Understanding Different Ebook Formats

 Publishing your book as an ebook is a great idea, but first you have to understand the ever evolving nature of ebooks. There are many ways to publish your ebook and just as many formats, but the four most important formats are pdf, epub, mobi and txt.

Whatever format your ebook ends up in, it is important to remember to keep your manuscript as simple as possible.  Jason Mathews, author of “How to Make, Market and Sell E-Books-All For Free,” suggests these things to keep in mind:

• Eliminate page numbers, page brea ks, and page references.
• Don’t have large font sizes, nothing over 12 points or 14 points at most for the title.
• Don’t use fancy fonts.  Stick to Times New Roman, Garamond, Arial, or Courier.
• Don’t use tabs or spaces for indents. Just use the basic settings on the rule bar, left and right indents for margins, and first line indent for new paragraphs.
• Don’t include images larger than 4 inches in height or width.  

Every ebook retailer has instructions on how to upload your book on its website, but if you don’t want to bother with submitting your book to multiple sites in different formats, you should consider using Smashwords.

Smashwords (https://www.smashwords.com) is an ebook retailer that converts your MSWord document into multiple formats and is a good place to direct people who want to buy your books. While they don’t have the same market size as Amazon, they convert documents into every format you need. Whatever type of reading device your potential customers may have, Smashwords can create a version of your book for that device. And when people download your book from Smashwords, you get an 85% royalty. Smashing! There are no setup fees, no packages to buy, and no cost to update or revise your book. Smashwords also provides free ISBN’s if you don’t already have one for your book.

Smashwords is also an authorized ebook distributor for most major online ebook  retailers, including Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, and many others. Their books are also distributed via ScrollMotion to the largest app marketplaces (Apple, Android, Windows Phone 7, WebOS) as singlebook apps. As an author, you get a 60% royalty on the books that Smashwords distributors sell.

Since Smashwords is obviously taking a cut for reformatting and distributing your book to other retailers, you would naturally make more if you dealt with these retailers yourself, so you must make the decision if submitting your book to multiple sites is worth your time and trouble.

Before making your decision as to whether to sell on Smashwords, you should read their terms and conditions carefully.  Go to:  https://www.smashwords.com/about/.
 

Pricing Your E-Book

Once you have decided to publish your manuscript as an e-book, you have lots of opportunities to sell it in different formats, but you will definitely want to start by getting your book formatted for  the industry leader, Amazon.com.  In an August 2010 interview a vice president at Amazon estimated that his company has 70 to 80 percent of the e-book market, and I would guess that still holds true as of this writing.   Amazon e-books are sold on its Kindle store, but remember that you don’t need a Kindle to read Kindle books.  I have a Kindle app on my iPad, and buy all my e-books through Amazon which are then downloaded to my iPad in seconds. The unprecedented popularity of the iPad has boosted the sale of all e-books, but particularly books bought from Amazon.

When you are ready to upload your e-book to Amazon, you will want to ask the experts on the best way to do that, and that of course is Amazon itself.  You’ll want to follow the instructions in the Kindle Direct Publishing Section by going to:  https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin.  Not surprisingly you can download a free e-book from Amazon, titled Publish On Amazon Kindle with Kindle Direct Publishing.

There are quite a few things to think about when publishing your e-book on Amazon, but none may be as important as the pricing, and this decision is not as obvious as you might think.  How do you find out about this topic?  Read an e-book, of course, and there is a good one out by Kindle expert Stephen Windwalker titled How to Price EBooks for the Kindle.

Here is the most essential thing you need to know:  price your e-book between $2.99 and $9.99, not higher or lower.  Why?  Because when you sell an e-book through Amazon you get a 70% royalty if your book is priced in this range, and a 35% royalty if it is priced either higher or lower.  Clearly this is the “sweet spot” that Amazon has determined that its customers will buy most of their e-books.  So don’t ignore Amazon’s advice based on millions of transactions; no one can dispute that they know how to sell the most books, and when you make money, they make money. Of course you will find e-books priced at $12.95 or even higher on Amazon, but these are likely best sellers, and placed on Amazon by major publishers, and the math that determines their best price point for these books  is far different than the math that will apply to you.

Trying to get a few dollars more for your e-book and going above the $9.99 pricing simply doesn’t make any sense. For example, if you priced a book a $19.99, you would be getting the same royalty as if you priced your book at $9.99, and you don’t have to do much math to figure out that you will be selling lots more books at $9.99. But don’t assume that just because your book is terrific (as I’m sure it is), you can price it at as high as $9.99. Windwalker has done a lot of research about pricing e-books, and has concluded that you must determine the best price point in part on your experience as an author. 

These are his recommendations for pricing a full length book equivalent to 160+ print pages with a defined and reachable target audience: 

$9.95 if you are a bestselling author, with over 150K books sold, including 50K of a single title.

$6.99 if you are an established author with 50K to 150K books sold.

$2.99 if you are an emerging author with10K to 50K books sold.

$2.99 if you are a fledging author with 0 to 10K books sold.

But Windwalker notes that there are other factors to consider as well, including:

What price are similar books selling for?  You don’t want to sell your book for more than a book by a person with similar credentials on a similar topic. But you also may not want to under price your book if you see that a similar book is very popular.

Is it hard to define your market? Subtract up to $3 from the price if you can’t clearly define the market for your book, but don’t go lower than $2.99.

Do you have a book that is “guaranteed” to help people make money?  This will raise your price, but not higher than $9.99.

There are other factors as well, and nothing is as important as how much time you are able to spend marketing your book and building a platform.  If you are willing to commit at least an hour a day to marketing your book, then this might be a good reason to charge more. Even the price sensitive customers who purchase e-books are susceptible to good marketing, which will make a few dollars inconsequential if they really want to buy and read your book.

For a very different perspective, you might want to purchase another interesting e-book,  How I Sold One Million E-Books In 5 Months, by John Locke.  John sold his popular mysteries as e-books and his not as popular western books by using his own “method” of combining blogging and social media.  I’m not sure if his ideas apply to self-help non-fiction, but they certainly make interesting reading.

Getting Your Book Reviewed

Many new authors look forward to getting glowing reviews of their book which will then promote them into the public eye and result in fame and fortune. But this is not exactly how it works.  Finding people to review your book is not that difficult, there are several thousand of places on and offline that do book reviews, but the real questions are:  “Who reads these reviews?” and “Do reviews get people to buy your book?”

If you have a self-help book that will appeal to a large audience, then you or your publisher may want to spend some time trying to get a review in a newspaper or magazine or web site with a large readership.  But unless you are an experienced author or a celebrity, this can be hard to accomplish.  An author on a recent book tour in Philadelphia stopped by the Philadelphia Inquirer and asked about the chances of getting her book reviewed in that paper.  A staff member told her that they get over 200 books a week to review and only review a handful in the paper.  Her chances were “slim to none.”

Please note that reviews are not the same as articles about you or your book.  Reviews are supposed to be unbiased opinions. They are intended to help readers decide whether or not to read your book.  I’ve had hundreds of articles written about me and my books, but these are not unbiased. Most of these articles are written to inform the reader about a particular subject, and I am quoted as an expert, and my book is mentioned as follow-up reading.    

The publishing revolution has made it much easier for authors to get reviews where it matters; on websites and particularly blogs that your target audience goes to on a regular basis. 

If you are a self-published author, or if you are doing publicity and marketing on the behalf of your publisher, I’d rather not see you spend too much time submitting your reviews to newspapers, magazines, or review sites (which by the way can take months to review and publish assuming they accept it).   Instead, I recommend going to the blogosphere and asking bloggers in your subject area to review your book. 

Of course if you prefer to have your book reviewed in the broader media, you can Google something like “how do I get my book reviewed,” and you will come up with a variety of sites that either publish reviews themselves, or will submit your book to relevant sites and blogs for review.  Some of these are free, and some of these will ask you to pay for the service.  Make sure that you don’t end up paying for something that will not really result in sales.

Here are a few well known places that publish book reviews. Note that some reviewers want you book before it is published (you will send them galleys) and other reviewers will be consider your book after it has been published.  Some sites where you can submit your book for review include:

Publisher's Weekly – for books available in bookstores only

Library Journal

Booklist
Kirkus Reviews

ForeWord Magazine

New York Times Book Review - for books available in bookstores only

Book Page

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

Post-Publication Reviewers

Midwest Book Review  

Small Press Review  

Choice – for academic libraries (see Contact button at the top of the page)

The Horn Book – children's and young adult titles

School Library Journal – children's and young adult titles

Your online book review will almost always have an advantage over a print review because there will usually be a link for the reader to buy it on the spot.