Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi and welcome to the e-book publishing masterclass. I'm so glad you're here. My name is Rebecca Wilson and I'm an author, a publishing specialist, and a professional editor. Today I'm here to be your coach to help you understand the whole process of creating and selling an e-book. I've broken down this process into four different sections that you can complete at your own pace to help you go from concept to publish product, no matter where you are along in the process, you'll find some new ideas, helpful tricks, and practical skills in this course. I know that most folks who are getting into the world of self-publishing are pretty busy. So all of the lessons in this course are divided into smaller sections that should usually take no more than 10 or 15 minutes to complete at a time. That way you can sneak in a little bit of learning anytime you have internet access as your new publishing coach and wanted to walk you through plenty of examples of ebook strategies and features that you can include in your book. We're also going to look at some different websites and resources that you can use to help you create, sell, and market your ebook. Oh, my background is in research and publishing. I've had some academic republished, iPad writing traditionally published. And I've also self-published a wide variety of different things. The world of self-publishing is by far my favorite because you get to be in control of all the aspects of your product and its launch into the world. So without any further ado, let's head on into the course.
2. The State of eBook Publishing: I don't think there's ever been a better time to get into ego publishing because it is such a steadily growing market. Year-over-year market reports indicate that more and more people are buying and enjoying digital copies of books. It's important to remember that e-book readers usually also love reading paperback books to most people tend to enjoy both formats. So it's not a case on one side of the industry growing and the other side dying. People simply prefer different formats for different types of books and different reading occasions. So okay, a quick history lesson. First, e-books started to become a thing in the early 2000s. This was thanks to a number of inventions like the PDF format, which was invented by Adobe in 1993. The first e-books were usually technical or scholarly documents, but eventually library start picking up on them and offering fiction books. By the 2010, they were really kicking off and that's when people started to buy dedicated e-book reader devices and they started to become available. And people were suddenly able to take huge numbers of books with them anywhere. E-books became a multi-billion dollar industry this way, Statista, which is a statistics firm, released a report in 2018 about e-book publishing that provides some really interesting information for us. E-books now make up about 25 percent of all book sales worldwide. The USA is the largest market for evokes in the world, with more than 487 million ebooks purchase per year, 83.3% of those sales were on Amazon. But runner-up in the US is Apple iBooks with 9%, and then Barnes and Noble, noch, cocoa, Google, and other miscellaneous others make up the rest of the sales in less than 4%. The UK is the second largest market worldwide for ebooks at 95.6 million ebooks purchased over a year. And we are talking about English-speaking countries here. The sales platforms are pretty much the same in the US. In the US, but with an even higher leaning towards Amazon at 87.9%. Canada is the third place runner up with 26 million ebooks sales in a year. There are some differences here as Amazon is only 57.2% of the market. Cocoa has a much bigger presence here with 24.9% of sales. And Apple iBooks also boosts up to 14.4%. Australia and New Zealand are together about equal to Canada's numbers. Additionally, about 12 percent of all those Amazon numbers were from their Kindle Unlimited Program. This is sort of like a lending library for people who own Kindle brand e-readers. So what do we see from all this data? We see that e-book publishing is a huge industry that isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It's been steadily growing since 2010 when self-publishing really started to become accessible to people. The majority of e-books are sold in the USA. This is true no matter where you're publishing from. And in this class we're going to be talking about several different publishing distribution platforms, but will often be talking about Amazon self-publishing platform as our example. This is because it's the big dog in the yard in terms of ebook distribution and because many of its features are very standard among its competitors and other distributors. So we said that millions and millions of e-books are being sold every year. So what kind of books are they anyways? Well, the e-books with the highest sales rates are fiction and especially romance fiction. People who like this genre tend to buy multiple books come in on a regular basis. And they also tend to have favorite authors that are dedicated to, in terms of creating a business strategy that includes e-book publishing. Creating fiction books demands a lock time. We're generally talking about 200 or more page books. These can take a lot of effort to produce, so you'll likely find a lot more fiction writers who do it for a hobby rather than a full-time income. E-books generally do follow the same trends of paperback fiction. However, they do have a specialty and this is how two books, these are books that are short or moderate in length, specific to a topic and provide actionable advice. People like these kinds of e-books because they want instant solutions. For example, if you wanted to start a blog, you're more likely to pay $20 for an e-book from an expert blogger than to start searching on Amazon for a paperback book on blogging. Paperback books also tend to be perceived as a moment in time because they're not often updated. They tend to be very static to the time when they are published. E-books, on the other hand, can be quickly modified or rewritten by comparison. Therefore, a certain topics especially pertaining to technology, business or social media, or more desirable in a digital format. Now the content of this course is applicable no matter what kind of ebook your writing and publishing, make sure you take note of the particular elements, particularly when we talk about designing and formatting that would work well for your specific genre and type of ebook.
3. Anatomy of an eBook: In this lesson, we're going to be talking about the planning and writing up your e-book. First, let's talk a little bit about what actually makes up an e-book. The first thing that you'll find an eBook file is the cover. Unlike the paperback book, which has things like margins to consider, the pages and cover of your e-book can be centered. At the most basic level. The cover will have your book's name and the author's name or pending on it. But you can add all sorts of other selling points. You can add a small quote or review awards or accomplishments, taglines, as well as compelling pictures or graphics. Ebook Covers can have a lot of the same features as a paperback cover. Just remember that sometimes your cover will be displayed as a small graphic. Details like small text might be lost. So make sure that the title above all is legible, even when the graphic is reduced down. Inside the eBook, you'll find a whole bunch of pages before the actual meat of the story appears. Again at a basic level, you'll find a copyright page and a title page. But you can add in other pieces of front matter to enhance your reader's experience or to promote other work that you do. Some books include a summary, a couple of reviews or highlights of what's to come in the book. You might find a list of other books by the author, maybe a table of contents, or even a sales page promoting a program or service. Particularly if you're looking at an instructional nonfiction e-book. After all the front matter, you will find maybe an introduction or forward. This is where the book structure gets pretty predictable and you'll have your chapters and then maybe a conclusion at the end of your book comes your end matter. Much like the front matter, there was a lot of variety as to what you'll actually find here. There could be your reference list and appendix, an index or an author bio. There can be a call to action, may be an urge to buy the next book in the series or visit a website for more information, or maybe go leave a review somewhere. I'll give you a little more information about things you can add in the upcoming section on additional content. So that's what makes up the basic structure of an epoch. Now let's move on and talk about defining your audience and your competition.
4. Defining Your Audience & Competition: When you're writing an e-book with the intention of selling copies much like any other product, it's important to think about who exactly is going to be buying it. This comes down to creating a marketing plan, which we're going to cover in lesson 4. However, I think that identifying that target audience early on is important as it will determine a lot of things including your design choices. If you're trying to cater to everybody with your book, you're speaking to nobody. Your audience will help you to determine the level of complexity and your language and your methods, the tone that you use, the style of your writing and formatting, and the way that your cover and sales copy look later on. Below, I've linked to a PDF worksheet that you can use to help you figure out who your audiences. One method that I find really helpful, especially for writing, is to pick an avatar. The idea is that you create a fictional person and give them a bunch of attributes and qualities that match the kind of person that you're trying to write for. You usually give them a name and other details like that. But I find that a more effective way is to pick somebody that you actually know, whether it be in real life online or wherever. Think of a friend or an acquaintance who could really use your book or find the content useful and then use them as the model reader. You don't have to tell them at all and maybe you shouldn't. But using them as the inspiration for your creative design choices can be helpful. So on this worksheet, you can fill in the first box to include as much or as little detail as you find necessary about your reader avatar. The rest of the questions are here to help you pull it so that the details from my avatar or audience consider what other experts they follow or read. This can give you a sense of what kind of style of communication they like. Do they like an aggressive swear fields, direct writing, poetic, gentle, nurturing, writing, something that makes them laugh. So think about what kind of social media accounts they might follow, or what YouTube channels or shows they watch. These other content producers are your competition in a broad sense, you're competing for our attention. They may not be offering a book or a book like the one you're writing. But your ideal reader is attracted to their message or their style for some reason and that is useful to study. Consider where your ideal reader likes to spend their time online. This can give us a good idea of the readers habits for marketing purposes and to figure out what kind of content they like. If they're really into video content than things like anecdotes or personal stories might work really well. If they love Instagram, that maybe they're more visual or into shorter actionable chunks of information. If they like blogs, then are they into the long storytelling kind or the bullet pointed headline kind? And how much time do they spend to read this stuff is going to help you understand what kind of content format they like to consume, and also what platforms or formats might be useful when you're trying to promote your work later on, consider what kind of styles are designed to appeal to them. Some of these cancers might come from the previous questions. Answers, think about broadly what kind of styling or formatting suits both your audience's tastes and your content. Is it more minimal, isn't more detailed, flowery, descriptive language or plane and businesslike. This can also head into choices of cover design. Are we thinking of big and bold and colorful design or something simple and texts lead? This can create a good reference point for a lot of the design choices that will come in Lesson 2. Next, consider what kind of problems you can solve for your reader. This is the really important point of connection between what you know and what they want from you. Especially when we're talking about non-fiction books. If you have content that you want to share, It's important to figure out how you can best position it to be useful. So let's say that you want to write a book about blogging, a book called logs. Everything I know about them would be way too overwhelming. And also not maybe very helpful, but a book called creating a blog and 30 minutes a day solves the problem of, I want to start a blog, but I have basically no time. The important thing is to be specific. The second important thing is not to be too specific. A book called Creating a book review blog and 30 minutes a day would be narrowing the field a bit too much because you're starting to eliminate people from be interested in the information probably still applies to them. Since in this case, the fundamentals of blogging or pretty much the same across all Nietzsche's. Next, consider what similar books or eBook titles exist. This comes down to understanding your direct competition. So what other books are out there? Take a browse through Amazon or whatever other platforms and treat you for settling. See what the best sellers are in your category. What do you think are the things about them that make them successful? Try popping into one of the sales pages for the books that you're examining. What are the reviews like and what do people like or dislike about it that can help you figure out how you can approach the same problem from a different angle that might be more useful. Finally, what are you doing to set your book apart? While thinking about these comparable books, ask yourself what is going to make your book special? This could be your level of expertise. It could be your content strategy, that level of detail that you go into on a key point, or even how approachable your book is, are easy to read versus the competition. All of these questions should help you figure out how to position your book a little bit better and how to understand what sort of market you're releasing it into. I find this info really helpful to have at any stage of the process, whether you're just trying to write or whether you've already got your manuscript done and are starting to edit it or make some tweaks. So now let's move on to talking about finding viable topic and what that means.
5. Planning Your Book Content: If you've already written your book or have a very clear idea of what you want to write about, then that's awesome. This information will be helpful for future writing projects because I know that there will always be a future writing project looking at the edges of your mind. So let's talk a little bit about what to do if you're not sure exactly what to write about. The great place to start is by asking people what they want to hear from you. This can give you a good insight into what topics or subjects people assume that you are knowledgeable about. If you have some perceived authority over a subject matter, it will make it that much easier and more natural for you to release a book on that subject. If you have an online platform like a blog or a social media channel, you can get a lot of information from there. On the one hand, you can ask your audience the same question about what they'd like to see from you. But you could also look at the content that you've already produced and that is done well. You can see what are your most read or liked posts. What do people enjoy seeing and hearing from you? If you've got an Instagram channel and use Instagram stories, use those poles and question features. Ask, what do you think I'm an expert in? What would you like to learn from me? These sort of strategies work best for non-fiction subjects, of course, but you'd be surprised at the story ideas that can come out at these kinds of conversations. Another way to get some ideas and viable topics is to examine the types of content that you enjoy consuming. So look at your subscriptions and your browser history. Where do you spend your time being entertained? You can also look at the work and projects you've done in the past. What was most exciting for you and what motivated you. What do you know the most about? You can start brainstorming on paper and creating a list of topics or a web, and just start getting more and more specific as it branches out. So once you have the seed of an idea, you can start to test the viability of that idea. If you have that online audience, you can connect with them and give them some shorter form content related to that topic, like make a post, make a blog, or do a video, things like that. Ask them what questions they have and be specific. And people respond very well to multiple choice questions. So give them multiple choice if you can. You can monitor that content to see how people are engaging with it and if they're reacting well to that coming from you. You can also start searching online on sites like Google or Pinterest, for example. Are there many other resources offering this information for free? And y is your content or approach even better? How do you distinguish yourself from others? People respond really well to content when it's well curated, when it's put in a nice format and easy for them to digest. So if you can do that and put it together in a way that people want to buy it. That's a good strategy to. You could also use a keyword searching tool to find out what people are searching for. One tool that I like to use personally is called publisher rocket, which is specifically for understanding what keywords are popular on Amazon. This is a onetime purchase software that gives you information on Amazon searches in the United States only and shows you competitors in those niches. Another useful tool is HFS, which is an SEO and key wording tool that has a much broader application than publish a rocket. You can use it for your blog as well and other things you're putting online. This one is little more expensive since it's a monthly subscription and this is more of a business expense. There are lots of other keyword and tools that you can use to look for trends and various different price points, including free ones like Google Trends. The key with any of these is to look for keywords that people are searching for in big numbers, but that they aren't finding great results. For, for example, if you type the word cats into Amazon, you're going to pull up a ton of books about cats, all of them in fact. But if you're trying to get more specific, let's say you're looking for poetry about cats. You're gonna find a much smaller range of products. You want to figure out what those keywords are, the people who are typing into the search engine but aren't finding exact matches for what they want. Or maybe the matches that they are finding are outdated or unattractive. We'll get more into this when we talk about keywords in less than three. So once you've got an idea that you feel confident somebody wants to read about, you can start to structure your book and we'll talk about that next. I think a great way to start structuring your book is to create a very basic outline. This is especially useful for non-fiction writers. Fiction writers often do like to use net line, but many enjoy freestyle writing and seeing what comes out so there's no wrong way to approach it. But since this is the most structured way, Let's talk that one through. In this section, I provided you with a worksheet to help you create a very basic outline. If you want to write something even bigger or more complex, this thing go right ahead. This is modeled a little bit like an essay, which is persuasive and effective for a reason. Right at the top we have a spot for you to reiterate your goal in writing this book. You can also brainstorm a title, but this can wait until later if you want. Next, you'll want to sketch out what some of the main points are that you want to touch on in your introduction chapters and conclusion. I've included more bullet points for the chapters than the true or the conclusion. As these two sections really are more for orientation, they won't contain the meat of what you have to say. Use the bullet points to figure out what key points you want to make in each chapter. They could also be subheadings for your chapters. That's all up to you. There's also room on this page for page numbers. This can be an estimate of how many pages you think each section should be. This might be helpful to give you an idea of which sections are longer or more priority than others. It can also help you pacing your writing. And if you know that you write fast order slowly, you can maybe estimate how long it's gonna take you to write your e-book. Now you might want to start gathering info and research while working on your outline. There are lots of great ways to organize this information as he came across it. One method is just use index cards and to get a little file folder to help keep them in and keep them organized. You can also use Google Docs or in other word processing app. Something searchable is really convenient. Scrivener is a writing tool that I particularly like. It's almost like a virtual binder that you can store all your notes in and your drafts pictures, links, any reference material for your project. I would strongly encourage that you keep track of where you get your information from coming from a research background, it's really important to keep track of where your information is from because you might need to reference it later, or because you're using someone else's concepts or ideas. At the very least, you may want to include a reference somewhere at the end of your book. That will all depend on how you're using that reference information if you're paraphrasing it or if it's just an idea that's getting you thinking, make sure that all of the information that you're getting off the Internet is from reliable sources, relevant and timely. Even if you're basing all of your information for this book off your own ideas or material, spilling out all that content into note form can be helpful to help you organize those ideas. So you can keep track of characters or plot devices on index cards where you can organize your chapters in a way that you can move them around to find the best order. There's no wrong system for organizing your ideas, just figuring out what works best for you. It makes editing a whole lot easier to have things put into a system ahead of time. Now at this point, you can put together the rough draft of your e-book. How long this will take will depend on how big of a project you're creating and every book and every author is different. But now let's presume that you have a finished manuscript that you're ready to start working with. And let's move on to talk about some of the additional content that you can add to your e-book beyond the main content of the manuscript. As I mentioned before when we were talking about the anatomy of the e-book, you have an opportunity at both the front and the back of the book to add in some extra content. You don't want to pad the book with useless information, but readers are usually happy to tap through a few extra pages here and there. And if they see something that catches their eye even better, we've got another worksheet here to help you figure out what extras you want to add into your e-book. At the very top of this page, you can check off which add-ons do you want to include? You can do none of them or some of them. It's really up to you. I've made some suggestions here as a starting point, a freebie which might come from a link to your website or mailing list. And author bio, which can include a picture or not. Table of contents is useful for longer books and can include anchor links in your text because it's a digital file to easily jump between sections, references if you mentioned other sources of vocabulary list, if you're working with a different language or providing technical information. And index could be helpful if you're writing a bet a lot of different subjects in your book. And you could also include a list of other books that you've written. Again, these are just a starting point, so do get creative with it. When it comes to putting an extras in your book, you can start by thinking about the takeaways from your book. What concepts do you want your reader to walk away knowing and what skills should they be developing if it's not fiction or what kind of extra Could you be offering them to compliment this book's content? Think about what else you're promoting. This could be a freebie like a worksheet or a template or something. This could be a good lean to get people to join your mailing list, which you can use to update them about future books and services. You could promote your website or a discount code for something else you offer. You can include an ad for a service, a course, or a product. This could be located at the front of the book, at the back of the book or embedded in the narrative if that's practical, or even just add it as a URL on the copyright page. Use this as an opportunity to cross-promote things, especially if you're releasing this book as part of a series for business that you run, you can definitely be creative here. Just make sure that the offer isn't taking you away from the value of the book that somebody has bought. At the end of the book, you can put a call to action. This is where you tell the reader what to do next. Should they sign up for your newsletter or visit your website, maybe by your next book or follow you on social media, pre-order the next book, maybe go leave a review. These kind of calls to action work really best at the end of your book since the reader is done reading and ready to do something else. But you can also put them at the front to maybe even both. If you're asking for reviews, think about how and where you're going to ask for this feedback. Certain websites like Amazon have rules about when and where you can ask a reader to review your book. So make sure that you're following their rules. You could also just ask readers to email you with a review or maybe a talk takeaway from your book. You could offer them a freebie or a quick action guide in return for this and incentive is definitely helpful. Now the worksheet for this lesson gives you a place to list the different things in the front and the back of your book. Some more ideas for the front could be a quote, a poem, or a dedication at the end of your book, you can include some thank yous, maybe credits to people that helped you compile it, or even referral codes to programs and services that you use. An important thing to note is that in e-books you can include hyperlinks, which basically means a link that you tap on that'll take you to a website. This can make things a lot easier to send readers to a website if necessary. So once you've figured out what the additional content is that you want to add to your e-book. You can put together all of these elements in your e-book for formatting. We'll cover that in the next lesson. But before we go to that, let's talk a little bit about working with an editor.
6. Working With an Editor: Working with an editor can be a really important step in getting your manuscript ready for people to read. I've worked as a professional editor for many years and I've worked on a lot of different kinds of documents. So I want to give you some advice on how to navigate this process. First of all, there are a lot of different kinds of editors. Some do all the different jobs, jack of all trades. And some will only do one type of editing. So it's important to be clear on what you want from them. Some editors are actually proofreaders. This means that they'll check over your manuscript for technical spelling and grammar errors, but they won't make structural or contents suggestions. This is good if you're confident in your content, but want someone to look for mistakes. You can also have a structural or developmental editor who will give you feedback on the way that you've written your book or laid out the ideas. The important thing is really to be clear on how much help you're looking for. Providing a sample of a couple of pages to an editor might give them a chance to see the level of health that your manuscript needs so that they can give you more accurate quote on their services. Most editors prefer manuscripts to be formatted as size 12 Times New Roman font and double-spaced. This is pretty standard for the industry. You can also add a header with page numbers. At the very least, you can add your manuscript title and surname here too, if you want to be very professional about it. Now, this may be a controversial opinion, but I'm going to share it and it's that I don't necessarily think that everybody needs to hire an editor. If you're writing something short or you're really confident in your own proof-reading skills, you may be able to simply get a friend to read over the manuscript and provide some feedback that could be enough. Hiring an editor can create a barrier to self-publishing because editors can be quite expensive to work with depending on their skill level and the amount of work your manuscript needs. I think most manuscripts actually do need a proofreader at the very least, but if you're keen to self-edit your work, Here's how I recommend you go about it. First of all, print out your text. If it's long, maybe pay a little bit to get it printed somewhere. Sit down with a pen and read and on paper, you will catch way more errors on paper than you will on a screen. Just trust me on that one. Next, transfer those changes into a digital document using online grammar checker, there are plenty of free ones like ribbons or Hemingway, and you can copy and paste your text into these sites and it will give you some feedback. This won't be the same as a human looking at it, but it's certainly better than not checking it over at all. But if you do want to work with an editor, I would suggest that you still do start by doing that self editing method described. Why would you do that? Well, it will save the editor a lot of time and that potentially can save you a lot of money. If a document is riddled with errors, it's gonna take them a lot longer to pause and fix each one or to leave a comment for you. Editor set their fees and a number of different ways. Some of them charged by the hour, some charged by the page, and others charged by the word. The amount that they charge will be based on their skills and experience and also the type of editing that you're getting, like proofreading versus developmental editing. You can always ask for an approximate quote based on the size of your project. If you really hate rereading your own work, lots of people do. Or if you have a big budget to spend, then you can probably find an editor who was willing to take on your project no matter what it looks like. But make sure that you set clear expectations from the start. I can't speak for all editors, but in my personal experience and based on the way I run my business, if someone has sent me a manuscript that was really badly written, odds are better that I will actually cancel the job rather than spend the additional time fixing it and having to postpone other projects I'm working on. But this will really depend on who you decide to work with. But a little pre editing on your part does go a long way. As for where to find an editor of the Internet makes this relatively easy. You can find editors and proofreaders locally by searching on Google or by asking for referrals from friends or other authors online. Local writing groups or guilds often have directories with editors for higher. You can also find Facebook groups for writers that often have editors just lurking around looking for new clients. Again, be clear on what you need and what your budget is. Many editors have websites where you can see their credentials and samples of their work. You can also ask them for testimonials, or you can give them a couple of pages of your writing to edit as a sample if you want to see their quality of editing. So with all of that being said, let's wrap up Lesson 1 on this course, we've covered researching, structuring, writing, and editing your manuscript so far. And in the next lesson we're going to discuss how to turn that raw file into a polished e-book ready to be shared with the world. So I'll see you there.
7. eBook File Types: In this lesson, we're going to be talking about how to format. That means a script that you've developed into a finished product that is ready to share and sell. So formatting an e-book is a lot easier than formatting a book for print. Print books have things like margins and page numbers that need to be accounted for. But epochs don't usually have these things. But keep in mind that there are generally two kinds of e-books, PDF e-books and e-reader optimized e-books. Pdf e-books are exactly what they sound like. They are a PDF file organized with your book content inside. This is really easy to email, to share and to download. These pages are static in that what you place on each page will stay there. The formatting or reader that use won't change how each page is designed. You can also include fancy formatting, graphics, colored pages, and plenty of other visual features. Pdf e-books are often given as a freebie or a website download and can be read on a laptop, on a tablet, like an iPad, or even on a phone. You can sell PDFs on e-commerce websites or on sites like Etsy that allow you to sell digital files. The other type of eBook is one that is formatted for an e-reader, like an Amazon Kindle or a capo. These are usually an ePub file or a proprietary formats specific for the reader. You can also get software for your computer that can open and read an ePub file. And this type of file uses minimal formatting as the book is generated to fit the eardrum question from a basic text file. This is how you distribute an e-book through a large distribution site like Amazon, you can upload it as a basic document, like a Microsoft Word or RTF file, and it will convert it into the right format. This can get a little bit tricky because you'll need your basic file to be organized with headings and things like a table of contents. The conversion process takes these elements into account. There are some different software options that will do this for you, like Scribner, which will do the formatting work for you and export a file ready to publish. But there's no reason that you can't just do these steps yourself in Microsoft Word Pages or Google Docs. Luckily, all of the e-book distributors want to make this process really easy for you. They all have comprehensive guides on how to format your book for their platform. And the next two sections we're going to go over some formatting specifics. The type of content that you're sharing will help dictate what format you want to use. A PDF E-book is better for artwork or instructions that rely on visuals. The ePub book is better for stories, long pieces of writing, or multi chapter texts. You can certainly create both types of the same material, but I don't think that's usually necessary. It's helpful to remember that the big ebook sites are generally e-reader distributors. So Amazon, cocoa, and iBooks all have a preferred device for their readers to use. If you want to be selling on their site than their format is the way to go. It really comes down to how you want to distribute your book and have readers will best engage with it. First, let's focus on formatting your book as a PDF. This allows you to go in and design each page individually. Two different methods for doing this that I like are using Canva or using Adobe InDesign. Canva if you haven't used it before, is a free web-based graphic design tool. It's very comprehensive, it has a lot of features. There's also a subscription that you can buy monthly for even more features, but you don't necessarily need it to create something cool. Canva is straightforward to use and has a lot of free graphic elements that you can use to create interesting designs. And they also have nice templates which can be a good starting point if you're just getting into design work, creating your e-book and Canva is a good idea if you're making something shorter, like a freebie for a mailing list, a giveaway for your online audience or something that you're putting up for sale on your own website. Canva has a limit of 100 pages per document, and I find that it starts to get a little bit laggy the more pages that you make. Especially if we're talking about highly designed pages with a lot of elements. So this will largely depend on your computer or your processor. And I also don't recommend doing any big design work on canvas, iPad or cell phone app, because these are less precise and don't have as many tools as the desktop version. You can also create PDFs in other free software like Google Docs, you'll only be limited by the functions of the software in terms of what you can create. So think about how complex or design you want your e-book to be. If you're using Canva or something similar, you'll have to decide how much text goes on each page because they don't have a run on text feature where it automatically put some texts on one page and so on the next when it runs over. This feature does exist in InDesign though, however. So that's a good choice if you're really comfortable doing your own design work. Indesign is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud, which is a subscription service. It's a bit more pricey than other subscriptions, but if you're using all of its software on a regular basis, it can be worth it. They're also discounted rates for students. I personally subscribe to both Adobe and to Canva pro and use them for different things. I find that canva is a really great tool for making book covers since I like making them myself. But you could also use Adobe Illustrator for that. And we'll talk more about the covers in a later lesson. So if you create your book using Canva or InDesign, you'll want to export it as a PDF, making sure that you've included the cover in the file. In terms of sizing, Canva has a suggested e-book size that you can work from or you can simply make it a normal 8.5 by 11 inch document. Just think about where it's going once you've created it. And if your readers need a particular device or app to read it, check out any size specification there. Since there are so many different software options for formatting PDF e-books, I can't get into them all here, but once you've determined the one that suits your needs, you can always find wonderful tutorials online for how to use that exact piece of software. Youtube is an awesome resource for this. Okay, so now let's move on to the next section and talk about formatting your e-book for specific e-reader types.
8. Walkthru: Creating an eBook in Canva: Okay, So in this video, I'm going to show you how to make a pretty simple E-book in Canva using one of their templates. So this is the Canvas home screen and this is my profile of gotten designs down below. And it gives you a bunch of suggestions of different types of document that you can create that they have templates for. So what we're going to be working with today is a report. It's right here for me because I've used it recently. But if you were looking for it, you can just type into the search bar and type in. And it will pop right up. So when you click on it, it gives you a ton of different templates that you can work with. So these ones are a lot of sort of business oriented templates. Some of them are a little bit softer looking. You can kind of figure out what your e-book is going to be about and pick the style that may be inspires you the most, but you can definitely customize these a lot. So don't be too intimidated if they aren't exactly what you're looking for. So I'm going to pick a template that I like to work with, which is actually a book report template right down here. So when you find the template you want, you just click on it and it opens up a new project for you to work with. So here we have the Canvas workspace. So right here we have the project and this has all the different pages. This particular template has three sample pages in it so that we can work with. There's also all the elements over here. So we have templates. They have a photo collection where you can use royalty-free photos. Elements are more like graphic elements and also they do charts and things like that. Text is your texts menu. So they have samples of different layouts, but also tons of different fonts that are royalty free. Videos are a little video clips. They have some samples here. Backgrounds. So background photos for your pages, patterns or textures. Uploads are your pictures that you've uploaded and folders are your other projects that you may want to import are combined into this one. And down in more, we have just a couple other little things you can combine, but let's just keep it simple and focus on this particular template. You can also make this sort of sidebar go away just by clicking here and hiding it. But we want it out just so we can use some of the elements here. So let's get into customizing this e-book or this report into an e-book. So I'm going to approach this as if it's a project writing an e-book about writing good blog posts. So first let's go in and change the text. Text down here is groups. So in the heading, let's say maybe not that. Great. Blog posts. Perfect. So over here, instead of a book report by Carlos pinky, well, let's say the small seeming to be able to see it on the video step by step guide by combining guy here. And we'll just change the spacing on that, drag it and center it. Okay, So now the text is better, but these aren't my colors and this isn't a photo I've wanted to use, so let's start changing the colors first. Up here I can select this bit of text and I'm going to go up to the font, text color. And over here, because I have an account, I can save different brand colors that I like to use. So I'm going to use this sort of brownish color. And I'll use, I'll select the blog posts heading and select this green color for that one. And we'll kind of go with that brown and green theme for this booklet. Next, I'll pick this box here, the orange box in. I'll change that to the green color as well. Okay, so that looks a little bit better. Maybe I'll change this font here. You can go into fonts right here up at the top. And it gives you a whole list. So any of these fonts of the little crown beside it is from having a subscription as a Canva pro user, you can use these. But anything without it is totally free for anyone to use. And these are royalty free fonts. So you can use them for whatever commercial purposes you want. At the top, they've recently added a sort of search feature for fonts. So I'm going to just type in handwriting and see if anything comes up that I like. So I'm going to scroll down and I quite like this font right here. So we like that fund. It doesn't quite fit into this box, so we'll just make the box a different size to fit it in. And there we go. And we'll just readjust it. Oops, click outside to grab it. There. That's pretty good. Okay, so now we want to change this background photo. So let's go into Canvas photo database and think about what kind of imagery want to use. So this is the blog posts, so I kinda want to picture that's a little bit businessy, maybe a laptop at a desk photo. So let's look for Workspace. And so there's a ton of stock photos here that really do meet those needs. So just looking at the different icons in the corner of this picture, there's a little dollar sign. This is because this will cost extra money to uses an image. So it won't be just for subscribers. This image is that it costs a $1.3839 canadian to use in your project. So hovering, there's lots of ones that don't have that cost. This one's a pro photo. So maybe we'll use this one here. Looks good. So let's click and drag it over until it fills in. Perfect, Okay, I think that looks pretty good, but I do kind of want the image to be filtered a little bit instead of being just very crisp because it's a little distracting with the crisp image and the crisp text. So what I'm going to do to add a little filter over it, was going to elements. I'm going to grab this square, the shape here, and click on it to insert it. When a line it up with the edges of my page, it can go over, it doesn't matter. And there we go. So now we have this square for a color. I'm just going to pick white so that it's really clear. And I'm going to go up here in the top right corner to transparency. And I'm going to drag this down. And now it becomes a little bit of a softer picture. So I'm going to leave it right around 50 percent. 49 percent. Perfect. And then I'm going to go to position and I'm going to move it to back. So that puts it behind these elements right here in the front so that they're not obscured at all by the transparency, but the picture behind is, okay. So that's basically a very simple cover for an e-book. So next, let's scroll down and see what other pages are in this document. So we have this introduction page, and like I said, this is a book report file template. So it set up sort of like that. However, this would make a really good table contents. So I'm not going to go in and insert a fake table of contents for you, but you can go in and change all the different graphic elements to match the colors and the font styles that you picked from the header because there'll be saved right at the top here. So you can see the fonts I used are at the top. That one's a little bit big, so we'll fix it there and get another picture. So let's find another desktop picture that we like. There's a lot to choose from. Let's say, I want something with kind of a white background. Maybe this one's good. So I'll drag it over until it replaces the picture. Now you can see this doesn't look very good. It's just the middle of the picture. So to move that within the same element that we just placed, you just click on it and then go up to crop. And it shows you the whole picture and you can click and drag it to the paste the space it's visible. So let's get a little bit of the book, a little bit of pen and hit Done. Now that looks a little bit better. And in fact, I want to adjust the brightness of this a little bit. So we go to adjust. These are photo adjusting tools. So we're going to just crank the brightness up there. Not bad. So here we can go in and we could adjust the text. And this is actually a grouping of text pieces. So when you click on it as a whole, the whole box pops up and you can move the whole thing like a box. But if you click Ungroup, you'll see that these are all separate little elements. So I can go in and change the color of each one individually, make it that brown color or whatever you'd like. So this is a good way just to edit that, to put in your table of contents. And then next we have sort of a content page. Now I do like this three sections sort of setup. But that isn't great for my full eBook is maybe is great for like an overview or an introduction, a summary just sort of like how they've used it here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to turn this into a page that could just be full of my text. So first of all, a minister at the bottom. I'm going to erase a couple of the pieces here. So I'm going to ungroup the box. And I'm going to remove everything except for one of the headers and limit. Drag this to the bottom. You can select it. So this is where I'm gonna put a copyright statement. So I'm going to insert copyright symbol, name and the year. And then I'm going to select that and center it. And we're going to make the font a little bit smaller. Maybe a size 12 is a normal font. And we're just going to reposition it close to the bottom. So that's good. Now let's move this box down. Just click and drag it to kind of cover it too, so that's a little bit better and let's adjust the color of that. Let's put it as that brown color. So then at the top will come up and change this color to that green color that we're using. And maybe I'll make that a little bit smaller. And tear could be the chapter title, it could be the name of the section. So let's just say Chapter 1. And then here we have another box full of little boxes. So I'm just going to change it to one big text box, but you can continue to use the sort of modular sections. There's really no limits to how he positional your textures. Make sure using clear headings and being a little bit conscious of the flow of readings. So what we're going to look at first, and where's the readers Eigen to be drawn? So let's just delete this. Good it delete right here and we'll delete the group. And then I'm going to go into text and create a body text box. So it's a little bit small here, but we can go get some sample text just to fill in. So hang on. I'm going to just copy something. Okay. So I just went in, grabbed a bunch of Lorem Ipsum text, which is basically a Latin piece of text which is a common place holder in design work. So I'm just gonna paste it into this box. Can see it's a little bit huge. So let's drag this up here. It's also flagging everything because it's a different language. So let's just remove some of it just for the purpose, a demonstration. There we go. Okay, so let's say this is the texts we're working with, and let's just center it on the page and you can adjust the margins of where the text lives on the page. Right now it's all centered, select, Selected, and left justify it. And at the beginning, zoom in a little bit here just so we can see it a bit better. At the beginning, I want you to be an indent, so I'm going to add spaces. And then we're actually supposed to have some paragraph breaks in here, but pasting didn't quite poppy bad. So we'll add a couple of paragraphs just to make it a little bit more visually pleasing. And that's basically it. So now I would have my text on a page. You can go in and grab the font. So right here, this font it has such as the example is majority thin. But in this demo we're using lifo. So there we go. So now it'll match up with the font up here. It has a different size if it wasn't size 14 and a half. So you can adjust the size if you like. But a size 12 is a typical printed out size for a font. So if someone was going to print out your e-book or look at it on paper and 12 is the right size for reading. Okay, so let's zoom out again and take a look at this document. So now we have sort of a three-page, very rough EBITDA. I mean, this isn't exactly well-designed, but this is just an example of how you can use a template, modify it, and sort of start to add your own elements and design choices into it. So once you're done all of this and you're happy with your design, you can go up to the top right corner and click on the Download button. And this will download it as a PDF. So there's a couple different file types you can choose from here. Pdf Standard is going to be a smaller size file, which is maybe a bit easier for emailing and sharing. Pdf print is going to be the high-quality version. And that's probably going to be the biggest difference in terms of its graphic quality. So if you are making a print copy of this, go with print. If you're just going to e-mail it or share online, standard would be totally fine. Then here you can select which pages are included in your final PDF. Typically you want all of them and then you just hit download and then it goes right to your downloads folder and you can do whatever you like with it. So that's how simple it is to create something in Canva. It's free to use, like I said, and the extra features are available if you have a subscription, but you really don't need a subscription to create something. Very nice. So I hope that was helpful and we'll get back to the next lesson.
9. Formatting for eReaders: For mining your e-book for an e-reader means abiding by the specific requirements set out by the distribution website that you're using to sell your book. Typically, these sites will ask for two separate files, one with your text and one with your cover image. This is so that they can put a nice crisp image on the cover of the cover for the sales page. If you're looking to put your book on Amazon, for example, the cover file needs to be a JPEG. This graphic needs to be a size ratio of 1.6 to one. A good baseline for this is 1, 10, 100 pixels by 6000 pixels. All of his specific information, don't worry, it's all up on Amazon's website with our guidelines. And that's easily accessible once you make an account on their self-publishing platform, which is called kVp Kindle Direct Publishing is a true for all the large distributors to. They all have a lot of guides for creating attractive e-books that will work on their devices. When it comes to creating the text value have a couple of options. On the one hand, you can create a very basic text file that you can upload to the site and have it be converted into the right format there. This can be a little tricky and you have somewhat less control of what goes on June the conversion process. It can lead to a little more trial and error if you upload it that way and notice that something isn't formatted, right? You'll have to go into the original file, update it and then re-upload it. This could absolutely work and is probably the most common way to do this, but not necessarily the most efficient. So when you create your text file, which for most people will be in Microsoft Word Pages or Google Docs. You need to use line breaks to create separate pages for each section. If your e-book, that means that all of the front matter you identified in the last lesson should come first with each page on its own page of the document. Use the software's formatting tools to add headings, tables of contents, and any hyperlinks, single-spaced lines are perfect. Remember that you don't need to add page numbers or tinker with the margins of the document because the e-reader that your reader will be using, we'll do all that for you. Alternately, you can use some software that will create the right format for you. As I mentioned before, a scrivener has this feature as does the software vellum and other popular one and many others. Amazon actually has their own software that you can download for free to help you format your manuscript for their platform. It's called kindled create, and it is available for both Mac and PC. And I would say that this is probably the easiest way to start if you're feeling a little bit stressed about formatting your manuscript with yourself and you want to have a book available for sale on Amazon specifically, with this software, you start off by uploading a Word document with your text in it. Remember that this could come from pages from Google Docs or Microsoft Word, whatever you're using, most of them can export a file as a Word doc. This file should have the body of your text in it. In this case, you don't necessarily need to add all of your front end and matter ahead of time. Use page breaks to separate the different sections or chapters of the manuscript and use header formatting for chapter titles and subtitles. Even if your chapters just called Chapter 1 or Part 1, they don't have to be fancy. It's just helps to generate the table of contents in the software. Doing this a little bit of formatting ahead of time simply makes things easier once you've uploaded the file into kindle create. Once you select the file to upload, it will process for a minute or two and then give you a pop-up with what it thinks are the chapter headings. You can check off the ones that have got right, and then it generates your e-book for you to review. You can do some modifications in the software, such as making the first letter of each chapter a drop cap or adding little flourishes or dividers. What's nice about this software is that you can add in the front and n matter using the menu on the left-hand side of the page. Since these types of pages sometimes have special formatting, you can avoid the hassle of navigating that by inputting your dedications, your copyright statement, and other additional pages right in here. Of course, you can also just include those in the body of the text if you prefer. There's also a preview mode where you can go and see how your book would appear on a Kindle device or mobile. So after you've done adjusting your formatting here, you can export your file. This software creates a Kindle specific file that you can upload, right to Amazon. If you want to upload your book on a different site, I'd recommend looking up their specific instructions on what they want. That Word document file is probably going to be the gold standard across the board. Cocoa, for example, allows content files in four different formats, doc and Doc X, PDF, ePub, and Moby. It is possible for you to try and upload a PDF style e-book onto Amazon. But the risk is that the Kindle device makes you up the formatting. If that's what you really want to do, the best thing to do is to use Kindle creates mode for textbooks and cookbooks that is designed to help manage PDF files and turn them into something that a candle can read. It may be a little trickier though, so you may want to just keep things simple if you're just getting started. I would say just stick with the text file for now. And also, I'll mention that in Kindle create you can add in pages with images or insert them within your texts. So if you have pictures or diagrams that you want in your e-book, you could go on those elements there rather than in the doc file.
10. Walkthru: Formatting an eBook in Google Docs: Hey guys. So in this little walk-through, I'm going to show you how to use Google Docs to format your manuscript as an ePub file and a couple other file types to if that's what you wanted to do. I think Google Docs gives really great and accessible because it's free. It's usable by pretty much anyone as long as you can have a Google account and sign into it. So this is a great tool, in my opinion for making different kinds of file types. So what I've made here is basically a, just a sample manuscripts. I've taken a couple of chapters of Pride and Prejudice and just turn it into a small file for us to work with. So first of all, what we've got up here is basic word processing features in case you're not familiar with Google Docs. On the sidebar here, on the left, it says headings you add to the document will appear here. We're gonna get to that section in a little bit later. And we're going to be able to export this to our hard drive once we're done. So let's just look over the file that I've made for us to work with. So at the top here, this section right here, I've basically made a quote from the book that I want to be the very first page. So we're talking about the front matter of the book. So sometimes using a quote or reviews or something as a fun way to lead into the story. So I've just taken a quote, I've given it a title, just a tale of English society just for fun and that I've included Pride and Prejudice. Chapter 6 is where the coat is from. So that's what I want to be on the first page, scrolling down on the second page, I want to be the title page, so we'll have Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen or whatever your title would be if you were making your own book. And then I found this picture. So I just thought I'd include it to show you how it works to add pictures in. But this is just one I found on Google. But make sure that the pictures that you're using you have the rights to or are royalty free. So that's the second page. The third page, I want to be the copyright information. So that's just this little bit right here, which says evil condition. You don't actually have to include those words. I just wanted to give it a title. So as you see what we use headings, it's really helpful to have just a title for each section. Then it says copyright Jane Austin, 813. I did look up when it was published, and then all rights reserved. So that's a very simple, basic but effective copyright statement. And then after that, I'm just going right into Chapter 1. You could add title pages or sorry, a table of contents, whatever else you like. But I'm just going to start with Chapters. So we've got the title here and then the text, and it's all indented. And we've got Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 in this little document just to keep it short. So as you can see, all the text in this document right now is formatted normal text, which is Arial size 11. So size 11 or 12 is pretty good because we're using an epoch format when we export this. Epub is great because it's dynamics. So the e-reader that you're using or whoever's reading it on, we'll adjust the size to whatever they set it as. So if someone wants it really large because they like to read large print, they can do that and it won't mess up the formatting. It'll just accommodate whatever settings you put. So that's why ePub is really nice. It's a very flexible format. So in order to format this, Let's go up to the top and start right here. So we're going to start with the front page, which as I said is the quote. So we're going to highlight the title of this and then I'm going to go up to where it says normal text. And this is the styles menu up on the top-left. And we're going to go down to heading one. I think just using Heading 1 throat is going to be pretty much our tactic here. It's very easy. So now you'll see this is a different size, and I'm going to center this text as well because I think it looks nice mid centered. So we'll do that. So we'll see over here on the left now it says a tale of English society has become a heading section. So this is creating a sort of dynamic menu. And when the e-book persons processes the file, sorry, it's going to do the same thing and make it something that they can, the reader can tap through. So now we've got this. I'm also going to put this little sort of credit in the center. And then that's all I want on the front page. So just to keep things organized and want to insert a page break or at the end of the last word. So that is insert, break, page break. And what that does is it just puts this on the first page and then it just bumps whatever is next to the next page and see the line break here. So I'll just erase that little dash. We don't need that. So now we're on page two and we're going to pretty much do the same thing. Highlight. Actually I'll do the title first. You get a heading, and then center both of those things. We're actually going to center the photo as well just to keep everything in line. Perfect. And then we can just go again, repeat the process. This might seem a little bit repetitive, but that's why I made the document quite short. Page break. I'll make the ebook edition as the heading. And you know, these pages are the ones people tap through quite a lot. They don't really look at it that much, but they are important. So let's just move this one down as well. Greek. And then heading. I'm going to center that as well. And I'm just going to put a line between those two just to give us some breathing room. And we'll just do the same thing for the other couple of chapters. Insert. Great. You can see this formatting if you're doing a whole novel, may take a few minutes to do, but it's not actually that complicated because we have those dynamic features. And you can see here on the left. Each of those titles is becoming a section so that you can easily navigate later on. And this is the last one. Oops. Insert, break, page break. And we will title heading center. Okay, so this is basically it. I didn't add a line break here that I there consistency. So now we have our document kinda put together. There's nothing after it. You can add more sections, your end matter that we talked about. And I didn't include any page numbers because the e-reader itself will do that. So if we go on up to the top, we can just see what we've done here. Our chapters all nice and separated with headings and the edition, the front matter I'll tidy. So this is basically it, as I said, that you don't have to format the text too much. The titles are larger and they will appear that way in the, in the uploaded document. But the e-reader will format everything according to its own specifications. So let's export this file and then I'm going to show you how it looks in Amazon's preview feature if you're uploading it to Amazon. And I'll also show you it in a couple of different ways. So we go to file and then download. And you can see there's a bunch of different file types. You can export this as and lots of them. Amazon will accept if, if you are using Amazon for example, Cobol uses a few fewer but doc excellent work on both. However, because we've got an image in here, I think that probably ePub is your best bet. Doc ex probably would work. Amazon will accept rich text format, but that doesn't work well with images and plain text as well. And we've got PDF too, so a lot of options here. So we're just going to export it as an ePub and I've saved it up here as a tale of English society is the name of the file. So we will just get that and then I'm going to upload it into Amazon and show you how it looks. Okay, so our e-book is now uploaded two kVp which is kindled, aren't publishing and this is the preview mode that shows you what your file looks like and how it's going to look in a tablet. So I've titled it proud and suddenly prejudice. It's just to avoid Amazon thinking I was uploading something copyrighted and, or public domain even I was just trying to set it up just for previewing. So this is how they say it's going to look on a tablet. And up here on the top right side there's a section where you can pick the kind of devices previewing on Jocelyn. I'll show you all of those. But first we're looking at tablet. So this is our first patient formatted. We have the title nice and big. And then we have the text here. And you can see up on the top left you can choose the font size between one to 91 is the smallest symbols to show you that. So it's slightly smaller and we see that actually we're getting a little bit of clipping of an image at the bottom. That's our picture. So I'm not really sure why the picture is showing up there, but this is so I mean, the point of this is that uploading to Amazon, it's more ideal to use the Kindle create software, but this can still work is my point and demonstrating this. So we'll just show you, let's maybe say a bigger font and say five. And that's even too big. Three. Okay, So size 3 looks pretty good. So let's look at the next page. There we are. There's a title page with our picture. This looks great. This formatted really well. Next page, ebook edition. Again, people would just talk through this and then I need to chapter one, and this is where the ePub format looks really good. All of these chapter pages are just like nicely formatted. The indents look good. The size you can scale up. Let me try changing the size here. So let's say we want it a little bit bigger. So this is a lot bigger, but maybe someone needs that for visibility reasons. So it's good to be able to change it up and have your texts B flat, flexible like this. So that's basically how it will look on a generic e-reader. Let's just change the size back and then the next device that it shows you is a phone. Now I find this one. Sometimes it's a little bit glitchy, but let's go back to the beginning of the book. So here we are. This is the front page again. And then there's the title page again. This is showing it on a phone. But if you were reading the file there and bought it off Amazon, and all the pages look pretty good and uniform. Next, we have the Kindle eReader. So this is Amazon's proprietary device. And this has a slightly different sizing problem. So the device, I don't, this isn't two sides, so we don't actually know how big the database is. In a handbook, maybe we'll make the font a little bit bigger. Five is still pretty small. B7. There we go. Okay, so that's a bit easier to see. So we have the front page. We have our picture now the picture slightly cropped here, so that's not ideal. Now remember if you are going to upload your file to Amazon for the Kindle, because that's the only way to get it on the Kindle using Amazon's software that can create software, which I'm going to show you in another video, is a bit more ideal because It's specific for their platform. So that's why your image probably look better if you use their software. And then all the rest looks pretty normal. So that's a pretty good way to get your file type ammonium is on, like I said, especially if you're not using any images. This is straightforward. You don't have to muck about with any third party software or downloading anything new. And it just it just works. So that's basically how that works, not I'm just going to show you how it looks when you open it up as an ePub on your desktop. I have a Mac computer, so it opens up in books or Apple's book software. So I'm just going to show you a little bit of difference how that looks. Okay, so now I've opened up that exact same ePub file using the books feature on a Mac. So instead of having the pages all on separate ones, it has bunch them all together. So we have everything kind of on two pages, see Page 1 and Page 2 here at the bottom. So we have our quote, we have our title page separated up because it's a bit too long and our copyright information. So we'll just click over to the next page. And it actually looks pretty good over here we have a two page spread. So the front matter is kind of where the ePub gets a little bit tricky. Sometimes it doesn't look exactly how you want, but if you keep it really simple and really clean formatting and you don't make it too complicated. This only has three front pages, then it won't really be a problem. The reader's not going to question your data tab through once or twice just to get to the nice, nicely formatted pages. The pages look in this format. So again, Apple has their own proprietary software. They have it's called Apple author or iBooks Author, something like that. Where you can upload it. I'm going to, I think I'm gonna do a walkthrough for that as well. So you can just use that if you want to specifically be on Apple devices. But like I said, this looks pretty good. So I think overall the ePub format is kind of a winner, especially if you just want to keep things super simple and straightforward. So there you go, That's how to do it on Google Docs. And of course, you can also use Microsoft Word or Pages on a Mac to do the same thing. The buttons just might be slightly different, but the concept is the same to use the headings and the page breaks two separate things. Okay, I hope that was helpful. Now move on to the next lesson.
11. Walkthru: Formatting an eBook in Kindle Create: So in this video, I'm going to show you guys how to use Kindle create to make an e-book ready to import to Amazon. So can we create, as I mentioned before, is a free software available for Mac and PC that Amazon offers to help writers get their books ready to upload entrepreneur Kindle platform or the KDE platform. So the point is to create a file that's optimized for the Kindle device. So this is something that you can't upload to another site. You're creating a file that only works on Amazon, but that's okay if that's where you want it to be because it'll make sure that the file is specifically tailored to their device and their formatting. So when you open it up and you can choose a new project from a file. And you have two options here. You can create something that's novel, essay poetry, or narrative nonfiction, silicon normal book. Or you can choose this category which is textbooks, travel guides, cookbooks, music books. And what you're going to put in here is a PDF. So this is just if you have a lot of graphic elements you want to make your book, there's a lot of visual content work on a Kindle. This is what you would use, but we're just going to focus on the more simple, straightforward uploading of the novel here. So if you watched my video on Google Docs, you'll see that I worked with a little manuscript I made up. That was his coupled samples of the Pride and Prejudice novel that I've just made for our purposes. So I'm just going to choose that here. It's a Doc X file. I'm just going to upload it and then we'll work with that one. Okay, So now once I upload it, it just starts to optimize your document and you just have to sit here and wait for that to happen. And usually it doesn't take too long to do. But while it does that, it shows you some different features for the software, which isn't super-helpful because you haven't actually used it yet. So you don't know how to use these tips. Okay, so I've imported that Doc X file, which is formatted to have headings and page breaks in it. So when I import that file, and by the way you can see how we did those formatting headers and page breaks. If you're not sure how to do that in the demo I did about using google Docs, but you can also do that in any other word processor. So when we imported it, it automatically recognizes all of these pieces of headings so that these go into the body category over here on the left. So we have on the front page are a little quote and then on the next page and just go down. Oops, went too far. You've got Pride and Prejudice and you can see the format is a little different here than other places we've seen it. So the text is a little bit different for the titles. The picture looks good though that turned out okay. Next we have either condition and then Chapter 1. So this is all pretty straightforward, but what this allows you to do can create has a couple of cool features. Is it can help you add your front matter here. If you didn't want to add like this title page here or this 4-bit here, you can go over on the left and hit the plus sign by front matter. And it gives you a bunch of different options of front matter you can add. So let's pretend that we hadn't added those already and we'll add the title page. So it'll bring up this which asks for all the information. So we could just say Pride and Prejudice. And there is no subtitle, but let's just give it one novel by skin and the publisher, let's just say it's literatures. You could add a publisher logo. So we'll just skip that, but then we'll just create that page. And here it goes. So this is how it would show up on Kindle. The just ignore that box around it. That's just formatting, but this is basically creating a little tidy title page for you. So it doesn't have to look the same way as this one does, which maybe you prefer. So there's other things you can add up here as well. And you can just kinda figured how much you want to include, of course is something that you want to include isn't listed here. You can just add it in the body of the texts like we already did. But it does make things a bit straightforward. And table of contents is a good one to add because it generates using the title elements in the manuscript. So here it's given us all of these. These are the different sections that we've got on the left-hand. And we say, okay, let's look good. And there we go. No, your table of contents that is tappable. So someone viewing this on an e-reader could tap on any of these blue titled Words, and it'll take you to the first page of that section. So very convenient. Down in the body section we have, once we already imported, you can add in chapters and parts here if you wanted to just make your, like assemble your manuscript in this software. Now, let's just go to the first page of Chapter one. And you can see over here on the right, there's a bunch of formatting things you can add. So right here we have this formatted as a chapter title. And you can see formatting over here. You can do a little bit of adjusting right within this software. Who wanted to add elements as well. And you can add in a subtitle. So we're going to add a subtitle in. Here we go. It's turned the first sentence of this into a subtitle. Now that's not actually what we want. Some just going to remove it or we can undo over here. But you can also add in different things like separators. So there's little like decorations. You can add them three dots to show up if you wanted to separate a section. So you have a bunch of different options in the bottom right subheading block quotes. So that's, you know, if it is a little quote you're inserting within the text. There's formatting for a poem and the separator and showed you opening quote and a little credit. So that's almost what we have up top here. So let's say up here. And we'll highlight this section. This is our quote we use and they getting what to call it opening quote. Didn't really format exactly well. And then we tried highly in this one. Secondly, doing that is a opening quote as well. So we have some spacing issues clearly, but had I not formatted this to already look the way I wanted it to look. There'll be a lot easier sometimes double formatting for today, pretty good. It would look more like this lower section here with the short quote from Elizabeth and the title for this second separate sections. So sometimes if you do too much formatting on the dock ECS that you're importing. The kinda create software will kind of try and override it. So it might do a little thing like this. So keep it simple. If you are going to use this, you can do a lot of adjusting written here. But of course you can't do your writing in this software. So you want to have your manuscript already done and just do this sort of presenting here. So we'll just undo those couple of things I did. And then down here at the back matter, we have more things just like the front matter that you can add in automatically. There's some pretty cool ideas here as well, in addition to the things we've already talked about. So you may wanna do books by this author, in which case you can see the number of books. I don't know off the top of my head the name of them, but if you are linking to other books that you sell on Amazon, you can link them right here, which is very convenient if you're trying to sell SQL or things like that. And then at the end of book, when the reader sees that this was a great book, I want to read more. They have another book, but it seemed author. And here it is, and you can tap on it to buy it. So it's very, very efficient and kind of slick, isn't it? So that's how you put together the content of your book for Amazon. And of course, over here we do have some options to preview. So if we click on preview and it's going to show us much like what we saw in the Google Docs video about previewing on kVp. This is how your book is going to look. So on a tablet. So here we get device again, phone or your tablet, regular tablet, and you get to pick your font. So let's just try different font. Baskerville, just the font here. Besides, you can adjust, we looked size five before, and we can also click here to see the table of contents and just quickly go through it. So let's go to chapter one. Looks good. And here's the title page that we made using the software. So this one you can see it actually looks a little bit nicer than the one that if you put together before, but doesn't include the image. So you can also add images using this software. And if we go to the title page, you can click on Chapter 1 and it'll take you there. So then it'll show you also on different devices. So let's look on the Kindle eReader. Slightly smaller than the tablet size, but very similar, adopts right to the size. So those are our pages, Table of Contents. And here's how their title page looks, which I think looks very nice. So you can just do whatever you find easiest if you do want to use the kinda create, they may be, you want to say you've all your front matter for being made right into this software. So let's exit out of that. And I'll just show you quickly. So we do have a button up here that says insert. So let's go down and maybe give us some space here and hit Insert and can put an image or chapters start image. So if you just pick an image right now, we'll just find one on my desktop. There's just a picture of a barn. So, so there we go. So now I've inserted at this image, and over here you can add in some properties. So alt texts. So basically this means if someone has a reader that can't be images, what is going to appear a bit of the image? So this is where you go. This is a photo of a red and blue sky. So that would just appear if Gibson was looking at it and couldn't see the image, you pick the size and the large image. And there we go. And there you go. So that's how you could add an image in if you want to not put it in the DOC ex file, but wanted to do it separately afterwards to make sure the placement is exactly where you want it to be. And again, let's just pop into the preview or and I'll show you what that looks like. So there we go. We have the full image that's been cut off. It just appears exactly as it is. And but remember that if you're going to use the Kindle eReader, it may push it, and it's also a black and white. So the Kindle reader doesn't usually use color. I'm not sure if there's any devices in that family that are in color, but typically you'll see it in black and white. So just remember that if you're trying to use images that are very vibrant, hover, this still does look pretty good. But because the pages are smaller, ticket fountains next one, so maybe a median size would fit better. So if you go up to Insert chapter start image, this is going to give you an option to put a picture at the top of your E meter or whatever screen you're looking at whenever chapter begins. So we can just select an image. I'm just going to use picture for my desktop. I'm a florist. And see here it crops it. So it's going to just, you can kind of move it around and figure out where you want the picture to take it from. I'll just put it right here on the horizon. And again, add the description for screen readers. This is an image, a forest. Make it simple and we'll just hit Insert image. So now top of this chapter we have kind of pretty picture that can kinda make it interesting for e-readers. So let's see, it's only on Chapter 1 because it's just where you've inserted it. So let's just go over to the preview and see what that looks like. Cool. So that's kind of how it looks on a tablet. So you could have your picture up here. And again, tablet can be in color, that could be an iPad or something like that. Kindle eReader is going to be black and white, but it's still looks very nice, but different atmosphere. So just be aware that it'll look different depending on what you're using to, to read the file. So that's basically how to use Kindle create. After that you want to export your file. You're going to go over to the right-hand corner and click on Publish. And then you want to save it. First case, we'll say that to my desktop. And then now we can create a publishable file. So when it's being worked on in, can recreate it as a casey be file. And when you publish it, it's a KPF file. So you can save. And then we'll have our special file just for Amazon. We're ready to go and then you can just look at it and upload it to ADP. So that's basically how to use this piece of software is pretty straightforward. It's bit more complex than a word processing software only because it does such a specific job. So if you tinker around a little bit with it, make sure you use the preview button plenty to see what you're doing in real time. You can probably create a pretty nice looking product this way. It's slightly more technical than doing an ePub file and uploading that. But again, if you want to include pictures, this is really the ideal way to do it. And if you want to kind of use the very helpful formatting sections for the front matter and the matter. This can make those particular sections a lot easier when, as we said in the Google Docs video, those sections can get messed up pretty easily, but a little tinkering and it'll look fine. So I hope that was helpful and good luck using kinda create.
12. Copyright Statements: No matter what kind of both your publishing, it's important to include a copyright statement. This usually goes at the beginning of the book before the title page. But if you're making something smaller like a workbook, you may want to have a small copyright statement on the bottom of every page or in a specific location that works with your format. So first of all, what is a copyright? So copyright is the exclusive legal right given to an originator, in this case, a writer, to print, published, perform film, or record literary, artistic, or musical material, and to authorize others do the same. When you create a piece of work like a book, you automatically have the copyright to this work. And unless you sign these rights away to somebody else, you will always have the copyright. In most cases, you don't actually need to register your copyright anywhere, but your country will have a copyright office, or you can do this if you want. Sometimes there's a small fee to register it. The three basic important elements of a copyright statement, our copyright symbol, which is a little c with a circle around it, the year and your name. This could be your actual name or your business name. If you're publishing something as a business, if you're publishing a small workbook, like I mentioned, you may want to have a copyright statement on each page, and this is the right amount of information to include. You can also add more details explaining the rights that you're reserving and even information on how to contact the publisher, which is you, if someone wanted to do something with the texts, like reproduce it or quoted at length. Below this video, I've shared some examples of copyright statements that you can use or modify as needed, and you can find more examples online if these ones don't meet your needs. Now, how long your personal copyright isn't effect depends on your country. In Canada, and most copyright is effective for the lifetime of the author plus 50 years. And most countries do use this author lifespan model for determining copyright, but the number of years added onto the lifespan varies. The United States uses a publication date model where the length of the copyright is determined by when the book was published. This is mostly important to know if you're doing any work publishing with public-domain works. For example, if you are releasing an annotated edition of a classic book, or if you were doing an illustrated version of one checker to books copyright page, if you're interested in going that route. So now let's move on to briefly talk about ISBN and whether you need one for your e-book.
13. What is an ISBN?: Isbn stands for International Standard Book number. This is a unique number that attaches to your publication to keep track of it anytime it's for sale. This number provides a link back to the publisher as well. Now, do you need an ISBN number for your e-book? The answer is no, not necessarily. Ebooks aren't physical objects and so they don't have to have an ISBN attached to them. However, you do have the option of adding one if you want. Depending on where you're publishing from, this may or may not be a simple process. In Canada, you can register with ISBN Canada through the Library and Archives Canada website and become a publisher. This is a relatively simple process and you can then obtain ISBN numbers for free. In the United States, you need to purchase ISBN numbers. These are available through a company called Boker, which is the official source for ESPN's in America. You can purchase individualized DNS or packs of them that you can use as needed. Since you don't need to have an ISBN for an e-book, you may not want to spend the money on this. In the UK. I ESPN's are purchased through Nielsen UK and for other countries, just simply Google your country and ISBN to find out how to obtain them. If you're doing a physical copy of your book along with your e-book, then you will want an ISBN for that physical copy. You can get it via one of the methods that I described above. Or if you're working strictly through Amazon, you can get a free ISBN number from them. This is a big perk of publishing through Amazon using their print on demand service. However, just remember that the ISBN you, that you are given by Amazon can only be used on Amazon. So if you wanted to print a bunch of copies of your book from a different print on demand service, you would need a different ISBN number for that. Different additions and formats of your book will need separate ISP DNS. So let's look at an example. Let's say that you have a book that you're releasing as an e-book, a paperback or hardcover book in an audio book. The E-book does not need to have an ISBN, but it can if you want it to. The paperback does need an ISBN. The hardcover book also does need an ISBN. And this would be a different one than the paperback because it's a different format. The audio book does not need an ISBN if it's being distributed online only. But if you sell a physical version of it, whether that's a CD or even just an empty box with a link in it, that item needs an ISBN. The fact that you don't need an ISBN for all of your evokes is one of the reasons that it's a great way for beginners to start publishing. There aren't a lot of barriers in the way from getting your work out there. So now that we've gone over all of this technical information, let's move on to talk about cover designs.
14. Creating or Outsourcing Covers: So as I'm sure, you know, book covers are really important. They can make or break the sales of your book. They set the tone and the expectation of the reader for what the content of the book is going to be like. They're also one of your most powerful marketing tools. So thinking back to the notes that we made in less than one and better avatar reader, knowing the kind of designs and styles that people are attracted to in our genre can be really helpful for choosing a cover design. So there are two routes that you can take to getting your book cover done. You can make it yourself, or you can hire someone else to do it for you. This choice is going to depend a lot on your skills and your budget. And no matter which route you take, whoever I think the starting place is the same. And that's collecting examples and inspiration. Now, I'm a big fan of creating a Pinterest board or a file folder on your desktop, maybe a Google Drive or even a saved photo file on Instagram where you can collect images that inspire you or other book covers that appeal to you. The idea obviously isn't a copy anyone else's ideas, but rather to get an idea of what appeals to readers, what trends are sticking out, and what suits your personal tastes along with what selling in your niche. Amazon is a great place to start this research, look in the category that best suits your project and see what kind of book covers are in the bestsellers. I find that business books and self-help books tend to be very text heavy on the covers. Romance covers usually have people on them. Sci-fi books will depend on the sub-genre, but often we see a lot of transportation themes. Historical fiction often has patterns or artful designs that reflect the time period they're up out. So trying to identify some of these themes that pop up in the covers that you're looking at and that you enjoy. This could give you some direction to start with and save these images to that Pinterest board or in that folder and make a running list of notes. But the things that you like and dislike. I also like to go through social media feeds for book cover inspiration. Hashtags like books to gram or other literary type hashtags are great to look through. These are filled with photos from people who stage the books that they're reading often for a book review blogs, this can give you an idea of some book covers that people like enough to want to photograph. And it may be a little bit challenging to find books that align with your niche this way. But keep an open mind and think about why you were drawn to certain designs recovers. The same goes for looking at book covers on Pinterest. Here you'll find a lot more theoretical covers. There are designers uploading samples of their work and conceptual pieces here that may be a little bit more experimental. But again, think about the vibe that you're going for. Once you've put together this inspiration board, you can look at it as a whole and start to make a clear list of the things that you do and do not want on your book cover. Do you want a photo background or an illustration, a hybrid, maybe he's just playing color. Do you want any info beyond your name and the title, like a claim, a tagline, or a little bit of a review. Do you want more of a serious looking format or something playful? Identifying what you like will be really helpful no matter what next step you decide to take. So now that we have our inspiration board together, Let's talk about outsourcing your cover next. If you've got some great ideas about what you want your book cover to look like. And you know, you don't have the time or the skills to commit to creating that covered yourself. You can work with a designer or an illustrator to make your book cover. When you're getting started, it can be helpful to put together a little package of what you're looking for to give them. So this could include a link to that Pinterest board or Google Drive with your inspiration pictures. This could include a list of the things you like or want. It could include a blurb about the book or a sample chapter or any other pertinent details you want to share. It's a good idea to be clear about your vision, but also to be flexible. The person that you hire may have some great ideas and experience in this job that you could benefit from considering. So where do you find someone to do your book cover? First, it's important to be clear on who you're looking for. A book cover designer is someone who will put the whole thing together. This includes the art and the typesetting. They may make the art themselves or they can create it out of composite elements, many covers on the market right now, or composite images. And Illustrator or an artist is someone who will create an original piece of art for your cover. They usually have their own signature style. So finding someone whose work you like is really important, they may or may not be comfortable adding the text and doing the typesetting for your cover depending on how often they do book covers. So be sure to discuss this with them so that everybody is clear on expectations. I think that referrals is a great way to find someone to do your book cover. You can ask other authors or people in the book scene who does bear covers. Or you could approach artists and illustrators and ask if book covers is something that they do. Just keep in mind that there may be a price difference between a designer making a cover using composite elements that they've purchased or made, and commissioning a unique piece of art. You can also browse social media for book cover designers. This can be as simple as going into hashtags like hashtag book cover and hashtag book cover designer. There are also Facebook groups for book cover designers and even for self publishers where designers may be in there looking for clients. This can be a good place to look for referrals as well. Of course, Google is a great source tools so you can search for a book cover designer and a city or your area. You may find someone who is local to work with which you might not have stumbled across otherwise. There are also book cover designers on services like Fiverr and Upwork. Some of these are great, but you really do get what you pay for. So a $10 book cover may mean that they have predesigned a few concepts and we'll edit in your title and name. It's up to you whether this is fine for your books concept. My favorite approach overall is to ask people and to search those hashtags that I mentioned. There's a lot of talent out there to choose from. And if you approach them with some well-organized ideas. You're on track to get a great design. If you are inclined to make your own Ebook Cover, then there are a lot of options out there for you. At the very basic and click level you could use and modify some of the book cover templates that are available for free on Canva. This isn't exactly exciting design work from a creative point of view, but it can certainly do the job in a pinch and it will look nice. What if the e-books that I've published myself about four, maybe five years ago has a cover that I made in Canva. And while it is certainly not outstanding design wise, I didn't really know what I was doing back then. I've definitely sold plenty of copies of it. A really fantastic way to figure out how to make book covers is by watching video tutorials. There are plenty of free ones that are specific to the kind of genre or software that you're working with. And so figuring out what kind of approach you want to take can help you find some guys to get you there. Specific tutorials can also point you towards the right resources for getting elements. Elements are things like fonts, pictures, artwork, and the little graphic details that you can import into Canvas or Adobe Illustrator, photoshop or whatever you're using to make your cover. A couple of resources that I like to use for some basic design elements are deaf font.com. This is a great site for finding interesting fonts that people have created just to ensure that you are filtering your results for fonts that are free for commercial use because you are creating something for commercial sale. There are two stock photography websites that I like to use that are free. They are Pexels, Unsplash. These are sites that have photos that are available for commercial and non-commercial purposes and you can modify them as needed for your project. There are also many sites where you can purchase illustrations and graphics that you can use for your projects. Sometimes very beautiful lens to Adobe Stock is one of the databases that I really like. Canva, as I mentioned before, has a lot of graphics and design elements that you can use for your projects. They also have more available for those with a subscription and some more available for purchase. My preferred method for making book covers, since I like to do illustration, is to create my own artwork on Procreate, which is a drawing app for the iPad. I then export that artwork to my Google Drive and opening it up on my computer, I import it into a canvas Document and then I add the font and texts. That way I find this is a super simple method and it gets nice results. So if you're creative and liked to do art that way too, that can be a good option for you. Cover creation can be a really fun part of the bookmaking process. And I find that having a collection of examples and inspiration pictures, it really helps to speed up the design process. The best advice that I can give you is to get a clear picture of what you want the cover to look like based on your market research and then to decide if that's within your skill set or not. And finally, don't be afraid to learn the basic skills that it takes to create a decent cover. Our design skills that can translate to a lot of different things. So it could be a fun thing to add to your skill set. In this lesson, we've talked about ways that you can DIY or outsource many of the parts if E-book Assembly. Since you're taking this course, I'm assuming that you're interested in publishing not just one e-book, but multiple projects in the future. That's why we're going over all of these different steps and skills so that you can reproduce them many times over. One thing that we haven't talked about yet is outsourcing the formatting process. There are plenty of people and services out there who you can send your manuscript to that we'll compile it together into a tidy e-book format. And I think this is a perfectly fine service to pay for. But I also think that the learning curve for this isn't that steep. You may be better off taking the time to figure out how to format your e-book either as a PDF or an e-reader format, as we discussed earlier. Again, this will depend on whether you have more time or more money to spend on this step of the process, you can find an e-book format or in the same spaces that you search for an editor. Facebook groups, Google searches and even asking for referrals can lead to some talented folks who can help you out. Just remember to figure out where you want to sell your eBucks before outsourcing as you can make sure that you're getting your book made it to the right format for the distribution channel.
15. Creating a Distribution Strategy: We're going to talk about your distribution strategy and how you're going to get your e-book into the hands of customers. First of all, let's remember that we are working with a digital product, not a physical or tangible one. This means that we need to get it to the customers via digital means. Now there are a ton of different websites out there for you to host your e-book, for people to buy it. So let's break it down into three general categories. E-book distributors, third party sites, and self-hosted. Now, ePub distributors are the big ones. They are the platforms that we talked about way back in the introduction, Amazon, Costco, Apple iBooks and so on. These are websites that specifically sell books, and so they already have people on them shopping for bucks. That's a good thing for everybody. It's putting your book Infinite people who are looking for books. The ascites take a portion of the sale as their proceeds and you receive the other portion as your payment. These are usually referred to as royalty rates by the distributors and the percentages can vary. Third-party sites and websites are where you can go in and make an account you're for yourself, make a store front and list your items for sale. Customers are still heading to that main website to shop, but they can stumble across your store front or your e-book in the source directory. Examples of this are Etsy or gum road. These are sites that are dedicated to eBooks necessarily, but they do allow you to sell digital files and digital products. Not everybody on the site will be searching for these types of products, but some are. So you'll get some organic traffic that way. These sites usually have a set rate of how much they take as a cut per sale, but the amount that you pay overall to them will probably be lower than the percentage that your e-book distributor will take. The third category is a self-hosted site. It would be more accurate to say a website that you pay for hosting. This could be a WordPress site or a Squarespace or Wix site, a Shopify store or anywhere else that you can completely build and customize your site, labeling it with your own domain name. The pro of this is that you can use all your own branding and you can avoid distracting customers with competitors products and you control how much you get paid. The downside of this is that there are fixed monthly costs with running a site like this and you won't get organic traffic without putting in some effort. Now I keep saying organic traffic. What does that mean exactly? Well, organic traffic simply means when someone stumbles across your page or your e-book without you telling them to go there. This usually happens because they've been using a search engine like Google or Amazon or z. Those are all technically types of search engines and have typed in keywords that brought up your item as a close match. This is my keywords are so important when it comes to getting your stuff found online. You want to make sure that you are labeling your e-book with the right keywords so that the right people can find it. Organic traffic is so important because it doesn't cost you anything. Paid. Traffic, on the other hand, can be super effective, but it costs money to obtain. And we'll be talking more about ways to get your e-book in front of different audiences in lesson 4 on marketing strategies. Now since most e-books are sold through distribution platforms, we're gonna take a look now at what kind of information you need to provide to sell your e-books. There.
16. Setting Up On Distribution Sites: All of the major e-book distribution sites are going to be looking for the same types of information from you as the creator of the e-book. We're going to be using Amazon's kVp or Kindle Direct Publishing as our model for the next couple of lessons, as it is the biggest distributor. The first thing that you need to do for any of these sites is to register an account. And there are three major pieces of information that you need to provide. Your author information, your payment information, and your tax information. Your author information is the info about you. This is your real name, your mailing address, and things like that. This is not the name that shows up on your books necessarily, and this information isn't shown to your readers. This is the legal information so that your distributor can address your payments correctly. The payment information is how the website is going to pay you. The easiest way is often a direct deposit with the distributor. You can get the information for direct deposit from your bank. These distributors usually offer another payment option like by check, but they have a threshold that you need to pass in order to get paid, usually a $100 or so. And then there is a service fee for that receiving that payment via check, which Amazon is $8 or so. So there is additional fees to get paid by check. The tax information will help to distributor understand how much tax they should collect or withhold. Many of these big distribution sites are based in the US. So for us it ascends this should be fairly straightforward. If you're sending up a KDC account with Amazon, for example, and you live in another country, you have to fill out a W8 ben form. This sounds complicated, I know, but Amazon makes it really simple and provides you with the instructions and a steps right there on the registration site to get that sorted. Once you have your author accounts that up on the distributor site, you can start to upload products for sale. There is usually a little bit of processing time between when you submit a book for sale and when it launches. Each company has a different process for reviewing eBucks before they go up for sale. When you upload an e-book, you're going to be asked to fill in a ton of boxes with different information about your book. Some of this is technical like ISBN numbers, and some of this relates more to marketing like keywords. All of these pieces of information that become attached to your e-book is called metadata. It helps websites to understand how catalog your book, how to show it to the right people and how to keep track of it. In addition to providing the metadata, you'll also have to upload the format of manuscript and the cover image and determine what price you're going to set the eBook at. You'll also see that different distributors have special programs or tools for sharing your book even more widely. So make sure you take a good look at these programs have for you enroll your book. For example, Amazon has a program called kindled select, which we already mentioned once before. People who own Kindle e-readers can subscribe to the Kindle select program for a monthly fee. This gives them unlimited reading access to all the books that are part of that program. As an author, you can enter your book into this program and get paid per page read. Part of the profits from this program get pooled and divided among the participating authors based on pages read. This may not be a lot of money per page. We could be talking about less than $0.01 here. But cumulatively, this can add up. However this program does, and a few things you should be aware of. If your e-book is in the Kindle select program, you must agree on being exclusive to Amazon. That means you can't sell it on the other platforms or websites or even give it away for free while it's in the program. If you weren't planning on sharing and elsewhere, then no problem. But if you do sell it elsewhere at the same time and Amazon search tools find out your account could suffer repercussions. Participating in Kindle select is based on a 90 day term. So once you put your book in, the program is locked in for the next 90 days. This will auto renew unless you specifically tell it not to. So just keep that in mind that these sorts of distribution programs can potentially increase your earnings and your reach. But they do come with a lot of rules that you should thoroughly read before signing up. Also, evoke distributors will provide you with the option of opting into digital rights management or DRM. This is a way of encrypting your e-book so that it can only be read on the e-reader and question. The point of this is to prevent piracy of your book. However, some people might be buying an e-book just to read on their computer or a different device than the one offered by the distributor. This would prevent them from opening it via unauthorized means. So once you off into this, you can't opt out. So have a good think about whether this is important for you or not. Now, let's go back to talk about metadata and find out what kind of information a distributor will usually be looking for when you submit your book.
17. Understanding Metadata: Metadata is all of the pieces.
18. Walkthru: Uploading to Amazon KDP: So in this video, I'm going to show you guys how to upload an e-book to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing platform. It's pretty easy and straightforward, but there are quite a few things you have to answer in terms of questions and boxes to fill in. So I'm going to just walk you through and show you how to do it with the demonstration. So this is my Kindle Direct Publishing dashboard. You can see I have a book down here and that's already published. And right up here is where you create a new title. So you can choose a Kindle e-book or paperback. And so we're gonna do an eBucks. We're going to click on that option. Okay, so in here we are, and these are the kinda tabs that we talked about in the lesson. But we have Kindle e-book details as the first page we have to go through, then we do our EBIT content and then our EBIT pricing. So first of all, we're gonna go through and we're going to use that example that I made, Pride and Prejudice sample. And so we pick our language here, which is English. It automatically populates that as you're probably using English, since it's the choice of the website, then we enter the book title. So let's do prejudice. And this is where you can enter some keywords as we talked about. So you could enter something here, like a store that you wouldn't say historical if you were actually publishing this because it's not history which he wrote it. It's Oracle, romance, novel. And maybe use some more keywords here. Mistake in. I don't know what the word would be. Impressions be more tactical than that. This is just an example, but a few keywords that people might be typing into the Amazon search bar for what they're looking for. So next we get Series information. This book isn't in a series, but if it was, this could be, you know, classic hits and it could be a number. What if that was your series edition number? This is the first edition, but if you are publishing a second or third edition, he could just take the number here. Next is your authors, let's say Jane Austin. So that's pretty straightforward and blowing contributors. So this is where you can add a second author. So if there's another one, you can add Suzanne Austin. And then maybe you add another or you can add in any of these things. You can add an editor, a forward. So maybe someone wrote the forward to the book and you want to add their name. Illustrator, someone who hurt the introduction, narrator, if it's a different type of work, photographer, preface and translator. So lots of different options of how you can credit the people that you work with here, all the different kinds of contributors. So moving down, we get the book description and this is where you include your a sales copy like we talked about. So just note that in this little box, you can actually make it bigger if you want to see it in a bigger size right here, you can use up to 4000 characters. And this has to be done using HTML. If you want to use things like bullet points or metallics or things like that. So I'll include a link below to add handy site where you can go and type in your text and format it, and then copy and paste the HTML right into this box. So HTML is just a coding language which allows you to do different styling to your font. So it is not terribly difficult and you don't have to use that. You're necessarily, you can still just put your text normally, but if you want it to look a particular way, you can do that right here. So since I'm didn't, I didn't write one. But let's just say this is a novel about what time was that is, was Guardian. It wasn't Edwardian. 18 19th century England. Let's just leave it at that. Okay, So down to publishing rights, you have two options here. I own the copyright and I hold unnecessary publishing rights. And this is a public domain work. So if you wrote the book, then pretty straightforward, you click on, I own the copyright and hold necessary publishing rights. And it just says here you can always hover over to see answers aren't new things where it tells you more details. And the publishing rights are basically just your ability to publish it. This is also if you've purchased the publishing rights or if you're publishing on behalf of somebody and they want you to publish for them, you have an agreement with them, you would put that basically just says, yes, the person who wrote this is either me or the person who wrote this has given me permission to do this. The other options, public domain work. And that is if it's a book that's in the public domain, which we talked about in our copyright less than a little bit. But basically if this, So if I was really publishing Pride and Prejudice, I didn't write it. So it will be a public domain work. But because that changes the pricing thing a little bit, we'll just go with cleaning desks and I'm not actually really published this sample. Then we move down to our keywords. And here you get to engineer seven keywords. As we talked about, these are supposed to be long-tail keywords usually that are a bit more detail to help people find specifically her book. So here you can enter all seven of them. Let's try turn. To love romance. That could be a sub-genre, could do with historical romance. Things like that. Historical romance actually probably used to grow out of one, but these are just some examples. So just enter your seven keywords here. And again, you can come in and change this anytime and modify your book and change it for keywords. If you find them, they're not performing. So next we move down to our categories, and here you get to choose 2. So we can click on Set categories and you can browse through and figure out where you want to place them. So typically, if you want to do fiction, you go in here, gives you a bunch of sub-genres. And then sometimes they have through the genres down. So here you see fantasy has even more. And you can just kind of go down by your sub-genre. In this case, I see there's a historical box. Will check that and you can find romance. And is there a historical yep, there's a historical romance subsection. So we'll go down and it's regency, right? That's the name of the air. I couldn't think of Regency romance. So that's very specific and that's helpful because anyone looking for that particular genre will be browsing through the category just to see what's new, what's hot, what's been released recently. So we've got our two categories and we can hit Save. Here we go. Next, we have our age and grade range. So if you're reading something for children or students, you can pick either at age range from baby up to 18 plus, and maximum is the same. Or you can pick a grade range based on the US system. So you can pick from preschool all the way up to 12th grade. Then below you have your pre-order section so you can pick, I'm ready to release my book now. That means that when you've finished this process and you hit submit, It's going to go into processing and then when it's reviewed, it'll be available for sale. So that's, you know, it may take processing typically takes less than 24 hours, but I've seen it been really busy before, especially around New Year's. I think when people have come around their news resolutions to publish books, it does get a bit slower, sometimes a couple of days. So do have a little bit of forethought to that, that there's a processing time if you're going to be announcing when your book is out. Otherwise you can click on Make your Kindle e-book a pre-order, and then you pick the release date and you can set that pretty much as far in the future as you'd like. I don't think there's a limit. And people will be able to go in and buy your book and then the dates released, they will have it automatically delivered to their Kindle and available to me. So we're just gonna go with release it now and not worry about that. So when you have this filled out, you can go and select Next and continue. So now on the second tab of this three tabs system, we are on the Kindle e-book content. So first of all, we have to It says please read the PDP guidelines and upload manuscript containing into your content to your e-book and make sure it's supportive file types. So then you get to pick whether you want digital rights management enabled, which we've talked about. So this is sort of the anti-piracy thing. And you get to choose if you want it to be enabled. I sometimes hit, yes, sometimes hidden. Know I have had problems with my books being pirated in the past, but honestly, I don't think anyone made any money off them. So some books I do with them. It's really a personal choice. Then it says all the formats here, which we've already talked about. So here you just go and grab that file for your manuscript. So I'm going to find the one that we made. So I'm uploading the KPF file, which is the one that was made in Kindle create. So we'll see what that looks like uploaded directly to this program. So now that it's uploaded successfully, it goes into processing. And so this basically means that they recognize the file. It is a file type they can process and now they're going to turn it into something readable. So this can take a few minutes, is really depends on the size of your document. But you can scroll down and upload your cover next. So it can not be book cover offers a cover creator. It's not particularly good. I can show you how it works right here by launching it. And what it does is it gives you a pretty generic cover to work with. So let's just continue and let's use from your image galleries, for example, lots of different kinds of pictures you can pick, medieval choose, I don't know. Nature, sunsets. Let's just pick this one just to be done with it. So there it shows you a bunch of examples of image-based designs. So these are fine. I mean, depending on how much effort you want to put into your book and maybe you are okay with this kinda cover. I don't think they're particularly attractive and they wouldn't catch my eye as a reader unless the content was something specifically I needed like a very specific non-fiction e-books. So because I don't really like these, we're just going to go back and exit out of the cover creator. So we're back here. So instead of clicking unused cover creator, we can just click on upload your own cover and has to be a JPEG or tiff file, but JPEG is usually the easiest. So we'll just fine, I'm just going to find a picture to use in this case. So I just clicked Upload to just a random GPA. I have been having my desktop. It was the picture of the flourish that we use for another walk-through. So it's just going to upload and then we can go and click on Kindle e-book preview. So it's processing the cover image and this is finished processing. But even if they're still both processing, you can click on Launch reviewer and it will uploaded so you can go and it'll take you to the uploader. So here we have our e-book preview, just like we saw on the Kindle create software, it looks very similar. So here is the picture I uploaded as the cover of this obviously is not a cover sized image. So I my apologies for not having a better sample here, but this would be where your coverage shows up. And then it's just previewing how this looks on the tablet device. And you can just click through and see it looks exactly the same way it did in the kinda create software. So this is pretty predictable. There's the picture I had pollution of a barn and all these other Pieces of information. So this is pretty straightforward, this looks good. So if that is fine, you can also check it on other devices like a phone, which is going to look just the same as we saw before. And you can also check it on the Kindle eReader format. So it looks pretty good. Okay, So then we can hit back to book details in the top-left corner. And we're back to this main page. You do have to review your book before you can process it. Then before we hit submit to the next page, we have the ISBN section. And as we discussed, you don't have to have an e-book for a Kindle e-book. Sorry, you don't have to have an ISBN frequently e-book, but you can if you want. You did you would enter the number here and you would enter your publisher name right here, which if you are a registered business, you can enter the business name. You can enter your first name and last name. You could make something up, but it should correlate to the ISP and that you've purchased so that if someone versus search for the ISBN in a database, your proper publisher name will come up. But again, that could just be your first and last name. So we're going to hit Save and continue to go on and say that that's our format and that looks good. And now we're gonna do a pricing. So the first option here we have is the kVp select involvement and they promote it as maximizing your royalties. So as we discussed, this is a program that requires exclusivity. So if you're going to be selling your book and other platforms, do not select this. But if you do, you click this little checkbox and that's really as simple as it is. But do keep in mind, this is a 90 day term that you can't back out of. So every 90 days you can leave the program. But if you click Yes here, you're in for the next 90 days and therefore can't sell anywhere else. So territories, this is where you have rights for the book. So if for some reason you didn't have territory rights for a certain country or this maybe if you're publishing public domain and you had the rights to publish it in Canada, but not everywhere else. You can change that. But for the most part you're going to have all territories. Or I guess if there's also a certain country you don't want your book to be published in. You would click individual territories and check off which ones you do want. Then we go down to royalties and pricing. So here, kVp offers a pricing support is in beta mode, but it'll tell you what books like yours typically sell for. I don't think it'll give me a very accurate estimate here because yeah, this is not a real book, but typically says highest author earnings are books. And unknown sense based on probably going to be some of the fact that this is a short book. It's only, I don't know, 15 pages or so, just the sample I made. So it suggests that you probably will earn those few, press it at 99 cents or alternatively at 299 is pretty good if you want to get this 70% royalty. So you can say yes here or no. Let's just say no so we can keep experimenting with it. Keep in mind these are USD prices. You can adjust the individual prices shortly. So let's say that this is a book I wanted to price at 499 US dollars. So we'll just type it in here. And you can pick our LT plan. So you can certainly pick 35 percent if you price it at this, but I wouldn't recommend it because you won't make as much money. And then 70 percent. So it's going to check and as it says here must be two, 99, 99, 99. And all marketplaces are based on this price. So over here it says, Thirty-five percent of you chose this, you'd be making a $1.75, 70%, 35 cent delivery fee, but you're making $3.48 per book and that's US dollars. So you can also go into other marketplaces here and change the price for specific countries or marketplaces. So the prices that they input here are based on current exchange rates. So that all will be roughly equivalent to 49 us. But let's say that you, I'll use myself as an example. Sometimes in Canada I want the book to be a little bit cheaper because the Canadian dollar right now is a little bit weak against the US dollar. So I may be selling a book for $15 US. But in Canada that will be like, I don't know the exact date, but maybe like $22 and that doesn't really feel right because I don't want my book to solve for that much, so I may adjust it and put it at 15 Millers here, but us still 15. So you can just adjust the per country. Generally you're gonna leave this alone. But it will also tell you the exchange rate or the royalty rate that you get. Certain countries have certain roles like here you must be enrolled in KB select to get to the 70 percent royalty for Amazon Mexico. So a weird, arbitrary rule, but they have weird rules. So for the most part, the marketplace in the US is going to be the most important because it is the biggest marketplace. But of course you can click here and pick a different one to be like your baseline. If I'm Canada, yes, we can change it to 99 to see all the prices below update to represent the same approximate value. So that is how you set the price for your book. And again, you get paid out at two months after the sale. So all of your royalties will come out at the same time then. Now we have Kindle book lending. So this is basically a program where if someone buys your book on their Kindle, they can give it to their friend, much like you just loan of book to a friend for 14 days if they want to read it. And so it's automatically checked off here. And I believe that's because titles with the 70% royalty option are required to be enrolled in it. So again, just more rules they put in place. Generally, I don't there's a problem with this because most people, unless they're just like really fanatic readers aren't going to receive a book and finish it in 14 days. So if they like it, they'll they'll end up purchasing. And below terms and conditions, it says it can take up to 72 hours, retitled to be available for purchase on Amazon by clicking purchase published below the confirm my all the rights necessary, et cetera, et cetera. So again, 72 hours is kinda their estimate. It has been the longest I've waited once when they had like a I think they had some technical issues in the back-end. It should have been eight days for it to be published, but that is the only time that's happened to me. Most time that's under 24 hours. So there you go. So then you would just hit publish your Kindle e-book. I won't do it because I don't want them to see this interesting sample I made, but that's basically how to upload it to kindle, not super-complicated. There are quite a few questions to answer that if you don't understand what they're asking and maybe a little bit intimidating, but hopefully this walkthrough helped you and make you feel a little bit more competent about selling your book on Amazon.
19. Walkthru: Uploading to Kobo Books: Okay, so in this walkthrough, I'm going to show you how to upload an e-book to the cocoa platform. So cocoa is a big distributor in Canada especially, but it is does have a presence in other countries. So this may be a good one to use as well. So first of all, we have four steps. Once you have made, this is after you've made your account and click on e-books and upland e-book, pretty straight forward on that and you have four steps here. So describe your e-book, add content rates and distribution, set the price and the public. So we're just gonna go through these steps with the demonstration book that I've made, that is a very basic little file. So first eBook title. Let's do our Pride and Prejudice sample. Subtitle again, this is where you want to include some keywords. If you have some keywords in mind. So maybe a region, romance, chance that caps turned to love. So maybe those are some keywords someone would use. But of course this is done after you've done a little bit of research on that. Next you have your series name is optional of course, as it says, if you have made a series that you want to include this in, below is your author information. So this is author names. So I would actually change this to Jane Austen, not my name. And you can add another author right in here if you want, or you can leave it out. Publisher name is an option too. So if you are publishing this book under your own publisher names, so sometimes I use lucky stroke. So let's put that in there. And imprint would be like the sub publishing. This is more if you're a big publisher. So I wouldn't really worry about that, but I guess a pub in this case, the publisher name could be lucky sprout. And then imprint could be lucky sprout. Don't worry too much about the implant and everything. But if you're just publishing e-books on your own because that's more of a technical publishing house structure thing. So this is your first time publishing your book. You can click yes or no. If you say no, it asks for the original publication date. If you publish it on a different platform, maybe before, or something like that. Is this is the first time you're publishing it. You can just click Yes. Then we get down to E ISBN. Again, it's optional to have an ISBN number four e-books, you can include it here if you have one. Pick your language and again, the public domain, whether this is yours or not to so typically you're going to hit Yes. Sorry. Typically you're going to hit No, it's not public domain. Yes. As if it's a book that you did not write that's out of copyright that you're sharing. And you're gonna hit get to the categories over here and click on Edit categories and go through and figure out where your book belongs. So this one would be in romance. And then we'll see gonna do historical romance. And how many categories can we pick up? 23. So maybe we'll do a different kind of the general romance. You'll go with a historical novel. Fiction literature, historical, cool, confirm. So there we have our three categories for this book. And again, remember, think of it, we're on those shelf. This would be your booklet place in a bookstore. That's the kinda where the categories come from. Then we get down to your synopsis. And unlike Amazon's uploading platform, you can do some HTML right in here. So you can just copy and paste your description in here and add in bold, italics, underline numbers, bullet forms, your indents. So it's very easy to format your, your sales copy here. So let's just put in a placeholder. This region. See romance. Well, you would do something a little more eloquent on your book, of course. So when we're done that we're going to hit Save and Continue. Oh, sorry, is to be at least 15 characters long as two, a little bit more tendons. Lastly, adapted many feature films or mini-series. Set one up Greek robo. Oh, I forgot to upload the book cover. Okay, sorry about that. Now we can upload a book cover and was going to find an image. So here I just clicked on a random book cover I, that I have on my desktop. This is the cover for a house plant journal that I made. So it is formatted to be a book cover size. So we'll just leave it at that and make sure that it doesn't actually publish. So we'll hit Save and Continue. Next is where you upload the file. So it asks if you have an ePub file and if not, you can use their ePub conversion tool. So you can upload here an ePub, a doc, doc X and will be or OTT. But we can just try and find a file that it likes. So I've selected a Doc X, which is the one that we made off of Google Docs. And we're just going to upload it and it will transfer it into an ePub file right here. If your file wasn't an ePub, it'll be converted right now. Cool. So let's say Close. And then it said you can move on to another step, so we'll do that next. So here's the digital rights management question. If you don't want to apply it, you just click here. Fortunately, they don't give you a lot of information about what that means here. So luckily that you should know from taking this course, the digital rights management is a little feature that you can add to prevent theft of your book. It kind of locks it to the format so it can't be shared. But it does restrict how the person who purchased it can use it. So you can click on or off here. Geographic rights. So this is again saying whether you have the rights in the whole world, published his book or in certain areas, or if you want to only distribute it in a limited kind of area, you can select, you have to write some published the book. So you probably likely have all of them because if you have this the book you wrote, then you have all the rights. Then you have the option to enroll your book into cocoa plus, so this program is a lot like Amazon's Kindle Unlimited programme, but with a few differences. Namely that it has a much smaller distribution network. So it's actually only available to readers in Belgium and the Netherlands, but it is still used by people there. It's, you know, it's something that they have access to, so you can certainly enroll in it. Now, what is different about Amazon specifically is that there's no exclusivity required. You see it right here when your book is enrolled here, but you are required to keep some book into a 90 day term, so you can opt into that here, or like Amazon, you do have to keep the book infra term. Again, you can also put it under programs, but be aware that you can't upload this book to Kindle Unlimited and cobalt plus, because Kindle Unlimited doesn't like it being shared. So he could sell your book on Amazon in general and also have it on cobalt. And being hopeless. So a little bit confusing, but it is just an option that you have here. And then you have the option to make your book available into libraries. So you can simply check this box here and you can have your book included in overdrive catalog that lets libraries purchase it, which is a cool feature and make it use an extra sales. So depending on how you pick all these boxes, you can hit Save and Continue, and move on to the next section to set your price. So here we go, setting our default list price. So the default list price here is Canadian dollars. So let's say that we want our book to be 499. It gives you a 70% royalty rate, which gives you $3.49. And if you want to sell your book for less like dollar 99, there, royalty rate is 45 percent here, so it is actually higher than Amazon's lower royalty rate, which is 35 percent. And so let's see you down below here, it tells you how much the royalty is for all these different countries and currencies that they felt broken. And what's the conversion rate currently is, and how much it's going to be selling for. And of course, you can set custom currencies for each country is. So let's say you want your us to alert what should look to be 99 cents there too, and not less than a dollar. So there you go, you can add a custom price. So pretty straight forward here. Next we hit save and continue. And finally, this is your published books. So you can just go ahead and you could, if you want to set a pre-release state here, you can pick what do you want your book to be released if you're doing a pre-order. Otherwise you can just ignore that and click today's date and then you can set publish e-book. And that's really it and it's going to process it to be published. So different than the Amazon process, It's a little bit streamlined. I find this one a little bit simpler. They also don't ask you for keywords. So a lot of your key wording is going to be right here in the Synopsis box, which is where you're going to want to be very conscientious about writings and sales copy that hits those keywords, but also entices the reader. So put a little thought into how to crack this particular section as it has a lot more importance on the cobalt platform. So I hope this walkthrough is helpful to you if you want to distribute your book on a wider platform that just Amazon. And I'll include the link to cobol writing Life website below so you can access it easily.
20. Alternative Distribution Methods: There are many sites where you can sell your e-books other than the big distributors. These are other sites that allow you to sell digital files using the same payment system that they use for any other type of item rather than a royalty rate. Usually this means the small percentage of the final sale price and or a flat feet. This will usually end up being a much better profit margin for you. But as I mentioned before, you won't have as many people looking specifically for e-books on these sites. Using a different method of distribution can be a great idea if you have a way to refer people to them. So if you have a popular social media channel, maybe a mailing list that's very big or preexisting business. You can promote your e-book and send people to where they can buy it. The cost of those higher profit margins is the effort you'll spend in getting people to find your book. But of course, distributing your book doesn't have to mean selling it. Maybe you want to use it for another purpose like driving leads or encouraging sign-ups to a mailing list or providing free information. One strategy that you see frequently in the world of online business is to offer people a free e-book to get started on a certain kind of skill or task. People can find these on your website, for example. The guide is useful for basic and at the end we'll find a pitch for something else, maybe a course that you offer on the same subject, another bigger book that you've written or a one-on-one service. If you're thinking of sharing your e-book for free, and you should find a way to host it online that makes it accessible. If you have a website and you can upload it there, you could also upload it to a Google Drive and make it publicly accessible. This is where using the PDF format becomes really handy. It's usually a reasonable file sides and the formatting is consistent and people generally know how to open it. So now let's head to the next section about pricing strategies to round it, this lesson on selling and distribution.
21. Pricing Strategies: Epoch cell for a huge range of prices. Generally they are lowering costs and paperback books because they don't have the same kind of costs in terms of printing and shipping. Determining how much you should sell your e-book for can be done via three things. Comparison to competitors, choice of platform, and your intuition. I've said it many times throughout this course that the books that you are competing against are a great source of information. If you see that other authors are selling their books for a dollar or two, Does that mean you need to do the same? No, not necessarily, but consider what value your reader will see in your book versus one at a lower cost. If we're talking about non-fiction books, the readers will usually believe that the value of the book correlates to the price. It's reasonable to assume that a 99-cent e-book is going to be a quick guide, whereas a 999 e-book is going to be a longer viewed filled with more detailed information. Fiction books, on the other hand, have quite a few different strategies that you can implement. You'll usually see these e-books for less than $10 with more towards the lower end of the spectrum. Frequently you'll notice a Fiction E-book is being offered for 99 cents. Now, why would an author price their work so low? Well, this can be a great pricing strategy for a series of books. If you have a five book series, for example, person the first one extremely low, can incentivize readers to impulse buy if they read it and they love it, there'll be way more inclined to buy the SQL, which can be priced higher, maybe four or $5 each. This provides a low threshold for getting into your book series will also earning a more reasonable amount for subsequent books. Now, the price that you set for your e-book is not going to be the amount that you receive on payday. The distributor will take a certain percentage of that sale. The amount will depend on the distributor and the terms. But let's look at what Amazon offers. For example, Amazon has two tiers of royalty payments for e-books, 35 percent and 70 percent. That means that you will receive the percentage of the sale price whenever the book copies cells, you get to pick which tear your receipt. However, you can only set certain prices within each tier. So if you want to price your book at $2.98 US are lower. You can only select the 35 percent royalties tier. Also, you can't press a book lower than $0.99. This means that you earn a smaller percentage of royalties on books that are low priced. Again, if you were using the low prices of pricing strategy, this could be perfectly fine. Sometimes you'll make more due to volume or B because an e-book leads to another offer. If you want to price your book at $2 in the United States, US, or above, you can select the 70% royalty rate in terms of when you get paid from these sites that will depend on the distributor. Amazon pays its authors two months from the end of the month of the sale. So for example, if your book sells the copy in January, you will see the payment for that at the end of March. If you're selling your book on a third-party site or your own website, you'll see those payments arriving within a couple of days at processing. So that is a big difference in terms of how fast you get paid. Another way to maximize the profits if your e-book is to create a paperback version. Amazon has tools that allow you to do this right within their platform, and they will print books on demand whenever people order them. This requires a few different steps to format and setup, but it can be another way to diversify your books income for people who prefer paperbacks, just ensure that the paperback is priced at least 20 percent higher than your e-book. If you want to keep getting that 70% royalty rate.
22. Creating a Marketing Strategy: So now that we've covered writing the book, formatting the book and selling the book. Let's talk about marketing the book. A lot of what you might know about marketing. Any type of product does apply to marketing a book, especially when it comes to social media marketing. However, there are a few things that are unique about marketing and book, and especially an e-book. So in this lesson we're going to cover some topics that will help you to build up an online author platform and get you thinking about creative ways to get your book in front of interested people. The first thing I want you to think about is shifting your perspective away from marketing an object or an item to marketing and experience. You're trying to get people to purchase a non-tangible thing. So what they're actually buying his information and a reader experience. You want your marketing strategies to convince them that a, they are going to find the information or content that they're looking for inside. And B, they are going to enjoy the experience of reading that book. Partly this is achieved through your branding. The way that you style your book, and the messages around it will give them some idea of what that experience is like. You have control over your book description, your blurbs, your sales copy, and other bits of information. These are almost like an appetizer to your actual book. So make sure that the flavor or tone is consistent. If you're writing nonfiction, you want your authority and your confidence to be clear. If you're writing fiction, you want to make the world that you've created in your book seems so enticing that they can't help but want to explore it. So as you can imagine, most e-book marketing is done online because this is a digital product you want to be targeting people in digital spaces. The important thing is to minimize the number of steps that a reader has to take in order to get your book in their hands. So let's consider why in-person marketing strategies won't work as well for digital product. Imagine that you're out at a coffee shop and you're in your neighborhood and you see a flyer on their bulletin board advertising a local author's book. This might cut your interests because you like supporting people in your community. Or maybe the subject matter is interesting to you. And if this book is available digitally, think about how many steps bit stand between you noticing that flyer and making the purchase, You'd have to decide that you want to read it. Then remember that decision. Then you'd have to take maybe a photo of the flyer and still remember to look at that photo later when you're on your computer or with your e-reader, you have to then find it and hopefully the price agrees with you so you can buy it. And that's a lot of steps and a lot of places where you can potentially lose a reader if you instead marketed your e-book at people in digital spaces where they hang out, you'll be creating a shorter pathway to purchase. The shortest pathway is of course, to run an ad or promote your book, right on the distributors website, for example, using Amazon's marketing services or AMS. But even a further step away, like linking to a place to buy your book on a social media channel is still more direct route to get to your book. Of course, if you're doing a physical copy of your book, you might find that doing an in-person event like a book launch could be helpful. Or if your book is related to a business that you run, you might be able to find creative ways to integrate it through that, but we'll talk more about launch events later in this lesson. So when you're ready to get creating a marketing strategy for your e-book, you're going to want to take a look back at some of the initial worksheets that we did in lesson one, where we identified some information about our target audience or reader avatar. One of the pieces of information that we identified was where your audience hangs out online. This is a key piece of information for you to consider as you start to build your marketing plan. A solid Book Marketing Strategy covers three bases. And these are building your author platform, pushing your content and showing up in public. We're gonna go over each of these bases over the next few sections. First, let's go and talk a little bit more about what an author platform is and how you can get started building one.
23. What is an author platform?: When you start dipping your toes into the world of self-publishing, you're probably going to hear people talking about their author platforms. So what does this mean? Well, an author platform is an online presence where you can connect with your readers, promote your work, and grow a following. To some extent, this is just like any notable persons online presence, just with a very specific purpose, which is to promote yourself as an author. Building a platform generally means creating social media profiles for yourself and also building a website or a blog. If you already have these things and have a bit of an online following, you can definitely integrate your writing and publications into these platforms so long as it makes sense with the kind of content that you'd like to share. But for a lot of people who are just getting started as an author, writing e-books just for fun. You're going to want to start from scratch with your author platforms. So let's go over how you can figure out which platforms are right for you. Now I've put together a worksheet attached to this lesson that will allow you to map out your author platform strategy. At the top of this sheet, there are checkboxes for you to indicate what platform so you're going to use personally. There's also a place for different components of your website, which we'll talk about in the next lesson. I think that's selecting just one or two social media platforms as wise, when you're starting out spreading yourself too thin means that you're just going to have platforms that aren't being updated regularly. And you're going to be more likely to bring yourself out, especially if being an author as a side hustle or a hobby for you. And you don't have a lot of time to dedicate to them. Which platforms you use will depend on a few key things. First, where does your audience like to hang out? So if you're writing a book for teenagers, you wouldn't want to use Facebook much, for example, as I've heard that many teenagers don't have Facebook accounts anymore. You should also consider what platforms attract you the most. You wouldn't want to find yourself presenting the experience of logging in and creating content. So if you really hate Twitter, just don't use Twitter. It's a fine balance of finding out where your audience is and doing it in a way that works for you. Youtube can be a really useful promotional tool if you like doing video content. There's a really strong community of book lovers on there, especially in the book review world. You can create trailers for your books, share readings of a chapter talking about creative process and maybe vlog you're writing experience. There are so many ways to keep video content around books and this can translate to other platforms. To Twitter is a text-based medium, so a lot of authors really find their niche here. Author Marion keys is a really great example of someone who has found a large following on Twitter and shows that both to promote her books and her writing, as well as her everyday life. People get a clear sense of humor from her content and they jump on new releases the minute they are available. Instagram is a slightly more challenging place to build an author platform, but it's certainly not impossible. You just have to remember this is a visual platform, so creating eye-catching graphics and photos is important. This could meet quotes, photos of your book in the wild or on an e-reader. Photos of your workspace, photos that inspire you, a commissioned art photos of you or anything else that fits your style. Facebook is a pretty commonplace to build an author platform as you can create a page for yourself and post updates, links to blog posts, photos, and links to other content that your audience might like, links to purchase your books and more. Remember that links are very important. You can easily link your book sales platform on Facebook or Twitter. On Instagram, you only get that one link in your bio or on your profile page. So this can be another challenging using Instagram to build an author platform. Linkedin is a very underrated platform for both marketing. But if you're creating an e-book that is about a technical skill or a how-to. You can get an in front of people who are keen for self-improvement and instructional content. Good reads as a platform for book lovers to track their reading so you can create an author page for yourself there. It also has some built-in marketing tools that you can take advantage of, including giveaways. These are just a handful of common social media platforms that you can use to build your author platform. Now, let's turn back to the worksheet for this section. There is a box where you can put your author tag line or your handle. This is how you want to show up online with your name or your pen name. A lot of office we use a handle like Jane Smith author or Jane Smith writer to identify themselves as an author or a writer. If you have something like an unusual name or an uncommon name, you may already have social handles that you want to use in this section on the worksheet, you can also just jot down the heading that you want to use to promote yourself. This should be something a little bit descriptive so that anyone who sees it can know what you're about and if they want to follow you. So an example of that could be JK Rowling's author of magical children's literature. Not that she needs to promote herself Exactly. So after this on the worksheet, we have three boxes that are going to help you figure out things like your tone and your approach for the platforms. First, What are three words that you'd use to describe the tone you want to use. Think about how this aligns with the kind of books you write. Someone who was writing steamy romances might use words like mysterious or luxurious. Someone who writes in the cozy mysteries genre might use words like cozy, comforting or relatable. Next, we have the cornerstones of your content. This is where you can decide whether your author platform is just about your writing career or if it's a bit more than that. If you're making an author profile under a pen name, odds are good that you don't want to be sharing too much if your real life. So maybe your cornerstones are writing tips, nature photography and book content. There's still some personality in there without it being too personal. But if you're being really transparent about who you are and growing your author platform more broadly. Maybe your cornerstones are your writing process, your dog and you're cooking hobby. Being a little bit intentional about what you're going to put on your platform in this way is useful as you start to grow because people can get a clear picture about what you are about. If you're throwing in content from all sorts of places and talking about your book and then making 10 posts about your dog. Your audience can get a little bit confused as to why you're building this online presence. Now, thirdly, I am encouraging you to set some goals, establishing goals for social media, especially when you're running it as a business, It's really important to give you some direction. Maybe your goal is to get 500 followers to push people towards your mailing list, or to get people to attend your book launch, or even just straight up to buy a certain number of copies of your book. Having clear goals will allow you to measure whether you are achieving what you want through your social media marketing efforts. If you're not hitting those goals, then it might be an indicator that your strategy needs some revision. And speaking of strategies at the bottom of this worksheet, there is a space to write down your strategies to grow your audience. This can be really simple, just be intentional so that you can clearly understand what you're trying to do with your content. Maybe your strategy is just to post every day or to use relevant hashtags, link to your blog every week or tag friends so that they're encouraged to share your posts. Hopefully filling out this worksheet will be useful in setting some ground rules and intention with your platform building strategy. My best advice for growing an online presence is to keep it simple and keep it consistent. Most people burn themselves out on growing a platform because they keep pushing it to be bigger and to do more. When you're promoting yourself as an author, you have a clear goal, so don't lose sight of that. Now, in addition to having a social media presence for your marketing, setting yourself up with a website can be a great idea. So we'll get into that next.
24. Building a Website: Having an author website can be a great resource for your readers. It becomes a home-base for you and your work. Fans of your writing can go there to find out more about your projects. Other books that you've written, what you're up to lately and maybe even get some cool bonus material for the books that they love. There are a couple of different things that I'd recommend, including in your author website. An About page is really helpful because it gives people an understanding of who is working behind the scenes. This is a great way to build trust between you and your reader. Remember that as a self-published author, you're not just a writer, but you're also running a business at least to some degree, helping your readers to remember that there was a real human on the other side of the book. Purchase can build a lot of trust. If you're building a platform for a pen name, you can still include an About page. Just write as much as you feel comfortable sharing. I wouldn't recommend using any stock photos and pretending that it's you. However, it's better to be a little bit withholding of personal information rather than misleading. Now, your website should include a list of your published titles and links to where to buy them. I'd recommend having this as a page on your site rather than a blog post, because then it becomes static and a good reference point. You can also send people there directly when people ask about your books. Having a testimonial or review section can be a great way to share your success and to give visitors an idea of the quality of your writing. This might be a page on your site or maybe a section on the homepage. Building a newsletter for your author platform is a really good idea because that's a way to access people directly. You can share news, release information and sales directly with your fans and readers through an email list. If you're just posting on social, is a chance that they are scrolling past it, that noticing what it is. Or maybe they don't log on in the day that you advertise something, people are much more likely to read an email sent directly to them. This is why it's important to include a newsletter sign-up box displayed clearly on your website, and finally your blog. The blog is one of the most important elements of an author website and my experience, the blog is going to provide you with content to push out on all your other channels. And it will attract organic traffic over time. It will also get prospective readers familiar with your voice via short form written pieces. Maybe you're a really funny writer. They'll pick up on that in your blog posts and decide if they want to hear more of what you have to say. The blood can also be a great place to share extra content or promotional material. Maybe you can blog about your character development process, your inspiration, ideas that you had but scrapped or you're writing process. Again, this is all stuff that you can push it out through your social media platforms, your newsletter, or that you can start to gain organic traffic through if you're using keywords effectively here, just like how you record in your book and the e-book distribution sites. Now, it's not absolutely necessary to have a dedicated website in all cases, if you're writing a simple instructional e-book, it may be a bit overkill, but an author website can act like a hub for promoting future projects and creating a larger portfolio. It gives fans a place to go and to immerse themselves in the worlds that you've built. Now, you may be thinking that that all sounds well and good, but how do I get a website? Well, there are a lot of ways to go about setting one up. If you're looking for a simple and efficient method, you can use a website building site like Squarespace or Wix. These sites charge monthly fees or a reduced annual fee and allow you to build a nice and customizable website. They'll allow you to create all of those website elements that we just talked about. And you can also acquire a domain name through them so that the website is totally branded with your name. The other option is to self hosted website. The most common way to do that is to build a website with WordPress.org, which is a complex and super customizable system. In this case, you would have to find a web posting service to put your website online. You can think about using a website building site a bit like renting an apartment in a building. Well, self-hosting is a bit like owning a house. In an apartment. You're living in someone else's building and reckoning a space. When you own a house, you own the building, but you still have to pay property taxes. If something goes wrong with your website and you're using a website building site, you can contact them for help, sort of like a landlord, if something goes wrong with your self-hosted site, It's usually up to you to solve it unless the problem pertains directly to your hosting. Maybe running away with this metaphor a little bit here. But both are great options. There are just different ways to go about setting up a site with different levels of technical ability required. And of course, you can't hire someone to help you build and design a website no matter which method you choose to go with. There are lots of freelancers and agencies out there who build and maintain websites for clients. So if you're not technologically inclined at all or don't have any time to build your own site, this could be a great option. You'll likely be able to find someone local to help you with this service. So now that we've talked to a picking social platforms and building yourself a website. Let's move on to talk about building a content strategy for those channels.
25. Developing a Content Strategy: Once you've figured out where it is that you want to be showing up on the internet, developing a content calendar or schedule for those platforms will be really helpful in keeping you consistent. One question that I've heard before is how soon before you release your e-book should you start marketing it? The answer is that it's never really too early because you can start building that following as soon as you have a concept in mind. However, I would say that you should only get specific about things like a release date once you have the first draft of that manuscript finished. This is just my opinion. Of course, having a big circle release date on the calendar can feel intimidating when you're still writing the book, but it can be extremely motivating when you're starting to edit and format. You can then start to roll up things like your blurb, your book cover, and where you're going to be able to buy it. You could also announce a preorder if you're launching your book with a distributor that offers this feature, developing a social media strategy is a really big topic and there are so many different ways you can go about it. I think that the important place for you to start this by coming up with a handful of core topics that you use to post about so that you can distribute them evenly over your calendar and never feel at a loss as to what to write about. These can be derived from your content cornerstones or they can mesh to get there. So let's take a look at some examples. Imagine that you are trying to build an author platform on Instagram, will use this platform as an example because it is one of the more challenging ones for authors due to the fact that every post requires the picture or a graphic. First one core topic could be where I write, meaning photos of the writing process. This could mean workspace photos, desk photos, notebook photos, pictures of drinks from coffee shops. Because if your dog sitting on your feet, let you work on your laptop, anything that gives a glimpse in the behind the scenes of the writing process. This could even be accompanied by a caption that explains exactly what you're working on that day. You know, having a hard time writing this big fight scene. It's tough when you go to love your character so much, but you know, in your heart, you need to kill them off. This gives your audience some insight into your life, your process, and your project, which is a great combo. Next year core topic could be inspiration photos. These are pictures that speak to your story. Baby. They're really atmospheric or remind you of locations from the book. Maybe there are certain objects that are important to the story or colors and textures that bring life into the world that you're building. Even an odd abstract photo can be interesting when contexts is provided in the caption, a close-up of a piece of fabric could be explained by saying, this is the fabric would inspire the beautiful gallon that my heroin wears to the masked ball. And the ninth chapter, I chose it because the luxurious material was such a contrast to how I imagined her personality to be. And I think that juxtaposition is really interesting. Use this as a chance to do a little bit of storytelling and people will start to remember things about your world-building. A great place to get these kind of inspiration photos if you don't want to take them all yourself, is to use a Royal Free photography site like Pexels Unsplash, which I've already mentioned. Another core topic could be quote and text images. These could be quotes from your text, little bits of advice or insights that you personally come up with, or codes that you like. In the caption. You can either explain the concept further or explain what the scene is about or just keep it short and sweet. Quote, posts usually do pretty well with engagement on Instagram. You can make Instagram posts with texts really easily using Canva, the same online graphic design tool that we talked about in the lesson on designing book covers. Another core topic could be around one of the unique features of your book. So let's say that we're marketing The Lord of the Rings series. One of the unique features of this is the elvish language that gives you a lot of content to create. Maybe you can start to share one word at a time or explain the definition. You could translate modern sentences or phrases into Elvish. Just be creative and have fun with it. Think about what makes your story unique and how you can turn that into a little series of content. Another core topic, if your book is already released with a design finalized, could be photos of your book or pictures of it loaded up on an e-reader. Take it to different places and photograph it with different backdrops. This could be a great chance to include reviews or nice feedback that you've received either in the caption or superimposed on the photo. You could also share variations of the cover that never made it. Concept sketches, illustrations, interior design choices, or other visual components of the book. Get creative and don't be afraid to show the messy side of book creation because readers can find that very endearing. So that makes five core topics that you can be posting on Instagram as a writer, workspace photos, inspiration photos, quotes, unique features and pictures of your book with reviews. When you're building up your content calendar, you could choose to assign a day of the week to each of these core topics. If you're planning on posting five days a week, you could have a pretty straightforward strategy to show up consistently and have something relevant and interesting to say. In this section, I've also included a worksheet titled pushing your content. This gives you some space to brainstorm what those core topics might be. This sheet has a section for brainstorming some blog posts and a space for two social media channels. I personally think that this is enough for building your author platform, a website plus 2 social media channels like that will be plenty. But do follow your own intuition on this. As I said, you don't want to burn yourself out on content creation. When it comes to brainstorming a blog post, you've got a space for a title and a CTA. In the social section, there's room for a post concept and a CTA. The idea for both of them is that you are going to be creating a piece of content and then asserting a call to action or CTA in it. This is simply an ask that you make up your reader at the end of the piece. Not all content needs to have a call to action, but the strategic stuff should include it. So that ask could be simply sign up for my newsletter, buy this product. Answer this question. Maybe saved this post. Let me know what you think. Share us with a friend tag. Someone needs to hear this. These are all great ways to get people engaged with your content, get them sharing or taking actions that are useful. Of course, it's a lot easier to get a viewer to do one of these things when you're giving them quality content in return. And that's why it's important to be strategic about the things that you post on the social section of the worksheet. There's a section for keywords and hashtags that you want to use. You can note any important ones that you want to include in your content. There's also a small posting calendar, and here you can indicate how many times a week you're hoping to post there. This might be every day on a platform like Twitter or once a week on a platform like YouTube, It's totally up to you. Now we can also think about that newsletter from a strategic point of view. Authors and marketers in general are big fans of Bill, an e-mail newsletter lists. And this can be a really effective marketing tool as we discussed earlier, you can toss out a sign-up link on your social media and invite people to join it. And you can put those sign-up forms on your website or blog as well. It's important to ask yourself, why would someone want to sign up for your newsletter? What is the incentive? If they're already a fan of yours, then that won't be a hard sell. They'll want to hear the updates from you, but think about what they'll get that is exclusive from joining your newsletter. Book is already out. Maybe joining we'll get them an additional chapter of bonus scene or a side story. If we look at some downloadable content or a worksheet or something else valuable for them. Consider what's in it for the person signing up so that you can market that value when asking people to join in terms of what you should put into your newsletter and its frequency. There are a lot of different opinions out there on that and many different strategies that you can follow. I would suggest that you start by signing up for a few author newsletters yourself. See what they're sending out and what kind of content they're pushing and what you like about it. You can include links to your recent blog posts, exclusive stories or illustrations, and other details that fans would enjoy receiving. Obviously, you can link your book and promote any new releases. There is also a thriving network of office with big mailing lists, charging smaller authors for mentions if future newsletters, this is something that you could either participate in yourself or build in the future. The important thing to remember about email marketing is that it is so much more personal than posting on social media. People may be receiving a notification on their phone when that e-mail arrives. This makes it a much bigger opportunity to grab someone's attention. You can also build a relationship with readers through your newsletter. Ask them questions and ask them to reply to that e-mail with answers. This can be a great community-building tool. In terms of setting up a mailing list. There are a lot of services out there that allow you to get started for free, like Mailchimp and Miller Lite. Your website hosting service may also provide a mailing list service which is convenient to keep in one place. So thinking back to the beginning of lesson 4, I said there were three parts to building a book marketing strategy. Building a platform, pushing your content and showing up in public. We've covered the first two. So now let's move on to getting eyes on our work by showing up in public.
26. Showing Up In Public: Creating content is about putting words, pictures, and ideas out there in spaces that you set up. This means making blog posts, tweeting, posting on social, or sharing any kind of supporting material that might entice a person to join your audience via follow or to purchase your e-book. But what about all the people who were elsewhere in the Internet who were never going to organically stumble across you and your work. Showing up in public is about finding some tactical ways to bring awareness to you and your writing to people who might be interested but would never find you. You do this by stepping into other people's platforms and programs. Some people call this process going on a virtual book tour. There are people who work in HR who you could hire to help you organize this. However, I think there are many ways that you can find these opportunities for yourself. Remember that when you create a social media presence that people need to login to that app to find your little corner of it. Showing up in public is about stepping out of that virtual comfort zone and appearing in places where people are hanging out. This means everything from using hashtags that people are browsing to guest armoring on a breakfast television show. There are some different programs and ideas that might be useful in doing this specifically for books. So let's go over those. So first, a good place to start might be participating in an arc program or advanced Reader Copy Program. This is a program where you give a copy of your book for free to someone else who was doing the program with the understanding that they will provide you with feedback or review if they are a blogger and have their own platform somewhere. Sometimes there are readers who join these programs just for fun and there'll be able to provide you with objective feedback in return. You can also do this yourself with people that you know, but do be prepared for feedback that is not so impartial. Arc readers are great for several reasons, mainly that they can attract even more readers and leave you valuable reviews. You can use those reviews in any of your content channels, including social media newsletters and your website. Reviews also help you build up social proof or credibility for your book. There are some different programs for you can pay for a book to be featured in a post or a big newsletter. An example of a site like this, this book bulb, which helps convince readers with e-book sales. This is a competitive program to get into, but it is popular with self-published authors. Just keep in mind that the more popular newsletter, the more expensive it will be to be featured, or if it's free, the more competitive it will be. So make sure to do your research and look for reviews from other authors who have used that service to see if it's worth it. Other Facebook groups are a great place to find out what people are doing successfully and what should be generally avoided in the marketing phase. Another good way to show up in public is to get feature or you do a guest post on another blog, website or new site. The way to find these sorts of opportunities is generally to do your own research and to ask, think about the kind of channels that would be most appropriate for your specific. Okay, so let's say you're marketing an e-book that is all about your advice for first time home buyers. You can look for blogs that focus on DIY home projects or renovations, or maybe finance and money blogs. Again, think about places where your target audience is showing up. Then it's a matter of pitching a really solid blog post idea to the person who owns that site. Every blog owner is going to be different. I'll say that it's important to make sure that you come across as a real, genuine human being. As a blog owner myself, I get a ton of weird spammy requests for link sharing and things like that which I simply delete. But if I saw an e-mail Britain to me that's addressed me by name, explained what their idea was, why they thought it was a good fit for my platform, maybe through a few examples of their work at me, it would be way more interested in that pitch. Some guest posters expect to be paid for their work, but it's up to you how to position your pitch if there's something in it for you by way of traffic or potential book sales, maybe that's a form of compensation that you find valuable. There are also lots of places where you can show up and write for even bigger audiences. You can pitch articles at magazines and newspapers, digital or otherwise. These sites have links, usually at the bottom of the page where you can go and find instructions on how to pitch a story to them. You can also post on sites like Medium or Quora, which have very large readerships. You can also look for pitching opportunities on Twitter or LinkedIn. Just make sure that you are being intentional about the kind of opportunities you are looking for. Make sure that makes sense with your brand and your story. Being a guest speaker on a podcast is another big opportunity. Those have dedicated audiences and the audience has a whole episode to listen and fall in love with you and your story. So another interpretation of the concept of showing up in public is to host a virtual book launch event. Of course, this is a onetime event, but it can be really effective way to build awareness about your book. A good way to do this is to use Facebook, create an event that you can invite people to and give it a time and a date when that time arrives, host a live video stream. This is a great opportunity to show up and remind people that there was a human being behind this book. Now, during that live stream, you could do a reading of a chapter or a section of your book, talk about your process inspiration. Share you good feedback that you've gotten so far and tell people why they're going to want this book when it comes to doing live video, the longer the better, because this gives more people a chance to catch you while your life. Put together a long list of things that you can talk about and share how some notes ready, maybe do a Q and a, or have some prepared questions that you can answer live. Again, this live video can be turned into more content for you. Push on social. You can post the whole thing as it is, or you could chop it up into smaller video clips, then you can post as individual pieces. So in terms of getting out in the public eye, we've covered a couple of things here. Giving out advanced rate of copies and getting reviews, getting a feature in a book promotion newsletter, being a guest writer on another person's platform or a guest on the podcast. Pitching a story to a big news or media outlet and hosting a virtual book launch. You can do all of these or none of these or whatever you think suits your particular book and your presentation style. There's another worksheet for this section below that is a fairly straightforward for planning what you want to do to show up and the steps that you will take to make that happen. This is pretty open-ended, so be creative. And I also included a few other ideas at the bottom of that worksheet. I really want to encourage you to be innovative and think of different ways to show up where your target audience hangs out. If you're stumped, you can try and see where other authors in the same genre are promoting their stuff and maybe you'll get some great ideas. You can also just ask around if people you know of different ways that they think you should promote your work, you might get some really creative suggestions that way, effective promotions are either going to cost you money or time. Just like every other step in the self-publishing process, just decide what you're willing to spend to get in front of the right people. So now let's pivot a little bit and talk about the marketing tools that the book distribution sites can offer you.
27. Book Distributor Marketing Tools: Every book distribution platform will have some unique things to offer in terms of the ways that you can promote your book. Many of these services are paid like ads. So be clear with yourself what you're willing to spend to test the waters on those things. However, there are definitely free services as well. So let's take a look at those first. Let's focus on what Amazon has to offer a synth that is the main distributor we've been talking about. First, Amazon has a service called author Central, which is separate from kVp. This is just a small platform where you can create an author page on their website. So if someone saw your book on Amazon and click on your name, instead of showing them books by authors with relate names, it would take the viewer to your author profile. Here you can put up a picture and description. You can link to your blog at some reviews and do other neat details. You could also claim your bucks so that they all show up here in one space. This becomes an easy way to show someone everything you have for sale in one place. Now you'll need to sign up to use author central, but you can use the same registration that you use with your normal Amazon account. So here's what's important to know. You can create an author page for your pen name. No problem, but you can only have three author pages per account. So let's use me as an example. I published books under my real name, Rebecca Wilson. I can have an author page for that name and I also published under lucky stroke press for my journals and workbooks. It has its own off the page over there. So I also sometimes write books under my middle name, Eliza Wilson. All three of these pages would be unrelated on the customer side of things. But I can create three distinct brands that way. So once you have your name in the author profile, you can then claim books that are published under that same name. It can take sometimes a few hours for that claim to go through. So having an author page on Amazon is a good marketing tool insofar as it keeps all your publications in one place and you can direct fans to it from your social media or your blog very easily. Now, in kVp itself, Kindle Direct Publishing, there are two promotional features that amazon gives you for free. There is a limit to how many of these promotions you can run per month. And note that these promotions are only available to eBooks enrolled in the Kindle select program. Remember that this program requires exclusivity. The two promotions are a free book giveaway in the price drop, there are tons of people scouring Amazon for free books. So this can be a good way to get your copy of your book onto their e-readers. Now, why would you want to give your book away for free? I think there are three main reasons. First is awareness. People will now know about your book if it's the first in a series and they get hooked, that may make more money selling SQL. Second, reviews, by law of large numbers, you may see some verified reviews coming this way. However, I will say I haven't heard of a lot of people having success doing this myself included generally the free book people aren't big reviewers. But thirdly, you may want to give your book away for free for lead generation, if your book is instructional or promotes a paid service, a course or another book, you may have some success getting people to check out that offer if they've read the book for free. If they read your whole book and they're going to start buying into your authority on the subject so long as it's well-written. If you're going with a free book promotion, then you should be clear about what you're looking to gain from it. I would strongly suggest that you put a call to action at the end of your free book, telling folks what you want them to do next. Whether that be leave a review, go by the next book or visit your website for a great offer. Don't assume that they will know what to do. They may not even know the book has a SQL if it just says the end at the end, That's it. A few years ago I put a novella that I wrote up on a free book giveaway. I didn't have any strategy to it. It was basically a short story that was a retelling of a met. So it was pretty niche. When you set up these campaigns, you indicate how many days you want to run it for? And I believe my was three or four days. Over that time I gave away just over 2000 copies of my ebook. And honestly I never saw a single review. Just took that book and walked away. But this is because there was no ask at the end. There was no request or incentive to do anything more. And it's pretty rare that somebody is going to take the initiative to do something on their own after reading. So be clear on what you're asking for an exchange with a free book. The second kind of ebook promotion that Amazon will let you do for free is a price drop. This is actually called a Kindle countdown. Again, you pick the number of days that you want to run this promotion for. So let's do an example to see how it works. If you have an e-book that you're selling for 499 and the promotion starts on Monday. You can drop it down to say a $1.90. Then 24 hours later on Tuesday, that book goes up to 299. The next day, 399. And then on Thursday we're back to full price. That's a full four-day promotion. Every day buyers will see a little timer telling them how long they have to get the book at this discounted price. The sooner they buy it, the better the deal. This promotion is basically just to drive sales using scarcity tactics. Since we're talking about e-books that don't take up any physical space anywhere. Any sale has a potential to be profitable. Again, to participate in these promotions, Amazon, you need to be in the Kindle select program. But I think these strategies could transfer well over to other selling platforms. The concept of a free book giveaway could work for your mailing list or a social media contest, or maybe it's a limited time offer. Now, as I said before, the other book distribution platforms have their own promotional tools that you can use. Cocoa, for example, has a service that you can use to push your e-book directly to Overdrive, which is a program used by libraries all over the world to let readers Borel books. This will get your e-book into libraries. Cocoa also has an affiliate program and suggests a bunch of hashtags to use on social media. Hashtags are a really great way to get featured on larger feeds. So make sure that you are using them strategically. So the final stop on this marketing train is to talk about paid ads will cover this in the next section.
28. Paid Advertisements: The big players in the paid advertisement game for our purposes, our Facebook ads, google ads, and AMS, which is Amazon marketing services. When it comes to making sales through ads, the important thing to remember is that the fewer clicks a customer has to do, the better, the faster they can add to cart and get to the checkout, the better. This is why AMS has an advantage over the others in terms of selling e-books just on the Amazon platform, marketing on Amazon means that you are showing your books to people who are already browsing for books. It becomes a symbol as encouraging them to add to cart. Now, online advertising is a very huge and complex subject, much like social media marketing. So it would be difficult to do it justice here. I'm going to save that. The key difference between Facebook ads and Google ads and AMS is that for the first two, you are generally paying for impressions. Well, with a MSU, we're only paying per-click. So what does this mean? Basically that your advertising dollars will go further. But again, it really depends on your goal. If you were trying to grow your author platform on Facebook, for example, and add people to like your page. Then running an awareness campaign or a campaign on Facebook ads would make sense. This could be a good way to build a fan base, especially if the content that you're pushing on that platform is valuable and more than just promotion saying buy my book. So when you're paying for impressions, that means that your advertising budget is being used up. Every time someone sees your ad. They don't have to interact with it for that budget to get spent. When you're paying for clicks. That means that someone is seeing your ad thinking. I might want to see more about this and clicking on it already. You are so much closer to making a sale. If you're going to be selling your ebooks on Amazon, I would say that perhaps giving a go doing AMS advertisements just to see how it works and impacts your sales, might be a good idea to give yourself a small budget that you can afford to practice with, even just 15 or 20 dollar. Figure out how many copies of your book this promotion needs to sell in order to make back that spend. This can be a good way to measure whether it's a success or not. I'd recommend waiting until the Jaipur on your launch passes because then you'll be able to tell more accurately the information from your sales spike that comes from the ad. An Amazon aside, pretty much all social selling platforms have a promoted or sponsored posts feature at C, Pinterest, Instagram, they all have it. Now all of these ads services do have a little bit of a learning curve, especially if you've never used them before. Each provider will offer some free training on how to effectively use their advertising tools. Exploring these resources can be great way to get a feel for the process. For example, facebook has Facebook blueprint where they offer free courses for their business tools. And once you start to get comfortable with them, you can then delve into the world of YouTube and other places to find people's advice on strategies to optimize them. Just remember that no method will work for everyone. And online advertising does require patients and trial and error. Running good ads often comes down to how well you keyword them and how well you know exactly who it is you're targeting. Sometimes this can take a little bit of adjustment. And if you may need to switch up your targets if you're not seeing results. The key reading tools that I talked about before like publisher rocket, and HFS, can help with finding appropriate search terms if you do decide to invest in those products at some point. So there is a lot to learn around advertising and there's a lot of skills to be gained. But like I say, with the design skills that come from formatting your e-book, these are very transferable skills then you can use to promote other things and other work that you do. And it looks great on a resume. So it's a valuable thing to build up if you are interested in gaining that skill for yourself. So now let's head to the wrap-up to finish up this final lesson of the course.
29. Wrap Up: Okay, so to sum up, our marketing lesson here is what we talked about. Start with the marketing plan and revisit your target audience, your branding, and your tone for the message that you're putting out into the internet. Build yourself a platform using a website and blog, social media and a newsletter. Push your content by creating a content strategy, writing blogs, creating freebies and complimentary products, and linking your content all over social. Show up in public by trying advanced reader copies, getting featured in newsletters, making guest posts, pitching to bigger platforms are hosting virtual book launches. Use the promotional tools that your book distributors offer as long as you have a clear goal in mind. Experiment with paid ads using a small controlled budget and do your research into how to make these tools work for you. Marketing skills and strategies are time-intensive to learn and they are always evolving. But once you have a finished product to offer, these are the skills that are going to bring me results. There are so many wonderfully written books abandoned to the depths of Amazon because the writers who are great at writing haven't embrace the whole job of being a self-published author. It's way more than just making great books. It's about treating your author career like a business and creating strategies that guide you in the right direction for the results that you want to achieve.
Rebecca Wilson, Writer and Artist
