Wednesday 28 March 2012

Self-Publish Your eBook. Reason #2


Bookshops groaning with Books.

There’s never been a better time to self-publish your own ebook. There are so many ways to promote your books through social media, publish them through major online retailers and make them available to libraries. And it cuts away at the monopoly of the big High Street retailers.

So what’s wrong with the big High Street retailers, Barnes and Noble in the US, or Indigo in Canada, or Waterstones in the UK? 

Well, not much really, except that they are limited by the size of their stores and the flexibility, or otherwise, of their central buying teams. These venerable institutions are in terminal decline because they simply cannot represent the scale of opportunity afforded online to the consumer. And, to make it worse, in an attempt to compete with the internet they are trying to reinvent themselves with non-book items —  fluffy toys, stationery — and so reducing the amount of already limited space available to books. A book store with 40,000-50,000 books used to be a reasonably typical size. This sounds like a large number, but with the publishing industry regularly pumping out over 150,000 new titles and reissues every year, you can see the problem. And Amazon has around 1.8 million books available.

Publishers, be they the powerhouses of Penguin, HarperCollins and Random or the plethora of indie outfits, all have a tough time selling their books into the limited space on the shelves of the big retailers. And they also sell to supermarkets, garden centres, chain stores etc, and these retailers have even less space for books.

So, as a self-publishing author, using Createspace, or Smashwords, or Lulu, or making and uploading yourself to Amazon, Apple, B&N’s Nook and Kobo, you will control over your own selling space. You can build on it and promote it. You can let it grow at a pace that suits you, you can publish one book every two years or five every other month. It’s your choice, not someone else’s, and, as long as you create something that’s professional and promotable, you will be the prime beneficiary.

And did I mention that you can change the price of your own book? Or alter the cover, or update the book without having to wait for the next print-run? Well, that’s for another post!

Coming Soon: Do You Need an Agent? and How do I Find a Good Proofreader?

Wednesday 14 March 2012

Self-Publish Your eBook. Reason #1

Teenage Vampire Fiction
Just a short post to highlight a couple of good blogs/articles elsewhere. One from the Economist called 'The Death of chick lit' in the Prospero blog and a follow-on from Mercy Pilkington at Good eReader. They both focus on the often ignored phenomenon within traditional print publishing which is the attempt to follow fads, flog them to death, then abandon them when sales have slowed. New writers often don't appreciate that book publishers are businesses that have to make money to survive and one of their methods is to find something that sells, or copy something else and ride on the success. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series spawned a mini industry of teen vampire novels (and TV series) that's lasted for three or four years. Now the peak of the wave is over, the market appears to have moved on for some publishers but there is still a good following for authors in this genre. Self-publishing through Barnes and Noble's PubIt, or through Amazon, or into the Apple iBookstore is a perfectly good route for such authors.

More to come on this... In the meantime, I need to embed the number 2UFQWYKWWMPN which a my Technorati claim token and should allow this blog to be published by a wider audience.

Coming soon: Go Local and The Pinterest Challenge.

Sunday 11 March 2012

Editors for eBooks

One of the main purposes of this blog is to encourage the proper use of freelance editors and proofreaders. The problem is, there are plenty of good ones around. If you're just starting to write, and have no connections within the industry, a simple Google search will report thousands of editors, from different continents, all brilliant, all available.

So, to help with this, I've just set up a Facebook group called Editors for eBooks. It will take a while but with some heavy networking it will become a useful resource for those who need to be put in touch with a good editor or proofreader. To join the group you have to become a friend of Nick Wells and then Editors for eBooks. This allows me genuinely to recommend the services of a professional. I'll tie it up to twitter lists too (@flametreetweet), and Linkedin.

Coming soon: Good Reasons to Self-Publish 1; Marketing Lessons from the Music Industry.

Self-Publishing eBooks: Ask Yourself Some Questions.


So why not find a good freelance proof reader, and an editor, perfect your book, then release it as an ebook, straightaway? 

In the last post I looked at some of the issues relating to finding a traditional publisher. While there’s much more to say on that subject, the real purpose of this blog is give people information and inspiration about self-publishing. That’s because there’s so much on the internet about this, it can be difficult to relate it to individual needs.

So, yes, absolutely it is possible to write a text, find a good proof reader and a constructively critical editor, find some simple software and send it off to Amazon, the Apple iBookstore and Google. Self-publishing for the modern world. 

But before you take the plunge you need to ask yourself some questions:

1. Am I passionate about what I’m writing?
2. Will I be able to advocate for it, at every opportunity?
3. Am I interested primarily in the writing itself, the achievement of having done it?
4. Do I want recognition for my achievement?
5. Is the nature of the recognition more important than the sales?
6. Are sales, and a means of earning a living, more important than kudos for its own sake?
7. Am I promoting some other product (seminars, exhibitions, healthcare products)?

If the answer to 3 and 5 is yes then self-publishing may not work for you. That’s because, in the digital community the marketing of what you write is at least as important as the text itself. 

If the answer to any of the other questions is yes, then you’ll need to embrace, if not master, the power of marketing in all it all it’s forms. At the most basic level, engagement with social media is essential, using Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and the rest. It’s about momentum, talking to friends and family, asking them to recommend your publication and help you advocate for it. 

Coming soon: Which software is best to make ePubs? How do I create a Facebook Page for my book?