Category: Book Formatting

Categories
Book Formatting Online Business

How To Launch A Service Business Online

Wow it’s been a while, about a month, but finally my newest website is live: BookFormatter.com (yes I was surprised that such a  grammatical, 2-word dot com was still available to).  

Bookformatter.com

The thing is – it’s not just a website, it’s actually a business!  

Hanging out on a writers’ forums  I see an awful lot of authors who are not sure that they are, or if they want to be in business.  I have a lot of sympathy for the ones who say “I’m not in business I just want to write books”. I used to say something similar – my version was: 

I don’t want an online business. I just want to rank websites and make money from affiliate sales and advertising. I’m just an Internet Marketer, not a business-owner. 

Well the Google changes last year put pay to that. I figure that, although I could probably win in the short-term, medium-term the 1000’s of PhD’s that Google employs were probably going to win .

So I turned to books, which is exciting, but frankly I’m not building my backlist fast enough to make a decent wage. I’m not giving up on that, but I needed a more short-term cash boost.  So BookFormatter was born. 

Service Businesses Online 

I’ve thought for a while that my Kindle formatting services page needed expanding. For a start I don’t just format for Kindle I also do ePubs for other eReaders and pdfs for print-on-demand. 

Plus a separate site meant the I could focus on getting all the words in the right order, with commas, and all the other stuff the writerly people seem to worry about. (If I’ve missed some on BookFormatter.com  feel free to email: lis(at)LisSowerbutts.com) 

It took a while, partly because people kept on contacting me to help format their books!  It’s taken me about a month to get the site live, along the way I’ve thought rather a lot about the process of launching a service  business online.  

I’m actually gone about this with some thought, and even, hold on to your keyboards, a bit of a plan.  So business planning by Lis 101 – who’d have thought? 

Why? 

Well that’s easy – I need the cash flow. Books make money, but it takes a while, and is uncertain. Most books I can format within 24 hours and the clients pay 50% upfront and 50% on acceptance – the most I’ve had to wait for payment is about 24 hours after I sent the invoice. That’s a good cash flow business.  

It also has the potential to bring in more NZ$ – the US$ exchange rate is continuing to hurt like hell – my expenses are in NZ$. 

Then I discovered another reason – I rather liked doing it. I actually liked the interaction, the sheer novelty of starting with a book put together in a way I’d never have done myself, and making it work.  I’ve always liked troubleshooting too and fixing problems as they come up.  The interaction with clients was fun. It’s possible I’ve been in the back bedroom too long. 

Defining  An Offering For Sale 

I must admit I’ve never been a huge fan of having a service business online. Indeed briefly I did offer small-business website SEO and basic websites. I struggled with it though, because it’s a very open-ended offering. It’s hard to know when you are done, you need to be very clear what you are quoting for and how you and the client will know when the job is finished. I got burnt rather badly by a client who could never quite decide which pixel went where (I’m not exaggerating) – I walked away when I realised I was living the famous Oatmeal Cartoon. 

This time around I’ve learned a lot.  Basically book formatting is something I like doing, and because of  a very weird background I have in obscure programming languages (awk, grep, sed) and old-style software (vi, DisplayWrite) I’m pretty fast at it. I’ve also narrowed down my audience to several groups.  I think knowing who your audience is helpful, because then you know how to find them.  

If you are going to make a service business work need two things; demand, obviously, but also the ability to perform the service quicker, better, more-effectively and at a better quality than the average Joe. 

Pricing 

Pricing – that’s the hardest bit still I think. At least I’ve stopped apologising for asking for money LOL.  I’m lucky with book formatting there are a bunch of competitors, listed right on  Kindle Publishing’s help page. I checked them out. They were pretty expensive.  Clearly the bigger boys were carrying expenses that I didn’t have (I suspect they are outsourcing to a third-world country and having to manage both the client and the worker). A lot of the pricing was just silly – quoting in hours when a client had no idea how many hours a job would take or in pages for an eBook.  I also checked those advertising in places like kboards.com. Some of those were very low. 

In the end I kept records of how long jobs took, worked out my required hourly rate, and came up with some indicative prices. I fell between the low and high-end of existing competitors – so that seemed like a good place to be. If I get overwhelmed with demand, I’ll put prices up. 

Marketing

Having worked out WHAT you’re offering, I started in a small way and when people approached me, I tried to remember to ask them how they found out about me. After a while  I saw some patterns. 

First – I had an abject failure by trying to market to my friends over at da Pond – most of them were fairly tech savvy, were writing non-fiction, and didn’t have a lot, emotionally or financially, invested in their books.  Cheap as possible was what they wanted to spend, and most had figured out how to do their own formatting which was “good enough”. 

Instead the people who actually found me and hired me were: 

  • authors who don’t have time  and/or the inclination to format their books themselves;
  • generally weren’t online in a huge way;
  • normally had full-time, well-paying jobs. 

But now it’s got more specific – I’m starting to see a pattern. I’m primarily attracting: 

  • those  who have bought my Kindle formatting book, understood the process, and decided they’d like to outsource (they make awesome clients because they understand what I’m offering them);
  • panic-stricken author’s who have just got a warning from Amazon that their Kindle book has problems. Because of my time zone I can often fix this faster than they’d believe; 
  • authors who have a book  published several years ago on  paper, but have put off  getting the eBook out as it was too hard.  

Advertising

Having discovered the audience you then think about where they  hang out, or how they might find me. The readers of my formatting book are easy – there’s sign-up at the back for the sample files in the book. 

The panic-stricken seem to find me via Google from what I can work out. That’s the easy bit of advertising – the keywords shouldn’t be hard to rank for. 

The third group, existing authors, I’m thinking about. It may be more about personal contacts and world-of-mouth among not so much writer groups, but those that have a story to share with fans (think those with causes or messages to share).  

From the Great Minds Think Alike Camp

Completely by coincidence within days of my launch 

Basically a new author who wanted to self-publish but wanted to outsource as much as possible – between the three of us I’d say your entry price is around  $200 (budget cover $100, formatting $70, free book promotion $35) .  Compared to the many, many thousands most self-publishing “companies” charge…. 

Categories
Book Formatting

eBook Formatting Mistakes – Or Why Word Acts Weird (and It’s Not Microsoft’s Fault)

I learned to type on something like this - Photo credit: Alexkerhead

My ebook formatting business  is quietly growing, and as I experience how others do their formatting – I cringe – like seriously. I know I started typing on a typewriter, but in 2013 when carbon paper would be unrecognisable to many, and most people don’t know that we had to physically move the typewriter carriage back  to the start of  a line and the innovation of electricity and  a return key that did it AUTOMATICALLY was COOL it’s surprising how many still use Word Processors like the typewriters, they’ve never known.   

So just, don’t okay.  You know when you shout and swear at the Word Processor cause it does weird stuff when you don’t want it to? Actually, it’s not the computer, it’s you. You have so many odd, inconsistent , and plain wrong invisible formatting symbols, you gave the software a headache, so it’s passing that pain on to you. 

When I format for non-fiction, particularly  I strip out almost all of this junk, but it’s no surprise at all to me if your file does weird stuff in the Word Processor from time-to-time.  

I learned to type on something like this - Photo credit: Alexkerhead
I learned to type on something like this – Photo credit: Alexkerhead via flickr

Or more specifically: 

  • don’t use multiple hits of the enter key to create spaces between headers or between paragraphs, or even -help us, to get a new page.  Instead use Styles (every word-processor has them).  If you want a paragraph indented (and you should ONLY want this if you are writing fiction) or a space after the paragraph, use a style. 
  • don’t use tabs to create indents or columns or tables. Really. Tables are just-about supported on Kindles these days, but keep it very, very simple folks. If you want a fancy table – make a screen shot of it and include it in your book as an image. 
  • want a heading? Use a heading style. Really no bold, italic, don’t add a special font, just use a style. That way, if you suddenly decide that your 29-chapter magnus opus requires a Palatino 33 as a chapter font – you can add it, in one place, not 29.  Actually don’t bother because an eReader won’t honour your fonts or character sizes, but if you want to make sure your chapters are centered or always start on a new page – modify the style, not each and every chapter. 

Now if you are formatting for an eReader (Kindle or otherwise) – make sure you don’t do the following: 

  • don’t include page numbers, anywhere. Page numbers don’t exist on an eReader. So no page numbers in the table of contents, in the text (as in see figure X on page Y – instead add a hyperlink to the figure)
  • do redo your “front matter” – it shouldn’t be the same as your print edition – because, well it’s not print! And remember that the first 10% or so is what the browser can see for free on Amazon – make it a good 10%,  i.e . make sure it covers your table of content (for non-fiction) or enough of your first chapter (for fiction) to hook the reader. Move the dedication to your cats, and the acknowledgement for the support of the Prisoner’s Rehabilitation league to the back.  I know a lot of people put in glowing “reviews” from “famous people”. Unless those are really famous people, I’d give that a miss to, let your writing stand on its merits, or at least give the customer a chance to read some of it! 

Front Matter For eBooks – My Recommendation

All of this is centered and on one page

  • Title – in H1 
  • Sub-title in H2 
  • several spaces (use  <br/> tag in HTML) 
  • author name (note no “by” ) 
  • author’s website (an active link so people can click through from the free sample…) 
  • Copyright 2013 author name all on a single line 
  • new page 
  • linked table of contents 
  • introduction to the book 

I fiddle a bit to get this all to fit on  single page in the Kindle Previewer for the Kindle Touch or PaperWhite. If they fit on that they will fit on the Fire. They won’t fit on a phone, but them’s the breaks for using such a small device IMHO. 

If I am formatting for distribution via Smashwords then I add the line “Smashwords Edition” under the copyright notice. If it’s an ePub being distributed to Apple you will also need to include an ISBN in which case I give up trying to fit it all on the one page and do something like this: 

  • after the author’s website force a  new page and add
  • Copyright 2013 author name all on a single line 
  • ISBN 
  • Disclaimer – something funny along the lines that although I’ve made every effort you’re still responsible for your own life (that’s for non-fiction). For fiction you could do the “this is a work of fiction and any similarity to any persons dead or alive is just a result of your own twisted narcissistic mind, and so not he author’s problem”. 

Back Matter for eBooks 

This is where you get to do a sale’s pitch. I don’t care whether you consider yourself a marketer or not –  you still need to do this. Basically if the buyer got to the end of your book, they must have actually read it (unlike a paper book is fairly hard to just flick to the end). Give them something there: suggestions include: 

  • Author bio and photo – they may actually want to meet you now! Include an email so they can contact you.  Link to social media and websites. 
  • More by you – if you have more books – now is a good time to promote them – I add a the cover image and the same blurb I use on Amazon plus a link to Amazon (note: if you are distributing this to Smashwords you can’t link to Amazon – just ask the reader to search for your titles at their favourite eBook retailer)
  • If you don’t have more books, and even if you do,  direct readers to a page on your website which consists of a welcome message and a sign up form for an email service like Aweber or MailChimp (A little like the one at the bottom of this post – but I keep it as a separate list as I know this person is actually a BUYER not just a web-site reader). 
  • A request for a review. Yup – most people don’t know that reviews are important to authors, so tell them, and ask, nicely.  
  • Oh  yeah the dedication and acknowledgement – you can add those here too. 

Don’t Bother With The Following Formatting for eBooks

  • font and size – neither of these are under your control, leave them alone and let the user choose what they want use the header styles (h1 through h6) to get larger and smaller sizes 
  • footnotes work fine and will flow to the end of the page, chapter or book as you decide
  • bold, italic, sub-script and super-scripts all work fine as well 
  • drop caps don’t work on older eReaders (try bold or all caps instead) 
  • most eReaders now default to full justification, if you are getting oddly spaced lines it’s usually because of a long URL – consider using a link shortner (eg. bit.ly) or put the url on its own line. 
  • remember the author pays for downloads by the MB so only include images that you NEED.