piątek, 9 marca 2012

Ebook Publication

By Owen Jones


Computers changed industry in a huge way when they became popular in the Eighties and Nineties. Then the Net brought a new wave if innovation in the Nineties and Naughties. It is hard to imagine an industry that has not been deeply altered by these fantastic innovations. The latest industry to get shaken to its nucleus is the publishing industry.

Publishers used to have a vice-like grip on which books became published and which did not. Publishers measure for whether to publish or not was simply financial: is the book liable to create money or not?

This is reasonable enough, but it means a weighty predisposition towards commercial novels written by well-known authors. It was very hard for new writers to put a foot in the door.

The music industry was the first part of the publishing industry to lose its control over its sphere of influence. The book publishing sector will become the next to go and the movement is already well underway. These days, you can download a free publishing software suite which is at least as feature-packed as MS Office.

Open Office has a powerful word processor with which you can write your book. It has an picture editor with which you can design the book cover and other illustrations. It also has a built in PDF conversion component. This equals that you may publish your ebook in a style that any computer in the world is able to read.

When your book is ready to publish, there are at least two ways to go, if you live outside the US; within the US, Google will help too. Google's Publisher works like Amazon's more non-discriminatory system, so let us have a look at that one. First go to Amazon and then click through to Kindle Direct Publishing, a sister company of theirs.

Then you will have to open an account with Kindle DP. This is simple, free and quick. Go to your bookshelf and click on 'Add A New Title'. Follow the instructions and your book will get uploaded into the Amazon system.

You decide on how much you would like to sell it for and you can decide on how much of that you would like for yourself. It appears a daft question, but you can take up to 70%.

If your book is accepted by a critic, it will be assigned a unique book number and will become part of the colossal number of books that Amazon sells worldwide.

It will be downloadable anywhere in the world; Amazon will deal with the payment and keep the money in your account. You will also be able to download a bit of code to promote your book on your own web site.

The alternative is ClickBank. ClickBank will also organize for your book will be showcased to more than 100,000 affiliates who might be willing to help you sell your book for a percentage of the profits.

Look very carefully at CB's small print on paying out. I have sold items on CB and never received a bean from them, because of the small print. I do not trouble with them any more.

Amazon is the route to go. In 2010 they sold more ebooks than paper books for the first time ever. They also have a motive to be promoting ebooks - the Kindle, which is their own ebook reader.

A traditional publisher would pay the writer 5-6% of the profits on a book with Kindle it is 70% of the sales price - that is a big difference for the author.




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