J.A. Konrath has often repeated the list of what you need to become a successful self-published author: “Write good books, with good descriptions, good formatting, and good cover art, sell them cheap, and keep at it until you get lucky.” I would also add, however, you need the kindness of strangers.

I have a lifetime of experience of being supported by people I know, whose friendship, sympathy, advice, and encouragement has sustained me in my life and work. However, in the past two years that I have been involved in self-publishing, I have been overwhelmed by the way previously unknown strangers have helped me, and today I wanted to give thanks to them.

First there were the bloggers. When I started on the journey to self-publishing, my writer friends were still firmly enmeshed in traditional publishing. That was their experience, and most of them thought that was their future.  This meant that I had to turn to strangers, bloggers I had never heard of before, like Morris Rosenthal’s with his How to Publish A Book, Jane Friedman’s There Are No Rules, Mick Rooney’s POD, Self-Publishing, and Independent Publishing, Joanne Penn’s Creative Penn, Henry Baum’s Self-Publishing Review, and J.A. Konrath’s A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing. I know how difficult it is to write consistently, clearly, and frequently about a subject that is so complicated, varied, controversial, and changeable. Yet these bloggers were doing exactly this when I started to look into self-publishing in 2009. It was these bloggers that convinced me that there were other options besides traditional or “vanity publishing.” These were the bloggers who gave me the confidence to choose self-publishing and the information I needed to become successful, and I thank them.

However, among their ranks there were bloggers who reached out and directly helped me in ways I can never repay. When April Hamilton made me a regular contributor to her wonderful and comprehensive site Publetariat this provided a platform for my ideas that I would have never have reached on my own, helping me build a following.

Joel Friedlander is another blogger who has gone out of his way to promote my blog, featuring my posts on his blog the Book Designer and tweeting about them. Whenever my back posts get a spike in hits, I can often count on Joel to have been the one who has caused this.

Next came Steven Windwalker, the champion of all things Kindle, who responded to some of my comments on Kindle Nation Daily with the offer to publish a Kindle Short (this was in the days before this cost anything), which then sent my first book, Maids of Misfortune, rocketing up the Kindle historical mystery best-seller list, where it remained for nearly a year, greatly facilitating that book’s success. I would like to specifically thank these three.

I know that on the surface the examples above might not seem like kindness, but just people making good social media connections for their own benefit. Yet what has struck me consistently about these and other members of the self-publishing community is that they seem genuinely interested in both sharing information with and promoting other self-published authors. I am a very small fish (in terms of length of time in self-publishing, books published, and breadth of my social media following) in a vast ocean, yet I have never been made to feel that way. Instead, I have been made to feel welcome, and the kindness of these strangers has been a large part of the reason I have enjoyed the process of self-publishing so much.

Then there are the writers. I have a writers group, who long ago stopped being strangers and became friends. But the group I am talking about is the growing number of writers who I have come to know in the past two years of self-publishing. I mean the strangers who I have never met face-to-face, who live scattered around the globe, who I may have encountered only briefly when they comment on my blog or participate in the same thread of discussion as I do on a list or blog. They have made me feel a part of a community of writers.

In particular I would like to mention my fellow members of the Historical Fiction Authors Cooperative. This group of historical fiction authors who came together in 2010 to promote their ebooks has given me so much in the past year of my membership. These are men and women I had never met before, and they have edited, read, and reviewed my books, shared their knowledge of marketing, and spent enormous amounts of time working on building the membership and creating a wonderful website. In the process a number of them have moved from strangers to friends. For this I give special thanks.

Finally there are the readers. Strangers who write unsolicited thoughtful reviews on places like Amazon or Goodreads, write me emails telling me how much they enjoyed my work, and comment on my facebook page. Small acts of kindnesses that are more precious to me as a beginning writer than all the sales. Some of these people even offered to be beta readers for my sequel, Uneasy Spirits, giving me wise advice, close edits, and the confidence to get the book out before Christmas. Without every stranger who was willing to take chance on buying a book by an unknown author, I would have no success, and I thank them all.

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.

 M. Louisa Locke

This is a reprint from M. Louisa Locke‘s blog.

This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on his The Shatzkin Files blog on 11/13/11.

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I want to make clear at the outset that this post is not about “enhanced ebooks”, making something multiple-media out of a book that started as straight text. That’s a “want to do” problem that I’ve always been skeptical about and which I believe many, if not most, publishers are abandoning as “not commercially viable at this time”. Today’s ruminations are about moving illustrated books from print to digital, which many of today’s book publishers will find a “must solve” problem as the channels to reach consumers effectively with illustrated books — the bookstores — are diminished in number and power by digital change.

Amazon and Barnes & Noble are trading boasts about whose iPad-lite is better than the other guy’s. Kobo’s Vox is joining the party with Kobo now owned by Rakuten, a massive Japanese company that gives the former upstart the means to really compete with all the other players. We can be pretty sure that tablets that can deliver color-illustrated book pages will be in many hands very soon. (That’s in addition to the tens of millions of iPads and many millions of Nook Color devices that have been sold already.)

This is presenting publishers with illustrated books on their list with what seems like an enormous opportunity. But it also presents some equally enormous challenges.

It has been estimated by many that 25% of the print books sold are illustrated books. (I last saw this number in a slide from Michael Tamblyn of Kobo at our eBooks for Everyone Else conference in San Francisco on November 2d.) I am not sure what that means. Trade books only?

And even if I did know what it means, I wouldn’t know enough. Books that are primarily pretty pictures, which don’t require much integration of the pictures and text (the minority of the 25%, one would assume) are a considerably simpler proposition to port to digital than a book with pictures and captions that have to stay with them or text that needs to be on the same page with a picture or a chart.

A lot of work is being done to create new standards called HTML5 and Epub3 that will permit more faithful rendering of a publisher’s intentions through a web browser or an ebook than our current capabilities do. But there are two very big flies in the ointment that persist regardless of the technology.

One: illustrated books are considerably more complex and expensive to deliver to digital devices than straight text books. (Even if HTML5 and Epub3 accomplish everything their creators want and they’re fed by XML-workflows, converting the backlists will cost a multiple on a per-title basis of what straight text costs. And I suspect we’re many years away from relieving publishers of the need to make the decisions necessary to execute multiple versions of each book, new or backlist, as will be made clear further on in this post.)

Two: we really don’t know whether consumers with tablets or tablet-lites will choose to consume illustrated books on those devices. (I’d say we do know that people will happily read straight text on devices; what seems to be true in my experience these days is that most of the people who say they “prefer printed books” have not tried an ereader yet.)

Read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files.

This post, by Gary McLaren, originally appeared on his Publish Your Own Ebooks site on 8/11/11.

There are so many different ebook formats in existence that trying to get your ebook into every possible format isn’t practical. However it is a good idea to make your ebook available in the four most popular ebook formats.

But first a little history.

Ebooks have already been around for a while. In the early days of ebooks people tried various ways of packaging ebooks, even including bundling text files into an EXE file. These “ebooks” typically ran on an application that looked like an internet browser and readers could click on buttons to navigate forwards and backwards through the book.

The problem is that downloading EXE files poses a fairly serious security risk to computers and this format quickly lost popularity as people became more aware of the risks of EXE files and computer viruses. It was only a matter of time until better formats were developed.

The four principal formats for ebooks now are:

• Portable Document Format (PDF)
• Kindle Format (AZW)
• Mobipocket Format (MOBI, PRC)
• Epub Format (EPUB)

Now let’s look briefly at each of these formats. Then I’ll give you a table that shows at a glance how these formats correlate to the most popular ebook reading devices.

Portable Document Format (PDF)

In 1993 Adobe Systems created the Portable Document Format (PDF) as a standard format for document exchange. When a document was converted to PDF each page was basically an image of the original document. Since almost all computing devices have the capability to read PDFs, the PDF format has been widely adopted and remains one of the preferred methods of providing documents on the Internet today.

However, a problem arose with PDFs. With improvements in technology we started carrying around smaller and smaller devices. First it was laptops and then even smaller devices including Palm Pilots, Blackberries, and mobile phones.

The early versions of PDF were designed for computer screens and were not very suitable for viewing on smaller screens. Because each page was like an image the text couldn’t be “re-flowed” to fit on tiny screens. Readers became frustrated by the need to scroll horizontally as well as vertically to read a single page in a document.

Several new formats for ebooks have been developed which don’t have this problem. The most popular of these follow here.

Read the rest of the post, which includes a summary table that compares various ereader devices and the ebook formats supported by each, on Gary McLaren‘s Publish Your Own Ebooks site.

This post, by Moses Siregar III, originally appeared as a guest post on David Gaughran‘s Let’s Get Digital site on 7/22/11.

One of the criticisms that self-publishers face is that they rush their work out. Sometimes it’s bad covers, or poor editing, but sometimes the book just wasn’t ready to be published.

Today’s guest poster, Moses Siregar III, understands the importance of making sure your book is the best you can possibly make it before you sent it out into the world.

Rather than be frustrated by seeing other indie writers dive in and rack up sales, Moses never rushed his work, instead taking the time to assiduously build his platform in a number of interesting ways, all building up towards the release of his novel at the start of August.

He has agreed to do a before-and-after guest post, so we will get to see how effective his strategy is. We’ll have him back some time in August to talk again, but for now, here’s Moses:

Using “Free” to Generate Pre-Release Buzz

Last summer, I wanted to jump into indie publishing before the pool became too crowded. Unfortunately, my novel was far from ready. So I came up with a creative solution to get an ebook out. I looked at my book to see if I could carve a novella out of it, hoping for a long excerpt that I could sell as a 99 cent or free ebook.

The idea was that the novella would be worth reading on its own, even though it was essentially a teaser for the coming novel. To make the purpose of the excerpt clearer, I called it: The Black God’s War: A Novella Introducing a New Epic Fantasy.

It worked, but only because I was able to make the book free at Smashwords, B&N, and eventually Amazon (plus iBooks, etc.). The novella/excerpt got some very nice reviews even when it was at 99 cents, but it didn’t sell many copies even at that price, perhaps because most reviews said things like, “Great teaser. I can’t wait to read the full novel.” Those pesky reviewers!

I wanted to give people a good taste (my novella is 27,000 words) without sharing too much of the story (my novel is 121,000 words). To this date, the novella has been downloaded somewhere between 15-20,000 times. I don’t know the exact number because either B&N or Smashwords hasn’t reported the numbers in a while—it’s a long story.

Here are some of the reasons why a strategy like this, or a variation on it, might make sense for you.

Read the rest of the post on Let’s Get Digital.