You might get the impression that digital publishing is somehow new and exciting. Actually, it’s been around for a while, but mainstream media seems to have just noticed and we’re all just catching up.

There are some people who have been involved in indie publishing for years now and April Hamilton is one of them. I’ve known April online for nearly four years now and she continues to innovate. Here’s a guest post about her latest project which is fascinating as I am someone who shares a lot online.

In my latest book, Overshare, over the course of a particularly challenging 13 months in his life a young man unwittingly, publicly reveals his increasing stress level and alienation from his wife, family and friends through his posts on social media sites. It was a scenario I’d witnessed in real life, and watching this person’s life unravel before my eyes was a sad and thought-provoking experience. I felt sorry for the obvious stress this person was under, and on the other hand, couldn’t help thinking about the quantity and quality of very personal life circumstances and details that can emerge from the sum total of one user’s social media accounts. I was immediately inspired to write a novel based on these events, but I knew a very large part of what made the story so powerful was the way I’d originally experienced it: as a voyeur, peeking into the social media windows this person had left open to the public. As I’ve written about this elsewhere:

Then it hit me…Why not show the reader my protagonist’s actual social media web pages, containing his status updates and others’ responses to them, as well as his blog posts, but purposely limit the content to only what a member of the general public would see? To make the reader’s experience as realistic as possible, I knew I’d have to mimic the look and content of the most popular social media sites very closely, and the resulting book would have to be presented in full color. To produce such a book in print would be cost prohibitive, but with the advent of color ereader apps and devices, it seemed an ideal fit for a totally new kind of ebook.

This approach would definitely be best for duplicating my original experience, but it posed numerous technical challenges. In order to create the illusion of real social media sites, I’d need photos to represent my protagonist, his friends and family members, and the events he’d be likely to post about. The next obstacle would be creating my own versions of the most popular, real-world social media web pages, to which I’d add character “status updates”, photos and blog posts. Assuming I could accomplish this, I’d still face the considerable hurdle of getting my carefully-constructed layout and graphic design to survive the ebook conversion process.

Preserving Complex Formatting

I’ll address that last issue first, the conversion, because I don’t want to mislead anyone into thinking I’ll be providing step-by-step how-tos for preserving complex formatting in an ebook during the conversion step. Even with my background as a software engineer and web developer, I had to outsource the final formatting and conversion tasks to someone very well-versed in working with a type of formatting tool known as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS controls and preserves complex formatting in web pages, and all ebooks are essentially a specialized type of web page.

Once I’d created my graphics to represent the various social media web pages and had collected the photos I’d need to insert in those pages, laying everything out in MS Word was easy enough to accomplish using tables. But I knew from experience, all but the most basic tables, whether created in MS Word or HTML (web code), would not survive the conversion process. And for this particular book, it was absolutely critical that my imitation social media pages look EXACTLY the same in the finished ebook as they did when I created them. Consider the screen shot from the book below, which may look like a screenshot snapped off a website, but is actually a two-column MS Word table with graphic elements and text inserted in its cells:

Anyone who uses social media will immediately recognize this “web page”, and will understand the information it contains. Imagine how much less realistic and recognizable this “web page” would be if this exact layout could not be presented in the finished ebook.

There’s lots of talk lately about how authors need to be moving in the direction of ‘enhanced’ ebooks (e.g., features like interactivity, full-motion video, embedded audio, full color and heavy use of graphics) if they hope to attract and retain a readership going forward, and I don’t disagree. But most such enhancements require a great deal of technical knowledge and expertise to execute, for the vast majority of indie authors it will NOT be a Do-It-Yourself project to create an ebook containing anything other than formatted text and basic, standalone images. Now, back to those first two challenges…

Duplicating the look of real-life social media websites

I began by taking screen shots of the real-life social media websites I hoped to imitate. I carefully matched their color schemes and recreated their layouts via MS Word tables. Because I knew I’d be publishing this book for the Kindle, I set my page size in Word to 4×6″. This kept me cognizant of the size and layout limitations imposed by the Kindle device screen size at all times. I knew the CSS to be applied in the final formatting and conversion steps would allow for the tables and images to resize automatically to fit larger or smaller screen sizes, for those readers who would view the book in the Kindle Reader app on any device other than a Kindle, but I had to ensure the book would look right on the actual Kindle device first.

By carefully sizing the table columns and merging cells or columns as needed, I was able to recreate the same look as the real-life sites. I was also careful to ensure each table would fit on a single page, and in cases where the content would flow across multiple pages, to break it up into multiple tables. This was necessary to ensure no table rows would “break” across pages in the finished book. For example, I didn’t want a faceplace photo to appear on one page, and its description and comments to appear on another.

I created my own versions of the real-life icons used on the sites in a graphics editor program, but I could also have purchased a ready-made set of icons from any of a number of stock art websites. I also searched the web on “free [social media website name] font” to find fonts that would match the real-life sites. I was careful to read the licensing terms of the fonts before downloading them to be sure it was acceptable for me to use them for a commercial (money-making) purpose.

With the colors and table layouts set, I would be able to enter my desired text for “status updates” on each page of my MS Word document. But first, I needed to “meet” my characters.

Sourcing photos to use in the book

Again, as I’ve previously explained about the book:

I’d need avatars, or user pictures, of the protagonist and everyone he’d be interacting with online. I’d need candid family and event photos of the sort people regularly post on Facebook. And because of the story arc, I’d need a series of pictures of a young woman at various stages of pregnancy, a series of pictures of a young man depicting the journey from hale and cheerful to beaten and haggard, and finally, baby pictures depicting a preemie’s path from NICU to healthy newborn at home.

At first this seemed an insurmountable obstacle. I couldn’t afford to hire models to pose for all the pictures I’d need, and didn’t have the time, equipment or skills to act as photographer. Anyway, posed stills would never give me the realism I needed. Then, another stroke of inspiration: Creative Commons –licensed images are easily found online, and plenty of them have been licensed as permissible for commercial and remix use. I soon had a treasure trove of real-life photos of real-life people for which the rights holders had pre-emptively granted permission to anyone to use for commercial purposes (such as in a book to be sold for profit) and remix use (such as cropping and coloring to achieve my desired effects).

Even though the images I decided to use were licensed as permissible for commercial and remix use, I realized the people in them probably never anticipated this type of use. What if some of them objected, changed their images’ licensing terms to prohibit commercial or remix use, and then attempted to bring legal action against me? How could I prove the licensing that was in place at the time I downloaded the images? This is where Webcite comes in.

Webcite is a non-profit service that allows users to store (and download) a permanent, archived copy of a webpage certified by Webcite to be a complete and accurate copy of the web page as it existed on the day the page was archived. I created an archived copy of every page from which I’d downloaded photos, each of which clearly displayed an icon to indicate the type of CC licensing applied to each image.

As an aside, I’ve heard from a few people that my use of these CC-licensed images in my book may be somehow illegal or unethical.

It is most definitely NOT illegal, in that the rights holders who posted the images to image sharing sites chose to apply CC licensing terms. The default type of licensing is “all rights reserved”, so every one of those rights holders had to take extra steps to purposely CC-license their images.

As to the ethical question… my feeling is that the rights holders knew what they were doing when they opted to apply CC licensing to their images and allow any member of the general public to make use of those images. If any of the rights holders object to my specific use, this only serves to underscore the point of Overshare: that actions you take and content you post online can have far-reaching and unanticipated consequences.

Are enhanced ebooks for you?

I’d encourage any indie author to explore the possibility of enhancing his or her ebooks, and really stretching the limits of what an ebook can be and do. However, I’d also caution those authors to go into the project with a full understanding and acceptance that it will probably be necessary to bring in outside, professional help at various stages in the process.

In the case of my book, the presentation was absolutely critical. This book simply would not work as a straight prose novel. Given the book’s design, the reader essentially formulates his own narrative and draws his own conclusions based on what he has chosen to focus on or ignore in each of the “web pages”—just as each of us does when viewing our online acquaintances’ social media.

April Hamilton is the author of Overshare, available now on Kindle.

She is also a blogger, Technorati BlogCritic, speaker and essayist on issues related to self-publishing and indie authorship. She is also on the Board of Directors of the Association of Independent Authors, and is the founder and Editor In Chief of Publetariat: the premier online news hub and community for indie authors and small imprints.

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It seems that every week brings a new development in the world of digital publishing and indie authors have varied opinions on what’s happening. In this interview I discuss some of the latest events and also debate what 2012 holds.

Steven Lewis is an author, podcaster and at Taleist he helps writers become published authors. He has just posted Self Publishing and Ebook Predictions 2012 on his blog which we discuss today. [Video at the bottom of the text]

• One of the comments in the article is ” 2012 is the year things get bad for traditional publishing industry”. My thoughts are more that there’s a split between publishers going digital and those that are not. Steven comments that for publishers going digital the problem is pricing and customers think the price has to be low. 99c – $4.99 which in some cases still doesn’t cover the costs of all the editing, design etc. People won’t pay print prices, that’s a given but where is the limit. Publishers will find it tough to run the publishing machine with less income.

• Publishers will be trying new things in 2012. Penguin opening up to ‘self-publishing’ is actually more like vanity publishing. None of us want to see the end of publishers and bookstores but things will continue to shift.

• Steve thinks Amazon has to start doing something about the crap that is being published in 2012. The spam, the hardcore pornography and the things that come up in searches. They have to clean it up but there have been problems with Amazon trying to get rid of what some people think is wrong e.g. gay/lesbian writers. We have to balance free speech with what is genuinely awful. I prefer to think of the customer as the gatekeeper as I am browsing by categories, ranking etc. The new stigma will be ‘not selling’ as opposed to self-publishing.

• What else will Amazon do in 2012? We discuss Kindle Select. It’s basically a way for self-publishers to put their book into the Kindle Prime lending program where members can borrow books. Amazon has put $500,000 in a pot and that is shared pro-rata depending on how many books & how many borrowed. You have to commit to 90 days exclusivity, so you can’t publish it elsewhere. It’s not an income strategy really. But what is interesting is that you can put your book for free for 5 days so you can control your timing on using free as a marketing tactic. Steven isn’t happy about this as he says we’re training readers that books should be free. I disagree and point to CJ Lyons’ article here as she uses free as a teaser to boost the sales of her other books. Steven has a full article here on KDP Select  if you want to read the long version. Amazon’s job is to make an offer and it’s up to the author to decide what’s best for their book. We’ll also re-examine this after at least a month’s worth of data.
• Check out David Gaughran’s article on KDP Select: How much do you want to be paid tomorrow?
  

• Steven gets upset at my comparison of KDP Select to a library. My point is that it’s more about marketing and getting your books in front of more people. Personally, I will probably put one book into KDP Select but keep most of them out.

• Will there be better tools for authors in 2012? Steven says it’s unlikely we will get much further than the basic formatting for mainstream books. I mention the FutureBook conference where I met publishers doing some really interesting work with transmedia and apps. This is something that we as self-publishers can’t do ourselves so if you have these ideas for cross-media ideas it would be better to work with a publisher. Authors also underestimate the amount of time to do all the things you can do and focusing on what will work for you. It’s a triathlon – you write, publish and promote but promotion also goes on forever. The cost is often in the time.

• If we’re basically seeing an expansion of mainstream print books, we have to get better at marketing. Reading works as it is, there doesn’t have to be a change. You really still only have to write books. You don’t have to do apps and all that multi-media. I’m interested in doing audiobooks. Steven has some experience of this and doesn’t find it a huge market but it’s definitely something that we are keen on taking further. It’s not about the money, more about the marketing.

• Amazon moving into international markets. I specifically want India to come online as a huge English speaking market. We note how Amazon keeps surprising us. There are no rumours, they just do it. They can move into these countries very easily and will do as soon as they are ready. Steven & I get annoyed about all the differences in pricing and sales tax.

• Advertising in ebooks. Authors will do it and Amazon is also putting ads on the Kindle. Steven even likes the advertising on his Kindle as it offers things the reader wants. Seth Godin with the Domino Project did get companies to sponsor the book and give it away for free. It’s not radically different to what we are used to now. Authors will also be able to advertise in each others books. Bloggers can join in an advertising network, so why not authors? Join in an advertising campaign and see what happens with it. You definitely need to use your Kindle book to advertise your own books. Make sure you hyperlink to Buy Now for each of the books you have available. Think about linking up with other authors and advertise each others but be careful.

• We talk about Scrivener and exporting to Kindle formats. The pros and cons. Check out David Hewson’s book “Writing a book on Scrivener“

• Amazon continues to dominate but we discuss Kobo which has great statistics, like when people stop reading your book & people can interact socially about it. Nook Color vs Kindle Fire. What’s happening with the other players in the market? It’s very hard to challenge Amazon’s place in the market now, they are so entrenched. They are also selling their devices at less than cost. It would be great to see some decent challenge to Amazon as with great power comes great responsibility and with all our eggs in one basket, they could turn around and change royalty rates later.

• As indies getting on everything other than Amazon KDP, our options are Smashwords and BookBaby, that’s about it. Will there be other options for us? or will Smashwords expand their offering. We love Smashwords but recognise the immense amount of work it is for Mark Coker to manage the company now it’s really taken off.

• Steven reckons Amazon will play hardball with the other players in 2012, e.g. asking for exclusivity. They also might move to a verification method for self-publishing e.g. paying $50 instead of free. It’s Amazon’s reputation at risk with the crap that is flooding the store. Serialization may also become available as a new model. Exciting times overall!

You can find Steven at Taleist.com and also on Twitter @Rule17

What do you think will happen in publishing in 2012?

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Every day we hear more exciting news about self-publishing and the growth of ebooks.

I monitor the US publishing news and blogs and feel that in the UK we are at least a year behind you guys, but the tidal wave is swelling and it’s a very exciting time! Doug Klostermann, author of The Ebook Handbook, is another writer who is passionate about digital publishing and today he shares a useful overview if you are just starting out.

Why now is the time to join the e-book revolution

Statistics about e-books, e-book publishing, and e-readers are being reported and discussed with increasing frequency and the overall conclusion is clear:  e-book sales are rising at a dramatic pace.  E-book sales in the United States currently exceed those of the other formats, including hardback and paperback sales, and grew 200% from 2010 to 2011.  Electronic books are now outselling printed books on Amazon.com – hardcover and paperback combined – and the Kindle e-reader is the best-selling product on Amazon.  Apple’s iPads are selling by the tens of millions, Android powered tablet sales are increasing, and numerous other companies are developing and selling tablet devices.  There is no better time to join the e-book revolution.

The publishing playing field has never been so level for self-published, independent authors.  Your e-books can be up for sale on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Apple iTunes and iBooks as soon as you complete them, and at no cost to you.  They will be available on these sites along with all the printed and digital books, with the potential to be found and purchased by anyone shopping and searching online.

Formatting and Optimizing Your Text for Various E-Reader Formats

You will likely want to publish your e-book to as many sites as possible in order to reach the widest audience, and this involves offering your text in a variety of formats.  Most publishers will convert your text for you for free, but there are a number of requirements you should follow so that your e-book functions and appears as best as possible in each format.  On your own website and blog you can offer your e-book in PDF format, Amazon will convert it to their proprietary AZW format for the Kindle, and Barnes and Noble will convert it to ePub for the Nook.  Smashwords will convert it and offer it in a variety of formats as well as allow you access to publishing with Apple. [Note from Joanna: This is the best way for non-US citizens to get onto iPad and Nook right now.]

Typically a basic e-book can be written in Microsoft Word DOC (.doc) format.  This format is easily converted to most of the required e-book formats such as PDF and ePub, is the preferred format to be submitted to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, and can be submitted to Barnes and Noble’s PubIt! and to Smashwords for conversion and distribution to Apple iBooks.  Publishers will accept other formats like plain TXT, PDF, or HTML, but unless you have complicated formatting and complex image layouts (neither of which are recommended, especially for your first e-book), then Word’s DOC format is the easiest and best format to use.

When publishers convert your DOC text for their e-readers, some of your formatting may be lost or altered so it is important to understand what you can’t or shouldn’t do when writing and formatting your text.  Most e-reader conversions will accept basic Word formatting in your text such as bold, italic, underline, internal and external hyperlinks, center text, chapter headings, table of contents, and page breaks, and all of this will typically convert properly in the e-book conversion.  However, special fonts, some special characters, headers, footers, and page numbers will not convert, so you should avoid them or plan on removing them for the non-PDF e-reader versions.  Bulleted and numbered lists may or may not properly convert depending on the format.  Proper spacing between paragraphs must be incorporated, which is set using Paragraph Styles and not simply by adding extra returns between paragraphs.  Publishers have different requirements for images, but in general they can be about 600 pixels wide at 96 dpi or higher to look their best. And of course you will want an appealing, professional quality cover.

Each of the publishers provides a formatting guide with their complete requirements.  It is important to read them and incorporate all of their requirements so that your document converts properly and functions and appears as best as possible.

E-Book Formatting Guides:

Amazon Kindle formatting guide
Barnes and Noble PubIt! formatting guide
Smashwords formatting guide

[ Note from Joanna: If you can't bear doing it yourself, you can get someone to do it for you. ]

Publishing Your E-Book at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Apple

Though there are countless websites to publish and offer your e-book, the majority of your sales will likely come from your own website and blog (if you market well) and through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Apple iTunes and iBooks, so it is best to focus your effort on these major sites.

Amazon.com is where you may reach your largest audience of potential readers, so you should first focus on publishing on Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).  Amazon provides step by step instruction for publishing on their help pages, and also in a free e-book publishing guide.  The process is very self-explanatory, but there are a few important tips.  Enter your full title and subtitle since keywords in your title may help searchers locate your e-book.  Carefully choose which categories you want your book listed in, as well as good search keywords, as these are important in assisting readers to locate your e-book.  Be sure to preview the book and download the HTML file provided for a more accurate preview.  Then within two or three days of publishing, your e-book should be live on Amazon.  Once your e-book is available, go through Amazon Author Central to create a nice formatted description and author bio.

The process to publish to Barnes and Noble’s PubIt! is straightforward and very similar to the Amazon KDP process [ Joanna - but only available to US citizens, others must go through Smashwords].  The third important site to publish your e-book is Smashwords, an e-book publisher as well as an aggregator that distributes e-books to other sites like Apple iTunes and iBooks, the Kobo e-book store, and the Sony Reader store.  To upload a completed e-book to Smashwords, first ensure that you have formatted it according to their strict Style Guide.  Their process is straightforward as well, but also involves a review for Premium Status, obtaining an ISBN (free or low-cost through Smashwords), and using their Distribution Channel Manager to specify on which sites your e-book will be available.

Use your Website, Blog, and Social Media to Spread the Word

Publishing your book on Amazon and the other major retailers’ websites offers an amazing selling opportunity because readers can find your book on their own without you having to put forth any marketing effort.  These sites have leveled the publishing playing field for independent book and e-book authors and publishers and now provide possibilities that did not previously exist.  However you can build upon this to increase awareness of your e-books and attract additional customers and readers through your blog, website, and social media.

[ For lots of book marketing techniques, click here ]

Take Advantage of the E-Book Revolution

The ability to create and publish an e-book with nothing but your ideas, your computer, some software and the Internet, and then to instruct or entertain readers through your writing is an immensely satisfying pursuit.  To additionally earn money, perhaps even a sufficient income through this effort certainly adds to the enjoyment.  And to be fortunate to see your e-book become a top-seller is a wonderful reward!

Independent authors are fortunate to be in the midst of the ongoing e-book revolution.  Don’t hesitate to take advantage of the tools and opportunities to present your work to this wide audience of readers that is now available to everyone.

There is obviously much more to learn and many more tips and advice about publishing, marketing, and selling e-books, and my e-book called The E-Book Handbook – A Thoroughly Practical Guide to Formatting, Publishing, Marketing, and Selling Your E-Book goes into much greater detail about each step of the process.

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I hope you were all inspired by the exciting new Kindle family and what it means for ebook consumption. If you’re ready to take the plunge, this article will help. This is a guest post from the lovely Simon Cheshire who is now helping writers with ebook file conversions. I am hugely grateful for this because I have a very low patience threshold, and patience is critical for ebook formatting!

I’ve been producing Kindle-ready ebooks for a while now. Through a process of trial and error (sometimes it’s been a trial, and it’s easy to make lots of errors) I’ve realized that the whole experience needn’t leave you tearing your hair out in frustration, provided you keep a few basic dos and don’ts in mind.

1. Your code can never be too clean

Although you CAN upload Word documents to Amazon for auto-conversion into Kindle format, I’d say don’t. Unless you’re prepared to keep re-uploading it until all the weird layout glitches are ironed out. The Kindle uses a version of HTML, and if you want your ebook to look good you should start with an HTML file, with the text derived from a format-stripped, plain TXT source. Everything, from paragraph marks and italics to chapter headings and em dashes, should be individually coded. Yes, that means a LOT of work, but clean, clear HTML code is at the heart of the ebook ecosystem.

2. Choose your keywords carefully

Until recently, Amazon allowed uploaders to add as many keyword tags to their Kindle titles as they liked (i.e. words which will help the book show up in searches), but not any more. You’re currently allowed just seven, so choose them with great care. Don’t just put down vampire or Harry Potter assuming it’ll put your book at the top of most reader’s searches. It won’t.

3. Ebooks are not printed books

An ebook is a fundamentally different thing to a printed book. A printed book has a layout, a physical look, that cannot be replicated electronically (unless you’re dealing with PDF files, and they’re a whole other ball game…!) When you come to prepare your book for the Kindle, bear in mind that things like graphics, boxes, tables and lists look great in print, but can look a horrible mess in an ebook. Ebook text is not fixed. It flows according to the reader’s preferences, not the writer’s. Minimise anything that will impede that flow.

4. Don’t underestimate the value of your work

There’s great debate all over the ebook world about pricing. All to often, the advice is: make it as near to free as possible. While this does entice some readers, it also badly devalues the long hours of work you’ve put into your book. You wouldn’t get Gordon Ramsey flogging dinners for the same price as a Big Mac, would you? Or Apple doing iPhones for the same as an entry-level pay-as-you-go? All Kindle titles can be sampled before they’re bought. If the book is good, readers will pay a fair price for it. I’d say a fair price is a few dollars less than the print equivalent.

5. Plan ahead

When you come to write your NEXT masterpiece, think ahead. If you’re only going to publish in electronic format, don’t write it in something like Word at all, just use a simple text editor. It makes for far less work later on. Or even, if you’re confident with HTML, code as you go! Insert your bold tags and your line break tags in with the story if you like, rather than putting things in bold, or whatever.

Simon Cheshire is the author of 16 books and you can find his books on Amazon. He has converted all his books himself so he knows the importance of formatting for Kindle sales. He is now doing ebook conversion with The Creative Penn clients, as well as cover design and typesetting. You can also listen/ watch an interview with him here about writing children’s books.

Once you have a converted file, you can learn everything else you need to know about ebook publishing in my mini-course. Click here to learn more about it.

Top image: Flickr CC GoXunuReviews

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This has got to be the moment.

Ebook sales have been steadily growing over the last 2 years and those of us readers who converted early are almost entirely ebook consumers now.

For authors, the global ebook sales market has meant we can sell direct to customers and every month receive a cheque from Amazon. We can log on and see our sales by the hour. It has been life changing for me and so many others.

But ebooks have been far from mainstream. Until now.

These new Kindle devices change everything.

 Amazon has unveiled a new family of Kindles including one at the magic price of $79. This is what happened with the iPod when the price came down low enough that it was a no-brainer purchase. Those people who had been on the fence about new-fangled digital music went out and got one, just to see what the fuss was about. I was one of those people (with the ipod) and it hasn’t left my side since.When did you switch to digital music?

Kindle sales growth almost vertical

I was one of the first people in Australia to buy the Kindle when it (finally) become available. I converted to 90% ebook reading within weeks and the number of books I bought at least trebled. I am unashamedly an Amazon fan but this is a massively exciting development for any author who can see what’s round the corner.

These new Kindles will ship in October and November. There will be many of them in Christmas stockings and ebook sales go up over Christmas because people have time to read, and of course, play with their new gadgets.

So what does this mean for you?

• If you don’t have a Kindle yet and you are a writer or want to be. Get off the fence and buy one of these (affiliate). Experience for yourself what the digital revolution means. Even if you still love the smell of a new book, there are millions of people converting to ebooks and you want to sell to them. You are not your market. You have to see this to believe it.

• If you are a writer with a back-list that you have the rights to, get your conversion sorted before the Christmas rush and then publish your ebook on the Kindle. This will show you how to do it. Seriously, you are late already and you will miss out on sales.

• If you are an author with one book that’s selling well on the Kindle, write some more books. I need to take this advice right now!

• If you are a traditionally published author and your publisher has not put your book on the Kindle with global rights, then go see an IP lawyer and see what you can do to get the rights back or ask the publisher to get your books up there. It’s not rocket science.

Trust the market

People want to read. They want to find books that will inspire them, entertain them, educate them, take them out of their world for just a few minutes. These book lovers are people like me. I devour Kindle books. I download samples several times a day. My biggest entertainment expense is ebooks. I love reading. Chances are, so do you, and so do millions of readers. Maybe they will like your book. But they won’t find it unless it’s on the Kindle platform.

I’m sure there will be the usual lamentation that this attitude will flood the market with more self-published books of bad quality, but I trust the market. I am a heavy Kindle user. I am the market. I always download a sample unless I trust the author. I always delete the sample and don’t buy if the formatting is bad or if the book is not enjoyable or useful. I only buy books that pass this sample test. I go by reader recommendations and how many stars there are. I buy based on recommendations from my friends on twitter. Crap books with crap covers do not sell. They don’t rank on the bestseller list. They do not get recommendations.

Stop with the excuses about why you think ebooks will fail, or how they are destroying publishing. Enough already.

This is no longer the future. This is right now. You need to act.

Image source: Business Insider

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This is a guest post from Patrick E. McLean, author of the Parsec Award-winning How to Succeed in Evil (which I am currently reading and it rocks!). Ebook pricing is something indie authors debate all the time so this unique perspective is fascinating. Thanks Patrick!

As a writer raised by Economists, I have some perspective that others don’t have, and maybe don’t want. (There’s a reason it’s called the dismal science after all.) But when approaching the question of how to price an e-book, sound economic theory (not that macroeconomic crap that everybody is currently lying their ass off about) can lend some interesting perspective.

Price vs. Cost

A price is only part of what a good or service costs you. Especially a book. In the economic sense, the true cost of something is what you give up to have or consume it. In the case of the book, you spend some money on the book, but the bulk of the cost is in the time you spend reading it. So book price + time cost = the true cost of the book.

So let’s say I buy an e-book for $3 ($2.99) and it takes me 8 hours to read it. Apply some guesstimate for what my time is worth (say $30 an hour) and you get to a true cost of $243 dollars for me to read a book. A little over 1% of which is the actual price of the book.

This is fascinating. And moves me to ask.

Does it matter what the Price of an e-Book is?

If my estimate of the cost is correct, are people really that sensitive to a change in price? Or, more importantly, if I double the price of my ebook (a 1% rise in the true cost of consuming a book) are sales going to change at all?

Economic theory cannot answer this question for us. The only way to know the answer for sure is to try it for a specific book at a specific time. And even that is not a true experiment in the scientific sense because there are too many factors to control. All we can know it what happened with that one book for that one period. So here’s what happened when I raised the price of How to Succeed in Evil from $0.99 to $2.99 –

Sales went up. I was averaging about nine copies a day. Now I’m up to seventeen.

It’s crazy to think that an increase in price causes and increase in sales. I think if I had left the price at 99 cents I would now also be at 14 e-books a day. I don’t think price matters that much. Especially within the accepted range. Economic theory can really say nothing about this particular case, but it can help us understand the forces at work. And before you discount this, please consider, this is really more help than it may first sound. To draw an imperfect analogy, even if you don’t know what the gravitational constant is, it is still very helpful to know that gravity sucks.

The Elasticity of Demand.

The Law of Demand states that the lower the price of a good or service, the more of it any one person will buy. For example, When cars are expensive, a family only has one. When cars are cheap, everybody gets their own car.

The question is, how much does the price of something have to rise or fall to make a difference. That’s the Elasticity of Demand. For example:

Cigarettes have very inelastic demand curve. They are addictive, so when you want them, you want them. Price goes up, still gonna smoke. Kidney Dialysis is inelastic. Unless you get another kidney, dialysis is perfectly inelastic. You get dialysis or you die.

So what about books?

Fans and the Elasticity of Demand.

By definition a fan is somebody who is addicted to an entertainment product. They have a highly inelastic demand curve for whatever that product is. For example, people who are fans of Game of Thrones or Harry Potter. When the next book comes out, they simply HAVE to have it. Fan is just another word for addict.

Creating Inelasticity

First, you’ve got to be able to write well. That’s price of entry. If you can’t do that, no knowledge of economic theory (or any other kind of theory) will make up for lack of talent. But assuming you are a fair hand at pushing a noun against a verb there are a couple of conclusions we can reasonably draw.

Be unique. If there aren’t any other good substitutes for what you put out, then people have no alternative but to buy from you. I think that well-written fiction is a pretty inelastic thing. When somebody wants a Stephen King novel, pretty much only a Stephen King novel will do. Because he’s the only guy who sees the world the way Stephen King does.

Create rich characters. This is pretty obvious. You can put a character in the most interesting suspenseful situation you like, but if the reader doesn’t care what happens to them, why continue? I think this is why mystery is such a popular genre. It lifts a lot of weight off the characters. People can either like the character or need to know how it turns out.

Don’t screw up the plot. There’s an eternal tension between character and plot. And, in the larger sense, story construction is a gigantic, difficult subject. But the fact remains, if you plot well, you suck the reader in. They want to know what happens next. They need to know what happens in the next book. Which leads us to the last point.

Write a series. When a reader is bought in, they want more. They want more of you as a writer and they want more of the characters they have invested so much time in. It is not a coincidence that the best-selling Kindle authors, the ones that are really putting up some numbers have series. As a personal note, this may be kinda hard for me, as the number of ideas I have are always threatening to draw me off into new challenges. I believe that I, you and everybody needs to follow passion — that’s what keeps us working — but, if your bliss allows it, a series is a good way to create that inelasticity which all authors crave.

To sum it up

I can’t pretend that common sense won’t get you to all of these conclusions. But having names for things allows us to think about them more clearly. The elasticity of demand is no exception.

–

Patrick E. McLean is the author of the Parsec Award-winning How to Succeed in Evil and Unkillable available at Amazon.com and as a free audiobooks at Podiobooks.com. He’s also the creator and producer of the award-winning Seanachai Podcast.

How to Succeed in Evil is the story of Edwin Windsor, Evil Efficiency Consultant. He tries to help supervillains be more villainous. Or at least more profitable and sensible about the business side of Evil.

Along with his very proper and English secretary Agnes and his hench-lawyer Topper, he struggles to make the world of super-powered people make sense. But this is very difficult because, while Edwin’s advice is excellent, all of his clients are too egomaniacal to listen. There is, it must be said, a bit of comedy in this work.

You can learn more about Patrick and his work at http://www.patrickecmclean.com

Image top: Flickr CC Slinky from rhinoneil

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This is a guest post from author CY Lyons, who writes thrillers with heart. You can also watch/listen to an interview with CJ here. I think this is a great strategy for authors with multiple books. We are also very lucky as indie authors to be able to change our pricing so fast so you can make an ebook free for a week and then shift the price again. It’s worth considering!

There’s a lot of talk about how much e-books are worth to readers.

I think that’s the wrong question. The question should be: how much are readers worth to e-book authors?

I’ve been indy self e-publishing for 15 months and as of June sold around 3000 copies a month. But I had one book, SNAKE SKIN, a mainstream thriller that was a bit of a stretch for my target audience of women who enjoy a touch of romance with their thriller/suspense novels. SNAKE SKIN had gotten rave reviews but just wasn’t selling.

I had SNAKE SKIN priced at $4.99 and consistently made around $300 a month on it. Tried a special sale price of 0.99–and made around $300 on it that month. Re-priced it at $2.99 and was…you guessed it…still making $300 a month.

This book recently earned a 4 1/2 star review from RT Book Reviews, one of the most respected print book review magazines. I felt in my heart it was worth more than $300 a month to me–and much more than $0.99 to readers.

I decided it was too valuable to reduce the price further.

Instead, I gave it away.

You read that right. I placed SNAKE SKIN on sale for FREE on Smashwords. In about three weeks the free price propagated to Amazon. I woke up on a Saturday morning to find that Amazon had dropped it to free and it had already “sold” 5,000 copies.

I figured that would be about it–that was already more than the 1000 copies it sold during the month I had it at 0.99…imagine my astonishment as I watched during the day to see it “sell” 10,000 copies in ten hours.

48 hours after it was placed on sale for free, 24,987 copies were downloaded and it had made it to #3 on the Amazon Kindle Free Bestseller list!

Now some might say: CJ you’re crazy! (I’ve heard that before, lol.) You could have made over $8,000 if you’d priced it at 0.99 instead of giving it away for free. You’re losing money!

No sir. I’ve lost at most the $300 a month the book was earning me…but I’ve gained potentially 24,987 *NEW* readers.

Readers are so much more valuable to me than $300. And NEW readers? Priceless.

How do I know they’re new? Well, just about anyone who knows my name would have heard about the previous 0.99 sale. And for the first half of the year, I offered free books on my website, including SNAKE SKIN.

So odds are, most of these 24,987 are new to me and my work.

I’ve always believed that my books are my Number One promotional and marketing tools. I’m seeing SNAKE SKIN as the perfect “gateway drug” to hook readers on CJ Lyons and her Thrillers with Heart.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about being an indy author, it’s that you have to have the end in sight (just like when writing a novel). You may not know how to get there, you might take a lot of detours along the way, but it’s important to stay focused on a clear, measurable goal.

My goal with this promotion was to attract new readers. To help SNAKE SKIN find its audience. Mission accomplished.

Has this experiment with free changed my future marketing plans? Oh yeah.

First, I sheepishly called my agent who manages the subrights for my e-books, thinking she would be dismayed that I’d given all those books away for free (after all, that’s tens of thousands of readers who will never buy SNAKE SKIN).

Instead she loved it! Totally agreed with me about the value of readers. But, being the strategist she is, she asked me to change the book’s price to 0.99 so she could start tracking actual sales figures.

To me, 0.99 for a book is cheap while a free book is a valuable gift from me to my readers. So I hesitated. Until I realized that we now had a new goal: making the “real” Amazon list.

Different goals, different strategies. SNAKE SKIN hit as high as #30 on the Amazon Kindle overall bestseller list and by the end of the month 40,000 people had it on their Kindles.

That’s twice the population of the town I grew up in. So, yeah, I now see the value in 0.99. It has nothing to do with the value of the book; it’s all about the value of being positioned correctly.

What’s next? SNAKE SKIN was a book in search of its audience and one of my lowest sellers until now. And this month, August, I’m putting my all time bestselling book, a romantic thriller called BLIND FAITH, on sale for 0.99.

BLIND FAITH received a coveted Top Pick from RT Book Reviews as well as great reviews elsewhere and has constantly outperformed my other e-books, hitting and staying on the Top 100 Romantic Suspense charts since it was first released.

My goal this time? I’m thinking big. I want to hit the top 20 on Amazon by the end of the month—which could maybe (if the timing is right and the stars align) lead to a spot on a major bestseller list such as the USA Today or even the New York Times.

Hey, I always say if you’re gonna dream, dream BIG!

It’s a gamble. A huge one. I risk BLIND FAITH, my top seller, being seen as “cheap.” But I hope readers will see this special limited time sale as an opportunity to grab a great book that has never been priced below $4.99.

Want to see how BLIND FAITH is doing? You can check here: http://www.amazon.com/BLIND-FAITH-ebook/dp/B0043M6J92/

What do you think? Where does free fit into your marketing strategy? And when is free too high a price?

Thanks for reading!
CJ

What do you think?

About CJ:
As a pediatric ER doctor, CJ Lyons has lived the life she writes about in her cutting edge thrillers.  In addition to being an award-winning, bestselling author, CJ is a nationally known presenter and keynote speaker.

CJ has been called a “master within the genre” (Pittsburgh Magazine) and her work has been praised as “breathtakingly fast-paced” and “riveting” (Publishers Weekly) with “characters with beating hearts and three dimensions” (Newsday).

Her award-winning, critically acclaimed Angels of Mercy series (LIFELINES, WARNING SIGNS, URGENT CARE and CRITICAL CONDITION) is available now.  Her newest project is as co-author of a new suspense series with Erin Brockovich.  You can learn more at http://www.cjlyons.net

Image: Flickr CC Brad Stabier

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So I’ve just moved from Australia to England and it’s fascinating to me how different ebook and Kindle sales are here, on the other side of the world, albeit in a similar culture. In the video I explain the different reasons to buy ebooks in Australia vs UK, and there is text below.

In Australia, the Kindle justifies itself on the price of books. A brand new print book is usually $30-$40 and a Kindle book $11 – so you can read 3x as many Kindle books and indeed, I found getting a Kindle reinvigorated my fiction reading amazingly after years of being very careful about what I bought because of the cost. So that was my main argument to people – it’s worth it for the money.

Here it is a very different matter. For a start, there is VAT on ebooks and not on print books. I am astounded at this and just can’t understand it. This means that ebooks can be more expensive than their print counterparts. In fact, you can usually buy 3 books for the price of 2, or get amazing deals in Waterstones etc that mean ebooks are not worth it on price.

So Amazon are selling on other factors. There are posters on the London underground, in the weekend papers – they are everywhere. The Kindle is sold at Tesco, a large supermarket, similar to Walmart. So what are these factors that potentially deal with the price issue?

• Speed and choice. Think of a book and start reading it in 60 seconds. This is indeed a marvel and I often take the Kindle to bookshops, browse and then buy on the Kindle. Super-duper.

• Weight. This is the going on holiday, oversize luggage question. Travelling in Europe is very cheap with base costs very low and then heavy charges for luggage. If you want to read 6 books on holiday, that’s a lot of excess luggage. The Kindle solves that problem.

• Space. Londoners don’t have much living space, and the UK is a densely populated country. If you have thousands of books, that is a lot of living space taken up, but the Kindle solves that problem.

They also mention the 3G wireless with no contract and the long battery life, now nearly a month.

I would add sampling which adds a lot to my life, and the fact I can switch between books as I travel. I am now commuting 45 mins each way on the London Underground and with a loaded up Kindle, I am never without something to escape into. Yes, I am still a die-hard Kindle fan!

How are ebooks and devices being marketed in your country? Why have you bought one – or why haven’t you?

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This was originally a guest post for Marketing Tips for Authors, now re-purposed for you as I am still in flux. Currently, we have a flat to move into at the end of the month in London but I have also started work (day job) so internet access and time is still sporadic. Normal service will hopefully resume in July. (I’m loving being back!)

I love my Kindle! I am a total ebook convert. I now read 90% of books on the Kindle device itself or Kindle apps on the iPad and iPhone. I am also a very happy Kindle author as my thriller Pentecost is still in the bestseller rankings 3 months after launch.

In the video, I go through my best tips for publishing on the Kindle:

• Use a freelancer to do the formatting. I’ve formatted files myself before and found it a frustrating process to get exactly right. It’s affordable to pay an expert to create a file for you and you can also get them to create an epub while they are at it for other devices. It will save you time and a lot of frustration! I recommend B10Mediaworx, April L Hamilton and EbookArchitects.

• Decide on the categories you will use. When you publish onto the Kindle you can choose categories for your book. This is important as it will control where your book is placed and also where you rank. For example, Fiction – Christian with sub-category Romance or Fiction – Romance category with sub-category historical. If you’ve written a romance, it’s important you find the right niche as readers will search here. You can choose a couple of categories but only a few so it is critical.

• Make sure your book cover is optimized for the thumbnail size of the Kindle store. I browse the new releases on Kindle every week, checking out the cover and titles first. Then I click through and download a sample if I like the look of it. So cover and title are still as important as they are on traditional bookshelves.

• Ensure your first few pages hook the reader. Although this should be true of any book, it is particularly important for Kindle books as people will download samples and delete them if they are not interested. I often have 30 or more samples ready to look at and I’ll maybe buy 1 – 2 of those. I have to be hooked. So make sure your book doesn’t get warmed up after 20 pages. It needs to be in the first 5 to get a kindle user to buy the book.

• Use targeted advertising. If you have a budget, Kindle Nation Daily blog has paid advertising to it’s members and has been proven to be more effective than most other advertising, according to many Kindle authors. You need to reserve your place for that months in advance though as it is so popular. You can also try Facebook advertising which can be targeted to those people who ‘like’ Kindle and in a specific country.

If you’re a Kindle author, what are your best tips? If you’re a Kindle reader, what do you want authors to consider?

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Stephen Windwalker’s Kindle Nation Daily blog connects authors to readers and is an invaluable resource for the indie community. I used the sponsorship for Pentecost in early Feb and made it to #4 in Religious Fiction, #1 on movers and shakers, #93 in thrillers

Stephen Windwalker is the author of 27 fiction and non-fiction books as well as running the Kindle Nation Daily blog and he’s an expert in all things Kindle related.

• How Stephen’s career progressed from being an undergraduate with Vonnegut, to community organization and then running a bookstore for a long time. Then into running the book, video and software for Inc Magazine which got taken over by Random House, so he ran a small publishing imprint for a large media organisation. He self-published some of his own books with Harvard Perspectives Press. Stephen saw Jeff Bezos on the TV in 2007 when the Kindle was launched and he realized that it had the potential to remove the intermediaries in the process. It would empower readers and authors. Immediately, he wrote a book on how to use the Kindle for the Kindle and it remained #1 on the Kindle store for along time. After selling the book so well, Stephen realized he had a platform. So it became a mailing list, then a newsletter, then a blog – which has turned into Kindle Nation Daily blog.

• Stephen saw the Kindle coming and embraced it on launch, unlike many in the publishing industry. He talks about how the last 6 months have been very exciting with the huge sales some authors have made. But many others are making a living, they may not be spectacular sales or press-worthy but authors are doing well with this. Authors can connect with more readers and sell more books for lower prices and still make more money than they did with traditional publishing. The stars in the firmament are currently reorganizing, the industry is changing and the relationships between them all are changing. The most important thing is that readers are empowered – they can decide what price they want to pay, they can demand an ebook and not buy hardback so the publishers are being affected by this change in behavior.

• On ebook pricing and the 99c discussion. Stephen has been proven wrong as he had previously said that with the 70% royalties at $2.99 and above, no one would go any lower. But clearly authors are making money at 99c and selling at least 6x as many books at the lower price. Authors who have changed their price to 99c have leaped up the charts, so it’s hard to decide. The people who are doing the best are authors who have a brand and a lot of books to sell, many at different price points. The first in the series at 99cents hooks people in for the rest of the books which can be priced at $2.99 or more. On “the race to the bottom” – pricing a book at 99c and making thousands of dollars on it is not a race to the bottom. The price is NOT 99c – it’s 99c x the number of books you sell.
  

• In the Kindle world, there is no scarcity in terms of books or readers. The market is growing. You won’t over-penetrate the market.
• There’s a mindset for authors which is understandable when you work on a book for a long time. You want a publishing contract, you want it to be sold for a decent price. You don’t want to be diminished in value. But the importance of something and it’s value is Price x No. of people who buy it. What will validate authors is connecting with as many readers as possible. If they can sell 10 x the amount at 99c as they can at $2.99, then why not?

• Reviews are important so the quality of the book is critical - the wisdom of the crowd. But also important is a high impact cover, good quality formatting, linked table of contents and a good title. Genre is also important. Some are clearly more saleable and some genres are easier to stand out in (enough vampires already!)

• Kindle Nation Daily is available for authors to connect with readers. There are posts about books, bargain books, free excerpts etc as well as posts on how to use the Kindle. Authors can use one of the several sponsorship models available. (I used it for Pentecost and was really happy with the results!)
  
• We talk about where else readers hang out and Stephen recommends BookLending.com
  

You can find Stephen at KindleNationDaily.com and on Facebook/KindleNationDaily where there are lots of promotions.

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