Excerpts from the book, How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks – All for Free
Take the Video Course
For people who learn better with video tutorials, they’ll benefit from this 8 hour, 14 lecture video of step by step explanations of the main points in my book. This course also includes a pdf copy of How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks All for Free to follow along with the video, so it really is a great way to learn all things related to e-publishing and doing it yourself.
The video course is at http://www.udemy.com/how-to-make-market-and-sell-ebooks-all-for-free/. It’s a combination of screencasting and power points designed to cover everything you need to know including:
- cover design
- formatting for retailers and your own sites
- uploading to major sellers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords
- creating free websites and blogs
- blogging like a pro
- social media
- selling with PayPal and Shopping Carts
- Public Relations and much more
Smashwords Beats Amazon in Many Ways
If you have an ebook or are making one, you really need to upload not only to Amazon, but to Smashwords.com.
Yes, yes, I know, Smashwords doesn’t have the same market size as Amazon, but it’s better in other ways. Amazon will only prepare your ebook to be read on a Kindle or Mobi-device while Smashwords converts documents into every format you need and more. No matter what type of e-reading device a potential customer has, Smashwords will create a version of your ebook that works for them. Epub, MOBI, RTF, LRF, HTML, PDB, PDF, JavaScript… that’s nice, especially since Kindle and Mobipocket aren’t the only readers out there. Money-wise, Smashwords pays authors a whopping 85% of royalties on any sale, so it’s far better to sell through Smashwords than Amazon (which currently pays only 35% as of March 2010). Smashwords also distributes its ebooks to multiple online retailers and mobile phone apps. This list of retailers includes Barnes & Noble, who sell ebooks from independent authors provided they have been accepted in the Premium program with Smashwords, which simply means an ebook is properly formatted and has a quality cover. Smashwords also doesn’t encrypt its conversions with DRM (Digital Rights Management. This way a customer can download an ebook and transfer it from their pc to any device or multiple devices. Essentially, the customer has more options with the book, which is different than the way Amazon distributes a book encrypted with DRM, basically good for one reader. Every retailer let’s you set and change your price, but Smashwords also allows you to enable sample chapters for customers to browse as much of the book as you’d like them to (a good way to hook readers), and they also have coupons which can be set for any amount with any expiration date. The only real con to Smashwords is a limited customer base compared to Amazon, but aside from that it’s better in just about every way. (And coming soon, Smashwords will also be distributing to Amazon, another reason to like them.)
You’ll need to read the Smashwords Style Guide, which isn’t long, as it’s the best way to understand how to format your document before uploading. These are most of the major tips though the Style Guide goes into far more detail.
- Don’t have large font sizes, nothing over 12 or 14 at the most for the title.
- Don’t have fancy fonts. Stick to the common ones. Times New Roman. Garamond. Arial. Courier.
- Don’t use tabs or spaces for indents. Just use the basic settings on the ruler bar: left and right indents for margins, and first line indent for new paragraph placement.
- Don’t have more than 4 paragraph returns in a row. They create blank screens of ebook pages.
- Don’t include page numbers anywhere. Ebooks have different screen sizes, so page numbers mean nothing to these things.
- Don’t include images larger than 3 inches. Resize them to be small enough to be enjoyed on those tiny screens.
Microsoft Word .doc files work the best for uploading, and then .rtf files are second best. Once you’ve followed the Style Guide completely, upload your book and cover by following the Publishing prompts. Remember, a good cover image is needed to be eligible for the Premium program which gets you into Barnes & Noble and other retailers. But not to worry, if for some reason they deny you, just make alterations and try again.
For more information and to get your ebooks for sale on Smashwords, visit http://www.smashwords.com
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Inserting Sample Chapter Links for Newbies on WordPress
Here’s the blog about creating WordPress links for Sample Chapter files that I mentioned in my book, How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks – All for Free.
Let’s say I wanted to make a sample chapter of my novel available in pdf format here. So I’d write something like, “Click here for Chapter 1 of The Little Universe,” intending for that to be the spot someone could click and read that sample.
Next I’d need to upload a file of that chapter in pdf format. For newbies, the first thing to do is to place my cursor at one end of the phrase, left click and hold down as I drag the mouse across the phrase to highlight it entirely. Once it’s highlighted I can go to the Upload/Insert choices above and click the one that looks like a star to Add Media. Then it prompts me to Select Files from My Computer, which is where they are. I click on the Select Files button then search the proper destination whether it’s on my Desktop or My Documents or wherever it is, click on the right file, wait for a moment and then click the Insert Into Post button at the bottom. Then my pdf file should be available to anyone who clicks it, plus it will have its own URL assigned by WordPress that becomes a handy location for later use or on another website.
Let’s see if this works.
Click here for Chapter 1 The Little Universe – Sample PDF 1 TLU 1-4-09
Yep, it works. For further WordPress advice on this, go to the support forum at this address -
http://en.support.wordpress.com/uploading-documents/
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How to Create Your Own Custom Badges.
This is an example of creating a Myspace badge (or any other type of badge). The image can be your own photo, a logo from a Google search or any image you can legally use.
How do you create your own badge for something like Myspace or anything you want to link to? There’s a few ways, but the main thing is to create a URL address of the image. One way is to Edit a Post or Add a New Post on WordPress (like this Edit) and insert a picture by clicking next to the Upload/Insert tab the icon that says Add an Image. It will prompt you to Select Files, where you will probably get it from your computer in that “ebooksuccess” folder. Once you select the image it will upload and then ask where you want it and what size. You can choose any size, but I prefer medium to smaller images. Once you click Insert into Post, your desired image will be there. You can View your site, click on the image and notice now that it creates an entire page with a URL address for that image. Copy that URL address, go back to your Dashboard, Appearances, Widgets, and drag an Image widget to the right side and insert it. You can name it as you like, but be sure to paste the URL address of your image into the Image URL box, and then copy and paste the destination page (your Myspace profile page for this example) into the Link URL (when the image is clicked) box. You can also easily adjust the Width and Height in pixels here to any size you want. Click Save, Visit Site and presto, your newly created widget is in place and functioning properly. You may have to adjust the size through the widget control and play around with pixel width and height.
There’s another way to create URLs of images and documents (which will come in handy when we load sample chapters later to your sites). This way is through a site called - http://www.docstoc.com/. It works very similarly to what we just went through, so instead of explaining it all again just visit their site and they’ll walk you through a similar process. (I will also cover Docstop in more detail when we upload sample chapters, so let’s wait until then.)
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Ebooks versus Paper or DTB (dead tree books)
It’s wise to think about having your book in print on paper someday but not to start. The reason is simple. You can get started with ebooks for free, and the fact is ebooks are taking off at phenomenal rates.
“Yeah, but they can’t compare with paper book sales,” you might say. Don’t be so sure. It’s true that ebook sales were rather flat from their inception until just a few years back. Then, around the end of 2007 Amazon released the Kindle, which has been followed by the Kindle 2 and the Kindle DX in less than two years. What’s happened to ebook sales in that time? They’ve been soaring! And if you listen to enough Kindle owners, one thing will become clear immediately. They love reading on that thing! Many of them prefer it to reading actual paper books. Plus they love the convenience of carrying all of their books on one device and having the option to change fonts, sizes, etc.
And we can go beyond talking about just the Kindle. Barnes & Noble has the Nook, Sony has the Reader, and the holy grail of electronic readers (or so it’s claiming to be), Apple’s Ipad is about to come out as these words are being written in early 2010. And let’s not forget the cell phone. That’s right. Stanza and other applications make it possible for people to read from their Iphones and other phones, so there are more and more e-reading devices popping up everywhere.
Since the Amazon Kindle has been out, ebook sales have grown exponentially. They casually went from $1.3 million in revenue for the 2nd quarter of 2002 to $8.2 million in the 4th quarter of 2007. Then Kindle and other devices came out and sales leaped to $17 million a year later in 2008 and then skyrocketed to a whopping $56 million in the 4th quarter of 2009!
With the Ipad joining the party and Barnes & Noble rolling up their sleeves while Amazon attempts to protect their turf… the battle for ebook supremacy is sure to be a fight of the ages. Ebooks will surpass paper book sales in the near future. It’s inevitable.
Any author who is serious about their future in sales absolutely must make their work available as an ebook. Simple as that. Besides, how can argue with the fact that it’s free for them to do so?
Look to this blog for more tips updated regularly here from the soon to be released book, How to Make, Market and Sell Ebooks – All for Free.
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