Podcast: Ebooks Q&A With Joshua Tallent From EBookArchitects

JP: Hi everyone. This is Joanna Penn with The Creative Penn podcast. Today I’m interviewing Joshua Tallent from ebookarchitects.com but first I’ve got a few updates for you just to keep you in touch with what’s going on and try and make this a bit more of a personal podcast. Okay, so my novel which is actually now called, I guess working title is Pentecost, because I found that’s actually one of the themes of the novel. It is a religious thriller so that’s pretty exciting. Okay, so my word count currently is 24,182 words of very first draft writing and I have a goal of 40,000 words by mid April. That’s probably not such a big goal. I’m just finding at the moment I just don’t have that much time. My work is – my day job is particularly tiring and busy at the moment and I’m also trying to learn to write a novel at the same time. So, you’ll be seeing lots of blog posts on novel writing aspects in the coming months. I do have a good plot, I’m happy with the plot and I know what I want to say. It’s just not coming out in the way I want it to which I think is a common issue with writing a novel. Definitely very different to writing non fiction.

One of the things I am finding useful and I mentioned this last time, is the Write Or Die software which actually gets me to write down even if it’s broad brush strokes of what I want to portray but it is really first draft stuff but I am enjoying it. When I actually get down to it I really enjoy it and I’ve also been listening to rain, you know, rain on iTunes which is really good cause it’s been so hot here in Brisbane that it’s just – it’s really been quite out of everybody’s comfort zone. And listening to the rain has actually made me feel quite comforted and I guess being British the rain helps me. Yeah, so that’s pretty fun. As research I’ve been reading a lot of Holly Lisle’s books and also Larry Books from Story Fix, on characterisation. I’ve also been reading Soul Stein which is an older book actually but really very good and I’ve also joined Robert McKee’s story log which is video based for writers. So, I’m basically a beginner with the craft of writing so all of this is really helping me learn.

So, yeah I’m still very busy at my day job. Somebody asked me what I do and I basically I’m an IT consultant for a large mining company in Australia, in Brisbane. At the moment I’m just sort of doing banking, setting up banking for this company so it’s interesting but it’s not obviously what I’d love to be doing full time. So yes I do this blog and the podcast for fun and not income. Because I’m I guess really busy and tired at work in the heat I’ve cancelled my live Brisbane workshop, full day workshop as it exhausts me and it takes about three days. And I’ve been turning down speaking engagements that are not directly related to writing. I am speaking on the Gold Coast this weekend however, and the Bali writer’s retreat is definitely on for October. So, I’d love to see you there if you’re interested in Bali and we’ll be doing a lot on author platform as well as actually getting your book done. Even though I might be struggling with my novel, I have still managed to get through three non fiction books. Anyway, if you’re interested in Bali then it’s thecreativepenn.com/Bali and there is some details there or details on the main page.

Okay, industry news. Interesting and I will be blogging, I have – or I will have blogged about this by the time you listen to the broadcast. Simon & Schuster who are a huge publisher have started a new site, they just opened a new sit simonandschuster.biz. It’s a new web site and it’s good this page for author resources for online tips and tools and they’re actually advocating that authors use blogs, social media book sites and video. So, interesting to see that the author platform idea is now mainstream. I’m actually going to be relaunching my Author 2.0 online course at some point, probably after Easter, but I’m also going to do some many modules I guess available on each topic. I’m thinking of doing blogging, podcasting, e-books and social networking as separate modules but do please e-mail me or leave comment if you have any particular things that you are interested in. You can also go to author2zero.com, that’s author number two zero dot com forward slash sign up to put in your email address if you’re interested in pre release specials that I will be doing. Okay, I think that’s about it. So, let’s get on with the interview and as ever please do leave comments and let me know what you’d like to hear or if you have any recommendations for speakers for interviews on the blog I’d love to hear from you.

Welcome back to The Creative Penn Podcast and today I’m interviewing Joshua Tallent. Joshua is the author of Kindle Formatting and is a specialist in formatting books for the Kindle and other e-book platforms. He’s also the founder of ebookarchitects.com, converting print books into high quality formatted e-books and taking all the pain away from us non techie authors. So welcome Joshua.

JT: Thank you. Good to be here.

JP: Oh, thanks for coming on the show. So, maybe for those people who haven’t heard of you yet, maybe you could tell us briefly a bit about yourself and about your businesses.

JT: Well, I’m an e-book formatter, developer by trade. I’ve been doing e-books for about seven years. I started out working for a software company working on their proprietary format and then as the Kindle came out and e-books started to take off, I found that I could help people like – especially independent authors who were having problems trying to get their books into right format. So, I kind of jumped on that and started answering questions in the Kindle forums and it turned into a little side job. And I thought, oh this is great, I can do this on the side and still work my day job and then about nine months later it had grown to about thirty and forty [0:06:54], yeah it’s time to change. So, I started E-book Architects back in January of 2009 and so it’s been smooth sailing and really great. The e-book world is growing very fast and it’s great to just kind of sit on top of the wave and watch as everybody figures out how to do e-books and how to get their e-books out there for people to buy and it’s a great place to be right now.

JP: And I guess – I really started my blog about a year ago as well and I’ve been aware of you I guess since then, but it seems like things have really moved on in that one year since January 2009. And like I said, you’ve been speaking everywhere and e-books are everywhere so can you maybe outline what has been changing in the world of e-books in the last year or so.

JT: Some of the biggest changes have been in the device market. You’ve seen a lot of devices kind of crop up in the last year. Before the Kindle came out in 2007, in November 2007, Sony already had its reader out and it was already – it had already been in the market for a while and nobody really knew what E Ink was or what the devices that they could use to read e-books were, but Amazon came out with a device and all of a sudden the market just got inundated. And then in the last year we’ve seen a lot of new devices come out. There’s probably twenty or thirty E Ink devices out there. Some of them are only in certain parts of the world, based for certain geographical areas but other than that, I mean it’s a pretty wide open field. And we’ve seen a lot of people come together behind the EPUB format which is the industry standard format and that’s really good to see. Cause then someone buys a book, they don’t have to worry too much about being able to read it on just one device like you get with some proprietary formats like the Kindle format. The restrictions are not quite as bad with that, with the EPUB format so it’s great. There is a lot of good technologies happening.

The iPad obviously is a really good thing to see and really interesting change in the market and e-books are growing quickly. If you look at the numbers – you know IDPF, the industry groups that does the EPUB format and manages the EPUB format, they release statistics every quarter about e-book sales and how things are increasing. And every year, just year over year the last couple of years, there’s been increasing 150, 200% and that’s great for authors, it’s great for publishers, it’s great for anybody who wants to sell their content and especially for authors. I have to say, the last year has been great for independent authors who don’t have necessarily the backing and all the money and all the things that a big publishing company might have. Being able to self publish your book and being able to, especially self publish your e-book and get it out there in the hands of people, is much easier now than it was just two years ago.

JP: No, absolutely and I guess maybe I could ask your opinion on the whole sort of U.S. versus international market because we only got the international Kindle just before Christmas and I believe Canada only got it this year. Is the rest of the world catching up I guess with the U.S.?

JT: Yeah, in some ways the rest of the world has been behind the U.S. in this and in some ways it hasn’t been. The Kindle really is the big dog in the e-book world so it’s great to see it go international and I think that is a sign that e-books are going to spread. And you see a lot of – I mean I’ve been contacted by certain people in like Europe, Eastern Europe and South America who are looking at, you know, they don’t have e-books in their country. It’s completely open market and they’re trying to get it on e-book retailing presence and tyring to figure out how to do conversions and things like that. And it’s definitely growing very quickly in other parts of the world but I think one of the things Amazon has going for it is kind of a unified front and that’s why Sony wasn’t able to necessarily get the traction even though the Sony reader was available internationally for a while before the Kindle came out. It’s that front that Amazon has, that fact that they really do provide a lot of the book buying online, they’re [0:11:09] to move international so easily. It’s great.

Hopefully we will see it happen and I really do hope to see this, is we’ll see devices that will come up in certain areas like in Australia where you are, that are specific to the market and the people in the area so that not everybody has to be on the same kind of device. You don’t have to be on the Kindle or the Sony but you can have a device that really is geared towards the needs of the people in that geographical area and that’s something that I think will happen in the next couple of years.

JP: That’s fantastic. So, I guess hopefully people listening to this call are interested in e-books in general but some people are still unconvinced. I regularly get emails from people saying, why do you talk about e-books so much and do you have any words I guess to say to one, authors and two readers as to why should they care about e-books.

JT: Well, e-books are in a lot of ways the way of the future. I mean there is – I don’t think print books will ever go out of style or ever stop being used. I still like reading print book periodically myself and that’s – there are some things that just never are never going to work very well as an e-book. But especially for fiction, especially for content that people want to be able to read easily, they don’t necessarily want to spend the twenty five dollars for a hard back, an e-book is a really good way to get your content, as an author to get your content into the hands of people who may not have even found you otherwise. If you’re an independent author and you’re not able to get your book distributed into the book stores, you’re having trouble getting that print distribution that you really would want, an e-book is a good way to meet your customer base in a way that you wouldn’t be doing in print. There is a lot of opportunities to get your book into a variety of retailers online in e-book formats and so it’s a good way for people to get to know you as an authors. Some authors actually will if they’ve got a couple of books. They’ll even make their older books available for free or for a couple of dollars so it’s a really easy buy in for someone and those people get hooked. They read your content, ‘Oh wow this is a great story, I really like this’, or ‘this is a great – they have a great writing style, I like this author’ and they’ll come back and they’ll buy your print books and they’ll buy – they’ll buy into you as an author. And that’s a – it’s a really good way to market yourself and market your content.

As far readers are concerned one of the biggest things for readers is just the lower price point. A lot of people buy e-book devices and they’ll spend $300 on a device because they’re not spending $15, $20, $25 on a book. They’re spending $10 on a book or $7 on a book and it makes it a lot easier for people to purchase content and purchase more content and be able to read more and engage more with the content that they want to read.

JP: Absolutely and I talked about this before and business books here in Australia are around $40 Australian which is I think is around $30 U.S. so we’re really penalised for business books especially and they cost around $11 on the Kindle. So, it’s quite clear, that it’s quite obvious that it is cheaper to buy it on the Kindle. The other thing I was going to say there as well about you saying people getting hooked on multiple books, I think Joe Conrath was saying he’s got thirty odd books now I think on the Kindle and people tend to buy them all. So, as soon as he hooks somebody they will go and just read his whole backlist and they can just click the bottom and if there is another link to another one of this books and it just goes on and on and on doesn’t it. It’s brilliant.

JT: Exactly. Yeah it’s perfect.

JP: Brilliant. So, I mean I’m obviously a convert and so are you. I was just trying to be an evangelist out there for e-books. Okay, so I have published on the Kindle just basically but I wondered since your first site is Kindle formatting and you do have a book there on the topic, maybe you could just briefly outline the steps someone would need to do to convert like just a plain text novel into a Kindle book?

JT: Well, assuming you’ve got say a Microsoft Word document that you’re trying to convert into a Kindle book, the process is not really that difficult. You can take that Word document and make sure that it’s clean and you don’t have any editorial problems with it. Proofread it, get a friend to edit for you if you can and then go through the book and actually do as much clean up on the content, the formatting as you can. Microsoft Word especially it has a styles process and a lot of people don’t know about the styling system that’s built into Word but you can learn about it very easily. Go in and style your book, use content styles on your headings, use them on the paragraphs and make sure that’s nice and clean. Page breaks in between your chapter, in front of your chapters and things like that. Then once you’ve got it nice and clean then you can do a couple of things. One, you can import it directly into say Mobipocket Creator, which is really the best way to do that. You want to get the book into Mobipocket Creator and it converts it into HTML and then you can go into that HTML file and clean it up. Or you can save the file from Microsoft Word into what they call filtered HTML which is kind of a cleaner HTML format that Word can create.

And then you go into the HTML, do a little bit of cleanup there and I’ve described that in my book, but that part even isn’t necessarily something you have to do if you’ve done a good job with the styles. And then you build the book as a Mobipocket book using Mobipocket creator and the process for that is very easy. It’s an easy interface to use and once you’ve built the book it gives you a PRC file. That .prc file is what you would upload to the Amazon digital text platform to publish and you’re good to go. There’s a lot of things that you can do as an Internet author to get your book out there that don’t really require a lot of techie-ness, that don’t really require you to dig into the HTML code or do anything like that.

JP: And there are some people now freaking out with all HTML and PRC and Mobipocket, so at what sort of level of techie-ness do people need and how can e-book architects help I guess? What do you offer to help other people?

JT: The level of techie-ness is basically if you’re good with Word and you know what you’re doing to Microsoft Word and you’re not afraid to try something new, getting into Mobipocket Creator. You could even upload that Word file directly to Amazon if you wanted to though I don’t usually suggest that. It’s not terrible. If you’re comfortable enough with the computer and you can play around with it, it should be pretty easy. What I do is I take that Word file and essentially follow that same kind of process, but because I’ve been doing this for seven years I’m really fast at it. So I can turn around what might take an author a couple of days or a couple of weeks even to try to figure out and hack through, I can usually do in about an hour of my work time. And that conversion process I get it into HTML and the benefit of using someone like me and their other people who do what I do as well, but the benefit of using e-book architects is that you’re getting a file that’s been cleaned up in the source code. We don’t do our editing in Microsoft Word. We do our creation in HTML, which is the base format for the Kindle. So you really – when you get into HTML it’s much more powerful. I have a lot more control over the formatting and how much – how things look and I can do little things to make a book just look really good on the Kindle device. And then there are some functionality things that you can do that like making way point navigation available in your book which essentially if you’re on the Kindle 2 or the Kindle DX, then you’re reading a book that has way points, you will see little dots in the location bar. And as you right click or left click on the [0:19:11] way controller, you can jump from chapter to chapter, section to section to those dots if they’re in the way point that are in the application bar. And that’s a really good feature for people who are reading a book, even a fiction book cause it gives a much – it’s kind of an easy navigation option. And then there is things like the embedded cover which I can create an embedded cover and put it up in the books so whenever someone goes to the very beginning of the book to the cover image, it’s actually full screen. There is no white space around it and it looks really nice and is a good feature to have in your books. So, those are the kinds of things, just little things that make a book go from being okay to being just fantastic.

JP: And I guess it is one of the most annoying things on the Kindle is when there are sort of badly formatted books that are hard to read and sometimes I resort to the native PDF thing and then the screen’s really tiny, the words are really tiny. So absolutely I think that’s brilliant. Can I ask about pricing. So, for example I’ve got a sixty thousand word just plain text book say that’s just in Microsoft Word, could you give me a price on that so people get an idea?

JT: Yeah. Usually the price for fiction and any kind of straight font text is going to be about $100. On a larger book, let’s say something that would end up being like three or four hundred pages in print, then maybe like a $150, but fiction books are really easy to do and as long as the formatting is not really weird and there is nothing really intense going on in the book as far as formatting is considered, $100 is pretty much the normal rate for a fiction book.

JP: Yeah, that’s brilliant, fantastic. So, highly affordable for most people and the authors who get their books on the Kindle I think are generally very pleased as long as their marketing obviously in getting the [0:21:06] so that’s brilliant. Okay, let’s move on. So, one question I also get a lot, I get children’s book authors, picture book authors, other sort of highly formatted text authors sort of emailing me and saying what is the most effective e-book format for them. Is it just PDF, what will the iPad, so do you have any answers for sort of those picture books and highly formatted books?

JT: It really kind of depends on the book itself. There are some things that you can do with a children’s book in say EPUB format or even Kindle format that are pretty good. It’s when you get into books that have lots of worksheets and that really would require someone – if they were in print someone would be sitting there writing, filling in a worksheet or writing content in the book, that’s the kind of thing you really can’t do as an e-book very well, that really should be kept as a PDF file. But when you’re doing say a children’s book, you can do a lot of really cool things with children’s books especially if you’re focusing in on a certain sized platform like the iPhone and you’re building say an application for the iPhone. You an do really nice things with those kinds of books. EPUB is a really good format for more intense formatting because EPUB is an open source standard, it has a lot more flexibility in formatting. So, I do suggest that people who have more intense formatting themes try to go with EPUB. One of the problems that EPUB has though on the counter point is that there are couple of different EPUB rendering engines, software programs that actually do that display of EPUB files. And so while you may make an EPUB file that looks really good on Sony reader, it may not look the same, actually probably won’t look the same on the iPhone in say the stanza application. So, you have to take that under consideration. Right now that’s probably the biggest limitation of the EPUB format is that problem of worrying about what your book is going to look like in the different areas.

So, a lot of times if you’ve got a very intense book and you have the ability to sell a PDF file, for right now that might be the best option for you. Is just to keep it in PDF, but if you’ve got the ability to play around with it a little bit and if you don’t mind not necessarily making it look exactly the same way that it looked in the print version, then you can play around and get it into the Kindle format or into EPUB format and it can look pretty good if you try really hard.

JP: And do you think that the apps for things like the iPad, and I think Amazon’s opened up the Kindle to developers, hasn’t it as well, so are apps the sort of way of the future or will books stay on the e-book reader apps I guess?

JT: I think books are here to stay. I mean applications, iPhone apps are really cool, it’s an easy way to get your book. Well, not necessarily easy but it’s a good way to get your book in front of a different type of audience then say someone who has a Stanza or someone who has an Iceberg reader or something on their iPhone, they [0:24:13] for books through the stores on those applications. But if you’re putting an app on the iPhone – I mean on the iTunes store then you’re hitting people who don’t even necessarily know anything about Stanza or any of these other applications that are kind of library systems. They can buy your book directly and install it on their iPhone that way. The iPad will change some things I think. I think the biggest thing the iPad is going to change, is it’s going to be hopefully more competition for Amazon on the front of ease of publishing. If Apple opens up their system like Amazon has, where anybody including independent authors can go and publish their content, then that will make the big difference. If Apple doesn’t do that and they’re still limiting themselves to only working with publishers, then I don’t think it will change very much at all cause really all the iPad is, is just a big iTouch, you know, iPod Touch. And a $500 price point is kind of steep for some people for something that may not do exactly what they’re willing to do. I don’t think it’s the killer application. I still think that dedicated e-book readers will be the primary way that people read electronic books in the future but the iPad has the potential to give Amazon a run for its money if Apple pulls it off the right way.

JP: No, absolutely and I really love my Kindle. Actually we all only have the black and white kind of – we don’t have the DX or I think the Kindle 2 or anything so we only have the basic one, but I absolutely love it, it’s brilliant. So, and that basic screen is what I actually like and I use my iPhone for different things. So, I agree with you there. Are you going guys going to be doing iPhone apps?

JT: Yeah, I’m actually working with the makers of Stanza. I’ve been putting this off and putting it off because I just don’t have time to mess with it right now to get my systems set up for it, but in the next few months we will be offering iPhone applications as an option for our clients, yeah.

JP: Fantastic. We’ll keep an eye out for that. That’s one of my goals this year is to get an iPhone app done, but there is so many options.

JT: Yeah.

JP: Okay. So, a couple more questions. We’re almost out of time. When do you think it is appropriate to have an e-book versus a print book or should you always have both?

JT: It really depends on the author and on the contents. Some books are just going to work better as an e-book especially things that, you know, if you’re going to be making a lot of changes to it because it’s say a fast moving business industry or something that you really need to get out right now because of something that’s going on politically or something that’s going on financially, that you want to get the content out there right away, e-books work really well for that kind of thing. If you’re writing fiction, I think you really should do both if you have ability because you’re going to hit a different market with print than you would with your books, and print books still sell more than e-books. E-books only make up a small percentage of the total sales in the publishing world so, you’re definitely going to – you’re missing out on sales if you don’t have a print book available. I think as far as timing is concerned, a lot of big publishers are moving to this let’s wait on the e-book, we’re going to wait four months before we release the e-book version. Personally I think it’s a bad idea. I think that authors – I mean publishers can make the decisions to sell the books at a later time but that doesn’t mean people are going to buy the print book instead of buying the e-book. I’ve got a Kindle. If I want to read a book I’m going to go look on the Kindle first and see if it’s available and see what the price is. And if I really, really, really want to read that book, I’m probably just going to wait until it comes out on the Kindle.

I think most people who have Kindles have that kind – or have e-book readers have that kind of thought. They have spent $300 or $200 or whatever on a device that they use to read books and if they have to wait a couple of months, it’s not a big deal. People wait for a couple of months to read the same book from the library because they’re on the waiting list for it. So, I don’t think that’s going to affect things the way the publishers expect it to.

JP: No, I agree with you. I think Mur Lafferty had something like this on her site as well this week and I went on and said, well I will buy a print book if it’s not on Kindle but only if I really, really, want the book like Seth Godin’s Linchpin that came out last week and is not on the Kindle here. Anyway, that’s the other thing. You guys get some of the books and we don’t. That’s really annoying.

JT: Yes.

JP: But yeah sometimes you do end up buying a print book but generally I want to buy them on the Kindle. That’s exactly right. Okay, another question, I guess this is probably the last one, where are the best places for people to start selling e-books. So, for example do they go to Smashwords, do they put them on their own web site, do they go straight to the Kindle, what do you think? If someone is ready with their e-book where do they put it?

JT: Definitely on Amazon. Right now from what I’m hearing Amazon sells 50 to 70% of e-books that are sold across the retailers and that number comes from the big publishers. It may not necessarily apply to an independent author but Amazon is a great place to put your book up for sale. So, I do suggest to everyone, get a Kindle version, get it up on the Kindle and if you do nothing else go there. If the iPad – if the iBook store is available and open, I would highly suggest that people go there as well as the second stop. Make sure that you’re out there on the iPad if that becomes an availability for independent authors. Places like Smashwords are really good. There are some issues with Smashwords because their formatting is not necessarily as good as you can create yourself and definitely not as good as what I can create myself, but it’s a good place to get your book out there and get your name out. If you have a market, let’s say you’re a business writer and you have a very consistent market, let’s say you’re doing speaking engagement and things like that, then definitely try to get your e-book for sale on your web site. You can even sell coupons or something on your book table at your speaking engagements and let people download your book. But they e-book from you at your book table and then download it from the web site or something like that. There is a lot of options available.

Make your e-book part of your platform. If you’ve got a good platform then your e-book will sell and your print book will sell and you can point people to wherever you’ve got it up for sale to make those sales. That’s the best thing. It’s just to get that platform working and make it work for you.

JP: I agree with that and I sell just PDF copies of my books from my web site and they sell pretty well actually for the same price as the Kindle but obviously I make a bit more money when it’s from my web site. So, that sort of PDF versus Kindle, I’m totally an advocate of being everywhere.

JT: And if you have the ability – if you have the ability to sell a PDF, then go and sell the Kindle and EPUB version on your web site too because PDF will hit a certain market but I prefer, much prefer to read a Kindle version of a book on my Kindle than the PDF version of the book because of the thing that you’d mentioned earlier about the text being smaller in the PDF and it being harder to read. If you’re already selling PDFs, hey get the EPUB and Kindle versions out there as well on your web site and you may draw some people away from buying it at Amazon and you only getting 35% of the cut.

JP: Ah good point. I hadn’t thought of that. I just linked to my Kindle page, but you’re right, I should just sell the format myself. Brilliant idea. Thank you for that. Okay, so finally, where can people find more about you and about your services?

JT: I am available at ebookarchitects.com, also at kindleformatting.com. My e-book architects web site has an information about the retailers and formats that are out there and also talks about my services and what I can do to help you out. I’m also available any time if someone wants to call me. I’m available in the U.S. 512 939 3466, which is my cell phone, so feel free to give me a call or on Skype at joshua.tallent, that’s T-A-L-L-E-N-T. And all that information is on my web site as well.

JP: Brilliant. Well, thanks ever so much for your time Joshua, that was brilliant.

JT: Thank you.