Ebooks: advice needed please

[Richard]

Having published my book in hardback and paperback and belatedly decided it might be a good idea to put it out as an ebook as well, does anyone know the best way to do this - how to go about it, whether I can do it all myself, how much it costs, how long it takes and so on? Any advice would be welcome.

[J.A.]

I'm afraid I only know the theory - so far. Write, Publish, Repeat by Sean Platt is a pretty comprehensive guide to self publishing. I found it very helpful.

Any of you self-published types about? Ava? Want to wade in on this one?

[Yvonne]

I'm currently using Lulu to sell a paperback and Amazon and Smashwords for ebooks. It is free to use both Amazon and Smashwords. There are different opinions as to which is the best regarding sales or potential sales but I figured that using both would be best. You might as well get your work out on as many platforms as possible to increase your chances. Amazon publish mobi but Smashwords also do epub, pdf, rtf, etc. And Smashwords distribute to other retailers such as Apple, Barnes and Noble, and various others. Smashwords have a style guide they expect you to follow to format your book. Don't be put off by it. It looks like a lot of hard work but once you've figured it out it's actually not that bad. Once you've formatted your document and got your cover image formatted to the correct size then you're good to go. It takes a couple of minutes for uploading and converting. Then your book is immediately available to buy from the Smashwords store, and then, assuming your file was correctly formatted to the style guide specs, it will be a few days before it's ready to be distributed to the other stores.

If you upload to Amazon it takes about 12 hours for your book to be "live" on their site. Some people recommend the kdp programme, others don't. I don't use that because you would only be able to sell your work on Amazon alone for 90 days. You wouldn't be able to sell it from your own site; something I also do.

[Dave]

I've done both Amazon/Smashwords as a combo (two books) and KDP Select (exclusivity) on its own. The novel that's both sites has done about 15 sales since January, only 3 of which have been on Smashwords.

My short collection, $0.99 for a handful of shorts, which also went up on both, has sold miserably. Two sales, both on Amazon.

My third book, a novel, was a jump into KDP Select. Over 100 sales in 30 days, and it appears to have driven at least some of the sales of my initial novel.

My own suggestion is to start on KDP Select, then branch out, but that's only because it seems to have worked for me.

As long as you have a decent cover, you should be able to get a book uploaded to either or both sites in a day with no out of pocket cost.

[Christopher]

As of this time I only do ebook releases.

As far as costs go, it sounds like you already have your stories and cover design, which is really the only cost for self-publishing. The only other thing is getting your book formatted. Amazon and Smashbooks do offer converters to go from Microsoft Word to their format for you, but I don't trust them and instead do my own handcoding (which I plan to open my own business offering that specific service).

I start with Amazon KDP select for the first 90 days, then release on Smashbooks. I have my own marketing plan, but it mostly involves finding people to review my book to try to get some 4* and 5* reviews and maintain a presence on social media. That's the hardest part, putting a book on Amazon is relatively easy.

[A.K.]

I do ebooks and paperbacks, I use Amazon for both of those and also use D2D (draft2Digital) for ebooks to Apple, B & N and Kobo. I did do select at the beginning but the pros didn't outweigh the cons, for me, so I no longer use that on amazon. I am probably one of the least tech savvy person around and I managed it on my own. Both sites will convert your .doc to their formats for distribution. There are lots of forums on the subject to gain info, plus here of course lol. If you have a specific query just ask, someone will have the answer. The publishing is the esay part - it's the promo that's not so easy lol. Hope that helped even in a small part.

[Richard]

Believe me, everything I've read in this thread has helped (I'm on a learning curve like a cliff face with this stuff!) so many thanks to all of you for taking the trouble. I think I'm going to go via the KDP Select route (to start with anyway) because it looks the simplest to me as a novice, and branch out later as suggested. I agree about the promo too - at times I feel I'm in one of those classic anxiety nightmares: running, running...getting nowhere, nowhere...

[A.K.]

Ah Richard, we've all been there. Once you get the hang of it you'll be fine. Just remember that kdp select locks you to them for 90 days, but you could use that time to check out other platforms etc. You'll be fine.

[Richard]

Well, it's taken a couple of weeks but I finally get my book out as an ebook via KDP Select...only to find that some of the formatting is wrong. I should explain, too, that I've never had the book as a Word.doc; the company that originally typeset it from my manuscript provided me with both a PDF file and an epub file - the latter being what I've now, in turn, uploaded to Amazon.

So, before I just delete the wretched thing again, my question this time is: does anyone know if it's possible to edit my own ebook (or possibly try uploading the PDF instead)?

[A.K.]

you can't edit uploaded file, you have to upload a different file, I upload word.doc and formatting is ok with that. the pdf, you can get a programme to covert that to word - do a google search and you should find one. I've never uploaded a pdf and not sure if that's one of the accepted formats but I don't think so. html and word seem to work best Richard. Good luck with it x

[Micah]

Actually you can edit your eBook. But...how comfortable are you with HTML (XML actually)?

If the answer is anything other than "I'm comfortable learning it" or "I know it pretty well" then you might want to just find someone to do it for you. It will cost you. Probably in the "up to $150" range.

I've published two KDP books, both of which I wrote in Word and then formatted in Notepad++ as XML files using CSS. I'm not an HTML guy, but make my living doing database design (VBA and some SQL), so it wasn't too hard for me to pick up the basics.

The real difficulty in doing it yourself is that eReaders are actually specialized web browsers. They all have their own quirks and issues, and absolutely none of them fully support CSS. What looks good on a Kindle may do very weird things on a Nook or in Apple's iBooks app.

Things that generally freak out eReaders if they're not handled properly are tables, pictures, special fonts, special characters (like quotes, ellipses, em-dashes and en-dashes), etc.

Without knowing the specific formatting issues you're facing, though, it's difficult to say what your easiest solution is.

However, before uploading any eBook to Kindle it's definitely recommended that you look at it in the Kindle Previewer app first, and make sure you check it out in various Kindle formats to make sure it's doing what you want.

[Micah]

Oh, and you can also use programs like Sigil to help you edit ePubs, but I'm not an expert in that (yet).

Good luck!

[Dave]

What I do is upload the book through Amazon and then do several manuscript passes based on the results from there. There's an option to save without publishing, and it's a good idea to use that extensively until you are happy with what you have.

I also don't just use the online previewer - I have an Android tablet, iPhone, and Kindle and I try to check it out on all 3 devices so I know what a reader is getting.

[Richard]

Just to say a big thanks (again!) - the Smashwords guides are a mine of info and Sigil looks promising too - I'm going to try that out on the epub I have). I also didn't know about the 'save' option (among other things, I've been grappling with a couple of dozen illustrations, captions and so on: what a nightmare!). For the first time, though, it is all starting to make sense.