How to
Publish an Ebook

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20 July 2006

Want to Publish your own Ebook?

Want to publish a book? Why not publish your own ebook? Many others already have. And it need not be all that difficult. Publishing your work as an ebook can offer many advantages over the traditional way of doing things. Check out these pages for an outline of some of the main issues and options involved. As well as ebook production I look at issues like sales, marketing, distribution and security.

How To Publish A Book As An Ebook

Much of the complexity and difficulty of publishing your book the 'traditional' way can be avoided by publishing an ebook (producing your book in an electronic format). These pages explore some of the advantages of ebooks over following the 'traditional' publishing route and provide some introductory guidelines on how to publish a book as an ebook.

Epublishing

Ebooks can be read online, downloaded via an Internet connection, emailed or copied to a CD, floppy disc or some other electronic medium. They have major advantages over their paper counterparts in being much easier to produce, store, market and distribute.

Who should use epublishing? Many people use it to make money by marketing 'info products' online. But publishing ebooks can benefit a wide range of people. You can use it to distribute collections of your poetry, publish your autobiography, novel, technical manual or whatever. Provided they own the necessary rights established writers can use ebooks to give a new lease of life to out of print works or to try out new ideas. Budding authors might give away copies of their ebook to get some feedback or begin to establish a following which could benefit their printed work.

There are many methods of publishing, promoting, marketing and selling an ebook. See our other pages for an outline of some of the main alternatives and options.

Benefits

When you publish a book as an ebook the benefits can, in general, be summarised as low cost, speed, simplicity and control.

• Low Cost? This is not difficult to demonstrate when you consider what would be involved in achieving even a small print run of a few hundred copies of a conventionaly printed book. Even if your book was a very slim volume the costs could be significant. If you then consider the additional costs of storing and shipping your books you can easily see how quickly the costs would begin to grow. With an ebook the costs of production and distribution can be neglible.
  
  
• Speed? Finding a suitable printer takes time. Print runs take time. So does storage and distribution. With epublishing the production and distribution of your ebook, once formatted, can happen right away.
  
  
• Simplicity? Getting your ebook from your word processor all the way to its intended recipient can be a very simple procedure indeed. Consider how simple it is to email an attachment to someone. You can email your ebook in the same way (size permitting). Uploading it to a server and letting people download it from a download page is not much more complicated. And uploading your ebook to a digital distribution service can be just as straightforward!
  
  
• With an ebook you have a great inbuilt advantage over traditional books in that you can relatively easily distibute your book 'worldwide', effectively at the click of mouse.
  
  
• Control? If you follow the traditional publishing route then you are going to have to hand over large areas of your project to third parties. Even if you self publish you might still use a book designer, printer, distributor, salesman etc. Self publishing an ebook allows you to do nearly all of this yourself if you choose to. You don't need to hand over control to others. You are in charge.
  
  
• And don't forget - your ebook (suitably formatted) can often be fed into an online print on demand (POD) system. This means that indivdual copies of your work can be printed and delivered to customers on demand. So if you really want to get into print you might now have a way of doing it with a much lower up front cost!
  
  

Please see further pages for more information about the issues and options involved.

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© Trevor Womack 2006