My eBook eXperience -- part two of many

To recap -- I had a manuscript ready. Now, I had to decide which formats, outlets, and submission routes to take. Obviously, the Kindle represents a big chunk of the market, as does the ePub format, which is used by the Nook, the iPad, and Sony's reader. Everyone can read plain text, HTML, and pdf. (Everyone can also read Kindle and Nook ebooks on a PC or Mac if they download the free readers, but I suspect those apps don't have the ubiquity of the Adobe reader.) Anyone can publish an ebook directly through Amazon or Barnes and Noble. I first heard about Smashwords from Bruce Coville. They are a major independent service that sells ebooks on their site and also distributes to all the key outlets in all the key formats.

There was one other major consideration. As I looked into the best way to distribute review copies, I discovered that Amazon and Barnes and Noble didn't offer a method to give someone a free copy of a Nook or Kindle ebook, other than buying a gift certificate. Smashwords allowed people to generate coupons. They also allowed authors to decide which formats and which channels they wanted to use. So I could have an ePub that I put on Barnes and Noble, and also offer the ePub format at Smashwords. Smashwords, righfully so, takes a cut of the royalties for books they distribute to other outlets.

After looking at all of this, and weighing the royalties, I decided to put my book on Amazon and on Barnes and Noble myself, to get the full royalty, but also use Smashwords, so my book would be available in as many places as possible, and so I could offer coupons.

Now, all I had to do was generate three versions of my book. Amazon will accept a variety of formats, but converts all of them except the prc (mobi) format. Barnes and Noble wants ePub, and Smashwords wants a Word doc with very stringent (but rational) format requirmeents.

You might wonder why I was concerned about the way the formats were generated. If my book were a novel, it probably wouldn't matter. But It Seemed Funny at the Time: A large collection of short humor is, as the subtitle makes obvious, a large collection of short humor. The pieces required a wide variety of layouts. There are essays, lists, satirical book reviews, and other typographical nightmares. I needed to make sure it looked right. And I needed a massive table of contents. (This turned out to be quite the albatross. More about that, later.) Bottom line -- I was going to do as much as I could myself.

There are actually lots of people out there who format books for a reasonable price. But that wasn't the route I wanted to take. Hey, I used to write programs in assembly language for the Atari 2600, where you had to count machine cycles and make sure a branch didn't cross a page boundary. I decided to put my book into prc and ePub myself.

How hard could it be to format an ebook? We'll get to that next time.