E-Books have been gaining popularity over the past couple years. The reason for this surge in popularity is due to the easy accessibility through the use of e-book readers and the ability to easily publish them to the market. The ladder of the two is what the main focus of this article will be about.
Publishing an e-book is a great way to get your ideas on the market and possible make a little money at the same time. There are various other ways that I will explain, in another article, of how to get the most profit from your publication, but for now let's get started on getting your book ready for publishing.
The first step is figuring out a good topic for your book. You want to pick something that you know quite a bit about, remember you should be an authority figure on the subject. If possible, something that is a popular niche right now, as this will create more views and sales for your book.
Once you feel like you know what idea u want to express you have to come up with a catchy title. The title is one of the most important parts, it should grab your audiences attention while using proper keywords to keep it at the top of the search engines. I would suggest using a keyword search engine, it will help you maintain the idea your title is trying to portray while boosting up your search engine results.
The length and quality of your e-book require some guidelines as well. Over the years, e-books have been getting shorter and shorter. Some of the most popular how to or idea books are in the range of 15 to 30 pages. Consumers are looking for books that are straight to the point without a lot of fluff. If you start to tell a story in your book make sure it is relative to the topic and try to get straight to the point. Books that contain more history about the author and less about the subject tend to get bad reviews and thus less sales. So remember that your e-book does not have to be long, 15-20 pages will do just fine in most cases. When you have finished writing, make sure you edit, edit, edit. I don't know how many e-books I have read that just were not properly proofread. Let your e-book sit for a few days then come back to it and re-read it. Also make sure you have other people read over it before you publish it; the more the better. Finally, while there are many acceptable formats for e-books, the most widely used and popular one is the PDF format. The main reason for this is because it will read more like a book on the computer, for people that do not own an e-book reader. Also note that it is free to get the word to PDF converter off the internet if you are more comfortable writing in a word document.
I am going to go into just a few websites I like and some reasons why I like them. There are just to many sites online where you can publish your book to be able to mention them all.
Kiqlo.com
This is a great site for beginners to test their book out on. It is free to publish, the author can set their own price, and they take no commission from the sales. The downfall to this site is that the traffic base is not quite as high as some of the other sites out there.
Ejunkie.com
This site has a monthly fee associated with it, but this can be well worth it because they are able to maintain a pretty high traffic flow rate. Which means more potential exposure for your book.
Lulu.com
This is one of my favorite publishing sites for two main reasons: high volume of traffic and no monthly fees to pay for posting. However, Lulu does take a commission of every sale made and requires certain price points to be set. This site also gives the author a lot of control over distribution through the utilization of DRM. Digital Rights Management basically give the author the control over how many computers or e-book readers your book can go on before it must be repurchased.
These are the basics for being able to get your ideas to the market. Lastly, if formatting your book is a problem check out some free e-books and get an idea of what formats you like.
