This is the next post in a multi-part series about self-publishing your eBook online. Posts include:

1. Selling Your eBook Without a Publisher, Part 1: Introduction 
2. Selling Your eBook Without a Publisher, Part 2: E-book Formatting (this post)
3. Selling Your eBook Without a Publisher, Part 3: Book Covers
4. Selling Your eBook Without a Publisher, Part 4: Amazon.com 
5. Selling Your eBook Without a Publisher, Part 5: Smashwords
6. Selling Your eBook Without a Publisher, Part 6: Scribd
7. Selling Your eBook Without a Publisher, Part 7: Lulu
8. Selling Your eBook Without a Publisher, Part 8: Selling Strategy

Let's talk about e-book formatting.

From looking at the Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines document, you might quickly think you need a masters degree in publishing and a whole lot of designer talent to pull this thing off (I did). Not true at all. My experience thus far has been that getting an e-book ready for publishing is really a pretty painless process. The retailers I'll be talking about in later posts accept a variety of formats, and where the expected format is proprietary (like for the Kindle), tools are provided to do the conversion.

Now, I'm not a designer in any sense of the word. So I'm not going to even try giving that sort of advice. But what I can do is point out some simple tips as well as resources that helped me format my e-book. The latter will be a running list; I'll add to it as I find new resources, and intend to use it as reference information myself.

As far as some basic guidelines, here's a few things I've run across:

1. Keep it simple

Don't go crazy with fonts, font sizes, and the general layout. Keep it simple. You want your e-book to be readable on as many devices as possible. The best first step in guaranteeing that is to not go crazy with styling.

2. Use a book cover

This one is HUGE in my opinion, mainly because I'm one of those people who uses the cover as a gauge of the overall quality of the work. Turns out coming up with a professional looking cover is not that difficult. I'll touch on this subject some more in the next post in this series. For now, though, here's the cover I used for my fantasy novel, The Hall of the Wood:

3. Do have a title page

Keep it basic: the name of the book and the author's name, possibly with some artwork if you have it.

4. Do have an 'other books' page

If you have other books available, why not let your readers know about them? Remember, too, that when you do release new e-books, go back and update your previously published ones with the title of the new book. One of the nice things about electronic publishing is that it is not immutable.

5. Do have a copyright page

Some online publishers/retailers require this. It's best to explicitly declare your copyright and/or licensing. If you're a resident of the United States you're automatically covered under standard U.S. copyright law, but something I'm considering is also releasing my work under a Creative Commons license also, similar to how I protect my blog posts.

6. Do have an attribution page

Use this page to thank anyone who helped you along the way.

7. Do have an acknowledgments page

This one is optional, but if you want to include a paragraph or two thanking various people…

8. Do have a quotations page

Another optional one, but some authors like to include a short quote as a lead-in to their content.

The order of the above pages varies. Right now, I'm reading Boneshaker by Cherie Priest, and the order I see is: praise/quotations, other books by author, title page, copyright, dedication, an acknowledgments page, a map of Priest's vision of Seattle, an excerpt from a fictitious history text, another title page (this one with just the name of the novel), and, finally, the content.

That's it for tips, and that about wraps up this post.

I'll leave you with a short list of styling resources I've discovered:

Smashwords Style Guide
Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, wrote this free e-book on how to style your e-book prior to publishing with Smashwords. At twenty pages, it's a fairly quick read, but has some good information in it. While intended as advice for publishing with Smashwords, the information is general enough to apply regardless of where you decide to publish.

Scribd's "Preparing Your Content"
Scribd is another online publisher which I'll be talking more about in this series. This forum entry has some good information about page size, fonts, and a tip I found especially useful regarding using text on your book cover image.

Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines
The first so many pages of this document are a worthwhile read, but when it starts to look like Greek it's time to shut'er down and move on. Too much low level detail for me, but some good stuff early on.

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This is the first post in a multi-part series about self-publishing your eBook online. Posts include:

1. Selling Your eBook Without a Publisher, Part 1: Introduction (this post)
2. Selling Your eBook Without a Publisher, Part 2: E-book Formatting
3. Selling Your eBook Without a Publisher, Part 3: Book Covers
4. Selling Your eBook Without a Publisher, Part 4: Amazon.com 
5. Selling Your eBook Without a Publisher, Part 5: Smashwords
6. Selling Your eBook Without a Publisher, Part 6: Scribd
7. Selling Your eBook Without a Publisher, Part 7: Lulu
8. Selling Your eBook Without a Publisher, Part 8: Selling Strategy

One of the thing I've been interested in for some time is selling my book (should be books soon) online. I'd already been doing some research into this, so thought I'd share my findings and investigative work through a new series. The series will likely cover e-book formatting, book covers and why they're important, and, last but certainly not least, the various online retailers that allow you to showcase your work and therefore skip the traditional publishing process entirely.

Selling without a publisher (i.e., self-publishing) is nothing new, but it seems only recently with the advent of popular e-readers that the possibility for e-books has really opened up. We're very possibly at the beginning of a new, mainstream medium for consuming literature, and there's no doubt the publishing game is changing. But going it alone sans agent or publisher isn't easy. Fortunately, there are online partners with whom we can collaborate: while you provide the content, they provide the showcase by which you can present your work. They, of course, take a percentage of your sales in exchange for this service.

Whether that is a fair trade or not is a matter of opinion (rates vary by partner site), but I think it helps to look at what these sites provide you. I mean, we all have web sites or blogs upon which to host the electronic versions of our books. So what are they providing that merits sharing the profit from a sale?

1.) Eyeballs

This one can't be stressed enough. As writers, we work in obscurity until we find representation or a big name publisher, or we work our way up through lesser known channels until we've built a following. Either way, we all start small, which means we probably aren't getting all that much traffic to our web sites. Online retail sites, like Amazon, for example, give us the opportunity to put our work in front of a lot of people who otherwise might never know it existed.

2.) Ratings

They also provide (in most cases) a means by which readers can rate our work. While this can be a two-edged sword in its own right, what we gain is essentially a third-party that removes the suspicion of impropriety were we to host such a facility on our own site.

3.) Community

Some online retailers create a community atmosphere around their product offerings. Scribd Community is one. Amazon Communities is another. You can gain support from others also trying to do well with this avenue, build a following, and connect with readers.

4.) They handle the transaction

They collect the dough, then send you your cut either at set intervals or, more likely, when a certain threshold is surpassed. The exact threshold varies by partner site. This has the nice benefit that you do not have to deal with providing a secure site in which to collect payment information, worry about storing such information for return visits, deal with the case where merchandise is returned (can you return an e-book?), etc.

Those all seem like good reasons to me, and well worth sharing the proceeds of a sale.

With that, I'll leave you with this introductory post for now. Look for Part 2 sometime soon.

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Every once in a while it's a good idea to freshen up the ol' web site/blog. Truth be told, that light blue background has been bothering me for some time now, but every time I tried to swap out the color I just couldn't find the right one. I was trying to go with a darker blue, and it kept coming out too… purple.

But last week I had sort of an epiphany. The layout, color scheme, and an overwhelming desire to simplify all hit me at once. Next thing I know, I've got a new look for the site.

The overall layout is more or less the same, except I cleaned some things up, took out the "About Me" section, and added a new "Bookshelf" section to highlight what I am currently reading.

Here are the old and new looks, for purposes of my own nostalgia if nothing else.

New look:

(Hopefully the menu bar color looks darkish red; it's actually CSS brown… doesn't look brown to me, but I like it)

Old look:

Much improved, I think.

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Barnes & Noble has released for pre-order their Kindle-killer: the nook (lowercase 'n' on purpose).

'Kindle-killer' is perhaps a bit of an overstatement given that the Kindle owns the e-book reader market right now. But the Nook's imminent arrival is what caused Amazon to preemptively drop the price of the Kindle, so its impact has already been felt.

And make no mistake: e-book reading devices are important not only to Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but especially to book/e-book publishers.

Why?

Because, since the arrival of Kindle and the Sony Reader, reading is up:

Amazon […] says that people with Kindles now buy 3.1 times as many books as they did before owning the device. That factor is up from 2.7 in December 2008. So a reader who had previously bought eight books from Amazon would now purchase, on average, 24.8 books, a rise from 21.6 books.

Sony adds this:

Sony […] says that its e-book customers, on average, download about eight books a month from its online library. That is far more than the approximately 6.7 books than the average American book buyer purchased for the entire year in 2008, according to Bowker, a publishing industry tracking firm.

More reading by consumers means more profit for the publishers. With a price war being waged between Amazon and Wal Mart (and now Target), there is real concern by the publishers over margins and profit.

There will no doubt be an exhaustive series of technical articles detailing the differences between the nook and the Kindle (here's one, from B&N's perspective). For now, though, we can take a look at this feature set from Barnes & Noble's eReading Blog:

• Download eBooks, magazines and newspapers in seconds flat
• Enjoy eBooks on an incredibly readable E Ink® reading screen
• Navigate your eBooks and other content on a color touchscreen
• Sync your eBooks to your iPhone, iPod Touch, BlackBerry, Mac or PC
• Share eBooks with friends using one of our eReader clients
• Read any eBook for free in a Barnes & Noble store
• Get special content and promotions in any Barnes & Noble store

The one thing I really like about Barnes & Noble selling an e-reader is that I expect I'll be able to visit my local store and demo the reader. That's something you can't do with the Kindle. I would keep in mind, though, that the nook is a first generation product. Even the Kindle has gone through one iteration now, and I think in many cases people who bought the initial model wished they had waited. This may or may not be the case with the nook.

As far as e-book formats go, the nook supports EPUB, the open e-book format. This is huge. Most of the new readers post-Kindle support this format. Kindle, by comparison, only supports their own proprietary format (the DX model also supports PDF). People do not want to be locked into proprietary formats. They want open formats, which allows them to view any content on any device. Kindle-formatted e-books are viewable only on the Kindle and it's associated applications (like the iPhone Kindle app).

I'll leave you with possibly one of the most tantalizing features of the nook:

The Nook also has software that will detect when a consumer walks into a store so that it can push out coupons and other promotions like excerpts from forthcoming books or suggestions for new reading. While in stores, Nook owners will be able to read any e-book through streaming software.

In my opinion, it's this sort of interactivity which eventually will lead to the demise of the printed book.

The nook is available now for pre-order, will be available for purchase Nov. 30, and be in stores Nov. 28.

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You may have noticed a recent slant in my posting topics towards e-books and electronic publishing. This is not without purpose. For a while now I've been considering foregoing the traditional publishing route in favor of the electronic, self-publishing one. The reasons for this are many. For one, it's disheartening (yet encouraging at the same time) when established writers divulge sales information that poignantly dismisses the traditional route.

Second, this writing thing is not my only thing. It's something I thoroughly enjoy, yet I don't expect to make a living from it. I'm not saying I wouldn't want to make a living from it, but the realities are that my day job will likely always pay more, and I'm at the point in my life where I'm not willing to downsize or give-up my lifestyle (such as it is). Perhaps going the traditional route is a game for the young.

Or perhaps it just isn't the route to take at all anymore, at any age, because the direction of things has changed.

Traditional vs. Electronic Publishing

Currently, I don't have a publisher. Nor do I have an agent. In truth, I wonder sometimes if I really need either. You see, the rules themselves have been altered. No longer do writers need to rely solely on publishers for exposure and distribution. Sure, publishers can give your career a boost out of the starting gate. But so much of it relies on the author taking it from there that the publisher/agent model soon becomes a hindrance and, in some cases, a detriment: while said writer is engaging in all the work, guess who's siphoning off the majority of the profit?

However, there's no doubt publishers have the potential to raise the bar in terms of quality. I'll be the first to admit that you have to wade through a lot of junk on the Kindle store, for example, before you find quality in the "self-published bin" (there's not really a "self-published bin", by the way). Publishers therefore have the potential to act as gatekeepers, holding back the stuff that probably shouldn't be seen by readers until it's been polished a bit more.

While I admire and envy those who have found success via the traditional publishing route, I'm seriously considering that it might not be right for me. I already have a day job; the reality of the situation is that I'll always be more self-sustaining doing that than writing. But I love putting words to paper, and especially concocting fantastic stories and the characters that populate them. Fortunately, there is hope for people like myself, and it is e-books.

E-books

E-books and the proliferation of high-quality e-reading devices are becoming the new medium for reading. Paper books will no doubt have their place for years to come, but it is a dying model. The world has gone green, and convenience coupled with instant gratification is a powerful driving force. Amazon, for example, touts their Kindle reading device with 3G wireless with this line: "...think of a book and you'll be reading it in less than 60 seconds". Competition in the e-reader space is growing every day. This, in turn, will continue to drive prices down. With many e-books already selling for $0.99, and price battles going on between the major players, this becomes a win-win for consumers.

But it's also a win for writers. Amazon, Scribd, even our own web sites become our distribution warehouses and provide the exposure we might not otherwise obtain. The middle-men—namely publishers and agents—are taken out of the equation. With more hands removed from the pot, the shares of those remaining gets bigger.

However...

Going electronic is not for everyone. For one, it's unlikely you can make a living off it (yet). But then everyone's definition of 'living' is a bit different, so a decision of this nature really becomes a personal one.

It's not an easy decision to make, either. I wonder in that you don't risk alienating yourself from ever breaking into the traditional model by jumping into the electronic one. Maybe that doesn't matter.

Of course, what I'm really talking about here is self-publishing, which has been around for a long time. Some authors (Paolini comes to mind) self-published, only to find great success under the traditional model after the fact. Is electronic publishing therefore any different?

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Amazon cut the price on their Kindle digital e-book reader again. This marks the second price cut of the year so far (the previous cut was $60). With Christmas rapidly approaching, and more digital readers hitting the market all the time (now, Barnes & Noble is going to sell one), one wonders if we won't see another price cut—or possible holiday price reductions—before the year is out.

As it stands now, here's the current breakdown of Kindle models and prices:

The $259 and $279 Kindle differ only in that the latter allows one to download e-books when traveling abroad (outside the United States). The Kindle DX is the deluxe, super-sized Kindle, with a larger reading screen and more memory. Scott Hanselman, a technologist whom I follow on Twitter and whose blog and podcast I read and listen to regularly, has a nice post up about the differences between the Kindle and the Kindle DX if you'd like to read more on that.

Given this most recent price reduction, I'd like to dig up an older post of mine, How much does the Kindle 2 really cost?, where I cited an article where the author ran through a cost-justification of the Kindle 2. The author makes a comparison between buying a Kindle and accompanying e-books (at a rate of 2 per month) vs... buying the same number of traditional paperbacks.

So, buying paperbacks:

I could get free shipping if I ordered two paperbacks at a time and didn't mind waiting five to nine business days for them to ship. If I chose standard shipping (three business days) instead, I'd pay about $4.88 for two paperbacks mailed together. I wouldn't be charged tax. (I live in San Francisco. How much you pay in shipping or taxes depends on where you live.) The $4.88 shipping for two books a month would equal $58.56 a year. That brings my two-paperback-a-month habit (books + shipping) to $447.12 per year.

Versus buying the Kindle (remember, the cited price of the reader does not include the recent price cut, nor does it include the price cut of $60 from three months ago):

My Kindle 2 order totaled $365.98, which includes $359 for the e-book reader and $6.98 for three-business-day shipping. The average price of the top 10 Amazon Kindle nonfiction bestsellers is $9.78. If I bought two e-books per month, I'd spend $19.56 per month or $234.72 a year (shipping isn't necessary). My grand total for the year: $600.70, which includes the Kindle 2 and 24 e-books.

That gives us $447 vs.. $600. A $153 difference. If you extrapolate this out to 2 years as the author of the article does (excluding the cost of the Kindle on the second year, of course), those figures go to $894 and $835. By buying the Kindle (at yesterday's prices) you wind up saving $59.

Now, let's look at that in light of the recent Kindle price reduction.

The first scenario obviously doesn't change, so our annual price of buying 2 paperbacks/month remains at $447.

The first year Kindle price plus e-books, however, goes down to $500 (Kindle: $259; s/h: $6.98; e-books: $234.72) from $600.

That makes for a 1 year difference of $53 in favor of buying traditional books (much better than the initial figure of $153). Over 2 years, however, we have $894 for traditional books and $734, a difference in favor of the Kindle of $160. Before the price reduction, that savings for 2 years of Kindle ownership was $59.

Given all of that, the question is this: Is now the time to buy a Kindle?

I think not.

While I think the long term cost savings begin to warrant the cost of the device, I'm willing to wait just a little bit longer to see what holiday price reductions Amazon institutes. Competition in the digital reader space is increasing, driving prices down. I'd like to see how much further they fall before I pull the trigger.

2009-10-09 Update: No sooner do I publish this post when word gets around Twitter that Barnes & Noble is planning a color e-book reader, to be released next year. A reason to put off buying a monochrome reader, or does this have further potential to drive prices of existing readers down? Guess we'll wait and see.

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There are a lot of eBook file formats: TXT, HTML, AZW, DOC/DOCX, OPF, TR2/3, ARG, DTB, FB2, XML, CHM, PDF, PS, DJVU, LIT, PDB, DNL… ok, I think I'll stop now. It's obvious that while one file format might be a nice ideal, it is anything but reality. Not everyone uses the same software, and there's no such thing as a universal e-book file format that all market players have adopted (EPUB stands out, but not every eBook retailer uses it).

At its simplest form, e-books are just text files. But text files are too simple. They don't contain the characteristics necessary for an e-book to rival a printed book in appearance. Also, TXT files do not support DRM.

E-book readers—both software and hardware—are a topic unto itself. For this post, I therefore want to focus just on the file formats that these (software or hardware-based) readers support. Also, I'll only focus on those formats I feel are the most relevant. It's not very realistic, IMO, for someone to read an e-book of any length in TXT format or even HTML. Other formats, such as PKG (which was a file format for reading e-books on an Apple Newton), are outdated enough to not garner further attention.

So, here are the formats and a bit of information about each.

AZW	AZW is the file format used by the Amazon Kindle e-reader. It is proprietary to Amazon and is DRM protected. The best way to both convert a file to this format and publish on Amazon's Kindle store is to use their Digital Text Platform site. Their recommendation for having a successful conversion: The preferred format for uploading content is as a single HTML file. To include images, provide a ZIP file that includes the images as well as the HTML file that refers to them (check the formatting guides to find out how to link to images from HTML). The HTML and image files all have to be in the same folder inside the zip file. I've gone through this process to publish my novel, The Hall of the Wood, on the Kindle store; it is a pretty painless process. Note: A lot of people/reviewers think Kindle only supports AZW. This isn't true. Kindle also supports (natively) TXT, PDF, Audible (Audible Enhanced (AA, AAX)), MP3, unprotected MOBI and (through conversion) HTML and DOC.
PDB	PDB is DRM-protected format advocated by Palm Digital Media. It stands for Palm Database, and originally was intended as a file format meant to be read on the Palm handheld device. It seems from looking around that many retailers support this format and that it isn't necessarily required to have a Palm handheld to read files in this format as software for PC's or Mac's is available. Also, the format is supported on many other handheld devices.
PDF	PDF stands for Portable Document File. It was established by Adobe in hopes of creating a universal file format to promote the ready exchange of data, specifically document files. DRM-free PDF's can be read by the free Adobe Reader. PDF's protected by DRM can be read by Adobe Digital Editions, which has the ability to allow or deny access to a downloaded PDF depending on the conditions under which the file was obtained. If an e-book was outright purchased, you should be good to go, though you will have to read the PDF using Digital Editions and will be further restricted from saving or printing the e-book. On the other hand, if you checked an e-book out from an online library and that e-book contains DRM, chances are the e-book will "expire" after the loan period is up, at which time you will no longer be able to view the e-book. PDF documents can be created by any number of freely available software converters. My preferred method of conversion is to use the Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS add-in for Microsoft  Word 2007. Of course, there's always Adobe Acrobat Professional, too.
ODF	OpenDocument Format is an XML-based file format used to represent spreadsheets, presentations, word processing documents, and more. While ODF has emerged as an industry standard, the specification having been ratified by over 600 technology companies (including Microsoft and Adobe), it is of some note that while applications such as Microsoft Office support ODF, that suite also still defaults to its own proprietary file formats. ODF is, however, the default file format for OpenOffice, a popular open source alternative to Microsoft Office. ODT, or OpenDocument Text, is the word processing specific version of the ODF file format standard. Similarly, there are presentation (ODP), spreadsheet (ODS), and other formats.
RTF	The Rich Text Format was developed by Microsoft in the 1980's. Not surprising, it is an 8-bit based format, and while it can address larger character sets, it is through means that relegate the format to mostly a legacy role. Still, the format is quite prolific; converting to RTF is supported by most word processing and other applications.
DOC/DOCX	The default file format supported by Microsoft Word. With Word 2007, Microsoft introduced the DOCX format, which is billed as an open, XML format that, unfortunately, has not been as widely adopted as Microsoft might have hoped. One of the nice things about the DOCX format is that it results in much leaner files. However, it is not backward compatible with previous versions of Word.
EPUB	EPUB is an e-book specific format engineered by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) and intended to replace the Open eBook (OEB) standard. EPUB includes optional support for DRM. The standard is supported by the Sony Reader and Apple's iPhone, as well as other devices. As far as converting a document to the EPUB format, it looks like there are several options: BookGlutton hosts an HTML-to-EPUB file converter, Google Code contains a software library called epub-tools which looks suitable for batch style conversion of files, and LexCycle has something called Stanza which looks to be a desktop application. I'll have to give each of them a whirl to see which is the best option.
PRC/MOBI	The PRC/MOBI file format is based on the Open eBook (OEB) standard (which I discovered was superseded by the EPUB standard; see above), and is considered one of the most prolific e-book file formats for mobile devices. The biggest proponent of this format is Mobipocket. Mobipocket offers both reader and publisher software, both free. Mobipocket Reader will run on PC's as well as a number of handheld devices. There are two ways to use Mobipocket Creator to author e-books: use the application to create the e-book and then add content and design from there or, the more practical approach, import Word, text, or PDF documents. The PRC/MOBI format does, of course, support DRM.
BBeB (LRX/LRF)	BBeB, or Broadband eBook, is Sony's proprietary file format for e-books, as if we needed yet another one. It comes in two varieties: LRX for encrypted (DRM) e-books and LRF for unencrypted e-books. Sony has their own e-book store where one can download e-books in these formats. The newest version of the Sony Reader is a device widely expected to give Amazon's Kindle a run for the money. In order to read books in the BBeB format, you will need a Sony Reader, much like the AZW format is married to the Kindle. However, Sony opened the Reader up so that it also supports the EPUB format. This is a good thing, and leaves the Kindle as virtually the only device that locks its users into a proprietary format. I haven't yet found a viable method by which to publish e-books in this format. Two options have come to light for converting from a more standard format to BBeB: 1.) As ZenEngineer points out in the comments below, there is a freeware program called Calibre that will perform the conversion. 2.) Also, there is the bbebinder open-source project hosted on Google Code which converts HTML and TXT files to the BBeB format.
LIT	This is a Microsoft-specific file format whose time I can't help but wonder may be at an end. LIT files are readable only on Microsoft Reader, and while there are versions of the software for PC's and handhelds, the major players in those areas (Amazon, Sony, Apple) have their own proprietary formats. Creation of LIT files seems a bit problematic as well. There is a Read in Microsoft Reader add-in for Microsoft Word 2000 and higher, but "higher" here does not include Word 2007. That kind of tells me the format is being abandoned by Microsoft.

References/Further Reading

• Comparison of eBook Formats
• Before Choosing an E-Book, Pondering the Format
• Why Kindle Should Be An Open Book
• E-book Conversion
• 100 Useful Links for eBook Lovers

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