Help!
When I first looked into epublishing, I came across a helpful website that started me in the right direction. Unfortunately I didn't bookmark the page, stupid me. I did send the author a thank you but I do wish I could link you to her site here. Instead, I hope this page will help; at least a little.
Although the largest market for book sales is still the printed book, I really believe that will change. Especially now that you don't need a dedicated reading device and ebooks are cheaper than their paper counterparts. The other great thing about epublishing is you retain all rights to your book and full control over the content. If you ever come across a site that claims you need to sign over your rights just leave it. After a lot of research I settled on two sites. One is Smashwords. They are easy to deal with, have a low commission rate, and make it easy for Canadian authors. That last point was especially important to me. The other company is Amazon. They have an easy interface for helping you design a print book and they offer a service that allows you to sell your book around the world. This gives indie authors the same distribution as traditional authors.
Although the largest market for book sales is still the printed book, I really believe that will change. Especially now that you don't need a dedicated reading device and ebooks are cheaper than their paper counterparts. The other great thing about epublishing is you retain all rights to your book and full control over the content. If you ever come across a site that claims you need to sign over your rights just leave it. After a lot of research I settled on two sites. One is Smashwords. They are easy to deal with, have a low commission rate, and make it easy for Canadian authors. That last point was especially important to me. The other company is Amazon. They have an easy interface for helping you design a print book and they offer a service that allows you to sell your book around the world. This gives indie authors the same distribution as traditional authors.
Need help with formatting or designing a book cover?
If you are having trouble formatting your book for epublishing or print there are a few things you can do.
"Mark's List" at Smashwords contains a list of people who can format and design covers for your ebook at a reasonable price.
Amazon has a similar service available. You can chose just formatting or just cover art or both, depending on your needs.
I can also help you format your book for epublishing or print (sorry I do charge for the work).
I have WordPerfect, Word 2010, and Open Office on my computer so I can handle most files.
Under 10K words - $10
10K-20K $15
20K-45K $20
45K-80K $25
80K-100K $30
100-125K $35
"Mark's List" at Smashwords contains a list of people who can format and design covers for your ebook at a reasonable price.
Amazon has a similar service available. You can chose just formatting or just cover art or both, depending on your needs.
I can also help you format your book for epublishing or print (sorry I do charge for the work).
I have WordPerfect, Word 2010, and Open Office on my computer so I can handle most files.
Under 10K words - $10
10K-20K $15
20K-45K $20
45K-80K $25
80K-100K $30
100-125K $35
Smashwords
Smashwords has a lot of benefits. They ship to Apple, Barnes & Noble, Diesel, Kobo, Page Foundry, and a few other companies. Publishing through Smashwords is free. To learn how just click on the first link. Both the Smashwords Style Guide and the Smashwords Marketing Guide are free and you should download them to read over before you attempt to publish.
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Amazon's CreateSpace for Books
They offer a very simple publishing service or one with all the bells and whistles and everything in between. They have an editing service which is very useful. So far, this is the only place I've found that allows you to publish a print version of your book and sell it around the world. I found their book making interface a lot of fun to use. Okay, maybe I'm just a nerd but I think everyone will find it easy to use even if they don't have as much fun with it as I did. You can sign up for a free account and test it out for youself.
Note: In order to distribute around the world you have to choose their Expanded Distribution. |
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Amazon's CreateSpace for Music
I thought I would include this for all my musician friends - just as a heads-up because I like the version for books. Just like the book version signing up and testing out the system is free. I have read up on this but I don't know enough about the music business to know what kinds of things might bother a musician so I won't offer a lot of comment here. Maybe someone will get back to me with some feed back on this service.
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Amazon's CreateSpace for Film
My comments on this service is the same as the one for music. And no, I don't know why the button for film is so much smaller than the buttons for books and music but the little button is all they have.
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