What about e-books?

People who go the trouble of printing 50 to thousands of copies of a book sometimes want to turn it into an e-book to give their book international exposure on internet bookstores.

• By that they usually mean they want it to appear in the Amazon KDP (Kindle Digital Publishing) Bookstore. Kindle is the largest and most popular e-bookstore but there are others, Apple, Barnes and Noble, Blio, Google, Kobo, Overdrive, Sony and others. There are no postage costs and books bought usually cost less than a third of their printed price (though prices are rising as a result of publisher pressure). If you have friends overseas who want to read your book and you don't want the cost and frustration of trying to send it physically to the other side of the world, a digital book can be a good way to get it to them. But it needs to be prepared for upload to digital bookstores.When self publishing authors ask me to produce a kindle book for them they are usually asking because friends overseas are wanting to read it online.
• Typically e-bookstores produce free downloadable apps that can be installed on many digital devices (like tablets and smartphones) so people can read your book. Amazon also puts out a specialised Kindle Reader, but many people prefer to download the Kindle app and use it on their tablets or smartphones.
• If you fancy yourself as an indie author using Internet e-bookstores to help make a name for yourself, click on the button below. Otherwise - keep reading.
Fancy yourself as an Indie author?
• 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. Usually books are priced between US$4 and US$9.99 (though prices are rising) and Amazon takes a cut. Typically you get a return of 30% -70% on the retail price of the book - more than you'll get from a traditional publisher - but sales often need to get to minimum threshold set by Kindle before money is transferred to your bank account, and returns can move a bit depending on the size of your book in MBs. Once your book is in the Kindle Bookstore you need to get 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. Kindle identifies whether reviewers have read the kindle version or not, and lets viewers know. You can put up a book cover photo so people can view it and browse a limited number of pages to get the feel of your book. 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 sphere on Amazon and fair game. Reviewers can be scathing or very flattering.
• I strongly advise you to get help preparing your book for e-bookstores. BriarsBooks provides this service. This is not a sales pitch. 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. Typically you will need professional book layout software and rigorous use of style sheets. In addition, e-books - under the hood - are really websites with style sheets converted to .css so you need some knowledge of html and css to get good-looking results. Different bookstores have required different formats for years, but improvements are happening continually and usually, if you can get your book into an epub format that passes online verification requirements, your book will have a good chance at finding its way onto most digital bookstores. Unless you're an 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 2023 its (downloadable) Kindle Previewer is giving very good previews of the way your book will look once uploaded. But e-book production is not something to be gung-ho about. 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.
• 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 an internet website will give you potentially far more international exposure than Kindle will; multitudes more people do subject searches on the web internationally than subject-search Kindle. You may be quite happy to put your e-book on a website and use social media to drive potential readers to it. The website and social media world is constantly changing. Whereas you used to need a website designer to do everything for you at some cost, there are options now that allow beginners to create a good-looking website with quite high levels of functionality at reasonable prices eg SquareSpace, Wordpress, Wix. (Increasingly you can add an e-commerce module to your site so you can set up sales of your book (printed and digital) online if you want to). Most people with a website will also set up a dedicated Facebook business page to give the book more exposure. E-books don't have to be complex. The simplest form of ebook is a pdf, and if your book is already laid out in book software, pdfs can be quickly and easily created and uploaded to your website ready for download. It will not be easy to charge for a pdf download from your site, so prepare to be philanthropic. Increasingly suppliers are offering websites that will host your pdf book (for a fee) and make sure it runs with all advanced features, i.e., flipping pages, audio, video. The file will reside on their servers and your website will carry a link to the book - which will appear seamless to the user. But, you're best to keep your pdfs simple at this point. You can also print out from PDFs. PDFs can be password-protected to allow people to read them but prevent them from copying the content. They can also be encrypted. But if you are just wanting to get your material "out there", copy protection and encryption is probably not important to you. You could password-protect your PDF to compel interested readers to pay you before you send them the password but it's probably not worth the hassle. People are also downloading and reading epubs from websites. Your website needs to be found of course, and that gets into the subject of SEO (Google search engine optimisation). Websites can also take a while to get traction and need your engagement, maintenance and money. It depends whether you're in it for the long haul or not. 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.
• Whether you write a printed version or an e-version of your book the issue is the same: people need to know your book exists. Unless people are intentionally searching for the keywords you have used for your, e.g., Kindle book, or come across your description, or know you and want to download and read the e-book version, your book may languish. Of course you can get the word around friends and contacts, use social media to drive people to the online versions and trust that your subject will be popular enough to attract readers. But unless you're a highly-motivated indie author or become an overnight phenomenon for some reason, you're very unlikely to get rich from sales of an e-book. You're more likely to get small amounts now and then, but at least your book is internationally available and accessible. For many authors, getting their material out to an international internet readership is the main point of the exercise.

What can you expect if you ask a designer to do an e-book for you?

• Typically your designer will already have the printed version of the book on computer, and the conversion to e-book will be done from that file. If not, the designer will still have to create such a computer file. But, the e-book produced will be in an intermediate form - usually an epub - which then has to be submitted to Kindle's (or your digital bookstore's) process and turned into their proprietory format. All book designers breathed audible sighs of relief when Kindle dropped its temperamental proprietory format (mobi) and announced that epubs were now acceptable for upload. However, the designer will still need to be familiar enough with HTML code to get inside it and make adjustments if the Kindle Previewer has difficulty with eg size of images, tables, columns, footnotes etc... So if your e-book seems to cost more than you were expecting, that's one reason why.
• Kindle does have an online tool for testing the technical accepability of your book before final upload but if you don't really know what you're doing "rejection" rates by the tool will be high and if the book does pass the test, the end product may not look as good as you might have hoped. It's far safer for the designer to create and test and re-test the epub on the local computer using the downloaded Kindle Previewer beforehand.