Over the weekend I attended a class. It was a very good experience in that I learned that what I was doing and my experience doing it was fairly decent. I didn't really learn anything else from the class other than that some folks make e-book publishing hard on themselves in order to save a few pennies.
On the way home I thought about putting together a presentation about my experiences in the past five years of publishing e-books.
Five years? Well, maybe six. But e-book readers have not been around that long. True, but computers and Palm devices have and that is where I got started. Up until late last year I published e-books in .PDF and .LIT formats as well as Mobi for Palm devices (never sold a Mobi version of any of the books.) and distributed them first on CD, then later through email (I even learned how to use PayPal and implement a shopping cart!).
When Amazon Kindle came along three years ago, it was a salvation. Finally a large scale e-book publisher that could distribute a little guy like me globally. Then Smashwords came into being. While their initial masher (the application that converts your Word file into different formats) was a bit clunky and error prone, they quickly fixed it and it now spits out a number of different formats for different readers quickly and clean. Sign me up! Smashwords followed that up with becoming a distributor of e-books with a number of online sellers - sign me up again!
At this point, I have written five different books, sold over 10,000 copies since burning my first CD with PDF files back in 2005 but don't consider myself an expert.
I certainly wouldn't want to stand in front of a class of impressionable e-book author want-to-be's and tell you how to do it. Since things constantly change in this world, the presentation I put together today will be out of date tomorrow. The terms and conditions I present today will be superseded by an update tomorrow.
Do I have some experiences to share? Well, I have written and converted quite a few books (and endless revisions) to a variety of formats (some have gone the way of the Betamax). I've created websites, blogs, and done some interesting marketing to try and get people to read my writings.
But I am by no means an authority on the topic and don't think I'll be putting a presentation together soon. But if you want some advice for someone who's been to the rodeo - let me know.
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Hi. This is me letting you know that I'd love some advice! I've been writing for a long time, selling a few short stories and many articles here and there, but what I'd really like is to start selling my novels. I have two in particular that are set in the same fictitious county in Oregon that I think might work well as eBooks. Where do I start? I'm a fair web designer so perhaps a site for each book? But then I have to drag people to the site. Wouldn't it be better to take the product to where potential customers are already visiting? What would you suggest as first steps?
ReplyDeleteHi Pam, sorry for the delay in getting back to you. Start by signing up with Smashwords.com. They've been great as far as learning how to convert your books to eReader format and also in distributing your work to Barnes & Noble, Sony, etc. Once you learn how to write using their style guide (or edit your existing books to their style) you can also sign up with Amazon. Then, if you want to do a site, go ahead but the first order of business is to get your books out where people can read them.
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