Question: If you publish your book only in electronic form, is it good or bad?
Answer: If you indie-publish your work as an eBook, whether it’s “good” or “bad” will largely depend on the writing.
If you market it properly, you’ll make some money.
Category Archives: eBook
Writers don’t need publishing companies. They haven’t needed publishing companies for more than a decade.
Writers also shouldn’t self-publish. With the maturation of the indie publishing community, there are professionals (the exact same professionals who work for publishing companies) who can help any anyone with a manuscript go from writer to author.
Scribd, the subscription-based content platform has apparently alerted its publishing partners that it will be dropping a number of romance and erotica titles from its ebook catalog. Smashwords CEO Mark Coker announced the news on the Smashwords website yesterday, along with the estimate that Scribd will drop 80-90% of the Smashwords romance and erotica titles. Mark is a strong proponent of indie publishing, and has been critical about the viability of a subscription model for ebooks (Amazon has updated its author compensation model for their Kindle Unlimited subscription platform starting July 1, 2015; authors now get paid “per page” read).
From Mark Coker’s post:
Scribd, the fast-growing ebook subscription service, today announced dramatic cuts to their catalog of romance and erotica titles.
There are many reasons that authors fail. The most glaringly obvious one is that they don’t treat their writing as a business.
Scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed, I came across a post that seemed to indicate that an eBook listed on Amazon was showing the wrong content when a potential buyer clicked on the “look inside” feature. The poster was “damning” the Look Inside feature.
So I asked a simple question: Did the original poster call and ask why the wrong content was showing?
The response showed that they had not done so.
Here’s the thing: YOU are the author. YOU are your business. YOUR BOOK is your product. Take some damned responsibility for it! Act like a professional!
Further examination showed that the eBook in question – which I looked up, accessed the “look inside” feature and downloaded the sample for – had been first published on December 19, 2013. By using the post date of the FB complaint, the date the interior file was updated can be extrapolated to March 27, 2015.
The eBook has no reviews.
Question:
What Windows application can I use to create beautifully looking e-books, withe possibility to export in both PDF and Kindle?
Answer:
There are a few options.
But first: PDF isn’t an ebook format. Please don’t make the mistake that others have by trying to sell a PDF file. If you want to create an ebook, there are two formats: ePub and Amazon’s format. That’s it. PDF is for creating fixed-format documents; eBooks are reflowable files that allow a reader to read them in the most comfortable way possible; larger font, smaller font, font they like to read the most, landscape or portrait, etc. PDF files don’t play well with eReaders or apps, and they’re – ultimately – a format for making a document look the same on screen as it does if it were printed; it’s a print format, not an ebook format.
To your answer: