Create Marketing Pieces

(This is step #15 of my How To Publish An eBook thang)

What's the number one thing you can do that will sell your ebooks?

You could get an interview on Oprah Winfrey's show, but that's hard since I think that show is off the air. And all the other forms of mass marketing and merchandising can also drive sales. If you can get Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh to read your book and talk about it on the air, you'll sell a boat load of books to their listeners. Same goes for not just right wing radio commentators, but for anyone who has a big broadcast voice. If you can do this, God bless you. And you're buying lunch next time, OK?

Before I got distracted by that last paragraph I had in mind the simple process of one-on-one selling. You've done a great thing writing a book and you should be proud of it.

If you were raised right, you learned it's not nice to toot your own horn. Let another person sing your praises and all that. Yet there is a time and a season for putting your best foot forward and you've got to be ready where it concerns that ebook you've published.

The big advantage of going with a traditional publisher is marketing and distribution. Amazon has done a good job of empowering you where distribution is concerned, but you still have to proactively engage the demands of marketing.

Even if you are as bad at marketing as I am, someone is going to ask you what your book is about. You will need to have your elevator pitch ready: cast your work in its best light in the span of 30 seconds to 2 minutes. This elevator pitch cannot be composed too early in the writing process. You may run into an editor or publisher with a suitcase full of money to induce you to NOT self-publish your work after you wow them with a boffo elevator pitch.

If that goes well, the person you are talking to may not be able to buy your work immediately.

You want to put something in hand that serves as a reminder so s/he can go back later and buy your work.

For The Aristotelian I had a local print shop make up a bunch of  postcards. That was OK, but I found that most times when I was having a conversation about it were times when I did not have any of those postcards on my person. Thus, when it came time to make up something like that for Finding Time, I decided to have business-cards made up instead.

You'll want to put your cover art on the front, and you'll want to put some kind of contact info on the back. I was going through a QR code kick a year or so back and I decided to have the hyperlinks in the last two paragraphs encoded as QR codes and fit my name and email beside it. Next time I'll probably quit the QR code business. It's cool, but nobody uses it.

It's very easy to keep a dozen of your work's business cards in a holder you keep in your coat pocket so that after you deliver your elevator pitch, you can give out your card.

Someday, you may find yourself manning a table at a book fair, trade show, or convention. You might want to get bookmarks printed up. I haven't done that, but some of my friends have. Other writers I know have had pens, calendars, and key rings made. You'll want to have these little bits of swag for you to hand out. It's also a good idea for you to have a few book-on-demand printed paper copies of your book for sale. If you're really ambitious, you can have those huge six-foot-high by two-and-a-half-foot-wide banners made to hang up behind your table. Or maybe set up a big-screen TV with your book trailer running on continuous loop.

(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

Waiting For Amazon

(This is step #11 of my How To Publish An Ebook thang.)

One of the annoyances of publishing with Kindle Direct Publishing is that you must wait for about 12 hours from when you tell it to publish your work until the time it becomes available.

While you're waiting you can redeem the time by reviewing your plans for promotion and advertising. I'm by no means an expert in these areas. In fact, I really think my efforts in this regard have been substandard. So, listen to someone else about promotion and advertising.

In fact, I'm considering hiring out promotion and advertising next time I self-publish something.

So, let's talk about hiring work out. Nobody can do everything at an expert level. That's a real-life corollary of a couple of my earlier blog posts about writing about superlatives, and writing here and here.

Take a survey of yourself. Can you write? Can you copy-edit? Can you do art? Can you write advertising copy? Can you do video production? Can you write press releases and follow up on them?

(I hope you can write. Otherwise it makes little sense to self-publish ebooks.)

For each of those things you either can't do, or feel incompetent doing, or have others tell you you're incompetent at--you should consider hiring that work out.

I've talked about how I got an artist for my work here. But I also hired out video production, copy editing, and web-page design. I think that next time, I'm going to do some more crude cartoons and story-boards.

Consider this image. It's crude and ugly. However, it served its purpose admirably: to help figure out composition and colors.  I wish that when I was defining Finding Time's trailer that I had put together crude story-boards. Likewise, my web page FindingTime.Poling.Info would have come together faster had I created some crude drawings.

Next time, I'll draw up a lot of simple sketches on a white-board, photograph them, and send them to my friends doing the art, design, and video.

I think I could have more quickly and more surely communicated my vision for the following trailer had I created storyboards like this.

 

(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

Add A Title To Your KDP Bookshelf

(This is step #10 of my How To Publish An Ebook thang.)

Kindle Direct Publishing isn't particularly difficult to work with.

Let's suppose you have created an eBook and you've formatted it for the Kindle. Suppose further that you've shown this Kindle-formatted file to a dozen or so advanced readers. Suppose even further that the editor you hired and these advanced readers assure you that the eBook is flawless, perfect, and without any typographical errors, grammatical errors, or spelling errors.

You have to make sure the quality of your eBook is perfect, perfect, perfect, because it bears the stigma of being self-published. Self-published works are looked down upon by many readers. Traditional publishers want everyone to believe "self-published books are trash." They want to serve as gatekeepers. They would like you to believe this is to protect the reading public from a flood of low-quality self-published works.

I wish that were the case. They are simply businesses trying to make the most money they can for their shareholders. They aren't really running a conspiracy to bring in the antichrist or to persecute you. If they believed he could make them a lot of money, they'd publish the devil himself.

Truly, traditional publishers produce edited works day in and day out. But traditional publishers also exclude works from publication for other reasons:

• they pursue different markets, 
• they already have similar titles for sale, 
• they don't publish Commies, Whigs, or Delusional Paranoids.

It is the responsibility of the self-published author make a lie of the traditional publisher's aspersions about his work.

A thousand self-published works can be great, but all it takes is for the reader to get one low-quality work to vindicate the traditional publishers' propaganda.

Once you upload your eBook to the KDP Bookshelf, there's a chance you'll create that bad impression about self-published work. So, now is a good time for you to ask yourself for the last time why you are self-publishing and also to ask whether you're deluding yourself about your deathless prose.
(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

Buy an ISBN or several

(This is the 8th part of my How To Publish An Ebook thang.)

Every book you'll find in a bookstore has an ISBN--an International Something Book Number. It's a tracking number that's used to track inventory and it allows the bookseller and the book buyer to unambiguously identify a specific edition of a specific book.

This means that if you were to publish a book in hardback, in paperback, and also in large-print, you'd be able to ring up your bookseller and get the edition you want. And an ebook is just a different sort of edition that doesn't kill trees. So, you'll want it to have a unique ISBN number.

When you publish an ebook, you don't absolutely have to have an ISBN, but if you don't, it'll scream "amateur." There are ways to get an ISBN that you don't have to pay for, but if you do, it'll have biblographic information encoded in it that you may not want.

ISBN numbers look random, but they are not. They are a fixed 10 or 13 number of digits, and they give a code number to every publishing company, and a sequence number associated with which book this is in your catalog of books. If you're a mega corporation, with thousands of titles, you'll be given a shorter publisher code and a longer catalog number. And if you're a small fry like me, you'll have a longer publisher code number and a shorter catalog number.

If you do a bit of googling of how ISBN works, you'll be able to look at any random book's ISBN number and know how big the publisher is--or isn't.

The pricing of ISBN numbers accounts for deep quantity discounts. If you want to buy a single ISBN number, it'll cost you just a few bucks less than if you buy ten ISBN numbers. Thus I suggest you NEVER buy a single ISBN number, and always buy a lot of ten ISBN numbers. If you publish a book in ebook and it sells enough to justify a paperback edition, you'll need that 2nd ISBN number and that's when you'll save money.

Prices right now are $125 for one, $250 for ten, $575 for a hundred and $1000 for a thousand.

You'll want to go to Bowker Identification Services and sign up for an account. Then follow their instructions to get as many ISBN numbers as you want. You'll get an email from them with a set of ISBNs that you can later assign to your works.

 As you publish editions, you'll go back to your account with Bowker to provide the information that they'll associate with this number when anyone asks. This will be the number you provide as metadata.

(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

Register a Company Name

(This is the 7th installment of my How To Publish An Ebook thang.)

When you publish an ebook, you'll have to identify who is publishing it. Publishing is a business and by publishing a book you are going into business for yourself.
 
You might say Steve Poling Publishing, but why should you publicize me? Instead, come up with a cool name for a publishing company. When you come up with a cool name, google it and make sure nobody else has something close.

Run it past some friends to get their reactions, because it's really easy to not-see problems with the name. I have a friend who came up with a cool name for a company that just happens to differ by only one letter from a slang term for an unnatural sexual act.

Once you've got a name you like, you have to register that name. How will you register the name depends upon your jurisdiction and how you want to organize your publishing company. Maybe you want to organize your publishing company as a multinational corporation. Get a lawyer and ask him what to do.

To start a little smaller, you can organize as a sole proprietorship and file for what I call a DBA. The letters stand for "Doing Business As." This probably won't need a lawyer. It depends upon your jurisdiction. In Michigan all you need to do is fill out a form, give it to the County Clerk with a fee and get approval. I suppose they check to make sure someone else doesn't already have that same name. (Just for laughs, why not try to file "Ford Motor Company" and see what happens.)

If some MBA tells you different, believe them instead.

Once you've got the name you are going to publish under, get ready to use it in a number of places. Starting with your ebook's metadata.
(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

Reverse Engineering ePubs

When you publish an ebook, you should study what others have done. There are some serious adults out there who can do some marvelous things in ebook design. And when you try to do the same, it can end up looking lame. The way to save yourself from looking lame is to learn what the serious adults did and so something similar.

I am a firm dis-believer in DRM. I think it is the tool of the devil and I will never willingly use DRM in anything that I publish. Moreover, DRM is something that one can easily defeat with just a fair amount of Googling. I mention DRM not because I want a flame war but to explain why you might not be able to reverse engineer some of the smart-kids' ebook designs. If you try to study an ebook that's DRM encrypted, you'll have to first defeat the encryption.

I think the great strength of Sigil is how well it works at opening up an existing ebook and showing you its structure. Sigil reads and writes ePub files. But what if the ebook you want to study is in MOBI (Kindle) format. Not to worry. Load the ebook into Calibre and ask it to convert from MOBI into ePub. You do use Calibre to manage all your ebooks, don't you? I've even heard rumors that those sneaky Russians have a way to circumvent DRM with a Calibre plug-in.

Once you have an ebook unencumbered by DRM, open the ebook's ePub file in Sigil and look around. You'll see a table of contents, a cover, content, and metadata. Take notes of what you see.

For instance, study the copyright page of your ebook. How can you make yours look cool and professional? What Tor Science Fiction did was to create an image of exactly the right size and on this image they put text and line-art consisting of the requisite info in the perfect typeface and size. Good idea. I can do the same in my ebook's typeface with my ebook's text.

How about the metadata for your ebook? What should you put in? Grab two or three other ebooks and look at what those guys included. Just make sure that your exemplars should be comparable to your own ebook. If you're making a cookbook, don't study a thriller's metadata. And if you're making a thriller, don't glom onto a cookbook's metadata.

Pay attention to the sequence that the other guys used to organize their ebooks. Do you really need to put the Table of Contents at the front of the ebook? Or the title page? Often times people will look at the excerpt at the front of your work. You don't want this clotted up with a bunch of non-prose that doesn't help the reader toward a buying decision.

Do your chapters have titles that look like "Chapter One" or "The Adventure Begins"? Which do you want to appear in your Table of Contents? What did someone smarter than you do in a similar circumstance?

If you see an ebook that looks amateurish, notice what it is that makes it look that way. Then look at a professional ebook to find out how it creates the opposite impression. Usually, when I see an ebook that looks amateurish, it doesn't have a snazzy enough cover. This is why I prefer to hire out cover design.

The main thing you want to do from this step is to build up checklists of things you don't want to forget to put in your ebook, and to raise questions for which you need to research the answers you'll need later.

(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

Copy HTML into Sigil

This is the third step in my multi-step tutorial on how to publish an ebook.

I use Sigil. You can find it here. It is free. You can download Sigil and soon be generating ePub files to publish. I spent about a day learning how to use it.

One of the good things about Sigil is that it'll read pretty much any unencrypted ePub file. If you see someone else's ebook and wonder, "How'd s/he do that?" You can use Sigil to reverse-engineer it. I'll talk more about that later.

For now, let's just stick with the basics. After you download Sigil and read its online documentation--or skim it at least. You should run it on your machine. It'll look something like this:

 

Now, get the HTML files you converted in the last step of this process. Click on that little blue cross on the toolbar and that will enable you to add your HTML files to the project. Put them in the folder marked Text.

You may have some images that your ebook uses. You have to copy them into the Images folder. Use the right-click pop up menu. If you have a lot of images, this can get involved.

 

If you have images like this, then you have to go into the HTML markup and change the locations to point inside the epub file. (If you're confused, don't try to grok this in one go. Just take this as a placeholder for something you have to learn to do, or hire out to a teenager.)

That's it for now. If you are serious about doing this, you should not regard this tutorial as anything more than a roadmap. You should spend the next few hours reading the Sigil documentation. It's not particularly hard, and if you know what you're doing, you can probably figure things out for yourself.

(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)

Convert To HTML

This is part 2 of a multipart tutorial on How To Publish An Ebook: Convert to HTML.

You may not know this, but an ebook is a lot like a web page. You're looking at a web page right now, and what makes it work is a markup language called HTML. The people who keep track of internet standards can tell you the difference between HTML4, HTML5, XHTML, XML and several other similar data format standards. You probably don't care. I'll be inexact in my terminology: when I say HTML I may be playing fast-and-loose and really mean XHTML instead. Will this hurt anything?

I hope not. I'd rather you get a few niggling details wrong and get the overall concept right.

Let's suppose you've gone through the process of writing a book. And that book just happens to be in DOCX format. This is the file format that Microsoft Word uses. If you use another word processor, you can probably get it converted to DOC or DOCX format easily enough. Otherwise, ask and we'll work out that contingency.

There are a lot of ways to convert a DOCX file into HTML. And they all work fairly well. However, they tend to generate bloated HTML code. You can generally represent something in many different ways. And when you have a Word document, it can have a lot of odd formatting things that anyone might put in for any reason. But that's not you because you're writing an ebook.

However, file format translation programs don't know that, and they can add a lot of just-in-case code in their HTML translations. Maybe you like having all that bloat in your HTML files, but I like to be able to see what's going on when I inspect an HTML file. (Generally this happens after something goes wrong and I need to find out why.)

That's why I like a clean, lean, light-weight HTML translation that's relatively minimalist. (And if your ebook design is not minimalist, you're doing something wrong.)

That's where Rick Boatright's translation comes in handy for me. Go here to see what i mean.

You'll see two boxes. One on the left and another on the right.

Go into Word. Hit Control-A to select everything. Then hit Control-C to copy everything.

Go into your browser and Rick's translation page. Click in the left box and hit Control-V to paste everything.

Select the checkboxes you want, then click the button marked "Clean up Word Text" and wait for a few minutes--depending on how long your document is. If it barfs, break up  your ebook into chapters and try again.

When you get each piece of your ebook translated to HTML, click in the right box and hit Control-A to select everything, and Control-C to copy everything. Then paste your buffer into a Notepad file and save it off with an extension of HTML into project directory.

When done, you should be able to double-click on each HTML document to see what it looks like in your browser. Pictures can be a bit tricky. You may want to get some help to get pictures put in the right places. It's not hard to do, just hard to explain in a brief post like this one.

Now is a good time to look for badly translated symbols like smart-quotes, copyright or trademark symbols and other bits of noise that'll hurt the appearance of your ebook. It's best to find these errors as early in the workflow process as possible to avoid rework

Do you have to use Rick Boatright's translator? No. Can you use other HTML translators? Probably. I'm only telling you what worked for me. And you might have some other way that works better. I certainly haven't cornered the market on truth. Can you avoid Word altogether and use another tool that generates clean HTML automatically? Idunno. Haven't tried.

Let me know if you have tried something different--like, say, Scrivener.


(You can find the bullet-point outline of How To Publish An Ebook here.)