Self-publishing an eBook

Self-Publishing an eBook
 
When I finished writing my first novel--about six months ago—I started looking for ways to have it published. I found that there were a number of companies who would let me pay them to publish my novel in eBook and/or print versions. I wasn’t interested in paying anyone anything, so I looked for other means.
While my novel was being professionally edited—a must do in my opinion—I put the book out on the authonomy.com site to get feedback from other writers, and kept researching the possibilities of getting published. From my research, from comments on authonomy.com, and from my editor I got the impression that self-publishing was definitely an option, but again there seemed to be some costs involved, so I went the ‘find-an-agent’ route. I’ve already written a blog entry on what I thought about that experience, so I won’t reiterate it here. It should be sufficient to say that I am now self-publishing.
Once I had accepted the fact that self-publishing was my choice, I started researching the process again, and was surprised by what I found. I checked three possibilities; Kobo, Amazon, and Google Books. All three had ways of easily getting eBooks published. Here are the steps I followed to become published.
1.       (Optional) Download and install the eBook manager ‘calibre’ from http://calibre-ebook.com/download. This is a free eBook manager that will allow you to create your book(s) in different formats. I am suggesting this application to enable you to see what your book looks like as an eBook. You don’t actually need it to upload to the Kobo, Amazon, or Google, because they will convert for you, but it is nice to see what your book will look like.
2.       Create your cover as a jpg, or have it created for you if you can’t make something that looks professional. This is probably the most complicated part of the whole process. I was lucky because my wife is an artist, and she has a copy of Photoshop. The other complication here is the image size. The Kobo Writing Life (this is the Kobo publishing site) instructions ask for a jpg or png file format, and in one place tell you that the image should be limited to 900 DPI and 1MB while on the actual upload screen it say the limit is 2MB. Amazon on the other hand accepts a larger image. They suggest that the optimal size for a cover image is 1563 pixels by 2500 pixels, and that the minimum is 625 by 1000. Amazon has very good and extensive documentation on the proper formatting of an eBook to be uploaded to them at https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A3R2IZDC42DJW6 Google has detailed instructions on file naming and formatting for their submissions, but they accept an epub format, so I created mine with calibre and sent that. The epub format has the cover image embedded in it.
3.       Obtain an ISBN for your book. The Canadian site is : http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/ciss-ssci/index-e.html
4.       Contact your bank and obtain the SWIFT code and routing number for your branch. If your eBook sells, the vendor is going to want to send you money. Cheques seem to be an option, but electronic banking appears to be the preference. Being a cautious person, I created a new savings account to keep all my profits (ha-ha) separate and also to keep my other accounts secure.
5.       Create an account or accounts on the sites you wish to sell through. It appears to take a few days to get everything setup and verified, and Amazon seems to be the fastest.
Here are the sites to join:
Kobo Writing Life at http://www.kobo.com/writinglife
Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing at https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin?ie=UTF8&language=en_US
Google Books partner program at http://www.google.ca/googlebooks/partners/index.html
Happy publishing.
PS. For those who have been waiting patiently for my Hosting novel to be available! It is now listed on Kobo, Amazon, and Google Books. Direct links are listed on my web site www.daveskinner.ca