Ebooks

Articles specific to writing and publishing ebooks.

Which eBook Publishing Platform is Best?

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This post by Kristen Eckstein originally appeared on The Future of Ink on 3/13/15.

Before we get too deep into answering this question, know upfront this is like asking a mother of three which child is her favorite. Each platform comes with unique benefits and drawbacks.

Digital publishing is a huge all-encompassing world of everything from e-books and Kindle to video and teleseminars. For the purposes of this article’s length and my own personal expertise, we’ll stay focused on ebook publishing platforms. There are three primary platforms to publish an ebook: Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Apple’s iBooks (iPad).

 

Amazon’s Kindle

Kindle is the granddaddy (though still quite young to be a grandpap) of e-bookdom. To this day, the Kindle Store still holds the record for e-book sales—67% of the e-book buying market. While this number has fallen to Nook over the past couple of years (it was closer to 99%), it’s still a good chunk of the market share. When Amazon came out with the Kindle, it did a lot of things right:

 

Read the full post on The Future of Ink.

 

Episodic Fiction is Finding a New Home on Kindle Unlimited

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This post by Michael Kozlowski originally appeared on GoodEReader on 3/11/15.

Indie authors are disrupting e-book publishing by writing episodic fiction. They are primarily distributing the titles through Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle lending library. This is providing a financial boon to authors who write 60 page novels in a serialized manner. This method of writing is quickly becoming more profitable than simply writing a single feature length novel.

Serialized fiction first gained prominence in Victorian England and it first appeared in newspapers. It was practiced by such literary giants as Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy and Joseph Conrad. It fell out of favor in the last fifty years, but is now making a rebound, thanks to Amazon.

Things have been fairly static in self-publishing and traditional publishing for decades. An author writes a book and has it distributed through specific sales channels. They promote a single title and get paid when readers purchase it. Now we have Amazon picking up the tab when a book is read and the reader pays virtually nothing.

The Kindle Lending Library was first established in 2011 and allows members who opt into Amazon Prime to read one free book a month. This has proven to be a lucrative method for indie authors to garner sales. Kindle Unlimited is a similar program, but instead of a Prime membership, users pay around $10.00 a month and read as many e-books they want.

 

Read the full post on GoodEReader.

 

How to Create Picture Ebooks for Kids

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This post by Laura Backes originally appeared on Jane Friedman’s site on 2/23/15.

Until recently, creating ebook versions of children’s picture books was something publishers reserved for their best-selling authors and illustrators. If you wanted to self-publish a picture ebook, you either needed to be a whiz at writing code, or you paid an ebook creation service to do it for you. (That said, it was possible to find a few services targeted toward publishing books for kids on Apple devices, such as Book Creator.)

Last September, Amazon released KDP Kids’ Book Creator, which allows the average Joe to create illustrated children’s books for the Kindle and upload them directly to Amazon. These books can be designed in the landscape format (to mimic the layout of print picture books) and can include text pop-ups that enlarge the text with a tap or a click, making it easier to read.

Side note: Using the KDP Kids’ Book Creator means you’re publishing through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program. You can choose from several royalty structures within that program, and also choose whether or not to be included in KDP Select, which gives Amazon exclusive distribution of your ebook for a certain time period in exchange for marketing perks.

While the KDP Kids’ Book Creator still has a few rough spots (which Amazon is presumably ironing out in response to user feedback), it’s a good start. Those of us who have worked in children’s publishing for years recognized this move for what it was: a game changer.

Just how much has Amazon’s new free software changed the game?

 

Read the full post on Jane Friedman’s site.

 

Magical Thinking and the End of Publishing

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This post by John Pettigrew originally appeared on Publishing Matters on 2/23/15.

‘Magical thinking’ is allowing our own ignorance of a topic to give us the impression that there’s something special, ‘magical’ about the people who do understand it. It’s a common failing but it’s having an unfortunate effect on the publishing industry’s approach to ‘digital technology’. And some critical shortsighted mistakes are being made as a result.

There are surely fewer more ridiculous terms used in publishing than ‘digital natives’ – apparently, people in their teens and twenties who have grown up with technology and so ‘get it’ in ways that older people don’t. The assumption that all people in their 40s, 50s or older somehow don’t ‘get’ technology (especially odd given that this is the generation that invented most of it!) is just wrong. After all, the fact that I grew up with cars and learned to drive one as soon as I could doesn’t mean that I could make one, or even begin to fix anything but the simplest issues when it breaks down!

Why, then, do we talk as though ‘young people’ somehow have a magical grasp of technology that older people don’t?

 

Magical thinking

We see magical thinking all over the place, but perhaps especially with subjects that are perceived as difficult – finance, science, technology. Because it looks difficult to us (who don’t understand it), we overestimate the difficulty of the subject.

This can have two opposite unfortunate effects. The first is when we undervalue or even devalue the subject area – because we don’t understand it, it must not be very important, and those people who do think about it are somehow lacking in finer feelings or social niceties or whatever. This approach is often associated with perceptions of Maths, Science and Engineering. We hear, “Oh, well, I don’t understand Maths” used almost as a badge of pride – in a way we’d never hear, “Oh, well, I don’t really understand literature.”

 

Read the full post on Publishing Matters.

 

The Strategic Use of Book Giveaways and How They Can Increase Earnings Potential

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This post by Jane Friedman originally appeared on her site on 1/30/15.

Over the last few months, I’ve observed a lot of chatter regarding the use of giveaways, especially for indie author book marketing and promotion. A summary of the most recent conversation can be found over at Porter Anderson’s post, ‘Who Decided Our Worth?’ Do Free Books Give Away Authors’ Value?

So, do free books hurt authors (or publishers, for that matter)? The short answer is no. For the long answer, keep reading.

 

What’s Your Funnel?

This is the key question that every strategic author needs to ask. The funnel is the path that readers take from becoming aware of you to becoming a fan.

Giveaways (or freebies) are popular for good reason; they’re a classic, frictionless way to make people aware of your work. Just about every industry has some way of using “free” to their advantage, particularly game, software, and app developers. If you can get a sufficient number of people in the door, and they like your stuff, you can sell them other things once you have some kind of trust or relationship in place.

If you’ve seen the famous Alec Baldwin speech in Glengarry Glen Ross—it’s a favorite of mine—it’s the same idea being expressed. A-I-D-A. First, get people’s attention—whether through an ad, a freebie, traditional media coverage, whatever. That creates interest. And if all goes well, you have desire and action to make a purchase later.

I don’t find it useful to discuss (or demonize) giveaways in the abstract, because unless we can tie it to a particular strategy for a particular author at a particular time, it’s impossible to evaluate it properly. If the giveaway leads to paying fans down the road, it’s smart. If the giveaway leads to no further action, then it should be reconsidered.

 

Read the full post on Jane Friedman’s site.

 

My Kindle Countdown Deal Epic Fail

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This post by Juliet Rich originally appeared on her site.

Over the Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend, I offered The Flaming Geeks Book of Geeky Trivia for .99 on an Amazon Kindle Countdown Deal. I didn’t have tiers, so it was 99 cents the whole time until it went back up to the list price of $2.99.

As I did when I offered it as a Free Book Promotion, I only marketed it by sharing it on my personal Facebook page. I did this a couple of times during the promotion.

The results:

Free Book Promotion – ~150 free downloads (no money for me), followed up with ~5 sales immediately after the promotion ended (yay money). Plus it netted me my first review (yay review!).

Kindle Countdown Deal – no downloads, no sales, no new reviews

 

Why didn’t it work?

Reason #0 – I need to do more marketing in general. But that was true of both cases.

Reason #1 – Everyone who follows me on Facebook who wanted it already had it.

 

Read the full post, which includes four more specific reasons plus analysis, on Juliet Rich’s site.

 

January 2015 Author Earnings Report

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This post originally appeared on the Author Earnings site on 1/28/15.

Executive Summary
AuthorEarnings reports analyze detailed title-level data on 33% of all daily ebook sales in the U.S.

30% of the ebooks being purchased in the U.S. do not use ISBN numbers and are invisible to the industry’s official market surveys and reports; all the ISBN-based estimates of market share reported by Bowker, AAP, BISG, and Nielsen are wildly wrong.

33% of all paid ebook unit sales on Amazon.com are indie self-published ebooks.

20% of all consumer dollars spent on ebooks on Amazon.com are being spent on indie self-published ebooks.

40% of all dollars earned by authors from ebooks on Amazon.com are earned by indie self-published ebooks.

In mid-year 2014, indie-published authors as a cohort began taking home the lion’s share (40%) of all ebook author earnings generated on Amazon.com while authors published by all of the Big Five publishers combined slipped into second place at 35%.

 

Full Report
U.S. ebook sales have plateaued — or are even declining, relative to print — declare some widely-cited industry statistics. Publishing pundits opine that readers’ Kindles are all “full” now, and talk about the “glut” of ebooks. News articles imply that consumers are abandoning ebooks and are returning to print books, and then those articles speculate about whether ebooks were “just a fad.” Other pundits assert that indie authors will no longer be able to compete with the Big Five traditional publishers, now that those publishers have begun to price some of their ebooks lower.

Lots of speculation. Lots of flawed studies based on 2008 methodologies. Lots of inaccurate statistics. And very few facts.

As always, we turn to the data for real answers.

 

Read the full post, which includes numerous charts and graphs with accompanying analysis, on Author Earnings.

 

Can You Successfully Use Word Templates to Create eBooks?

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This post by Kimberly Hitchens originally appeared on BookNook.biz on 10/5/14.

Once upon a time, (okay, about a month ago or so)  in a fit of curiosity, I decided to buy one of those advertised templates—you know the ones—make your ebook from WORD!  Why?  Because we get a lot of inquiries here.  In fact, we receive about 300 emails a day, believe it or not.  We get people asking why our services are “better” or different than what they can do themselves. A lot of what we do is invisible to the human eye.  This makes it hard to answer those types of questions without sounding self-serving.

As in, “well, gosh, we export and clean up the HTML, so that all the bad code that you can’t see with the naked eye doesn’t make your book go wonky when it’s opened on a Kindle.” This is a difficult sell, to be honest.  It’s the same difficult sell that I run into when I try to explain that Smashwords does not do the same thing that we do.  But, when you look at a sausage, do you know what’s inside it? Can you tell that one sausage-maker lovingly crafted his sausage from the BEST stuff, while the other used what remained on the floor after the first guy finished?  No, you can’t.  Not unless you already do this for a living, and if you did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation–would we?

An eBook-making Test:  Show, Not Tell.

In that vein, I decided to test what we do against those “DIY Word” templates that you can buy all over the Internet.  After all, a picture is worth a thousand words, right?  Perhaps, I thought, if I simply used one of those commercial templates, I could show–not tell–people the difference.  I made sure that I bought a well-written template, from one of the most reputable and best-known websites on the topic of bookmaking.  For both ebooks and print books.

 

Read the full post, which includes numerous images for comparison, on BookNook.biz.

 

An Incredibly Brief Introduction to New Media Lit

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This post by Matthew Burnside originally appeared on Ploughshares on 2/5/15.

Let us consider a form mired in its indefinability: new media lit. I’ve found that nothing – not even poetry – can alienate a reader more quickly than encountering it. Normally I would resist trying to encapsulate an entire genre into one shell of a definition, but because we don’t have a lot of time here and my purpose is simply to expose you to the very distant edge of what the genre has to offer (whether you choose to step further is up to you), let’s stick with a radically basic, extremely flawed definition: New media lit is any “literature” that appears online, utilizing the myriad tools of technology and often allowing a greater degree of reader interaction than does offline literature.

This stuff has been around for a while—since Michael Joyce first doled out a floppy disk to his peers bearing the first (arguably) hypertext story entitled “Afternoon, a Story” in the late ’80s—but only on the fringes of literature, existing more as a novelty than as a respectable form. Robert Coover hailed its potential more than anyone, seeing it as perhaps the natural evolution of literature—the product of emerging media and our increased connectedness to technology. At a certain point in the 1990s, for some, new media lit seemed to be the inevitable future.

It was a future that never came to pass. But today, as digital literacy and the capacity for multimodal thought processing increases light years with each new generation beyond the previous one, I think it’s worth dipping into the digital waters again, if only to challenge our notion of what literature is and consider what else it can, and might, one day be.

 

Read the full post, which includes links to some online New Media Lit, on Ploughshares.

 

5 Self-publishing Truths Few Authors Talk About

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This post by Dylan Hearn originally appeared on his Suffolk Scribblings site on 1/5/15.

One of the hardest thing to watch on social media is an author, usually a debut author, getting excited about their upcoming book launch and knowing they are about to get hit around the head with a hard dose of reality.

They’ve done the right things, built up a twitter or Facebook following, blogged about the book, sent copies out for review, told all their friends about the upcoming launch, pulled together a promo video and graphic, maybe taken out some adverts. The first few days after launch are filled with excited tweets, mentions of early positive reviews and chart rankings. Then, after a few days, maybe a few weeks, the positive tweets stop and an air of desperation sets in as the reality of life as an indie author hits home.

Part of the problem is that the authors most vocal on social media are those that have already seen self-publishing success. They got in early, made names for themselves through talent, hard-work and persistence, and are happy to spread the gospel of the new self-publishing utopia. They are telling the truth, from their perspective, but for the vast majority of authors the picture is very different. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible to find success with your debut novel, just that it’s rare – and with changes in the market, becoming ever more so.

In order to provide some balance, below are 5 truths I, and many other self-published authors, have experienced. This hasn’t put me off from a writing career, and shouldn’t put you off either, but at least you will be going in with your eyes open.

 

1 You need talent to succeed but it’s no guarantee

 

Read the full post on Suffolk Scribblings.

 

‘Who Decided Our Worth?’ Do Free Books Give Away Authors’ Value?

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This post by Porter Anderson originally appeared on Thought Catalog on 1/28/15.

‘There’s Something Badly Wrong’

For those following the industry! the industry! in its digital melodrama, tossing books to the crowd free is not new.

But the question of whether today’s plethora of free offers may devalue books and/or authors in readers’ minds is not going away as easily as some folks wish it would.

The London-based author Roz Morris (both traditionally and self- published) became concerned enough about the issue this week to write Free book giveaways – when do they work? When don’t they? In it, she writes:

I’ll admit that I worry we give away our work too easily. If we create a culture where a book costs less than a sheet of gift-wrap and a greetings card, there’s something badly wrong. An ebook may not have material form, but it does give you more time and experience than something you glance at and throw away. And tellingly, the people who get cross with me for speaking out are the ones who say they refuse to spend more than a couple of dollars on a book, or berate me for not putting my books into Kindle Unlimited.

Indeed, the question of her headline — when do free books work? — is not the interesting part.

 

Read the full post on Thought Catalog.

 

Translating John Sargent

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This post by J.A. Konrath originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog on 12/19/14. Note that it contains strong language.

Often times it seems as if those who work in the legacy publishing world are so out of touch with authors that a translator is needed to explain the true meaning of what has been said.

Such is the case with John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, in his recent public letter.

Sargent in crazy bold italics, the translation in common-sense normal font.

Dear Authors, Illustrators, and Agents,
There has been a lot of change in the e-book publishing world of late, so I thought it a good idea to update you on what is going on at Macmillan.

Translation: It will be easier to accept the bad news if I warn you first.

The largest single change happens today, December 18th. Today a portion of our agreement with the Department of Justice (called a consent decree) expires, and we will no longer be required to allow retailers to discount e-books.

Translation: Remember when we illegally colluded with other publishers to price-fix? We did that because we were worried that low-priced ebooks would harm our paper distribution oligopoly.

It doesn’t matter that we have a much higher profit margin on ebooks. It doesn’t matter that since forcing the agency model on Amazon, our authors made less money. What matters is that we foresaw a day where ebook sales surpassed paper sales, and we knew that would put us out of business because savvy authors wouldn’t need our value-added publishing services anymore.

Happily, Amazon won’t be able to discount our ebooks anymore, so we can charge high prices and protect the interests of our business and of the cartel at the expense of your financial situation.

Unless you’re one of the huge bestsellers we publish. Those huge bestsellers sell a shit-ton of paper books. Under this model, they’ll continue to get richer.

 

Read the full post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

 

Among The Disrupted

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This essay by Leon Wieseltier originally appeared on The New York Times Sunday Book Review on 1/7/15.

Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind. Everybody talks frantically about media, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as content disappears into “content.” What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous.

Meanwhile the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms: Economists are our experts on happiness! Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be. Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything. It is enabled by the idolatry of data, which has itself been enabled by the almost unimaginable data-generating capabilities of the new technology. The distinction between knowledge and information is a thing of the past, and there is no greater disgrace than to be a thing of the past. Beyond its impact upon culture, the new technology penetrates even deeper levels of identity and experience, to cognition and to consciousness. Such transformations embolden certain high priests in the church of tech to espouse the doctrine of “transhumanism” and to suggest, without any recollection of the bankruptcy of utopia, without any consideration of the cost to human dignity, that our computational ability will carry us magnificently beyond our humanity and “allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. . . . There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine.” (The author of that updated mechanistic nonsense is a director of engineering at Google.)
Read the full essay on The New York Times Sunday Book Review. Note that The New York Times may move this material behind a paywall in the future.

 

Kindle Unlimited Not a Great Deal for Readers or Authors

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This post by Marion Stein originally appeared on her Marion’s Blog on 1/12/15.

One of my Goodreads friends recently asked if he could find my works on Amazon’s recently launched Kindle Unlimited scheme. Here is what I told him:

My books aren’t enrolled in Kindle Select and won’t be. Authors who participate are mostly losing money compared to before. Authors who aren’t in it are also seeing sales drop. Everyone is losing money but Amazon. There are now 700,000 books on Kindle Unlimited. That may sound like a lot, but unless you only read indies, most books you want to read are not there. Traditional publishers can put books into Kindle Unlimited and still sell those books in other venues like Nook Books and Kobo. However, indies have to also be enrolled in Kindle Select to be on Kindle Unlimited, which means they have to sell those ebooks exclusively on Kindle, and many authors (and readers) feel that that lack of competition is not a good thing.

Here are some more reasons why Kindle Unlimited is bad for authors:

Readers can use Indie Select as a private (but expensive) library. They can borrow your book, but if they don’t bother to actually read it, you get NOTHING. If they do read more than 10%, you get something, but it’s far less than if they bought it.

 

Read the full post on Marion’s Blog.

 

A Look Ahead to Self-Publishing in 2015

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This post by Jennifer McCartney originally appeared on Publishers Weekly on 1/16/15.

Industry insiders predict an increase in diversity, serialization, and hybrid publishing

Self-publishing saw another successful year in 2014, with authors like Deborah Bladon and Jen McLaughlin hitting the New York Times bestseller lists, fanfic authors like Sophie Jackson receiving six-figure advances, and many millions of titles being published across the industry’s numerous platforms. The view of self-publishing as an outlet of last resort for desperate authors is also changing—the negative stigma that’s long been associated with the industry is being discarded for a more progressive outlook, along with the acknowledgement that self-publishing and traditional publishing can coexist and even benefit one another. And self-publishing platforms are increasingly serving as a kind of testing ground for traditional publishers, which are snapping up successful indie authors and offering them, in some cases, million-dollar advances. Further, some traditionally published authors are becoming more open to exploring self-publishing as a supplement to or as a replacement for their traditional publishing careers.

A year ago, we predicted that the self-publishing industry would mature in 2014, with writers taking ownership of their role as both authors and business owners. As 2015 begins, we once again anticipate a year of growth, despite some concerns about market saturation. For this year’s preview, we talked to a number of industry insiders about the current state of self-publishing, the trends they’ve noticed over the past year, and the current challenges facing indie authors in an increasingly crowded market, along with some of their predictions for 2015.

As an example of continued industry growth, Ashleigh Gardner, head of content at Wattpad, noted that in 2014 the social publishing site gained millions of users who shared 15 million works of fan fiction alone—resulting in breakout publishing stars like Anna Todd, whose One Direction fanfic, After, got her a four-book deal with Gallery Books at Simon & Schuster.

Established self-publishing sites like Lulu also saw growth over the past year, according to the company’s v-p of marketing, Dan Dillon, as a result of new initiatives like Lulu Jr.—a brand enabling children to become published authors. In addition to Lulu Jr., the company announced a partnership with Crayola to develop a line of co-branded book-making kits for kids.

Across all segments of self-publishing, there were signs of continued growth and innovation—from Crayola to fanfic to hybrid publishing to the rise of serialization, we break it all down for you here.

 

The Rise of the “Authorpreneur”

 

Read the full post on Publishers Weekly.