Online Marketing - Websites - eBooks

In answer to the most basic question I’ve been asked several times – how do you publish your own book. Plenty of people who are in the position to publish a book easily (e.g. those who already provide lots of information for free on topics on forums or their own blog), seem intimidated by the thought of going it alone with actually publishing a book. The unfortunate, or clueless fall for the many self-publishing scams out there. 

Plus there are a number of companies who would just LOVE to help you – for a small fee – of course. So here’s how you can do it yourself – for low or little cost. 

How To Write &  Publish A Book In Six Fairly Easy Steps 

Step 1: Write a “book”

Informational books are often about  8000-30,000 words. We are not talking War & Peace here. Answer the questions you know readers have about your area of expertise. It doesn’t have to be great literature,write clearly, use sub-headings and bullet points to make it easy to read. If it’s a factual book try to write your advertising “blurb” – the description on the back cover  first. Write  down 4-5 key points you want to explain to the reader for the blurb – there’s the start of your book outline! 

Step 2: Pay an editor

No one can pick up their own mistakes, there are some tricks:

• leave the draft t for a few days before you review, 
• uploading it to your Kindle to get it to read aloud to you really helps, 

but if there is one thing you spend money on – pay an editor. I generally pay around $50-$100 for editing a 20-30,000 word book. 

Step 3: Make or pay for a great cover design

I’m no designer – but I’ve generally done my cover designs myself with LOTS of help from designer friends. I pay for the stock photos (about $20) – paying for the design would cost maybe another $100. The trick it has to be eye catching in the very small size that book covers show on Amazon listings

Step 4: Format the book for Amazon ebooks (MOBI)

This requires learning a bit of HTML stuff – its a little tricky until you get used to it – I’ve actually written a book on Kindle formatting on how to do it. I also format books  for clients – about $50-$100 for a book depending on the complexity

Step 5:  Upload the eBook to Amazon

Amazon is about  60% of the eBook  market. If you ONLY have your eBook available on Amazon then you can enrol in a program called “Kindle Select” which allows you to set a book free for 5 days out of the 90 day exclusivity period. Also Americans who are members of the Amazon Prime program can borrow your book for free and you still get paid. Note you can publish a book via Createspace (or any other print publisher) while your eBook is in the Select program -the exclusivity agreement ONLY applies to eBooks. 

Step 6: Create the paperback via Createspace

Createspace is owned by Amazon. They allow your book to be made into a paperback which is them printed on demand when someone buys it.  Having both the paperback and ebook version means that you end up with a pretty listing on Amazon which emphasizes how much cheaper the eBook is, and also suggests that it’s a “real” book – you know – not self -published 🙂 

You have to now take that same file you had and make it into a PDF all pretty and laid out. It took me about a day to do it – I use OpenOffice which is a free wordprocessor (like Word) which will save-as pdf. You also have to get the book cover now extended to cover the back and spine. Load it all up to createspace, approve the proof, either digitally or pay for a copy to be shipped (about $10 to NZ). Details on publishing at createspace here . 

 In total I think costs for self-publishing 25,000 word book could be summarised as 

 EBooks 
Cover ($40-$150) most author’s will need to pay for this
Editing ($60-$120) every author should pay for this
Formatting($60-$120) most author’s could do this themselves  but there is a learning curve (hint Word is not a good HTML editor) 

Paper Books 
Cover ($0-$40) if you have some skills with GIMP or photoshop you can probably take the eBook cover and make the paper back version yourself
Formatting($0-100) This is not hard but you need to add in a whole lot of front matter that you wouldn’t  have in an eBook plus you need to worry about
footers, headers,page numbers, fonts, page breaks
Proof copy ($5-$10) – depends on how much the postage will cost. I only got the proof copy for my first book – because I had no idea what to expect for the quality.  

Advanced Distribution 

The above six steps only cover getting your book into Amazon (com, uk and the European stores inclusive).
Distributing via Smashwords.com
They will distribute your book via a long list of retailers the most important of which are: 

• Barnes & Noble
• Apple 
• Sony
• Kobo 

Kobo has recently (July 2012) started their own portal which allows you to upload your own books directly to them via Writing Life – it still seems buggy – but presumably will improve with time. 

Only American residents, can submit books to Barnes & Noble directly. 

Only Americans using Macs who have their own ISBN, can submit direct to Apple. 

All three of these sites, if you can load directly to them, will accept a file in ePub format. You can easily convert your Amazon eBook MOBI file using  free Calibre software. 

However to actually submit a file via Smashwords you need to submit a Word file. This is a problem because this severely limits the chances that your formatting will look any good.  It also means you have access to Microsoft Word. Creating a doc file using OpenOffice will not work in my experience. Watch this space for a solution! 

This post was prompted by an online colleague who admitted that he has been  avoiding paper versions of their books because he was  scared of  the formatting.

The formatting is pretty darn easy actually, well at least for Amazon’s CreateSpace which is the service I’m using.  Much more straightforward than doing the e-version in my experience. 

What You Need To Get Started 

1. An account with createspace – sign up fill in the form – done. 

2. A formatted book. If you used my method for Formatting Non-Fiction books, then you will have an HTML file and some images. 

3. A cover image. 

At The End Of  The Process You Will Have 

1. A book cover which includes the back cover – I’ll probably do another post on this but basically you create the correct size (and it varies with the number of pages in your book) upload the jpg to Createspace and they will create a pdf of the cover for you. 

2. A PDF of the book. 

3. Once you upload these two, Createspace will send you back a PDF proof copy which will print on standard printer paper “2-up” so you can see the actual layout. Alternatively, and obviously at some cost, you can also order a print proof copy. It’s a good idea to do this for the first one. That way eventually you will notice the obvious typo on the cover! 

Self-Publishing A Print Book With  Amazon’s CreateSpace

1. Front Matter

Go find a a real book in your genre.  You’ll find these in a book shop, or a library. Look at all the extra pages there are at the front of the book. There are a surprisingly number of them. I flipped through quite a few and I ended up adding: 

• half title page i.e. just he title;
• More books in the series page (optional but you will need a blank page because the next page must be on the right);
• full title page includes title, sub-title, author name and url of the “publisher”;
• copyright page, including date, edition number and ISBN;
• disclaimer;
• blank page to ensure that the table of contents start on the right page. 

This is not set in stone, but I intend my books to be consistent. Often trad published books have heaps of reviews at the front, as a reader I find these incredibly annoying so I didn’t add them! 

Verso and Recto

What you have no idea what verso and recto pages are? Me neither, but if you write your language from left to right: verso is the page on the left, recto the page on the back, if you are writing Hebrew or Arabic, it will be the opposite (full explanation).  

To keep it simple – the important shit like the start of the book, the start of the table of contents, the start of chapters MUST go on the right side (recto) of the opened page – like this:

 

2 Back Matter 

I used the end of the book to advertise other books in the series by including a blurb. I already had an about the author page and a request for readers to leave a review and signup for updates. 

Re-Formatting From eBook to pBook

Workflow matters to traditional publishers and typesetters (that’s a formatter in the paper world). There’s a reason for that – it saves a lot of mistakes and re-work if you know exactly what file is at what stage.  I suggest that you set up draft and final version folders and have sub-folder for every version of your book (ePub, Kindle, Paper etc). 

Take your final HTML as used to create your eBook and import it into your word processor. Mine is OpenOffice which allows me to save PDF files directly, so that’s what I’m talking about from here on in. 

Go to Createspace and download the doc template for the book size that you’ve chosen. There is no right answer for this, I chose 8″x5″ because my book is quite short so I wanted it to not look too skinny. 

Now learn how to use “Page Styles” (F11 in Open Office). You need to use Page Styles, and know how to change from one to the other so that you can: 

• ensure no  header/footer shows on blank pages, and title and other similar pages; 
• pages numbers don’t usually start displaying until the actual text start – my first page with a number is a page 9. If you have a long introduction and table of contents you can number these with small roman numbers but I thought that looked a bit old-fashioned; 
• you can use page styles to change the running head to reflect the current chapter, and you should for non-fiction. 

Fonts and Justification

I didn’t like the suggested CreateSpace font (Georgia) that much and changed to Palatino Linotype for the majority of text. You can use different fonts and sizes for the front matter and chapter headings, but keep it fairly simple. 

Note different fonts make a large difference to how many pages your book will consist of. More pages means more cost to the reader, but on the other hand using a minute font, is not going to win you friends and readers either.  Decide on your font before you fiddle with the page breaks. 

Books are fully justified. Yeah, I’d forgotten too. But they are – you don’t see ragged right alignment except maybe in a poetry book. You may find that you have some oddly spaced words because of it, usually means you need to add some extra spaces. 

Margins and Gutters

The Createspace template will give you the required margins. Note that books are “mirrored” because of the gutter at the spine – so pages will not look symmetrical – if they are symmetrical the book will look awful. It will also come with suggested fonts and sizes. 

Add in the front and back matter you’ve decide your book needs. 

The CreateSpace template has a number of pre setup page formats which I adapted for my own purposes. 

Now you need to add back in headers and footers including page numbers. Again the format is up to you, but most non-fiction books seems to have a the title on the right page and a running chapter or part heading on the right. 

Page Breaks 

With paper books page breaks are critical, the exact opposite of ebooks.  Your word-processor will have widow/orphan control (to prevent only a one line appearing on a new page), but got a better result by going through and doing this by hand.  As you do this you may end up needing to add blank pages if you want major sections to start on the right side page. 

Images 

Images cost money – and unless you have black and white images they will cost you a lot of money 

 

Final Steps To Printed Glory

Once you think you are getting close create a pdf (save as PDF in open office) and see what it looks like. If you think you are getting close, then upload it as your “interior file” to createspace. This will give you the chance to seee the interior pages in their online reviewer. Well worth clicking through this as it will find you lot’s of errors such as headers on the wrong side (well it did for me). 

You can do this any number of times and it only takes a few minutes to upload a new version. 

Once you are REALLY happy then work your way through the rest of the createspace process and hit submit, including adding the cover image. You will get a message saying that your book will approved (or not) within 48 hours (more like 24 in my experience). What you will get is either an email telling you what the problems are  that your book is ready for you to approve the proof. 

Accepting the Proof – It’s Your Choice 

Up until now it has cost exactly nothing to create your book now you have a choice: 

• approve the PDF file they’ve sent to you (this is not the same as the one you submitted to them), or
• order the proof copy

The second option will cost you the price of the book, plus P&P – in my case to New Zealand it cost around US$10 to get the book in my hands and 2 weeks of waiting. It should be quicker and cheaper for the rest of you. 

You don’t have to do that – you can just download the PDF proof and print it out. Yes you can also proof the PDF on screen, but I wouldn’t – you won’t see the errors! 

Printing the file will give you a two -up layout view with the verso and recto stuff sorted out correctly. Compared to the printed book proof, and despite having printed the 8″x5″ proof on metric equivalent paper, it’s a good representation. Won’t help you with the cover of course, but the rest of the book is a close as possible to the reality. 

Now you repeat the process a few more times and get the rest of the mistakes sorted out! 

Note until you approve your book it’s not available for general sale. 

Once you have approved it  – you can still change it, but you will need to go through the proof approval process – and if you opt to pay for extended distribution you will need to pay that fee again for each new “edition” you create, even if it’s just to fix typos. 

It’s really not that hard, because it’s easy to see exactly what your book will look like on paper. The tricky thing is that an awful lot of stuff that ignore with eBooks, become critical with printed books: fonts, margins, blank pages for starters. 

So what’s your story – have you produced a printed version of your self-published book?  How did it go? 

The initial reason I got into travel eBooks is I could see a gap in the market. The travel industry is dominated by the big guide book publishers: Lonely Planet, Frommers and similar. And none of them do eBooks well. In fact the eBooks I’ve seen from Lonely Planet are virtually unusable. But for a traveller an eBook reader is the best invention since cheap international airfares. So there was a bit of a supply, demand disconnect, and decided to fill it. 

So I published one book, and then I got distracted. Frankly, I found writing something longer, and better organised, than a rambling 800-word blog post quite intimidating. Like hard work or something. 

However as I said recently – Google managed  to focus my attention back to Amazon. So I wrote a second travel book, as was my Editorial Plan, which I now actually wrote down (that helps with plans!). 

I wrote the next travel book, got a a great cover, paid an editor, and then I started formatting … Several days later I finished formatting. And I was mad, it had taken far longer than it should have. I wrote notes so I could replicate the process more efficiently next time.  The notes were quite long, (about 10,000 words in the end). Seemed like a potential book really. After all I’d bought several books on the subject of Kindle formatting – and they had varied from dire, to out-of-date, from misleading, to plain annoying. Really. So I, out of genre, I needed to  write another  book the one I couldn’t buy!  

I wanted some reviews so I priced it at 99c and mentioned it to my mailing list and on a couple of forums and Facebook groups I’m a member of. I sold some copies: 

We are not talking hundreds here – but selling 35-odd at 99c within 24 hours pushed me up the best-seller lists in the niche and I even, briefly, ranking in the7000’s overall. 

So now I have a side business! If you want to either buy my book on Kindle formatting or get help with your book’s formatting check out: 

• Kindle Formatting For Nonfiction – the Book 
• Book Formatting Service – Have Me Do It For You 

Also, some time in the next few days I’m going to redesign the site – so if it looks funky for a while – stay with me – it will get sorted, probably!