The Ebook Ebook

By Michael Booth

The Ebook Ebook guides aspiring author/publishers through the wilds of ebook publishing and marketing. The author explains writers' options at every stage of the e-publishing odyssey. Booth's research for The Ebook Ebook is as scrupulous as his writing is a pleasure to read. This is a book which will not only save author/publishers untold grief, but will give them a morale boost at the same time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Booth
• Release date: Sep 25, 2010
• ISBN: 9788461440061

Michael Booth

Michael Booth is a journalist, broadcaster, and keynote speaker. He is the author of several works of non-fiction, including the award-winning, international best-seller, The Almost Nearly Perfect People and Super Sushi Ramen Express. He is a correspondent for Monocle magazine and Monocle M24 radio, as well as other international publications. His works have been adapted by BBC radio in the UK and NHK TV in Japan, and translated into over twenty languages.

Book preview

The Ebook Ebook

Michael Booth

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Michael Booth

ISBN: 9788461440061

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. It you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

Preface

Like All the Best Things in Life, This Book Was an Accident

Surprise! This Ebook Is Not About Fine-Art Printmaking

What This Book Is; What It Isn’t

Chapter 1

Just What Is an Ebook Anyway?

Free Online Ebook Self-Publishing Rears Its Beautiful Head

Do You Need More Convincing?

Is the Real Book About to Disappear?

Weary of the Old Way? Discouraged by Rejection Slips? The Last Laugh is Yours!

What Has Happened in the Publishing Industry That the Media Devote So Much Space to Ebooks Lately?

Ebooks are Deadly Machines for Eliminating Middlemen

Some Economic Good News for a Change

Chapter 2

More Ebook Advantages for Writers and (Some) Publishers

Your Ebook Affords Your Readers So Many Advantages

A Trickle Is Becoming a Tsunami — A Quick Look at Ebook Distribution Numbers

It’s a Wonderful (Digital) World

Nothing Is Possible Without the Internet — Get Used to It

Chapter 3

Prepare Your Ebook — What Are You Waiting For? Getting Published Has Never Been So Easy

How Does a Writer Get Started Publishing His/Her Own Ebooks?

Mrs. Mae Horn’s Advice: Make an Outline

Mind-Mapping Sounds Like Something Out of Star Trek — And It Is

Your Cover Doesn’t Just Cover and Your Title Doesn’t Just Title

What to Do with the Front Matter? Put Most of It at the Back

The Three Secrets of Writing: Sit Down and Write, Write, Write

Some Copyright Nuts and ISBN Bolts

What Do You Do When You’re Finished? Who Said ‘Finished?’

Chapter 4

Look Complicated? Get Some Help

The Mother Cat Editing Process

It’s Probably Better if Your Expert Is an Ebook Specialist

Chapter 5

Mommy, Where do Ebooks Come From?

In Passing He Invented Hypertext Links

Practical Apps

Early Adopters

E-Reader Evolution

Steve Jobs Upsets the Ebook Apple Cart

Chapter 6

The Format Wars: Proprietary vs. Open Solutions

Enter Amazon

Converting Your Personal Documents for the Kindle

Converting PDF or DOCX Files

To Send and Convert Your Personal Documents:

The Secret Which Will Set You Free

Chapter 7

How the Internet Body-Snatched Marketing and Changed Your Life

The Times They Are a‘Changing

Online PR Has Made It Possible for You to Do It Yourself, Better

Communication with Customers Is No Longer a Letter-in-a-Bottle Monologue

Time-Honored Word of Mouth Goes Viral

The Web Is the Web; The Spider Is You

The Web Log Within You

More Advantages, More Work

Images and Videos

Social Networking Is Big, But How Well Does It Sell Books?

A Social Networking Site That Will Work for You

Make Yourself Findable

Suddenly You Feel Like a Circus Performer Spinning Plates on Poles

The Online Publishing Services Are Your Best Allies in Launching Your Book

Take It from a Pro

Your Product is Not Your Book — It’s You and Your Book

Guaranteed Success!

Chapter 8

Your Ebook as a Business Venture — Life is Just One Big Business Plan

We’re Talking About Business; Bookselling Is a Lot Like Selling Manhole Covers

Do You Like Writing Fantasy?

Chapter 9

Battle in the E-reader Jungle

Will OLED Technology Be The Next Step in Displays?

41 E-readers Baked in a Pie

Breaking E-Reader News

Ebooks for Business Use

Print on Demand Publishing (PoD) as a Compliment to Ebooks, or Vice Versa

Chapter 10

To DRM or Not to DRM, That Is the Question

The Pros

The Cons

Social DRM, The Soft DRM Option

Chapter 11

You Are Not Alone

One of Life’s Great Satisfactions is Not to Have Missed the Boat

The Meek Shall Inherit Book Publishing

Ebook Glossary

The Ebook Ebook

Now the Publisher Is You!

This book is a navigation chart for avoiding the dangerous reefs and rip tides of the new publishing mare nostrum. If it can fill in the gaps in your e-publishing knowledge and help you to avoid a shipwreck in your publishing projects, it will have been worth your time and money.

Preface

Like Almost All the Best Things in Life, This Book Was an Accident

What’s a guy like you doing writing a book like this? I asked myself. It’s not a long story. I’m an online fine-art-printmaking publisher. Over the years our printmaking websites accumulated a lot of good content, and it seemed a shame not to gather up the best of those articles and publish them as a book. When the new wave of online ebook self-publishing arrived, that seemed to be the way to go.

It looked simple. All we had to do was to clean up our web content, knock out some introductory text, create front and back covers, and upload the whole shebang to Amazon’s Digital Text Platform publishing service. They would then format it automatically and offer it for sale in the Kindle store. We would just wait for the compliments and reviews to roll in, not to mention the money. What could be simpler? Like everything else, however, it soon began to look more complicated.

So I started looking into it, a task which led me into a maze of self-publishing platforms, authors’ services, low-grade entrepreneurial schemes, format issues, digital rights management questions, e-reader compatibility choices, marketing tactics, and social networking strategies, all being touted by experts of all sorts, all of them with their own agendas. If I were going to publish an ebook there were a lot of decisions to make, but the objective information on which to base them was skimpy and confusing. Don’t get me wrong, there was plenty of information, too much in fact. But most of it was designed more to sell me something than to offer useful solutions. Everybody with interests in the business was skewing the information to their own benefit. If all that wasn’t confusing enough, all my options were morphing and multiplying at Internet speed.

I didn’t come out the other end of that maze for a couple of months. A few days into what turned out to be a period of intense research, it occurred to me that I probably wasn’t the only one faced with that cacophony of information en route to the publication of their first ebook. I suspected that many writers, in view of that panorama, would give up and turn back. Without some reliable and disinterested advice regarding their best ebook self-publishing and marketing options, a lot of worthy authors would not bother to take the first step.

Surprise! This Ebook Is Not About Fine-Art Printmaking

That group of writers who needed more — and more reliable — information before embarking on their ebook projects looked to me like a market. So I started nosing around, consulting my writer and publisher friends, and following the online commentaries on the subject. As I suspected, most of them were unclear on what publishing tools were available and what the options were. So I planted a Google Alert with a few ebookish keyword phrases (ebook publishing, online