcover), but that PDFs only cost $0.99 a piece ($1 in 2014!), here are some things you should definitely consider:
● Price – although not the most important consideration, pricing is still very important. Obviously, we want our product to cost as little as possible, however, if we want people who haven’t bought our product yet to buy it soon after they hear about us then we also want them to know what they are getting at a price as low as possible too! Whatever price you set will make or break whether your book will actually sell at all; so make sure that when setting prices you factor in not just the cost of production but also how competitive your product will be with similar products on sale today.
2. The Benefits of E-Book Publishing
In this post, I’m going to share with you some of the things that have helped me to launch my e-book and make it a success.
It is no secret that I am a huge advocate of ebooks, and I have seen first-hand how they can do wonders for people. However, ebook publishing does have its own set of problems.
One of them is not having a publisher (or being one in the wrong one). While there are many benefits to self-publishing, it also comes with its disadvantages. One of them is not having publishers who will look after your book from start to finish. This might be something that you are already aware of, or you might be completely unaware of the fact. No matter how well you may prepare your manuscript, if nobody is looking after it from beginning to end, then those plans just won’t work out in the end.
Fitting into this blog post are three books that I have been working on for years now: my first novel, A Bed For The Night, and its sequel A New Day On The Farm. They were both published by Dawntreader Publishing, which keeps everything as transparent as possible while also providing some competition along with me!
The benefit here is that I am able to publish my books at no cost since Dawntreader Publishing allows me to pass on all profits from sales directly back into my pocket, and there is nothing more liberating than making money yourself!
3. The Challenges of E-Book Publishing
This post is part of a series on the challenge of e-book publishing (since I like to think it’s a field that can be “e-book” and not just “e-books”) and the challenges it presents.
Here are some examples:
First, there are file size limits imposed by Apple (a very powerful product). In particular, there are long file sizes that are too large for Apple to support (unless you use a proprietary format). There is an alternative format called PDF that Apple does support, but most people don’t know about or use it. And there are formats for which Apple supports only certain types of files such as .docx and .pdf.
Next, the file must be in some format (.docx, .jpg, or .png) to be uploaded to Apple. However, this is not good enough for the vast majority of e-book publishers who require images for their books — even if those images have been created using open source software such as GIMP and Inkscape. For example:
The image has been saved in JPG format using Inkscape, but Apple will not accept it because they want an Adobe PDF version. You can see that the only way to get around this problem is to use ImageMagick to convert your image into an Adobe PDF format. This requires downloading ImageMagick, installing it on your Mac OS X system (which you do anyway), and then configuring your Apache web server to serve ImageMagick JPEG images rather than gifs or pages.
This is all well and good if you have some awesome open-source image manipulation software on hand; however, most users don’t have any of these things with them; so what do you do? Fortunately, there are several existing products that will help you out here:
You can download Gimp from http://www.gimp.org/download/ The Gimp Community Edition has become increasingly popular with people who need a free alternative to Photoshop: http://www.gimp-project.org/download/ What about Illustrator? It’s nowhere near as popular as Gimp, but it’s reasonable enough for most users: http://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator/downloads/. Also available on Mac OS X 10+. Of course, we’re talking real professionals here at Buffer — we really like Illustrator!
4. The Secrets to E-Book Publishing
It’s not that e-books aren’t popular, it’s that they are mostly used by people who are not serious about reading. They are the books of choice for kids (I know) and you know what? They get it. They get that e-books can be a fantastic alternative to the printed book (often with a much better price). They have their own (or are starting to have) their own ebook stores, which can be as good as or better than Amazon or Barnes & Noble — and they also have an ebook reader application on their phone or computer which is usually also free.
Yet, these people don’t buy them because they are just so cool. The reason why is that e-books do not provide the same experience as a physical book: you cannot hold one in your hands. You cannot rattle it around on the table like you can with a physical book. And while they allow you to read them in bed without disturbing your partner, they don’t necessarily keep you awake at night worrying about how many pages remain or whether your text will ever be converted into an ebook format at all.
5. Conclusion
Nobody is as excited about e-books as we are. We believe that the future of books in the digital world will be e-books, and we have been doing a lot of work on getting it right. We’ve come to learn that the information contained within an e-book is very different from anything you’re used to reading on paper. The data is much finer than print, but it’s also much larger and harder to store. And digital readers don’t always look at a page in its entirety: they scan it or jump around.
E-books take advantage of all this by laying out multiple pages on one device, with little compression between them so your eyes can focus on one thing at a time without skipping around too much.
We believe this will be an important part of the future of reading: a way for people to read more as they do now, but with the added convenience of being able to download large files for offline use too!
