Creating and Selling ebooks

This is the very first question you must consider, as the answer affects the majority of decisions afterwards. Since my daughter was creating original content, I was looking for ways to get it published. What I quickly discovered is that there is very little updated information available on publishing original content, but a wealth of information (in fact an entire industry) dedicated to Affiliate Publishing.
Affiliates don't create original content, but rather sell original content created by others. Please note, I have nothing against Affiliate publishing. Successful Affiliate publishers create websites that attract high volume, targeted audiences with the intention of selling books, guides, tutorials or training programs that are written and packaged by others. The affiliate earns a percentage of the sale for each product sold thru their website. Since other affiliates are selling the same product, the key to affiliate sales is being successful at attracting people with a particular problem or question to your site before they click on others. This means getting top rankings by the search engines. If you are interested in getting deeply involved with Affiliate Publishing, just type Affiliate Publishing into your favorite search engine and begin reading.
Now that we have that cleared up, just remember that all the information presented in this lens is geared toward small, independent, original content publishing.

I. Product Creation

This is my daughter's job. She develops and writes the stories. Any illustrations are created by her. The book cover is designed by her.

There are lots of good Squidoo lenses on how to improve your writing, and the web is FULL of advice on writing for fun or profit. No need to discuss that topic further.

Mom helps out with proof-reading, as do a few of my daughter's friends.

Dad created a Word template to paste the final, proofed story into. I tested the layout (font, font size, page margins, etc.) until I found the combination that looked right. While this is important for sales of the books in .pdf format, it is worthless for .epub format. More on those file formats later in this lens.

Another advantage of this template (for .pdf) is a consistent layout from book to book, which should help build a "brand" and author identity. This will also be true of the book cover.

Spent a few evenings researching online for original content copyrights. Formulated our own copyright wording and added that to the template. Copyrights vary so much between authors. Some people use one sentence, while others fill an entire page with 6-pt font covering every possible copyright angle. I decided to be somewhere in the middle.

ISBN stands for "International Standard Book Number". It is a unique identifier for books, e-Books, tapes, and CD's. For traditional paper books, the ISBN number is typically printed on the book's title page. Please note there is no legal requirement to have an ISBN and it conveys no legal or copyright protection. However, both brick/mortar and some online book sellers in the US (Apple & Sony) require ISBN identification. The cheapest source for ISBN identification I have been able to find to date is from Publisher Services (http://www.isbn-us.com).

The question still remains. Is it worth doing? So far the answer appears to be no, but I am still researching this to weigh the advantages and pitfalls of spending the money for each completed e-book.

One advantage of Affiliate Publishing is that you don't have to worry about theft prevention, as the content owner will do this for the affiliates. However, for creators of original content, you have to make your content easily accessible to your target audience, but not TOO accessible.
The challenge here is unauthorized distribution of your original content. I found several companies on the web selling products that help prevent product theft. These solutions usually involve making the published product an executable file or requiring a password to enter at a special webpage or some other form of internet security. If your target price for the product you are selling is high enough, or if you intend to use affiliates to help distribute your publications, then I believe these products are worth serious consideration. However, our target price for our ebooks is below $5.00, and we intend to sell primarily through our website, so to me the benefits of delivering the purchased product quickly and in an easily readable format to the purchaser is our greatest concern. Again, price of the product weighs heavily into this decision.

A couple of evenings surfing the web has brought me to the following conclusion: Publishers of original content need to offer their finished product in BOTH .pdf and .epub formats. This means preparing your completed word-processor document (we use MS-Word) in slightly different levels of formatting for easier conversion.

Turning your finished product into a .pdf file.
PDF documents are exact duplicates of the original document. Headers, footers, indents, illustrations are all in the same location with the same number of pages. Nothing changes. So, for .pdf conversion, you need to have your document formatted just as you wish your purchaser will view it. Adobe Acrobat has always been the "700-lb gorilla" of pdf file creation, but the good news is that it is no longer the only solution. There are a lot of older website content out there claiming if you don't purchase the expensive Adobe Acrobat program, you will need to purchase or subscribe to their product so that your pdf file will allow for weblinks within the finished pdf document. This may have been true in the past, but today there are several pdf generators that maintain the weblinks. And some of these are even free. We are using PDF reDirect Pro, but there are many other products available online.

Turning your finished product into a .epub file
EPUB (also know by: ePub, .epub, or other variations on capitalization) is a free and open standard for for eBooks (electronic books) maintained by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). The ePub file format was designed to be open (anyone can use it or create it) and reflowable (the text can be re-sized and re-arranged to accommodate whatever size display it's being read on). It is quickly catching on as the standard for ebooks, for the same reason Adobe's .pdf took over in the past: it allows one electronic publication to be read by nearly all devices. At least that is the goal. So far, the major e-readers have their own "versions" of the ePub format that works best with their reader. Some day in the not-too-distant future, one version will dominate and overtake the rest, but until then.... The even bigger advantage epub has is that there are already free or nearly free epub converters available for converting MS-Word or .pdf documents into epub files. I am experimenting with a few to see how they work and compare the results to my Word template. Since my daughter's books don't have illustrations or tables within the text, the conversion is pretty simple. The key to .epub conversion is removing nearly ALL of the formatting. Mark Coker of Smashwords wrote a very good (and FREE) download detailing the requirements to convert to .epub. A link to this book is below, and is a MUST READ for anyone wishing to create an ePub formatted document.

II. Product Distribution

Having a basic understanding of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) will be beneficial to you when you begin to pull all of the various elements together within your website. When I started investigating this project, I quickly realized that I knew absolutely NOTHING about HTML or CSS. My last programming class was in college (+20 years ago). Fortunately, there are resources available today to quickly come up to speed with a basic understanding. For me I purchased the book shown below, and read it cover-to-cover. I also referenced a few good Squidoo lenses for more specific information.

A separate e-mail address is an essential component of this process. There are many places to go to receive a free e-mail account. If you are not familiar with the popular providers, type Free Email Services into your favorite search engine and begin reading.

Call me paranoid, but since it costs almost nothing to establish a second checking account at our bank, I decided to do so and link the Merchant Accounts and website expenses to this account only. Keeps everything (i.e. account numbers) separate from the household finances. And should also help come tax time.

When I began researching PayPal and other payment processing solutions, it quickly became apparent that I needed a real web address. I have maintained a Squidoo account for a few months, and also have a technical Wordpress blog, but the payment processing services won't operate "thru" them; payment processing only works thru your own domain. Squidoo doesn't offer that option. Wordpress does, but you have to pay for it. After more research I decided to secure a domain name and purchase some web hosting.
There are MANY web hosting providers available today. Type Web Hosting Services into your favorite search engine and begin reading. I decided upon GoDaddy.com for both domain registration and web hosting. So far they have treated me good; but I have nothing to compare to, so I can't really declare them better or worse than their many competitors.
Two additional things I paid for within the web hosting that I believe is very valuable to this project. First, for less than $10/yr, I got a Private Registration. When you register a domain name, you have to use your real name and real contact information. This information becomes readily available thru free websites (like http://whois.mtgsy.net/). Private Registration hides your personal info within a "corporate umbrella." Secondly, for less than $5/yr, I got the domain Certified. To me it shows creditability that the website is not some fly-by-night operation. Is a Certified Domain worth the money? Don't know that answer yet.

Like those cool looking social media icons on the bottom of the webpages? In today's web experience, they are a necessity, although I am not sure how all of them survive. In any case, I incorporated several from Komodo Media (see link below). They are free, and work great. Lots of different sizes and designs available, if you search the web. Not that difficult to implement either, and they add some color to the web pages. Give these guys some love if you have a need for these icons on your website.

I thought the website needs a forum for customers and visitors to post their opinions. It is not a requirement, but the search engines like the increased traffic. There are several free guestbooks available. Free if you can put up with the ads, or you can pay to have the ads removed. So far it is working OK with the light traffic. We'll see how it goes if/when website traffic increases.

Getting this right is one of the bigger challenges in this entire process to date. There is quite a bit of information on the web on this topic, but unfortunately, A LOT of the information is outdated, or is written towards the Affiliate Publishing market.

Once I started to identify payment processors that worked with small, independent merchants, the next criteria I judged them against is the fees charged. Some processors charge a monthly fee, while others charge a per-transaction fee, and others charge both monthly AND per-transaction. Also be aware of any one-time setup fees, and any fees to add additional items to the account. I spent more time researching this topic than I did for the rest of this project.

Since my goal was doing this on a shoestring budget, I concentrated my efforts on the per-transaction offerings. I finally settled upon PayGear.com for our Payment Processing. I liked their low fees, and the fact they interfaced with both PayPal and Google Checkout. They also have the ability to interface with Authorize.net if I decide to do so in the future. As before, I can neither endorse or break bad on this provider, since my experience has been very limited. I have asked quite a few questions to their customer service department, and they have always answered back in a timely fashion and provided relevant answers.

Does the Product Creation section appeal to you, but the Product Distribution seem to be too much work, or just doesn't interest you? There are a couple of alternative paths to investigate that may fit your needs better.

The first alternative path I am just now beginning to investigate is selling directly through the big three's electronic bookstores (Amazon / Barnes& Noble / Borders). Amazon's Digital Text Platform is operational already. Borders has partnered with Kobobooks to format and handle their digital offerings. Barnes&Noble's Pubit platform has just launched. The secret to gaining access to this massive distribution option is formatting your ebook in the .epub format. All three bookstores claim they offer tools for the independent author to create .epub files compatible for their customers. I have yet to do this, so I cannot comment positive or negative yet, but it appears to be very promising.

I am looking very closely at the Sony Reader Store, which uses Smashwords for their conversion and distribution. They distribute to almost all the major e-book players, and have reasonable commission.

I looked into the Apple iBookstore, but their requirements include an ISBN number (discussed earlier), and the ebook published on a Mac OS X10.5+ to encode the book. No good for me, as we are running a Windows platform. Maybe their requirements will change in the future.

The second alternative path, for those interested in writing only and dealing very little with anything after the story is saved in your word processor, is to investigate one of many small publishers that specialize in ebooks and paperback publish-to-order services. Do a websearch for "ebook publishers" and begin reading.

III. Post Launch Adventure

We are now official and selling the first book, titled "Always Here Never Gone". My daughter has now learned the amount of time required to edit her writings. The .pdf version is the first to be available thru the website.

By request of a few relatives, I made the first six pages of the book available for free download. This seems to have kick-started the sales, as we now have a few sales (even a few non-relatives). Still waiting to turn on the full marketing machine; so far have only promoted it thru Facebook.