How to Publish an eBook

 

For the last few years e-books have been revolutionising the publishing industry. In 2010 Amazon’s e-reading device, the Kindle, became its best-selling (and most gifted) product of all time and to date, Apple has sold something in the region of 17 million iPads, the hi-tech tablet computer that enables users to buy and read e-books through their iBooks application. E-books’ percentage share of the book market is growing at a remarkable rate.

Meanwhile the ease of publishing and selling e-books is opening up whole new worlds to writers at all stages of their career - best-selling authors are rejuvenating their back lists; others are finding readerships for previously rejected manuscripts; and self-published novelists, short-story writers and even bloggers are finding it remarkably easy to e-publish and sell their work.

And trust me: it’s worth your while. I self-published my travel memoir, Mousetrapped: A Year and A Bit in Orlando, Florida, in paperback in March 2010. Almost as an afterthought, I decided to release e-book versions as well. That first month, my e-book earnings were $11 (€8); I’d sold about 6 books. In January 2011, just 10 months later, I sold around 900 e-books, earning about $1,900 (€1,400). And my book is non-fiction - fiction writers are faring even better. Way better, in some cases. In the United States, a fiction writer called JA Konrath is selling 1,000 e-books a day and will earn the best part of a million dollars from them in 2011.

Now don’t you want to get onboard? This simple guide to basic e-publishing will help you do just that.

WHAT TO E-PUBLISH

The beauty of e-book publishing is that it works for everything. As long as you price your e-book right, you can publish full-length books, novellas, short story or flash fiction collections, individual short stories - even your blog. As long as you own the rights, you can e-publish it.

WHERE TO E-PUBLISH

I always recommend that writers publish their e-books simultaneously in two places: Smashwords and Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (previously Digital Text Platform). This will ensure that your book will become available for all major e-reading devices and on all major e-book stores. Just remember to set the same list price for your book on both sites.

A NOTE ON PRICE

In my experience, e-books will not sell unless they are priced significantly lower than their print counterparts. Mine is $2.99 (working with Smashwords and Amazon, all prices will be set in US dollars). Most of the e-books that sell in significant numbers are priced between 99c - $4.99 (with the exception of major titles released by publishing houses). You want your book to be priced low enough so that e-book readers will be encouraged to ‘take a chance’ on it, but not so low that you send them a subliminal message that the book isn’t worth much. Remember: the royalty rate on e-books is 70% in most cases and you have no manufacturing costs to pay.

WHAT YOU NEED TO BEGIN

To publish an e-book on Smashwords and Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, you will need the following:

-· A correctly formatted interior file (i.e. your manuscript) - see below for instructions

-· A cover file in JPEG form. Use a picture or get someone with a little know-how to make one for you. Remember a good cover is just as important to an e-book as it is to a print book.

-· A blurb and ‘About the Author’ description for your book (max 4000 characters)

-· A Paypal account (so Smashwords can pay you)

-· If you don’t already have them, sign up for free Amazon and Smashwords accounts.

WHY YOUR E-BOOK FILES NEED FORMATTING

To publish your e-book, you’ll upload a Microsoft Word file to Amazon and Smashwords and they will then convert it into the correct e-book formats. In order to make this work correctly, you have to prepare your manuscript in a very specific way.

In e-books, there is no page. In the words of Smashwords’ Style Guide:

“E-books are different from print books, so do not attempt to make your e-book look like an exact·facsimile of a print book, otherwise you’ll only frustrate yourself by creating a poorly formatted,·unreadable e-book.·

With print, you control the layout.· The words appear on the printed page exactly where you want·them to appear.·With e-books, there is no “page.”· By giving up the control of the printed page, you and your·readers gain much more in return.·Page numbers are irrelevant.· Your book will look different on every e-reading device.· Your text·will shape shift and re flow. Most e-reading devices and e-reading applications allow your reader·to customise the fonts, font sizes and line spacing. Your customers will modify how your book·looks on-screen to suit their personal reading preference and environment.·By transforming your books into digital form, you open up exciting possibilities for how readers·can enjoy them.·At Smashwords, the motto is “your book, your way,” and this means a reader should be able to·consume your book however works best for them, even if that means they like to read 18 point·Helvetica with blue fonts, lime background colour, and triple spaced lines.”

For example: in my e-book, there are less than twenty page breaks. This is because I only inserted them after the end of each chapter. I did this because I know that my “page” has no relationship whatsoever with what my readers will see when they open Mousetrapped on their e-reading devices. Your goal is to make your document flow, like a scroll rather than a sheaf of pages.

So are we ready? Good. Let’s go!

HOW TO FORMAT YOUR E-BOOK

Step 1: Get Rid of the ‘X’

Smashwords only supports MS Word files that end in .doc. If you have a newer version of MS Word, your file will end in .docx by default, but you can change that. When using the ‘Save As’ function, hit the drop down menu labelled ‘Format’ and select ‘Word 97-2004 .doc.’ Continue to save as normal. I recommend you work from a copy and not your original, in case anything goes wrong. Don’t say you weren’t warned…

Step 2: Prepare Your Manuscript

I’m going to assume that you’re working either from a manuscript you intended to submit (double-spaced, new chapters starting on their own page, Courier or Times New Roman) or from the interior file of your POD book (fancy font, chapter headings, blank pages). Whatever you’re working from, you need to prepare it now for its life as a e-book.

Get rid of all the front and back matter: title pages, copyright notice, table of contents, chapter title pages, index – anything that isn’t the actual text of your book or a chapter heading. Lose the page numbers, headers and footers. Next, close it all up so that there’s no blank pages, and new chapters start right below the previous one.

Finally, select all text (Edit -> Select All) and change it to:

•· ‘Normal’ paragraph style

•· Left-aligned

•· Pt 12 sized text (avoid more than 3 different font sizes)

•· Single line spacing with no extra space in between paragraphs

•· A simple font, like Times New Roman, Arial or Book Antiqua.

Forget about having tables, columns, text boxes or footnotes. If you have these in your book you’re going to need to figure something else out, or spend a week studying Smashwords’ Style Guide and following every one of its recommendations.

It will be easier to envision what your e-book will look like if you set your MS Word ‘View’ to something like ‘Web’ or ‘Outline.’ DO NOT view it in ‘Print Layout’ as this will mess with your head and confuse you with the idea of actual pages.

Step 3: Go Tab Hunting

It is extremely important the you do NOT use tabs to delineate the beginning of your paragraphs. Instead, use the automatic paragraph indent feature as shown in the image below.

(NB: These are instructions for basic e-book formatting. For a more complicated e-book, see Smashwords Style Guide on their website.)

Word’s Show/Hide feature is·designated by the “¶” mark in the toolbar. Click it. If you’ve correctly used indents, the beginning of your paragraphs will be marked with nothing and the end of them by one of these “¶” marks. If you’ve used a tab, it’ll show an arrow pointing right at the start. Go through your document until you have eliminated ALL tabs/arrows indicating such.

Step 4: Really Close It Up

In Step 2 we closed everything up so that we had removed all blank pages and had each chapter starting on the same page as the one before it had ended. But now we’re going to really close it up.

Listen to me VERY carefully: under no circumstances should you have more than 3-4 empty lines anywhere in your e-book. Did you listen? Trust me, this will be difficult to implement. You’ll really, really, really want to leave some after your copyright notice, or after the last line of each chapter, but you need to be strong! Don’t do it.·When you press Return to make a blank line, you’ll get a little “¶” mark as you do at the end of each paragraph. Make sure you have no more than 4 of these together anywhere in your book.

Step 5: Make Chapter Headings

Once you’ve done this, make your chapter headings. KEEP IT SIMPLE. I made mine all caps and in bold. Do not use a different font or a different font size if you can resist it. Remember: the simpler the better.

This is what the bit in between your chapters should look like:

This is what the bit in between your chapters should not look like:

Step 6: Add Your Sparkly New Front Matter

What goes at the front of your e-book is not the same as what goes at the front of your print edition. You should have the title, your name and then your copyright notice. We’re going to use a Smashwords copyright notice and license note for this example but you can just modify as need be. NB: This is required for Smashwords upload, and it’s the only thing I’ll let you centre.

MY BOOK’S TITLE

by Soon To Famous Author, i.e. Me

Smashwords Edition |·Copyright 2010 My Name

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. ·This ebook may not be re-sold or given·away to other people. ·If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase·an additional copy for each recipient. ·If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it·was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your·own copy. ·Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

www.mywebsiteURL.com

www.mysmashwordsprofilepage.com

Step 7: Add Your Sparkly New End Matter

Smashwords recommends that you type ‘###’ and centre it beneath your last line to mark the end of your book. You can leave it like this if you like, but it’s a wasted opportunity. Instead, write a little author bio for yourself and list your website or blog, Twitter username, Facebook page and whatever else you want. And remember – this is an e-book; you can insert hyperlinks. (Use Word’s Insert -> Hyperlinks function.) Then if someone is reading your book on, say, an iPad, they can click onto your blog immediately after finishing your book to see what else you got.

And they all lived happily ever after.

THE END

###

About the Author

Up until recently, E-Book Author was drinking copious amounts of coffee and working on her second novel. However after spending a weekend attempting to format this e-book correctly, she had to be transferred to a secure mental health facility for the safety of people around her. She’s currently considering embellishing her experiences there á la James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. Her agent thinks she’s onto something… Oh, wait. That should have been on something.

Find out more on www.amillionlittleformattingerrors.com.

Step 8: Upload Your Book

Follow the simple instructions on Smashwords and then Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing sites to complete this step.

A note on sampling: e-book stores generally offer a free sample of the first 25% of your book. DO NOT DISABLE OR DECREASE THIS. It is just the same as being able to flick through a few pages of a book in a bookstore, and the more of the book a reader reads for free, the more they’re invested in it, and therefore the more like they are to pay to read the rest of it.

Step 9: Upload Your Cover Image

Smashwords offers a lot of technical information about the required size, shape and quality of your cover image; I say ignore it. (I had to, as I didn’t have a clue what they were on about anyway.) Instead, follow Catherine’s Hit and Miss But Ultimately Simpler Way of Uploading Your Cover Image:

1. Get a JPEG of your book cover

2. Upload it

3. If it doesn’t upload, re-size it and try again

4.· Repeat as required.

If you don’t already have a print edition, chances are you won’t have a cover image. (Unless you’ve been doing some serious visualisation/vision board work.) Covers are just as important to e-books as they are to print editions; they give you a big clue about what level of quality you can expect to get in the book behind them. If all else fails, consider making something in MS Word or whatever word processing program you use, then save that as a PDF, then save the PDF as a JPEG. It won’t be a high resolution and it’s really the poor man’s way of doing things, but it’s better than nothing.

Step 10: Check Your E-book

DO NOT skip this step. Trust me - I speak from personal experience! The first version of Mousetrapped’s e-book has 1,300+ pages because a bug with MS Word for Mac had inserted a page break after each paragraph. Once your e-book has been converted (published) you need to check that it looks as you intended. We’re going to check the two most popular formats: the standard format, EPUB,· and the one that goes on Kindle.

To check EPUB:

1.· Download Adobe Digital Editions to your computer (it’s free).

2.· Download the EPUB version of your e-book from Smashwords (where you can download your own books for free).

3.· Flick through to make sure it looks okay on the screen.

To check KINDLE:

Here, you have two options. After you upload a file to Amazon, they will immediately show you an approximation of what your book will look like on a Kindle screen and you can flick through the whole thing to see if it’s okay. That’s what I recommend you do. Otherwise, download the free Kindle application for your computer and a sample of your book, and check it that way.

Congrats! You now have an e-book for sale.

Troubleshooting:

According to Smashwords, the top 5 formatting errors are:

1. Improper indents. Don’t use tabs.

2. Repeating paragraph returns. No more than four empty lines together, and as few as possible.

3. Improper paragraph separation. I haven’t mentioned using the block paragraph style here because as a reader it makes my blood boil, but use either it OR first line indent. Using both equals disaster.

4. Font and style mistakes. Use the same, simple font throughout, no more than 2 or 3 font sizes and nothing bigger than pt 16.

5. Copyright notice mistakes. Don’t forget to include it, as above.

It took me a few tries to get my e-book right, and I found that the mistakes I was making included:

•· Using page breaks. Be ruthless; get rid of them except for the end of chapters

•· Using font sizes that were too large for chapter headings

•· Not having all my text set to ‘Normal’ paragraph style.

•· Not having my paragraph spacing set to ‘O’ between paragraphs, or not having the box checked for ‘Don’t insert extra space after paragraphs.’

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Once everything has been okayed and converted, your e-book will appear for sale online. If you want to reach maximum coverage on Smashwords, you must submit your book for inclusion in their Premium Catalogue. If you do this, and taking into account your Amazon upload as well, your book will appear, in time, on:

•· Amazon.com

•· Amazon.co.uk

•· The Kindle store available to all Kindle owners through their devices

•· Smashwords.com

•· Sony E-Reader store

•· Kobo e-book store

•· Diesel e-book store

•· Apple’s iBooks (for the iPad, iPhone, etc.)

•· Barnes and Noble’s e-book store for Nook (US only).

You will be able to see how many units you’ve sold by checking your Amazon KDP and Smashwords accounts online. Amazon updates in almost real time; Smashwords once a month or so and on a delay.

You will get paid once every two months from Amazon by dollar (from US sales) or British pound (for UK sales) cheque, and from Smashwords once a quarter via Paypal. Both sites withhold 30% of royalties earned for US tax unless you provide them with alternative information. See the sites for more details on this.

And with any luck, you’ll become a best-selling e-book author in no time at all!

http://www.smashwords.com

http://kdp.amazon.com

Catherine Ryan Howard is one of writing.ie's guest bloggers - if you enjoyed this article, check out Double Spaced in Guest Blogs, and her book is just as good, buy Mousetrapped here.

 Double Spaced recently featured the excellent eight piece series, Self Printing Summer.  It is full of handy tips and advice on self publishing. Also read Catherine's articles here on writing.ie on:

How Much Does it Cost to Self Publish   Going It Alone: Self Printing  How to Self Publish With Create Space  How to Publish and EBook  How to Sell Your Book with Social Media