E-BOOKS

As at 2024, Amazon/Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is the largest and most popular international e-bookstore for self-publishing authors. It dominates the book market with over a 85% share [compared with Apple Books (10%), Kobo (1%)]. Many authors get about 90% of their sales through Amazon compared with other online retailers. You can submit your book to only one e-bookstore or to all, but you'll need to watch for exclusivity clauses if you submit to a range of bookstores. Read their publishing conditions carefully. Check them out on the Web.

Unless you're a highly-motivated Indie (independent) author or become an overnight phenomenon for some reason, you're unlikely to get rich from sales of an e-book. You're more likely to get small or larger amounts now and then, but at least your book will be internationally available and downloadable. For many authors, getting their material out to an international internet readership is the main point of the exercise.

E-books on Kindle

When self publishing authors ask me to produce an e-book for them they are usually meaning Amazon Kindle (KDP) and they are usually asking because they don't want the cost and inconvenience of trying to send a printed version to the other side of the world when postage costs can be more than the purchase price of the book. Readers need only to purchase and download the ebook and view it on their device. Sometimes these authors are thinking of family and friends overseas but of course they are hopeful of attracting other readers as well.

Typically e-bookstores produce free downloadable reading apps that can be installed on many digital devices (like tablets, laptops and smartphones) so people can read your book, eg., people download the kindle app then buy online and download the e-book they want to read.

It's possible - without many skills - to produce a basic and badly designed e-book - which can make your entire effort look amateur - but it's not easy to produce one that looks professional. I strongly advise you to get help preparing your book for kindle or any e-bookstore. Briar's Books provides this service. This is not sales pitch. It's just that e-books - under the hood - are really websites written in web code so you need some knowledge of html and css to get good-looking results, ie., they are WEB-books. Usually, if you can get your book into an "epub" format that passes online verification requirements, your book will have a good chance of finding its way onto most digital bookstores but unless you're a dedicated indie publisher you don't need to put your book in multiple digital bookstores anyway - Kindle is probably enough. Kindle has been generally behind the curve when it comes to producing a good looking e-book but is trending steadily upward each year. As at 2024, Kindle's downloadable Previewer is giving very good previews of the way your book will look once uploaded. But e-book production is not for the faint-hearted. People trying to use Kindle's online file converter can end up tearing their hair out. Rejection rates by the tool can be high. If you want a quality e-book give your book to a professional who knows the pitfalls. Unless you are skilled, you risk spending weeks or months trying to make your book "work" on Kindle. The submission of digital books is done by uploading them online.

Costs and returns: It won't cost you anything to place your book on the kindle bookstore - except what you pay the designer to prepare the book according to Kindle's technical requirements. Your cost - if it could be called that - is the commission Kindle will deduct from your sales returns depending on the MB size of the book in download bandwidth and choices you make during the upload process. Typically, your returns will be somewhere between 30% and 70% of the retail price of the book. You can decide what price you want to put on your book.

Be prepared for your e-book to look very different from the printed version. E-books have to become reflowable to be easily viewable on many different screen sizes, ie., like websites they reconfigure to fit your screen to be easily readable. If you want your e-book to have exactly the same layout and look as your printed version, reflowable e-books are not for you. If your layout is to be exactly preserved you are really asking for what is called a fixed layout - and that will not be readable at smaller screen sizes. The reflowable e-book will still contain all your images and content but decorative fonts and fancy features will have to go. With e-books simple and uncluttered is best. Though, as technology leaps ahead, they will have more features.

To get your e-book onto Amazon/Kindle you need to set up an account with Amazon, give them your bank account details and put a price on your book. Prices are rising and Amazon takes a cut. Typically you get a better return than from a traditional publisher - but sales often need to get to a minimum threshold set by Kindle before money is transferred to your bank account, and returns can move a bit depending on the download size of your book in MBs.

People need to be able to find your book. Once your book is in the Kindle Bookstore you need to put pithy descriptions, genre categories and keywords in place to help people find it. You can either wait till people find your book and place their reviews, or you can galvanise friends to download the e-book and place their own reviews. You need to let them know it's up there and send them the link so they can leave their review. Kindle identifies whether reviewers have read the kindle version or not, and lets viewers know. You can upload an image of the book cover so people can view it and Kindle lets readers browse a limited number of pages to get the feel of your book before buying. You can also read the gurus for all sorts of tips and tricks to help you maximise your sales. Don't forget you're in the public arena on Amazon and fair game. Reviewers can be scathing or very flattering.

E-book distribution services

E-book production and distribution services are springing up now which offer to get your ebook onto many bookstores. Draft2Digital, PublishDrive and Ingram Spark are 3 of these. PublishDrive allows one free e-book title and then requires continuing monthly payments graded according to number of titles. These services will allow you to upload your e-book and get it out to many e-book retailers but the services come at a price and these retailers may not be your money-earners. Experienced e-book writers tend to stick with four digital bookstores: Amazon/Kindle, Barnes and Noble, Apple Books and Kobo. Experienced e-book writers also tend to do their own formatting and uploading to these stores because they believe their books look better that way - or they get a local agency like Briar's Books to do the design and formatting for them because they can be much more part of the process that way. Kindle is not hands-on.

Other Options - eg websites, PDFs and EPUBs

You don't need to use a digital bookstore - though that's the easiest way to market and collect payments for your e-book. Actually a website will give you potentially far more international exposure than Kindle will; many more people do subject searches on the web than subject-search Kindle. But you need to make sure your website is getting traffic or you're no further ahead. You can place a book pdf or epub on your website (see below for more about pdfs and epubs). If you want you can create a bookstore on your website and charge for your book that way - using, eg., Shopify.

Most people with a website will also set up a dedicated Facebook page to give the book (printed versions and ebooks) more exposure. If you don't want to have a website, you can still create a page on Facebook to let your friends and interested parties know the book is available in print and digital form from you.

PDFs

E-books don't have to be complex. The simplest form of ebook is a pdf, and pdfs can often be fairly quickly and easily created and uploaded to your website ready for download and viewing in the free Acrobat Reader - widely installed on most digital devices. You can also create an interactive pdf with instant hyperlinks to each chapter from the Table of Contents. PDFs can be emailed to interested parties and will look very similar to the printed version of your book. It will not be easy to charge for a pdf download from your site (unless you pay for a website shopfront) so prepare to be philanthropic. Increasingly the technology is becoming available to make your pdf "reflow" so it can be read on devices of all sizes, but at the moment this functionality is hit and miss. You're best to keep them simple at this point. PDFs can be encrypted and password-protected but if you are just wanting to get your material "out there", copy protection and encryption is probably not important to you.

EPUBs

People are also downloading and reading epubs from websites. Epubs are reflowable books and more and more people are downloading apps that will read epubs. Thorium is a very good (free) modern epub-reader. Your website needs to be found of course, and can take a while to get traction. It also needs your engagement, maintenance and money. You also need to produce the epub. Briar's Books provides that service. Epubs have more features than kindle books.

If you're just doing one e-book and wanting to keep things simple you're best relying on kindle to do it for you, and social media contacts and usual communities and networks to let people know it's there. If you are going to use social media you will need to keep your, e.g., Facebook/Instagram page updated and interesting.

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