e-Publishing // How to Publish an e-Book

Background to e-Publishing

Until a few years ago getting anything published required perseverance and luck. It involved sending a typed manuscript to publishers or sometimes to agents. If you were lucky, you got a rejection slip, more likely you would never know whether the manuscript had even been read. Eventually you might find a publisher who would take on your work. Since the rise of Amazon Kindle e-publishing (also known as self publishing) has become increasingly popular and has low barriers to entry compared to conventional publishing.

Steps to self publishing

1

Preparation

Although it seems obvious the first step is to formulate your ideas. If your book contains any technical or factual information you will need to insure that you researched the subject well. It is standard practice and helpful to readers to have an index or bibliography identifying the sources of information.

2

Writing & Proof reading

For the writing part you will need to allocate enough time, it will always take three time longer that you think.

It is probably not a good idea to proof read your own book. It's far better to get somebody with a fresh eye to read it. Commercial proof reading services start at £20 or so for 10,000 words (c. 40 pages) and at this level will mostly concentrate on grammar and spelling. You could also ask friend and family to proof read for you.

3

Formatting your e-book

If you want to sell through Amazon Kindle Store you will need to follow Amazon Kindle guidelines, this will restrict your ability to sell on other platforms. Amazon have a huge customer base so this may not be an issue. Kindle and similar formats allow for 'free flow' formats, meaning the page will fill to the readers screen, where is a fixed format e.g. pdf is less flexible but is best suited for books with fixed layout with flowcharts and graphics/photos.

4

Cover design and book title

Cover design is surprisingly important, people will deep into a book purely based on an interesting cover. The same will apply to your book title.

5

Your book ISBN*

To have your book listed on any commercial or non commercial your book will need to have your own unique ISBN, each country issues these and the country of issue will depend either on your own residency or that of your company. A single ISBN is relatively expensive but they are generally sold in blocks of 10 - each format that you write it should have its own ISBN e.g. .epub, pdf etc and hard copy.

*An ISBN is an International Standard Book Number

How to self publish an e-Book?

The cheapest way to self publish your e-Book is through your own website. Overheads are low and you keep your profit. If you use a platform such as Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing you keep 70% of the total revenue but you do give up some rights.
Publishing on your own website means of course that all marketing costs are on you.
Online publisher such as Kindle Direct Publishing, PubIt (Barnes & Noble), Smashwords, Kobo's Writing Life will let you self publish your book for free in e-book format.
Where you want to sell a hard copy your book, the way to go is print on demand. Lulu is the big US publisher, but it's important to get your pricing right given that printing service will take quite a big proportion of your costs. Lightning Source and CreateSpace are also offer print-on-demand books.

As can be seen from the above, self publishing raises as many question as is answers and for those for the right ideas, can be extremely profitable.