Category Archives: ePub Author Questions

ePub Author Question – How Do I Convert My Color Book to Black and White and Make a LOT More Money?

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If you are self-publishing hardcopy books with color images, you may want to take a long, hard look at converting your book to black-and-white. The printing cost of a black-and-white book is just a fraction of that of a color book, which means you’ll be able to price your B&W book much cheaper and sell a lot more copies.

If you haven’t priced out the difference between color printing and B&W, you’ll be surprised. I’ll give you the numbers from one of my books as an example. 

My best-selling book is a 478-page book called Practical and Clear Graduate Statistics in Excel. I originally published the hardcopy version in color using Print-On-Demand from Lightning Source. The printing charge from Lightning Source was $44.02. At a retail price of $79.95 with a 20% wholesale discount (meaning that Amazon would get 20% of the sale price), I earned $19.94 per sale.

Introducing Lightning Source’s Convenient Publisher Compensation Calculator

Lightning Source has a convenient Publisher Compensation calculator on their web site. Below is a screen shot of the LS Publisher Compensation calculators running the numbers above: 

Lightning Source POD Publisher Compensation Calculator - Color Book

Lightning Source POD Publisher Compensation Calculator - Color Book

Now let’s take a look at the numbers after the same book is converted to B&W. The printing charge from Lightning Source was reduced to $9.90. At a retail price of $39.95 with a 20% wholesale discount, I earned $22.06 per sale. Cutting the retail price in half greatly increases sales and I even earn a few dollars more per sale. Below is a screen shot of the LS Publisher Compensation calculators running the numbers above: 

Lightning Source POD Publisher Compensation Calculator - Black-and-White

Lightning Source POD Publisher Compensation Calculator - Black-and-White

Not every color book will work as a B&W, but many will. Yours might.

Converting a book from color to black-and-white for the most part involves converting all images from color to grayscale. You will also need to create a new cover artwork file because the spine of a B&W POD book is thinner than a color POD book. This requires a whole new cover artwork .pdf file to be created and then uploaded to Lightning Source. Let’s do that first.

First step – Create the New Cover Artwork File

There are two files that must be created when submitted a book to Lightning Source for Print-On-Demand. Both files are .pdf files that must meet rigid, professional-quality printing standards defined by Lightning Source. The first .pdf file contains the book’s contents. The second .pdf file contains the cover artwork.

We have to create a new cover art .pdf when converting from color to B&W because of the thinner spine of the B&W version. B&W POD pages are slightly thinner than the pages in a color POD book. The spine of the B&W version of a book is therefore thinner than the color version. A thinner spine means that a whole new .pdf cover artwork file must be generated.

Introducing Lightning Source’s Convenient Cover Artwork Template Generator

Lightning Source provides a custom cover art template based upon the book’s dimensions, selection of color vs. B&W, binding type, and number of pages. Here are the inputs for Lightning Source’s cover template generator: 

Lightning Source Cover Artwork Template Generator

Lightning Source Cover Artwork Template Generator

The above inputs are for a B&W, 8.5 X 11 inch, perfect bound book, white paper with gloss laminate having 478 pages. I am choosing to have this template emailed to me as a .pdf file that I will open up in Photoshop. Note that the bar code will not include price information. This is nearly always the correct choice if your POD book will be sold in online retail bookstores such as Amazon. I do a lot of experimenting with pricing for all of my hardcopy POD books. That would not be possible at all if the barcodes on my POD books contained fixed prices.

Below is a blank Lightning Source’s .pdf art cover template based on the preceding inputs:

Lightning Source Blank Artwork Cover Template

Lightning Source Blank Artwork Cover Template

 

This file then should be opened in Photoshop and the work begins. A specific procedure must be followed when opening Lightning Source’s .pdf template in Photoshop to ensure that bar code will contain only black and white without adding any color. If the bar code contains any color, the cover artwork .pdf file will be rejected by Lightning Source. Opening the .pdf template incorrectly in Photoshop is one major cause of color appearing in the bar code. Here is the correct procedure for opening the .pdf from within Photoshop:

- File / Open / browse and select the blank .pdf template saved on your computer that Lightning Source has emailed to you.
- The “Import PDF” dialogue box will appear. Enter the input choices as follows:
- Crop To:  Media Box
- Uncheck: Anti-aliased
- The Width and Height dimensions sent by Lightning Source of the blank template should be correct
- Check:  Constrain Proportions
- Resolution:  300 Pixels/inch
- Mode:   CMYK Color
- Bit-Depth:   8 bit

After you have correctly opened the template in Photoshop, you can begin creating the front and back covers along with the spine. Red dotted lines in the blank template define the edges of the Safety Region for the covers and spine. No artwork or printing should extend past the Safety Region. The blue dotted lines on the blank template define the edges of the Bleed Region. Background color should extend to the edges of the Bleed Region, but not past it.

The bar code on the back cover can be placed anywhere on the back cover. It does not have to remain in its original position in the blank template

The final cover artwork .pdf that will be submitted to Lightning Source must have the red Safety Region lines and blue Bleed Region lines removed. Everything else in the blank template can remain. When you are ready to save it in Photoshop as the final .pdf, follow this procedure:

- File / Save As
- Name the file:   13-Digit_ISBN_cov.pdf    For example:  9781937159139_cov.pdf
- Format:  Photoshop PDF
- As a Copy:  checked
- Alpha Channels:   unchecked
- Layers:   Unchecked
- Use Proof Setup:   Unchecked
- Embed Color Profile:   Unchecked
- Save
- Adobe PDF Preset:   [PDF/X-1a:2001]
- Standard:   PDF/X-1a:2001

Saving the .pdf at the PDF/X-1a:2001 standard causes all colors to be converted to CMYK and ensures that the resolution is at least 300 ppi, which are two of the main Lightning Source requirements for the uploaded file. Here is what the final cover artwork .pdf in this case looked like: 

Final Cover Artwork .pdf File Ready for Upload to Lightning Source

Final Cover Artwork .pdf File Ready for Upload to Lightning Source

This cover artwork file is now ready for upload to Lightning Source. It will be a large file because of the 300 ppi resolution throughout. This particular file was 10.9 MB. Let’s move on to creating the black-and-white content file.

Second step – Create the New B&W Content File

The only difference between a color POD book and a Black-and-White POD book is the color of the text and images. The B&W book must have all images in gray scale and all text in black.

Converting all text to black is simply a matter of all selecting all of the text in the entire document (In MS Word click Edit / Select All) and setting the Font Color of the entire selection to black.

Converting all of the images to gray scale will take a bit more work.

 

How To Convert Color Images To Grayscale

To summarize the process, you’ll need to open each image in Photoshop, set the image’s color mode to grayscale, and ensure that the image is sized properly. After each grayscale image is inserted into the document properly, the document must be saved as a .pdf file that meets the PDF/X-1a:2001 standard, just like the cover. The final step is to run a check called the Preflight check in order to ensure that the entire .pdf file conforms to the same PDF/X-1a:2001 standard that the cover artwork .pdf file conforms must conform to.

The first thing to do is open each image file in Photoshop. The best and safest way to resize and transform an image in Photoshop is to first open it as a “Smart Object.” A Smart Object is a container-like layer that almost anything can be opened up in. No matter what you do to an image opened up as a Smart Object, Photoshop remembers all of the information about the original image and places that information back into the file.  To open an image as a Smart Object, click File / Open As Smart Object as shown below: 

Photoshop Opening an Image As Smart Object

Photoshop Opening an Image As Smart Object

Once the image is opened as a Smart Object in Photoshop, set the image’s size and resolution properly. Click Image / Image Size / and then set the correct setting in the Image Size dialogue box as shown below. The resolution for an image in a POD book should be set to 300 ppi (pixels per inch). Images that consist of line art should be saved at 600 ppi resolution.

The Width and Height dimensions in the Document Size box are the other two measurements to be set. For an 8.5 X 11 inch POD book, I try to make sure that an image’s width never exceeds 5.5 inches and its height does not exceed 8 inches.

The Pixel Dimension setting of width and height would be the dimension to be set if the images were going to be viewed onscreen, such as in an .epub eBook. For an .epub file, I try to ensure that all images are 72 ppi and no more than 500 pixels in width or height. Note that convention is to state the width dimension before the height dimension. Below is the Image Size dialogue box:

Setting Image Size and Resolution in Photoshop
Setting Image Size and Resolution in Photoshop

After setting the size and resolution of the image correctly, change the color mode to grayscale. Do this by clicking Image / Mode / Grayscale. If the image was not originally in CMYK mode, select CMYK mode first, and then select Grayscale. When you select the color mode (CMYK or Grayscale) you will be asked if you want to rasterize the image. You do want to allow Photoshop to rasterize your image at this point. Below is the menu selection of Grayscale.

Setting Image Color Mode To Grayscale in Photoshop

Setting Image Color Mode To Grayscale in Photoshop

Now that your image is properly sized and in grayscale, you can go ahead and swap out the old CMYK color image with the new grayscale version that you just created.

I like to create my content files using MS Word because it is so convenient to make changes. Another big reason that I usually create my content files in Word and not Adobe InDesign is that all of my clients will have MS Word on their computers. I can send my file to them as I am working on it to get their immediate feedback. I couldn’t do that if I did my content files in InDesign because most of my client don’t use InDesign. I don’t dislike InDesign. In fact, it is really a much more capable publishing program than Word. It’s just that my client don’t use it very often.

I am assuming that you have created your content file in MS Word. If you have swapped out all of the color images with grayscale CMYK images, you can now convert the Word document to the final .pdf content file that will be uploaded to Lightning Source.

The best tool to have on your computer for this is Adobe Acrobat. If Adobe Acrobat is loaded on your computer, you will have an Adobe PDF menu item in Word (this is the 2003 version) as shown below.

You’ll need to ensure that the .pdf file will conform to the PDF/X-1a:2001 standard required by Lightning Source. To do this, click MS Word drop-down menu item Adobe PDF / Change Conversion Settings as shown below:

 

Adobe Acrobat Change .pdf Conversion Setting

Adobe Acrobat Change .pdf Conversion Setting

 

The following Acrobat PDFMaker dialogue box will appear. Set Conversion Settings to PDF/X-1a:2001 and make sure Create Bookmarks and Add Links is unchecked. The PDF/X-1a:2001 setting will, by default, set all colors to CMYK. Leave security defaulted to none. Make sure that the page size is set correctly by clicking Advanced Setting / General /  Default Page Size. An 8.5 X 11 inch book should have the width and height settings at 8.5 and 11 inches. All other settings should be defaulted correctly.

Adobe PDF Maker - Correct Settings

Adobe PDF Maker - Correct Settings

After setting the Acrobat PDFMaker dialogue box correctly, convert the Word document to the final .pdf by clicking Adobe PDF / Convert to Adobe PDF.  It can take a little while for your computer to complete this process because the final .pdf file can be very large, particularly if there are lots of images. Images at 300 ppi are large files. The content .pdf file of the book shown here, Practical and Clear Graduate Statistics in Excel, was 101 MB.

After this .pdf file is created, it needs to be checked to ensure that it meets the PDF/X-1a:2001 standard required by Lightning Source for POD input files. The test to ensure that the PDF/X-1a:2001 standard is met is called a Preflight check. This is named after the check that pilots perform on the place before take-off.

Open the .pdf file in Adobe Acrobat. I use Acrobat Professional Pro Extended version 9.0. It is expensive software but worth every penny if you do lots of work with .pdf files.

To bring up the Preflight check on the .pdf content file loaded in Adobe Acrobat, click drop-down menu item Advanced / Preflight as shown below: 

Selecting the Preflight Check In Adobe Acrobat

Selecting the Preflight Check In Adobe Acrobat

ThePreflight dialogue box will come as shown below. Select PDF Analysis and then select “List page objects, grouped by type of object” as shown below:

Specific Preflight Check Selection

Specific Preflight Check Selection

 

You are most concerned that all images are at least 300 ppi and CMYK. 

Preflight Check Output

Preflight Check Output

Below we are expanding the image section of this report to view resolution and color mode of all images.

Specific Preflight Check Output

Specific Preflight Check Output

 

After you have uploaded the cover artwork and content .pdf files to Lightning Source from their web site, you will find out within usually 24 hours whether you have created both files correctly. If both files have been created correctly, you will see the following.

BOOKBLK Accepted  (BOOKBLK is the content .pdf file)
COVER Accepted

I have ordered a proof to be made and shipped to me. Below shows that this proof has been generated, but has not yet been shipped to me. 

Lightning Source Title Status - Cover and Content Files Accepts & Proof Generated

Lightning Source Title Status - Cover and Content Files Accepts & Proof Generated

I received the proof of this B&W version of the book and it looked great. Once again, great job by Lightning Source and now I should be able to make a lot more money selling this book in B&W than in color.

ePub Author Question – Should My Book Be in Color or Black and White?

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Color printing is great but it will really jack up the retail price of your book’s hardcopy version.  I’ll show you the figures for one of my books printed in both B&W and color. The difference between the retail prices of each print type needed to provide the same royalty per sale is almost astonishing.

Clarify the Question

Before we break out the numbers, let’s clarify the opening question. What we are really asking is whether the hardcopy version of your book (the Print-On-Demand version if you are self-publishing) should have color images or black-and-white images. A book’s images are the only difference between the color book and a black-and-white versions of the same book. Both versions can have the same full-color cover and same B&W text. The difference between the two is whether the book’s images are printed in color or in gray scale. The images that appear in a B&W book have been printed in gray scale using only black ink. The images in a color hardcopy book have been printed in a color mode called CMYK.

The question of whether to use color or gray scale images is relevant only to printed, hardcopy books. An eBook’s price is not affected by the amount of color contained in the images. eBook images are displayed on the screen of an e-reader. Adding color to an eBook’s images doesn’t add cost to creating the .epub file or displaying the images. Printing a colored image on paper, on the other hand, is way more expensive than printing a gray scale image.

How much more expensive? Here are the numbers for one of my books.

If you are self-publishing, you’ll be using a print-on-demand (POD) company to print and ship your hardcopy books. The POD company partners directly with all online bookstores. When an Amazon customer purchases a hardcopy book, the order is sent to the POD company, who then prints and ships the book to the customer.  The only involvement that you the self-publisher have in this whole sales process is to receive royalty payments at the end of the day. Not bad.

Lightning Source as a POD Company

I use Lightning Source is my POD company for one simple reason. They allow me to make the most money. Lightning Source is the largest POD company with the most retail partners in the world. Lightning Source’s clout makes them the only POD company that can dictate to Amazon what Amazon’s wholesale discount will be. I set my wholesale discount for all of my POD books at 20%. That means that Amazon will receive only 20% of the sale price of one of my POD books. That is significant considering that Amazon keeps a full 65% of sale price of most of my Kindle eBooks.

Lightning Source also gets paid during the sale of each hardcopy book. Lightning Source is the printer and charges a fixed fee for printing each book during each sale. Lightning Source’s fixed printing fee depends on the type of printing, the binding type, and the number of pages in the book.

Lightning Source’s Publisher Compansation Calculator

Lightning Source has a convenient Publisher’s Compensation calculator on their web site that enables you to determine the retail price of your book that will provide a specific royalty payment. Simply input the following information into Lightning Source’s Publisher Compensation calculator:

- Type of book (color or black-and-white)

- Binding type from Lightning Source’s available choice of bindings

- Page color (white or creme)

- Number of pages

- Wholesale discount (the percent of the sale price that you allow the retailer such as Amazon to keep)

- Retail price of your book

The Publisher Compensation calculator then displays Lightning Source’s print charge and your publisher’s compensation.

Here Are the Actual Numbers

Here are the number for one of my books, just to illustrate the difference in pricing between the color and black-and-white versions of the same book.

One of my better-selling books is a 478-page manual entitled Practical and Clear Graduate Statistics in Excel. I originally printed the book in color and was selling it in hardcopy from Amazon at a retail price of $79.95. My royalty from each of these sales was $19.94. Here are the inputs and output of Lightning Source’s Publisher Compensation calculator in this case:

Numbers for the Color Book

- Color, 8.5 X 11 inches, Perfect Bound on White Pages with Gloss Laminate

- 478 Pages

- $79.95 List Price

- 20% Wholesale Discount

Outputs

- $44.02 Print Charge

- $19.94 Publisher Compensation

If I simply convert all of the book’s images from color to gray scale and sell the book as a black-and-white book, here are the new figures (make sure you are sitting down when you read these):

Numbers for the Black-and-White Book

- B&W, 8.5 X 11 inches, Perfect Bound on White Pages with Gloss Laminate

- 478 Pages

- $39.95 List Price

- 20% Wholesale Discount

Outputs

- $9.90 Print Charge

- $22.06 Publisher Compensation

By merely converting all images to gray scale, I was able to cut the book’s retail price in half and increase my profit from each sale. The difference is that the black-and-white print charge is only $9.90 compared to $44.02 for color.

Conclusion

If you want to earn the most money from the sale your books in hard copy, use Lightning Source is your POD company and sell your books in black-and-white.

ePub Author Question – How To Create a Great Amazon Cover Image That Will Sell Lots of Books

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A book’s cover and its Amazon cover image are often very different but guess which one is more important?  Outside of brick-and-mortar book stores, a book’s cover won’t help sell at all. But who cares? Independent authors sell almost exclusively online. The Amazon cover image, on the other hand, is the second most important factor in getting a book sold online.

The book’s cover needs to be attractive when held in the hand but it’s the Amazon cover image that sells books. Well, not sell exactly. More like set the appointment for the closer. Amazon sales are closed by the book’s description, reviews, and Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature. The Amazon cover image and its partner in crime, the title, need to hijack and overwhelm the curiosity of a casual Amazon browser in a split second. The Amazon cover image is lethal if it is loaded with the following three bullets:

1) Instantly legible title

2) Striking

3) Simple

First, contrary to popular belief, the book’s cover and the Amazon cover image do not have to be the same. They need to be similar not necessarily identical. Both need to have the same theme but the Amazon cover image is often most effective when it is a simplified version of the book’s cover.

How To Simplify a Book Cover Down To a Great Amazon Cover Image

Simplifying the book cover down to an effective Amazon cover image means doing the following:

1) Remove all text except the title and subtitle. Keep the subtitle only if it is brief.

2) Ensure that the title is instantly readable. It should be near the top, stand-alone, highly contrasted from its background, and large. Chose a font for the title that fits the theme and genre but remains easy-to-read when shrunk.

3) Use only one graphic. More than one graphic makes the postage-stamp-sized Amazon cover image too busy to stop a casual Amazon browser. That one graphic needs to be a grabber.

4) Ensure that each item, whether text or an image, is in its own space. Nothing should overlap.

5) Use only a few colors. The background should be only one color.

6) There should be only one focus. Anything else makes the Amazon cover image too busy.

7) Contrasts between elements and the background should be strong.

8) Your book’s genre should be instantly conveyed by the Amazon cover image.

9) The Amazon cover image should have similarities to others in its genre but must stand out in a noticeable way.

The Amazon cover image needs to have an outer edge to contrast it from the white background of its placeholder. If your Amazon cover image is white on its edges, you are allowed to outline it with a thin, black outline. An Amazon cover image that has white edges will fade into the placeholder background and not look like a book at all. Any momentary confusion generated by your Amazon cover image will prompt Amazon browsers to simply continue browsing.

Characteristics of an Ineffective Amazon Cover Image

You will lose sales if your Amazon cover has any of the following:

1) Hard-to-read title

2) Too many elements

3) Too much to read

4) A main image that doesn’t grab attention

5) No outside edge

6) Elements overlapping each other

7) Too many colors

8) Not enough contrast between elements and the background

9) More than one focus or focal point.

10) Doesn’t stand out from others in its genre

The Postage Stamp Rule

Pretend that you are creating a postage stamp. An Amazon cover image is just about the same size so this technique is very applicable. Postage stamps have only a single, striking image. The text on a postage stamp is stand-alone and easy-to-read. Nothing overlaps on a postage stamp. Postage stamps have only one background color. Postage stamps are always simple, never busy. Of course you can create a much more striking Amazon cover image than a postage stamp because of the fonts, images, and background colors that you have at your disposal. The important point is that your Amazon cover image needs the simplicity, contrast, a single focus, and legibility of a postage stamp.

View your Amazon cover image as it would be seen on Amazon by sizing it to approximately 1.5 inches in height and then save it as a jpeg at 72 ppi with 50% resolution. How’s it look?

The Billboard Rule

Imagine the you’re speeding down the highway and a billboard briefly catches your eye. What did you briefly notice? The billboard’s headline and one image if it was large enough….Anything else? Nope. But…what about all that great advertising text and artwork all over the rest of the billboard? Of course not. And why would any of that stuff be on a billboard anyway? The drivers are speeding along and the faraway billboards look tiny from the road.

You probably see where this is going. You’ll do well to create your cover image for the Amazon catalog is as you were designing a billboard to place beside a highway a ways back from the road. Place only enough on that billboard to catch your potential customers eyes as they are speeding along Amazon Highway. Just like on a highway billboard, anything beyond just a few main items will clutter, crowd, and confuse your book’s billboard on the side of Amazon Highway and your customers will just keep speeding along until a more focused billboard grabs their limited attention.

How To Know That You Have Created an Effective Amazon Cover Image

You’ve probably created an effective Amazon cover image if you are happy with your answers to the following questions:

1) How conspicuous and legible is the title?

2) Is your Amazon cover image busy or is it simple and focused?

3) If you have an image, will the image stop casual Amazon browsers in their tracks?

4) Is the overall contrast sufficient to make every element on the image stand out?

5) Is each element in its own space or is there any confusing overlap among elements in the image?

6) Does the Amazon cover image make the book’s genre instantly clear?

7) Does this Amazon cover image stand out from others in the genre?

ePub Author Question – How To Work With a Cover Artist To Create a Great Cover

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How Important Is Your Cover?

A great cover will sell a lot more books than a mediocre cover. Your cover, particularly the thumbnail image, has to grab the casual Amazon browser who is skimming through rows of thumbnails in your genre. The book market is becoming crowded FAST – over 1,000 new books go on sale every day. You need to put your best foot forward and that best foot is a strong cover image.
 

Should You Create Your Own Cover Or Hire a Cover Artist?

Unless you are an experienced cover artist with demonstrated success, you should hire a freelance cover artist to do your cover. It will cost you at least several hundred dollars but will be one of the wisest investments you’ll ever make in your book.  If you have written a good book, the increased sales from a great cover will recoup your investment quickly. Paying a cover designer should not be thought of as a cost but as an investment that will pay for itself many times over.
 

Where Do You Find a Good Cover Artist?

1) Look at the web sites of a number of graphic designers and find several whose style you like the best. Make sure that the graphic designers who make your short list have experience doing book cover design. There is a learning curve, particularly when creating the cover artwork .pdf file for Print-On-Demand. Files submitted to a POD company such as Lightning Source have to meet a number of technical specifications exactly because these files go right into production. The cover artist needs to be experienced in creating these files.

2) Join author groups. Author groups are great sources for locating every type of professional help that a writer might need.

3) Graphic design schools have lots of talent that should not be too expensive. If you opt to employ a graphic design student, make sure that the student has the experience you need and is willing to work with a contract and meet deadlines.

4) Look on the covers of hardcopies and ebooks in your genre. The artists are sometimes listed on the cover.
 

What Are Important Questions To Ask the Cover Designer Before You Hire Him or Her?

1) The most important aspect of working with a cover artist is that you feel comfortable working with him or her. If you are a bit uncomfortable with an artist after one or two communications, you probably should continue your search.

2) Pay attention to the number of questions that the artist asks you. The more questions that the artist asks about your book, your concept, and your goals, the more likely you are to get a final product that is inline with what you want.

3) Ranking right up at the top of the list is the designer’s experience in creating book covers. How many did the artist do? How many in your genre? Take a look at them.

4) You should request a contract with your artist. If the artist doesn’t do a contract, he or she may not bring the professionalism to the table that you’ll want.

5) You need to have the right to use the artwork forever. If you have to renew a license in order to continue to use the cover artwork, you are taking a big risk. Your artist could move, raise licensing prices, or even refuse to relicense because of disagreement. The worse-case scenario would to lose a license for cover artwork used on a series of books. In this case you would have to redo all of the covers. Any brand equity that had been built as a result of cover recognition for your series is instantly gone. You never want to license cover artwork temporarily.

6) You need to get everything clearly spelled out regarding what you will be billed for. Cover artists often bill hourly. Find out what tasks are considered billable. You want to be paying your artist for creative artistic and design work. You don’t want to pay the artist for tasks that you could do yourself. If, for example, the artist bills for image searches, you might consider providing the images yourself. There are also lots of sites that you can find royalty-free images on. There are also plenty of well-known sites that sell the right to use images.

7) Related to the above point is a payment schedule. Make sure that payment terms and schedule are clearly spelled out. The artist may also request a downpayment, sometimes up to 50%.

8) The total cost for creating your cover will be at least several hundred dollars, maybe even more depending on how unique you want your cover to be. Be wary of a cover designer whose price seems too good to be true. You may not get the experience, amount of interaction, or the effort that you would like from the artist.

9) You’ll want to get a production schedule from the artist, complete with deadlines.

10) Don’t expect your cover designer to create illustrations, perform photography, or to have to secure the rights for images for your cover. If you have provided the images, you have relieved the designer of liability for copyright infringement. You may have to provide extra money to the artist if you would like him or her to locate stock images for your cover.

11) Make sure that cover designer can create the proofs in the form and format that you need. For example, if you are creating a cover for a Print-On-Demand hardcopy for Lightning Source or CreateSpace, you’ll be provided a custom .pdf template by the POD company. It is best if your cover designer has created covers in the past for the specific POD company that you intend to use. Each POD company has its own set of specifications and templates. You would rather have your cover designer at the top of that learning curve than at the bottom looking up. I can recommend Lightning Source as a POD company and have used them for all of my POD books. I have not ever used CreateSpace so I can’t  provide first-hand information about them, although I’m sure they do a great job as well.

12) Ask how many cover ideas you will initially receive from the artist. It is not uncommon for a cover designer only to provide a single cover concept and work from there. In the past, cover designers often provided more than one cover concept.
 

How Do You Work With Your Cover Artist To Get the Best Result?

1) Provide the cover artist with a detailed brief about what you would like for your cover. Your brief should provide your ideas about what overall effect and mood you would like the cover to evoke. Provide your ideas about color schemes and any other ideas of artistic expression related to the cover that you have.

2) Make sure your brief contains all necessary factual information such as page count, ISBN, binding format, binding size, color or black-and-white printing on pages, color of pages (for example, crème or white), and the name of the POD company that will be printing your book. Each POD company has its own technical specifications and template. You’ll need to provide the cover artist with enough information so that the artist can download a custom template from your POD company.

3) Your input should important to the designer. Equally important from your end is  to respect and trust  the designer’s creative, artistic abilities. The designer hopefully has worked on many more books than you and should know a thing or two. If you have found a good cover artist, listen to him or her. Your cover artist is the expert in the field of cover design. After all, you are shelling out good money for that expertise. You might as well get your money’s worth.

4) Don’t expect your cover designer to take photographs or do illustrations, Cover designers combine and manipulate images and type face to create effective covers. If you wish the artist to locate images for use on your cover, you may have to pay extra.

5) Be open to an experienced designer’s suggestions of how to change the cover concept to appeal to a wider audience. Authors sometimes define a book’s  target market too tightly.

6) Always insist on a contract with deadlines, payment terms, definition of billable hours, artist’s deposit requirement, copyright retention terms for the cover design, definition and specifications of what the final product will be, how the final product will be uploaded to the POD and also included in an .epub/.mobi eBook file if this will be created.

7) Learn as much as possible in advance about the publishing process and what the specifications required by the POD company mean. Get the cover artist to define the publishing process and also explain all of the POD specifications including the custom template in detail to you. The more you know about the entire process at the beginning, the more likely that the final product will meet your satisfaction. Get the cover designer to go over the template with you and explain what the “bleed” and “trim” areas are. It’s not as complicated as it may sound. The cover artist should be able to explain all of the POD company’s specifications and template in simple, understandable terms.

8) Expect the artist to respect your wishes if you have very strong feelings about some aspect the cover design. On the other side of the coin, respect the artist’s experience and talent. Try to keep in mind that the artist probably has worked on quite a few more books than you have.

9) Request changes if you see something that you would like changed. Before you request any changes, try to clarify exactly why you want the change. Be prepared to listen to the artist’s reasoning on why he or she created and laid out the elements of the cover in that way.

10) If you ask for lots of changes, expect to pay more for the additional work.

11) At the end of the day, do you best to hire talent, provide as much information as you can, and then try as much as possible to trust the skill, creativity, experience, and judgement of your cover designer.

ePub Author Question – What Goes Into a Great Cover?

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Why Is a Cover So Important?

People do judge a book by its cover and a great cover will sell a lot more books. In the online world, a cover can make or break a book. Your cover is the most important selling tool that you have. Quite a few self-published authors don’t understand the importance of a great cover. Your cover is your billboard that will convey your book’s excitement and uniqueness. Just like a billboard, your cover has maybe 6 seconds tops to grab the casual Amazon browser.

The book market is becoming crowded FAST – over 1,000 new books go on sale every day thanks to the recent advances of self-publishing. Your book must stand out. Period. An amateur cover will make your book look, well…, self-published. The bottom line is that you’ll sell a lot more books with a great cover.

Should You Create Your Own Cover Or Hire a Cover Artist?

Unless you are an experienced cover artist with demonstrated success, you should hire a freelance cover artist to do your cover. It will cost you at least several hundred dollars but will be one of the wisest investments you’ll ever make in your book. Cover artwork, editing, and marketing are three areas that you need to spend money. Skimping on any of these will knock the wind out of your book sales.

If you’re a writer, write. Leave cover design to a professional cover designer. There is almost no chance that an inexperienced person will create a more effective cover than a pro cover designer (or even come close, or… even do a good job at creating a cover). Cover design is definitely a job for a pro.

The few hundred dollars that a great cover costs should pay for itself with increased sales almost immediately. The money you spend designing all of your covers might be the most effective investment you can make toward your long-term success as an independent author.

Another article in this blog will discuss how to locate and work with a skilled cover designer to create a great cover.

Should You Create a Cover with One of the Cover Template Packages Available?

There a lots of packages out there that provide templates which enable anyone to create a cover in no time. However, with 1,000 new books coming out on the market every day, a template-created cover won’t give you an edge. It will make your book a “me too” book. It’s not that hard to spot a cover that was created from a template. Hire a pro cover designer if you want your book to persuade a casual Amazon browser of your book’s genre to stop and take a look. That is the crucial first step on the path to the “Buy” button. Your book will not standout in the crowded market if you create your cover with a template.

The Most Important Rules of Cover Design

- By far the most important rule in cover design is to know your audience. You need to understand your genre and who reads it. Inspect as many books in your genre as you can. What are the similarities? What differentiates cover art work of the best sellers? What about the ones that aren’t selling well? The top selling books will always be ranked higher in an Amazon search of your book’s genre.

- Don’t worry about trying to appeal to everyone. The more specifically you know your book genre’s audience, the more accurately you can target them with your cover. The more focused your cover is on your genre’s audience to the exclusion of everyone else, the more books you’ll sell. That might sound illogical but is based of one of marketing’s most powerful principles of focusing the marketing efforts on the target market.

- Know the USP (Unique Selling Proposition) of your book. If you are writing nonfiction, your book needs to be solving an important problem that faces your target audience. The cover must instantly convey that your book will solve this problem. If you are selling fiction, your book must be providing a desired experience to your target market. The cover must instantly convey the experience that your target reader is seeking. Do you have an intimate understanding of the type of experience that your target audience is seeking? Can you articulate how the covers of some of the best-selling books in your genre individually convey that experience?

- The cover must make the genre clear in a second or two. If your cover’s presentation of the genre is even the slightest bit confusing to the casual Amazon browser, they’ll move on and you’ll lose a ton of sales. Clarity often trumps cleverness here.

- The cover must look professionally done. It is easy to tell if the cover was made using a template or by a person without cover design experience. An amateur cover is a sales killer.

- The cover needs to be clear and look great as a thumbnail. The title and subtitle should be clear on the Amazon thumbnail.

- A poor cover thumbnail will absolutely hammer your book’s sales. Believe it or not, the thumbnail image of your cover is more important than the full-size image. People now buy books online much more than in book stores. This creates a quantum shift in cover creation. The cover thumbnail must grab the casual Amazon buyer of your book’s genre. If your cover’s thumbnail isn’t instantly clear or does not resonate immediately with your target audience, you’re handing over book royalties that should be yours to a competing author. Tragic!

- Simplicity is generally better with covers. Clutter on the cover is major distraction to the casual Amazon browser, who needs to be able to instantly figure what’s special about the book. Simplicity also translates to a much better thumbnail.

- The cover should be eye-catching to differentiate the book from the crowd. Always remember that 1,000 new books are coming online every day.

- If you are writing any kind of a series, the cover should quickly identify the book as part of that series. Your covers create your brand. Consecutive books in your series must be instantly identifiable as part of that series.

- Your book cover should look like others in its genre, but stand out in some significant way that resonates with your target audience. It is very important that you can articulate specifically what makes your book special to your target audience. Just being different is not the key. Being different in a way that is important to your target is the key. Your title and cover need to clearly reflect this difference.

- Your title should be large and usually at the top of the cover. Keep the clarity of the thumbnail in the forefront of your thinking when creating all elements of the cover.

- The typography should match or be similar to typography of other books in the genre. Check out the typography of best-sellers in your genre. You’ll probably see a lot of similarity in typography. You might also see several distinct styles of typography that most of the best-sellers in your genre will fall into.

- The outer edges of your front cover should not be white. Your book’s front cover should be framed on all edges with color, preferably a darker color. A white edge will fade into the white background of the Amazon space holder. The viewer won’t be able to see the book’s outline and the book will not look like a book at all. Any confusion will prompt a good percentage of casual Amazon browser to simply move on to the next book.

- Always remember that the main purpose of the book’s cover is to persuade the browser to take the next step. Maybe that next step is to read the online product description or to take a look at the online book reviews. Maybe that next step is to persuade the viewer to read a sample of the book.

- The book’s title and cover thumbnail need to be traffic stoppers. The first step in the book selling process is catch your target audience’s attention. That’s your title and cover’s main job. If they are not doing their job, you’re handing hard-earned royalties over to a competing author. Amazon browsers will keep browsing until a title and cover grabs them. Make sure your title and cover have stopping power in your genre.

- The book’s spine should have only plain colors. No designs on the spine.

- Establish what the principal focus of your cover is. The principal focus of the cover should be the  book’s USP (Unique Selling Proposition), which is the main benefit that a reader will get from your book. Everything on the cover should sell your book’s USP. Every element on the cover either adds to selling the book’s USP or detracts from it. Evaluate every element on the cover.

- The title by itself should convey the book’s USP. Very important. The title and cover thumbnail need to stop traffic. They will only stop traffic if they clearly sell a USP that is highly sought-after by your target audience.

- Too many elements on a cover will also distract from the USP that the cover needs to quickly convey to the casual Amazon browser. Once again, simplicity is usually best.

- Don’t use too many colors. It is a bit confusing to the casual browser because it will make the cover thumbnail overly busy. Once again, simplicity is usually better. Use just a few colors.

- Don’t take the cover too personally. Let the cover designer do his or her thing. You should of course have lots of input into the design of your cover. It is important to remember that covers (at least, good ones anyway) are not usually created by the authors. Authors often have to detach themselves personally from the cover and put on the hat of an unrelated publisher who is trying to sell the book.

- Important stuff usually belongs in the top and right side of the front cover.

- Back to the first and most important point in this list – know your genre’s audience and study lots of book covers in your genre. What makes a good cover good? What makes a mediocre cover mediocre? Get specific. You really want to understand what signals “a good read” to your genre’s audience and why. This is the number one rule of creating a great cover.

What Goes On The Front Cover?

- Brief and concise title and subtitle

- Images

- Bullet points

- Short lists (usually with bullet points)

- Very persuasive testimonials or endorsements

What Does Not Go On The Front Cover?

- A very long title

- Any visual or image that distracts from the main selling proposition of the book

- Anything related to the price

- Testimonials or endorsements that are not powerful

What Goes On The Back Cover?

- Genre category in the upper left corner. Here is a link to: http://www.bisg.org/what-we-do-0-136-bisac-subject-headings-list-major-subjects.php  which list all major book subject heading and all 2800+ subcategories of books of the Book Industry Study Group.

- Sales copy. The back cover should make the browser want to take a next step and find out what’s inside.

- The sales copy should have a headline (tag line) and maybe a subheadline which need to be compelling and tell the browser why he or she needs to have this book.

- The sales copy should be short, sweet, and direct. Use bullet points if nonfiction. If fiction, present just the important details that will hook the browser.

ePub Author Question – What Are the Parts of an ePub File?

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Let’s open up the hood and see what’s inside an ePub.

The first thing to know is that an ePub file is actually a compressed collection of files, just like a .zip file. In fact, if you make a copy of an ePub file and change the ePub’s file extension from .epub to .zip, you would have the following .zip file that can be unzipped to extract the contents so we can view them: 

An ePub file and a copy of the file with the file extension changed from .epub to .zip

An ePub file and a copy of the file with the file extension changed from .epub to .zip

We can now unzip the .zip file and view its contents. After unzipping, we see that an .epub file consists of the following two folders ( the OEBPS folder and the META-INF folder) and one file (the mimetype file):

The main three parts of an ePub file: two folders (the OEBPS folder and the META-INF folder) and one file (the mimetype file).

The main three parts of an ePub file: two folders (the OEBPS folder and the META-INF folder) and one file (the mimetype file).

 
If we open the META-INF folder, we can see that it has one file (the container.xml file) as follows: 

The one file in the META-INF folder - the container.xml file.

The one file in the META-INF folder - the container.xml file.

The container.xml file provides the location of the content.opf file as shown in the following image. The content.opf file contains important information such as the epub’s metadata (author name, published date, etc.), manifest (a list of every item in the epub file), and the spine (the order in which items are viewed as the reader scrolls through the epub). The content.opf file will be discussed shortly.

There will be additional lines of code in the container.xml file if encryption or digital rights management has been added to the ePub file. The container.xml file has been opened up below in the text editor Notepad++, which works well on a PC. You might use a text editor such as Text Wrangler if using a Mac.

The container.xml file provides the location of the content.opf file.

The container.xml file provides the location of the content.opf file.

Below is the mimetype file opened in Notepad++. The sole purpose of the mimetype file is to indicate that this is an ePub file.

The mimetype file has just one line which states that the file is an epub file.

The mimetype file has just one line which states that the file is an epub file.

 
Clicking on the OEBPS (Open eBook Publication Structure) folder reveal the following three folders (the Images folder, the Styles folder, and the Text folder) and two files ( the content.opf file and the toc.ncx file):

OEBPS folder's three folders (the Images folder, the Styles folder, and the Text folder) and two files ( the content.opf file and the toc.ncx file).

OEBPS folder's three folders (the Images folder, the Styles folder, and the Text folder) and two files ( the content.opf file and the toc.ncx file).

 

Opening the content.opf file in Notepad++ reveal three main parts of this file. The first part of the content.opf file shown below contains all of the metadata (author name, publication date, etc.) for the ePub file. The second part of the content.opf is the manifest for the entire ePub file. Every item in the entire ePub file is listed in the manifest. 

The content.opf file's metadata section and the manifest section.

The content.opf file's metadata section and the manifest section.

The third part of the content.opf file is the spine. The spine, shown below, provides the order in which the parts of the ePub file will be viewed as the reader scrolls through the ePub eBook. 

The content.opf file's spine section.

The content.opf file's spine section.

If we open up the toc.ncx file in Notepad++, we can view the contents of the ePub’s built-in navigational table of contents as follows: 

The toc.ncx file showing the built-in navigational table of contents.

The toc.ncx file showing the built-in navigational table of contents.

 Clicking on the Text folder reveals the collection of XHTML files that are the contents of the ePub eBook. Each XHTML file is a single section of the eBook.

The Text folder's XHTML files. Each XHTML file is a separate section of the ePub eBook.
The Text folder’s XHTML files. Each XHTML file is a separate section of the ePub eBook.

Opening up one of these XHTML files (New_Manuals.xhtml) shows the XHTML code. This is the same code that appears on web pages. An ePub file is just like a mini web site. One line of code contains a hyperlink and the last line links to an image, just like the HTML on a web page. 

The XHTML code of one of the sections of an ePub file, just like a web page.

The XHTML code of one of the sections of an ePub file, just like a web page.

If we open up any of the XHTML files in a web browser, it will open up just like a web page. We will open the above file (New_Manuals.xhtml) in the web browser Firefox and we’ll see that it views just like a web page, as shown below. This demonstrates how similar an ePub file is to a web site. In fact, the best tool to create an ePub is an HTML editor used to build web sites such as Dreamweaver or Microsoft Expression Web (my favorite).

Opening one of the ePub file's XHTML files in the web browser Firefox. This shows how similar an ePub file is to a web site.

Opening one of the ePub file's XHTML files in the web browser Firefox. This shows how similar an ePub file is to a web site.

 

Clicking on the Styles folder shows a CSS style sheet (stylesheet.css). The Styles folder will always contain at least one CSS style sheet. There can be more than one. Opening stylesheet.css in Notepad++ shows the CSS styles in this style sheet which control all formatting and styling in the XHTML pages. 

The CSS style sheet that controls all formatting and styling in this ePub document.

The CSS style sheet that controls all formatting and styling in this ePub document.

 The Images folder contain all of the images (jpegs, gifs, or pngs) in the ePub document as shown below:

All of the image file within the ePub document.

All of the image file within the ePub document.

 

Now you see how it all fits together and how an ePub document is very similar to a mini web site.

ePub Marketing – How Do I Set Up and Sell My eBook On My Own Site With ClickBank?

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If you have written a book and also maintain a web site or blog focused on the same topic as your book, you may have a match made in heaven. You can monetize all that traffic to your site or blog if you can entice some percentage of your visitors to purchase your book. You could send interested prospects to your Amazon sales page but I suggest you close the sale right there on your site.

I’ve been selling my eBooks from my web site: http://excelmasterseries.com/  and my blog: http://blog.excelmasterseries.com/ a lot longer than I’ve been selling eBooks with Amazon Kindle. It has been a profitable undertaking for me because eBook sales from my web site is my second largest cash flow stream behind Amazon combined sales (Kindle  plus hardcopy print-on-demand units sold). The blog article written right before this one discusses the Pros and Cons of selling from you own web site using ClickBank for payment processing. This blog article discusses  how to set up your web site and account with ClickBank so you can sell your eBooks directly to visitors on your site.

First of all, what is ClickBank?

ClickBank was founded in 1998 and is a secure online retail outlet for more than 50,000 digital products and 100,000 active affiliate marketers. ClickBank makes a sale somewhere in the world every three seconds, safely processing more than 35,000 digital transactions a day. They serve more than 200 countries, and are consistently ranked as one of the most highly-trafficked sites on the web. ClickBank is privately held with offices in Broomfield, Colorado and Boise, Idaho and is a subsidiary of Keynetics Inc.

For me, ClickBank is my payment processor.

Visitors who purchase an eBook from my web site will go through this purchase and payment process with ClickBank:

1. A site or blog visitor arrives on one of my product sales pages: http://excelmasterseries.com/ClickBank/Students/Student_Excel_Master.php 

2. If the visitor clicks a purchase link on the above sales page, he or she would be directed to a ClickBank order form for the specific product Here is the ClickBank order form for the product in the sales page above: http://31.solvermark.pay.clickbank.net

3. When the visitor completes the order form, ClickBank processes the credit card or Paypal payment. As soon as the payment is approved, ClickBank redirects the visitor (now a customer!) back to the product download page on my web site. My product download page has links to  download the eBook in three formats (.pdf, .epub, and .mobi) and links to download free e-readers  for each format (Adobe Reader for .pdf, Adobe Digital Editions for .epub, and the mobipocket reader for .mobi). I also provide my book in the .lit format but I don’t count .lit as a valid format any more because Microsoft has discontinued servicing that format. The following four consecutive images below show what the download page for this product looks like:

  

 

Download Page on My Web Site For a Product Sold Using ClickBank As The Payment Processor

 

There is really not much to setting your web site up with ClickBank to process payments for the sale of your digital downloadable products. After you have set up a vendor account with ClickBank and created your digital products, you are immediately ready to begin selling those products through ClickBank.

Setting up ClickBank to Perform Payment Processing For a Digital Product Involves Just the Few Following Steps:

1. On your web site, create a sales page and a download page for each product, similar to what is shown above.

2. Log into your ClickBank account

3. Go To Account Settings / My Products / Add New Product

4. Provide the name of the new product and a brief description. Finally, provide the URL of the sales page and download page (called the Thank You page by ClickBank).

That’s all there is to it. There are guidelines that must be followed when creating the sales and download pages. These guidelines can be found on the ClickBank site.

When a sale is made….

When a sales is made, ClickBank will immediately send an email to me with contact information for my new customer. I will then send the new customer a personalized thank-you email right away (nearly always that day). This has enabled me to start a number of deep relationships with my customers. It also goes a long way in reducing the number of refunds requested. In the two-and-a-half years I’ve been selling through ClickBank, I’ve only had a handful of refund requests and I believe the personal follow-up emails are a big part of that.

ClickBank charges 7.5% of each sale, plus $1. That’s a lot less than Amazon Kindle and Lightning Source charge. I gross 35% of the retail price of each Kindle eBook sold and about 30% of the retail price of a print-on-demand hardcopy sold from Amazon. Each eBook sold from my web site through ClickBank grosses me between 85% and 90% of my retail price.

ClickBank send out electronic payments three weeks after a sale is made. My payments have always been prompt and correct.

ClickBank is also one of the largest affiliate companies. You can drop your digital products into their affiliate network. I have not done so because I feel that my information products are not well-suited for sales through affiliates.

I’ve been using ClickBank for quite a while and I am a big fan of theirs. I especially like ClickBank’s ability to smoothly process payments from every corner of the world. I can’t recall every having had a problem with that aspect of ClickBank.
 
I like to use Paypal’s convenient invoicing system if I want to send an invoice through email for a service such as converting a book to epub format. For downloadable digital products however, ClickBank payment processing can’t be beat.

ePub Marketing – What Are the Pros and Cons of Selling Your eBook From Your Own Web Site With ClickBank?

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Many self-published authors can create a strong and dependable cash flow stream by selling their eBooks from the own web site. I sell my eBooks from my web site/blog using ClickBank as the payment processor and the results have been very good. My web site/blog has now become my second largest source of book sales behind Amazon. The purpose of this blog article is to provide a list of pros and cons of selling your own eBooks from your own web site with ClickBank as your payment processor based on my own experiences of having done it for a few years.

Here are the Pros of selling your own eBooks from your own web site using ClickBank as the payment processor:

1. Top reason, the money! Every eBook you sell from your web site is nearly 100% profit to you, with a small payment to the payment processing company (ClickBank in my case). Amazon Kindle Direct doesn’t get to keep 65%. Barnes and Nobles doesn’t get to keep 50%. The print-on-demand company doesn’t get any of the loot either. The money is all mine, mine, mine! Downloadable information products such as eBooks are perhaps the most profitable thing that can be sold on the Internet. Every part of the sale can be completely automated and the overhead is negligible.

2. The payments from ClickBank are weekly. Everyone else pays monthly. The payments are electronically deposited and I’m happy to get them every week.

3. ClickBank payments are sent out much more promptly than any of my other sources of online sales. For example, Amazon Kindle Direct pays out at the end of the second month after sales are made. Lightning Source pays out at the end of the third month after any print-on-demand hardcopy sales are made. ClickBank pays out three weeks after sales are made.
 
4. ClickBank combined with my web site expands my global sales much wider than Amazon does. At least a third of the eBooks I sell from my web site are sold outside of the US.  You can take a look at the customer testimonials of one of my books to get an idea of how wide-spread sales can be from your own web site: http://excelmasterseries.com/ClickBank/Students/Student_Excel_Master.php None of the well-known online book stores seem to have a strong presence outside of the US. My own Amazon eBook sales from outside the US are a small fraction of my US-based Amazon sales. My ClickBank sales come from every corner in the world.

5. ClickBank can handle credit card or PayPal payments in just about any currency and from any location. I don’t deal with any aspects of payment processing for sales from my own web site. ClickBank has been a very satisfactory, cheap, turn-key, multi-national payment processing solution.

6. Second top reason – ClickBank sends me contact information (name, email address, and location) of every customer who makes a sale from my web site as soon as the sale is made. This is HUGE! Every time I make a sale from my web site, I email that customer a personal note thanking them for the sale. I also try to mention something nice and interesting about where the customers lives. These emails are usually sent out within a few hours of each sale. The customers are delighted to get a surprise personal email from the eBook’s author right after the sale is made. I have been able to create a quite a few very close relationships with my customers that all started with that one follow-up email. I also have a large email list of every customer whoever purchased from my web site. Is any of that possible when selling eBooks through an online book store? Nope. Amazon and B&N aren’t about to give up their customer lists.

7. When I sell my eBooks from my own web site, I can sell in any format. Amazon Kindle eBooks are all .mobi. B&N (and most other online book stores) sell .ePub eBooks. Several online book stores, such as the Google book store, provide downloads in the .pdf format. If you purchase any eBook from my web site, you get all three types of downloads at no extra charge.

8. When you sell from your own web site, you can include extra bonuses with each purchase as an extra incentive to make the purchase.  If you click on this link once again:  http://excelmasterseries.com/ClickBank/Students/Student_Excel_Master.php and scroll down the page a bit, you’ll see the extra bonus e-manual that I provide each customer. Certainly this extra bonus e-manual was the right nudge that turned at least a few fence-sitters into customers. To my knowledge, Amazon does not provide authors with the ability to offer bonus eBooks. That might be an effective sales tool for Amazon.

9. Selling eBooks on your web site through ClickBank allows you to create a very personal download page. When a customer’s payment is successfully processed, ClickBank directs the customer back to a download page that is on your web site. Your download page provides you with all kinds of great opportunities, such as upselling and writing a personal message to the customer. You have nothing of the kind going on with Amazon.

10. Unlike Amazon browsers, your web site visitors will not be shown eBooks that compete with yours. I’ve always wondered how Amazon customers who were just about to buy one of my books changed their mind at the last second as a result of being shown something else by Amazon?

There are more Pros that could be added to the list, but we should also discuss the Cons as well. I have found selling my eBooks from my own web site through ClickBank to be overall very worthwhile, but every good thing has downside.

Here are the Cons of selling your own eBooks from you own web site:

1. Your web site sale cannibalize your Amazon sales. The more units that one of your books sells on Amazon, the higher Amazon will rank that book in its search engine. The higher your book come up during Amazon searches, the more you will sell. Instead of making a sale on my web site, I could direct interested prospects to the Amazon sales page of the same eBook. If I did that, I certainly would have higher Amazon sales right now. Selling my eBooks from my web site no doubt has reduced my Amazon sales. How much, I’ll never know.

2. It’s a LOT of work put together an effective selling web site. I put my whole site together myself: http://excelmasterseries.com/ but I bet I would have saved myself an enormous amount of work if had I simply used a template available for such a  web site. You need to have pretty good graphic design skills and along with solid HTML, CSS, and PHP knowledge to do it yourself. You could hire someone to do it for you, but that’s not cheap.

3. If your works are nonfiction, you’ll need a blog, I believe. Nonfiction writers need to establish themselves as experts in their field and blogs are a perfect tool to quickly do this. Blogs are excellent traffic builders. Google loves a site with a blog because blogs normally provide up-to-date, relevant information on a topic. You can place a sales form right in your blog, as I do in mine here:  http://blog.excelmasterseries.com/  In case you are interested, the Excel Master Series blog is a Blogger blog and the blog that you are now reading is a WordPress blog, just so you can see the differences. The downside of a blog – It is also a LOT of work to regularly write good articles. Before you begin a blog, you’ll need to make sure that you have a passion for the topic and won’t run out of material after 10 articles. You can install analytics (I use Google Analytics) into your blog to find out how many of your sales are coming directly from blog visitors.  You will probably find you blog to be an excellent source of direct eBook sales, but, once again, it’s a LOT of work to maintain a blog.

4. Sales from your site are totally dependant upon the traffic to the site. You need to become a good Internet marketer to generate that traffic. Becoming a competent Internet marketer is a long road filled with countless fruitless, frustrating dead ends. I can’t tell you how many “sure things” that I’ve tried which didn’t move the traffic needle even a blip. It’s hard to predict what will work and what won’t. Sometimes only one out of five things you’ll try will bring more traffic. I haven’t hit a get-rich-quick speed bump yet in my pursuit of Internet marketing wealth. I know I’m a lot better at it than I was a few years ago, but each step forward usually came after a couple steps back. Generating substantial Internet traffic to your site is a long-term proposition involving a LOT of work.

So, there you have it. The Pros and Cons of selling eBooks from your own web site, based on my experiences of doing so. At the end of the day, selling my eBooks from my own site has been a profitable and worthwhile endeavor, but not the easiest thing I’ve ever done.

Author Question – Why Does It Take So Much Longer To Create a Print-On-Demand Book Than an ePub?

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You would think that a book is a book is a book is a book, regardless of its final, destination format. Quite the opposite is actually the case. Yes, the content will be the same,  regardless of final format. But, that’s where all similarity ends. The differences between creating the files for POD (print-on-demand) and the files for an ePub are greater than night and day.

Before we go into the differences between creating POD and ePub, here is briefly what they both are. If you are a self-published author and your books are available on Amazon, your hardcopies will be sold in the form called print-on-demand and your Kindle eBooks will be sold in the format of .mobi, which is very close to the .ePub file from which it is derived. You, the self-published author, interact directly with Amazon Kindle Direct. Any eBooks or updates that you upload to Kindle will go live the next day.

In the case of POD, you are interacting only with the POD company. The POD company is a third-party aggregator and will conduct all interaction on your behalf with all online book stores for the sale of your hardcopies. Any POD files or updates that you upload to the POD company will take much longer to go live in the online book stores.

Now here are the reasons why it takes so much longer to create the files for a print-on-demand hardcopy book an ePub eBook:

1. The number one reason is the amount of formatting needed for the print-on-demand book. The hardcopy book is…. a hardcopy book. Every page of the book will be formatted from top to bottom. Every element of every page of a hardcopy book will have its own place on that page. An ePub eBook has very little of the on-page formatting that a hardcopy book does. ePub eBooks don’t actually have “pages” due to the ePub’s reflow capabilities. The contents on an ePub “page” that would show up on your e-reader screen would totally depend on your e-reader’s screen size and the font size that is set by you. You’ll never see page elements such as headers, footers, or page numbers in an ePub eBook because ePub “pages” have no set page length due to the ePub reflow capability. The only significant formatting issues in ePub eBooks are where to start the beginning of  each “page” and the horizontal positioning of elements, whether centered, floated left, or floated right. All ePub formatting is accomplished with CSS. All POD formatting is accomplished by directly placing each element in its designated location on its page. Adobe InDesign enables the use of CSS through its paragraph and character styles. I, however, don’t use InDesign to create print-on-demand files because my clients usually don’t have InDesign. They would not be able to open up an InDesign file that I am working on for them in order to give me feedback.

2. Right on the heals of point number 1 above, the additional formatting requirements of a POD book usually result in significantly more interaction between myself and the author than is the case when I am creating an ePub eBook. It is my job to make the book exactly as the author wants. I use Microsoft Word when creating the POD so I can send updated versions to the author as soon as I change anything. The authors always have Word so they can see exactly what I am doing and provide instant feedback. That’s the way they like it and that’s the way I like it too. The back-and-forth interaction between myself and the author when creating a POD definitely adds to the total time it takes to complete the job – but the end result is that the author gets exactly what he or she wants. And that’s what I want. Occasionally authors will apologize for the amount of feedback they are giving, and that always surprises me. When that happens I try to remind the author that the more feedback that he or she can provide, the better the book will be. I want their feeback.

3. An ePub eBook is only one .epub file. Creating a POD book requires creating two .pdf files. One of the .pdf files contains the book’s content and the other .pdf file contains that cover artwork.
 
4. The required specifications of an ePub file are much less stringent than .pdf files that will be sent to the POD company. ePub files have to meet the guidelines of the most current ePub standard. I put an ePub through a process called “validation” to ensure the current ePub standard is being met. If I have been careful when creating the ePub file, very few errors will need correcting upon final validation. Creating the two .pdf files for POD is a completely different story however. There are no ordinary .pdfs. These .pdf files must be configured to meet all of the standards of professional printing presses. Without going into details, I found the learning curve to be steep when I first started creating print-on-demand .pdf files for my own books.

5. One final factor that significantly adds to time it takes to get a POD hardcopy out on the market is interaction that you’ll have with the POD company. Compared with setting up an account on Amazon Kindle Direct, an account with a POD company seems like it takes forever to get going. I use a company called Lightning Source for all of my POD and I highly recommend them. But, like any POD company, there are lots of forms to be filled out. Right now I believe Lightning Source has five or six forms that are part of its account set-up process. Really, that’s not a huge deal but just takes a little longer than setting up with any online store to sell eBooks. One consolation is that the POD company will handle all interaction on your behalf with all online book stores from here on out.

ePub Marketing – Should You Sell Your eBooks Directly or Use a Third-Party Aggregator?

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In theory, third-party aggregators should be the most efficient way to sell your eBooks. You just submit your eBook to a third-party aggregator with the a large network of online retail partners (such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, the Apple iTunes Book Store, etc.)  and that’s it! The third-party aggregator places your eBook into its network of online retail partners and handles all details from start-to-finish. At the end of the day, you receive a royalty check from the third-party aggregator for cumulative sales from the entire network.

In theory, sounds great. The reality tells a different story. I tried a third-party aggregator for a while and I would not do it again. I heartily recommend going direct to each major online book store and not doing it indirectly through a third-party. Here is the experience that I had using a third-party aggregator:

I use a company called Lightning Source to create all hardcopy, print-on-demand versions of my books and all of my clients’ books. Lightning Source does an outstanding job at POD and also has the largest network of online retail partners through which your hardcopies will be sold. Lightning Source is a third-party aggregator for POD hardcopies and they are the best in the business. I wouldn’t use anyone else.

Lightning Source is also a third-party aggregator for eBooks. A while back, I was considering using a third-party aggregator for my eBooks. At the time I was already selling my eBooks directly through Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble. Lightning Source was also doing a great job as the third-party aggregator for hardcopy, POD versions of all of my books. Lightning Source seemed to be the logical choice to be the third-party aggregator for my eBooks as well, so I signed on the dotted line.

The experience didn’t go as well as I expected. I don’t want this blog article to be a knock on Lightning Source’s eBook distribution services because I really thought their service on this end of the business was quite professional and prompt. They probably do this as well as or better than anyone. Lightning Source is an outstanding company and I’m one of their biggest advocates. The main purpose of this blog article is to highlight the general issues that will occur anytime you use a third-party aggregator to distribute your eBooks.

Here are the issues that occurred during my experiences with a third-party aggregator which convinced me to go direct from here on out:

1. No Control Over Prices – You do not have control over the retail prices that your eBooks will be sold at throughout the third-party aggregator’s network of retail partners. Invariably some of the network partners will sell your eBook at a large discount. This will wreck your profits with Amazon. Amazon will set its retail price of your eBook based upon the lowest price that your book is sold anywhere else. You will then be paid your 35% or 70% Kindle royalty based upon that discounted price that your eBooks are now selling at on Kindle.

2. Retail Discounting Will Wipe Out Your Amazon Kindle Profits – You have no way to stop the above discounting of your eBooks except to completely remove your eBook out of the third-party aggregator’s distribution. Believe it or not, this is no easy thing to do. When my eBooks where being sold through Lightning Source’s network, they wound up being sold at a huge discount at the Borders online book store before Borders went out of business. Amazon Kindle Direct reduced the prices of all of my Kindle eBooks to match Borders prices. It quickly became apparent to me that Lightning Course could not control how Borders priced my eBooks. The only solution was to pull all of my eBooks from Lightning Source. That I did. It was definitely not an instantaneous shut-down. My eBooks remained in Borders’ online store for quite a while afterward. I had to make a number of requests to Lightning Source to get my eBooks out of Borders. It seemed to me that Lightning Source did not have firm control over their eBook retail partner network. I had a lot lower royalty payments from Kindle during that time than I would have if my eBooks had not been discounted. Amazon is the Big Dog. If you take care of the Big Dog, the Big Dog will take care of you.

3. No Sales Tracking – You have no idea where your eBook sales are coming from. As a marketer, I don’t like having no idea where my sales are coming from. Also, there was always in the back of my mind a sneaky little suspicion asking whether I was really being paid for all sales. How would I know if I wasn’t? I wouldn’t. I totally believe that Lightning Source completely on the up-and-up, but you will always be wondering whether you’re being paid for all of your sales if your eBook is being sold through a third-party aggregator.

4. Loss of Cover Images – Your front cover image won’t always make it out to all of the retailers in the third-party aggregator’s network. No one will buy an eBook online that does not have a cover image. That issue happened to me with Kobo. Kobo was one of Lightning Source’s third-party network partners. The cover images for all of my eBooks somehow did not make it from Lightning Source to Kobo. My eBooks were being sold on Kobo without cover images. I contacted both Lightning Source and Kobo repeatedly but it never got fixed.
 
5. No Control Period – Even though I have shut down all eBook sales  with Lightning Source’s third-party aggregator service months ago, my eBooks are apparently still be sold through them. I receive a little payment for eBook sales from Lightning Source every month. The amount is negligible, normally between $50 and $100, and it’s nice to get, BUT….. it worries me that they have that little control over their network that they cannot stop the sales of my eBooks at my request (actually, my repeated requests).

So, there you have it – my unvarnished experience with a third-party aggregator. Once again, this is not a knock at Lightning Source. They have all of my POD business and they’re great at it. With eBooks however, I highly recommend going direct with each major online book store. One of the most enjoyable parts of my day is to log on to the online retail books stores to see the latest eBook sales. Why deny yourself that pleasure? Go direct with the online book stores you can count your new money every day as well.

ePub Author Question – Are Author Services Companies Worthwhile?

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An author services company is a sort-of a one-stop-shop for authors. Typically they offer packages of services to authors that include providing an ISBN, cover artwork, editing, interior layout, ePub conversion, print-on-demand conversion, uploading to online book stores, and marketing help. The question is: Are they a good deal?

Well, I guess I’m an author services company of sorts since I perform all of the above services for my clients except editing and cover artwork creation. It is always a good idea in business to keep an eye on your competitors and I’ve been doing just that with author services companies. I contacted a number of author services companies stating that I was a new author hoping to publish a manuscript. Since then I’ve had direct contact with the sales reps of each company and I’m on all of their email lists. Here is a summary of my experience with the author services companies:

1. An author needs to have regular interaction with the person who is converting their book into ePub or the .pdf files necessary for print-on-demand. Every conversion that I’ve ever done has involved lots of feedback and questions from both my side and the client’s side. There is no way that I could have done a good job at conversion without this regular back-and-forth with the client. I asked all author service companies about this and the answer normally implied that there would not be this kind of interaction. Typically the answer was, “The production department will handle the conversion.” I imagine that at least some of the author service companies had the conversion work farmed out cheaply overseas. It was fairly clear to me that there would be no interaction with the ePub converter in most cases.

2. An author should not have to pay for an ePub or print-on-demand conversion until the job is finished and the author has reviewed and is totally satisfied with the final product. The majority of author service companies wanted all of the money up front.

3. An author should be able to conduct negotiations with people who know what they are talking about. I asked some fairly basic questions about the company’s ePub conversion process to every sales rep. None of them had a solid understanding of the ePub conversion process. A few had no knowledge of ePub conversion at all. It reminded me a little of my mortgage loan officer days at the height of the real estate boom last decade when mortgage companies were hiring people right off the streets and putting them on the phones with little or no training.

4. An author should own the ISBNs attached to their books. Most of the author service companies will supply the ISBNs. In this case, the author service company will be listed as the publisher of record. If you are serious about being an author, you should own your own ISBNs.

5. An author who would like to provide print-on-demand hardcopies of their works should be able to expect high quality. The only real guarantee of quality in print-on-demand is Lightning Source. You want to make certain that your POD version will be done at Lightning Source if you chose an author services company. My suggestion is to go directly to Lightning Source or find someone experienced in doing POD with Lightning Source. If an author services company farms out the POD work to a lower quality printer, your hardcopy version could wind up with a shoddy binding and lower quality printing.

6. If you use an author services company, your cover artwork will produced from a standard template or by someone assigned to your account. You are infinitely better off locating your own cover artist that you are comfortable working with and trust.

7. Marketing your book is work that you will have to engage in on your own. Never purchase the marketing packages that author service companies offer. They’re a huge rip. Most of the sale reps that I dealt with tried to apply pressure on me to purchase one of their marketing packages. The “deluxe” package was normally more than $1,000.

8. Author services companies state that they will handle all aspects of distributing your book to the online book stores. That scares me the most. You, the author, absolutely want to working directly with Amazon yourself. There are many reasons for this. Most importantly, you get paid all of the royalties and you can upload any changes to your book that you want. You can’t do that if an author services company handles your Amazon account.

Another very important reason to maintain your own control over the distribution of your eBooks is that Amazon has a policy of matching the lowest price of your book anywhere it is sold. If an author services company places your eBook into an online retail bookstore that practices deep discounting, Amazon will reduce their retail price of your book to match the competitor’s discounted price. Amazon will then pay out royalties on its sales bases upon the discounted price. Amazon is the big dog that you need to take care of. Once your eBook gets into discount online retailers, it is difficult to shut that down. I went through that once and will discuss that experience in another article in this blog.

You may gather that I do not recommend author service companies. It is my feeling that many of them prey on new authors with lots of sales pressure to buy large, expensive packages that will not produce what is promised.

ePub Author Question – What Authors Can Do To Expedite Conversion To ePub

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If you are having your book converted to ePub, here are a few things you can do to expedite the Process

1) Send the book in as many formats as you have available. The more formats that the ePub converter has to work with, the easier it will be for the ePub converter. Different ePub converters work best with different formats for incoming book files. Send everything you have to the ePub converter.

2) If possible, try to send the book file in a reflowable format, such as a Word file. A reflowable document is one can perform word wrap is you expand or contract the width of the document on your computer screen. For example, if you open a Word document on your computer and stretch or contract the document’s width, you’ll notice that the words will always reflow, that is, they will fall in place to completely fill out each line, regardless of how wide the line is. An example of a non-reflowable file type is a .pdf. The .pdf is the last stop in the conversion train. All formatting and styling is removed when a file is converted to .pdf. If you expand or contract the width of a .pdf file on your screen, you’ll notice that the text does not reflow. An ePub converter has a lot of extra steps to do with a non-reflowable file like a .pdf. The ePub converter has to remove the carriage return at the end of each text line in the .pdf. Following that, the ePub converter has to create all styling and formatting from scratch. I probably get about half of my incoming book files as .pdfs so I am used to doing this.

3) Try to have the images ready for emailing. If you have all of the original image files separate and ready to email over, great. Not every author does. Sometimes authors have only the final Word or pdf document to send over. In that case, I’ll have to recreate the images by taking screen shots and then editing those images in Photoshop. It just takes a bit longer.

4) Don’t worry about having the images sized and sharpened. All image files will have to be resized and sharpened in Photoshop by the e:Pub converter. That’s a given so don’t worry about image processing. Just make sure that the ePub converter has the tools (Photoshop preferably) and skills to do this. Definitely inquire about this because your images are a very important part of the final document that goes out to your paying customers.

5) Try to label the images so it is clear where they belong. This is one thing you can that will really help out the ePub converter. Rename each image file systematically so that the ePub converter can tell right away where the image goes. One easy system for doing this is to include the page number in the Word or .pdf document which contains the image.

6) Try to make sure that editing work is completed. I do occasionally get book files from authors that aren’t totally finished. That’s not a big problem, it just adds to the time that it will take to complete the entire conversion.

7) Try to learn a little about ePub so that you know the basic differences between an aPub document and a printed document. Probably the main difference that you’ll want to be aware of is that an ePub does not have page layout like a printed page. Page length in an ePub document (what the viewer sees on one screen of an e-reader) totally depends on the e-reader’s screen and the font size that the viewer has configured the e-reader to. ePub documents won’t contain items that are placed in specific spots on a page, such as page numbers, headers, and footers.

8) Be ready and expect to interact with your ePub converter. Creating a ePub document should involve a lot of back-and-forth between the ePub converter and the author. If this doesn’t happen, the author will be disappointed with the final result, because he or she did not have input into it. Make sure that you have direct and continuous access whoever is doing you ePub conversion work. This is extremely important to the author’s satisfaction with the final converted ePub that will be uploaded to online stores.

ePub Author Question – How Do I Get an ISBN and When Do I Need One?

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As soon as you begin selling your books through retailers – both online book stores and brick-and-mortar book stores – each version of each one of your books will need a separate ISBN. An ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is a 13-digit code that identifies what book and which version of that book is being bought at retail. 

A single ISBN indicates the format of a specific book. For example, a single book sold as an eBook, a hardcopy, and a paper back should have at least 3 ISBNs assigned to it. Many people, even the official dispenser of ISBNs, will tell you that you need a separate ISBN for each version of eBook that you sell. That would mean a separate ISBN for the .mobi file uploaded to Kindle, a separate ISBN for an .ePub version sent to the other online book stores, and a third ISBN for the .pdf version. That’s not true. Just get a single ISBN to cover all eBook versions of your book.

If your book ever makes an eBook best-selling list, you would want all of your eBook versions to have the same ISBN so that all eBook sales will be tracked together. You don’t want your eBook sales information split up as would happen if different versions of the same eBook had different ISBNs. Certainly the .ePub sales from Barnes and Noble should be combined with the .mobi Amazon Kindle sales for the same eBook. ISBNs are sales tracking tools and should be thought of as such.

You get your ISBNs from R. R. Bowker, the U.S. Agency of the International Standard Book Numbering Convention. R. R. Bowker is the originator of ISBNs for U.S.-based publishers. Publishers in other countries can only obtain ISBNs from their local ISBN Agency, a directory of which can be found on the International ISBN Agency website.

You can purchase your ISBNs and assign them to your books by going to R. R. Bowker’s web site, https://www.myidentifiers.com/, and performing the following 3 steps:

1) Set up an account an account with Bowker at that web site. You’ll need to provide your business name and your contact information.

2) Log in to your Bowker account and purchase one or more ISBNs. As soon as you purchase them, they are available to be assigned to your books instantly.

3) Log in to your Bowker account and click on My Account. You’ll see a list of all of your purchased ISBNs both assigned and unassigned.  Assign one of your available ISBNs to a book by providing the book title and other information. That’s it. You’ve just assigned an ISBN to a book.

At the time of this writing, you can purchase ISBNs in units of 1, 10, 100, or 1,000.  The prices of each are as follows:

Single ISBN $125
10 ISBNs $250
100 ISBNs $575
1,000 ISBNs $1,000

I suggest that you buy quite a few more than you think you’ll need. My first purchase was 10 ISBNs and I went through them in about 2 months. My next purchase was 100 ISBNs, which I should have done initially since I am going through them so quickly. If you just plan to write one version of one book, there are author servicing companies that can provide an ISBN to you. In this case, they will be listed as the publisher of the book.

If you are a serious about being an Indie (independent) author and anticipating writing more books, I strongly recommend purchasing your own ISBNs. I would personally never consider authoring and selling a book without owning the ISBN.

When you purchase your ISBNs from Bowker, you can also buy Bookland barcodes. If your book is sold in hardcopy, you’ll need a barcode on the cover. However, if you are a self-published author and use a company called Lightning Source to create your hardcopies (I can highly recommend Lightning Source for print-on-demand since they have done a great job for me), you don’t need to purchase barcodes from Bowker. Lightning Source will create a barcode for your book. This barcode will be part of the cover artwork template that they send to you to prepare your book for upload to them.

ePub Author Question – What Is a Fair Price For ePub and Print-On-Demand Conversion?

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Converting a manuscript to ePub and converting to Print-On-Demand are two completely different animals. This blog article will cover the major parts of each process so you can see what you are paying for.

Creating an ePub

I generally charge $150 for converting a book to ePub. If there is a lot of image work or difficult formatting, I may charge a bit more. Here are the major parts of converting a book to .epub/.mobi:

1. Create a text file containing the book’s content. That usually  is just a simple copy-and-paste the contents into a text file. This can normally be done no matter what format I receive the manuscript in. If I receive the book file as a .pdf, I have to take the additional step of deleting all carriage returns at the end of each line. This can be time consuming for a long book. Inserting the content into a text file removes all formatting. I will later rebuild all formatting with CSS styles.

2. Paste the text file into an HTML editor. An ePub file is actually a mini web site complete with pages of XHTM, a cascading style sheet, and a folder of images or links to images. An HTML editor such as Dreamweaver (I use Microsoft Expression Web) is the best tool to build a web site and also the best tool to build an ePub, which is a mini web site. Each page of HTML code will contain one chapter from the book. I could paste the text into Adobe InDesign but I like to work directly with the HTML and CSS code, which InDesign does not allow.

3. Break all text up into separate paragraphs.

4. Build a CSS style sheet with all formatting styles for paragraphs and characters.

5. Apply all styles to paragraphs and characters.

6. Build the table of contents by applying <H1>, <H2>, and <H3> tags.

7. Copy and paste the style sheet into an ePub editor. My choice of ePub editor is Sigil.

8. Copy and paste the HTML code from the HTML editor into the ePub editor.

9. Resize and sharpen all images in Photoshop. Images should be 72 ppi and no more than 500 pixel wide or tall. The cover image should be somewhere around 600 pixels wide by 800 pixels tall.

10. Insert all images into the ePub editor.

11. Create the table of contents page, which is a page of HTML bookmarks that link to the chapters.

12. Insert all page breaks with the ePub editor.

There will normally be a lot of feedback from author when I am creating the ePub file. I send the author a link to download a free e-reader (Adobe Digital Editions) so the author can view the ePub document as I am making it. I will normally email the updated ePub file to the author whenever I make any additions or changes.

Creating Print-On-Demand

I generally charge $200 to create the two .pdf files that Print-On-Demand companies require. If there is a lot of image work or difficult formatting, I may charge a bit more. One .pdf file will contain the books contents and the other will contain the cover artwork. These .pd files are not ordinary .pdf files. The files go right to the printers at the Print-On-Demand company. There are numerous detailed specifications that these .pdf files are required to meet in order to be printer-ready. Here is how I create the two .pdf files:

1. Create a text file containing the book’s content. That usually is just a simple copy-and-paste the contents into a text file. This can normally be done no matter what format I receive the manuscript in. If I receive the book file as a .pdf, I have to take the additional step of deleting all carriage returns at the end of each line. This can be time consuming for a long book. Inserting the content into a text file removes all formatting. I will later rebuild all formatting.

2. Paste the text file into a Word document. At this point, the file will be completely without any styling or formatting.

3. Create all formatting with Word formatting tools.

4. Create the table of contents using the table of contents builder in Word.

5. Create any headers and footers that the author wants.

6. Resize and sharpen all images in Photoshop. Print-on-demand requires that all images are 300 ppi and CMYK or Grayscale color mode. I generally try to make sure that all images are no more than 5 inches in width or height.

7. Download cover artwork template from the print-on-demand company. I use Lightning Source for all of my print-on-demand books. I am very satisfied with their service. The cover template is something that is customized based on the number of pages and the type of binding. It can be sent in several types of formats. I request mine as .pdf files.

8. Open the template up in Photoshop and build the cover. This ultimately winds up being a very large file because it must be saved at 300 ppi.

9. Upload the two completed .pdf files to the Print-On-Demand company. If everything is OK with the files, the Print-On-Demand company will send a proof of the book to the author. As soon as the author approves this proof, the Print-On-Demand company will get the book listed in the catalogs of all of their partners, such as Amazon. The Print-On-Demand company handles all aspects of order fulfillment whenever a customers makes a purchase.

There is normally a lot of feedback between myself and the author when I am creating the Print-On-Demand files. I send a copy of the Word file to the author when I make any changes or updates. The authors are generally very involved during the file creation stage.

ePub Marketing – Which Online Book Stores Will Produce the Highest Sales For You?

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A question that just about every author who has written an eBook asks is, “Which online book stores should I sell my eBook in?”

I can answer that question with this question: ”Where do you buy books online?” Note that the question was not “Where do you buy eBooks online?” Book buyers like to shop for books and eBooks from the same place online. The reason is that an online book store which sells both hardcopies and eBooks will have larger selection than a store that sells only hardcopies or only eBooks. The convenience of a one-stop shop that has everything is huge.

If you were asked, “Where do you shop for books online?” Most likely your answer would be, “Amazon.” Many people might search in one or two other online book stores besides Amazon, but Amazon is generally a first stop for most people. It is also the last and only stop for most online book buyers as well.

Amazon is, therefore, where you should focus your selling efforts for your eBooks. Amazon is the big dog. The rest – all of them – are much smaller players. I’m sure this blog article might generate some flaming replies but I call ‘em like I see ‘em.

Here are the main reasons that Amazon owns the online book store space and will only grow more dominant in the future:

1) Amazon has been in the game the longest. They now have the largest volume of book-buying traffic by far.

2) Amazon has almost become the generic term for online book store. If someone suggests that you buy a certain book online, they would probably say without thinking too much, “Buy it on Amazon” not “Buy it at the Apple iTunes book store.”

3) Amazon has done the best job at creating convenience. Convenience is major factor in choosing an online shopping venue. Amazon’s buying process is the easiest of all the online book stores. Amazon has even streamlined the purchase process down to “One-Click” for repeat buyers. Amazon’s book selection is the widest. Today’s online buyers are simply not willing to spend time evaluating many alternatives if they can get a good product with good reviews at a reasonable price quickly.

4) Amazon’s product review system blows the rest of the competition out of the water. Everyone, and I mean everyone, checks out Amazon book reviews before they buy a book on Amazon. No other online book store has a review system that can touch Amazon’s. That trust factor that Amazon’s unvarnished and comprehensive book review system creates is an unbeatable and growing advantage for Amazon. Amazon has made social media its most powerful selling tool.

There is no reason not to sell your eBooks in other online book stores besides Amazon. Just make sure that your focus is on Amazon. What I mean by that is the following:

- Use Amazon to determine your correct price point. Amazon has the most online book store traffic by far. You’ll find out most quickly what works and what doesn’t.

- Focus your effort on getting Amazon book reviews. Reviews can make or break your book. Amazon’s product review system is miles ahead of the competitions and creates a trust factor among online book buyers that can’t be beat.

- Direct book buyers to your product page on Amazon before you send anyone to another online book store.

The online book store industry is starting to undergo a shakeout similar to the search engine industry’s shake-out over ten years ago. You might remember when there were many popular search engines. Now there is Google and everyone else. There is not even a close number two. Yahoo and Bing combined have just a fraction of the search traffic that Google has.

Google’s dominance has forced other search engines move to niches in order to survive. The same will happen to the online book store industry. Other online book stores that do not effectively differentiate themselves from Amazon will eventually follow Borders out of business.

The shakeout is on! Focus your online eBook selling efforts on Amazon. There is nothing wrong with being in the other online book stores, but Amazon is where you need to make it.

ePub Author Question – Skills and Qualities That Your ePub Designer Absolutely Must Have

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The person who creates or converts your EPUB document needs to have the following skills to perform professional and polished work:

1) Strict guarantee of quality – No invoice should be sent until the customer is totally satisfied with the finished product. Being asked to pay up front for ePub conversion is a red flag. Most other types of contracting services do not ask for payment until the work is finished. An ePub converter who does top quality work would have no worries about getting paid only after the client is totally satisfied with the work. Directly ask when the ePub converter expects to get paid. The answer should be, in every case, “Only when you are totally satisfied with the work and all changes are completed.” Why accept anything less?

2) Outstanding HTML design skills – An ePub is a mini web site complete with pages of XHTML, a cascading style sheet, and a folder containing images or links to them. Would you pay someone to build your web site if they didn’t have expert knowledge of HTML and CSS? Sure not. You also should not hire a non-expert in HTML and CSS to build your mini web site, that is, your ePub document. Ask if the ePub converter knows how to build an ePub in an HTML editor like Dreamweaver or Expression Web. Also ask what ePub editor the ePub designer uses. Any decent ePub designer will be totally at home with at least one ePub editor, such as Sigil. Another red flag here is the ePub editor that only knows how to create an ePub in Adobe InDesign. Adobe InDesign has a number of limitations that require the ePub designer to get under the hood and tinker directly with HTML and CSS. A person who is not a solid HTML design person cannot do a good job at ePub creation.

3) Deep CSS design skills – Ditto for CSS skills. All formatting in an ePub document is controlled by a cascading style sheet, just like a competently designed web site. You definitely want to see demonstrated HTML and CSS skill before you let anyone work on your ePub.

4) Graphic design skills (preferably with Photoshop)  – All images going into an ePub needed to be sized properly, sharpened, and have the resolution set at between 72 dpi and 150 dpi. 150 dpi is the most common resolution. Photoshop is the basic tool for this type of graphic work. You probably won’t have your images looking as good as they should if your ePub converter is not facile with Photoshop. Ask if the person owns and uses Photoshop. If that person states that they don’t have this basic tool of graphic design, he or she probably can’t do the work on your images that needs to be done.

5) Strong working knowledge of an EPUB editor such as Sigil – I can’t remember ever creating an ePub that I did not have to considerable tweeking afterwards with Sigil. If an ePub converter cannot claim to be skilled with an ePub editor, you should not even consider using that person to convert your book to ePub. This is an absolutely essential skill in ePub design.

6) Solid working knowledge of EPUB validation – Any ePub sent to an online book store must be validated. Ask the ePub converter what validation is. The answer should be that validation is the process to ensure that the ePub conforms to the latest ePub standards. Ask how the ePub converter will perform the validation and provide you with verification that the validation was completed.

7) Accessibility – Your ePub converter should always return emails within a day, without exception. Ask if you can expect this. Also, ensure that the ePub conversion work is not being farmed out. Every ePub that I have ever created for a client has been totally customized work that would not have been possible if the client did not have regular access to me through email.

8) Their own self-published works – If an ePub converter has never successfully self-published anything on Amazon Kindle, he or she does not have a complete picture of what is happening. There are a number of formatting items specific to Kindle that an ePub designer has to be aware of. I learned quite a bit from self-publishing all of my book on Amazon Kindle and also as hard copy print-on-demand books on Amazon. Ultimately that is where you want your books to be. Hire someone to do your ePub who has been there, done that.

9) A short turn-around time – It should not take more than a few days to have an ePub created and validated. You will probably need a few more days to go back and forth with final changes and corrections.

10) A reasonable price – I generally charge around $150 per conversion, unless there is a lot of extra work involved, such as substantial image processing or unusual formatting. If you are paying less than $100, you are probably not getting competent work done. You definitely get what you pay for if you use price as the most important deciding factor in the selection of an ePub designer. A bargain rate ePub will probably have to be redone completely somewhere else. I have several clients who went through that before they came to me. If an ePub converter is asking more than $250 and your manuscript does not have any unusual difficulty, the price is too high.

If you ensure that you are dealing with a fair and competent ePub designer from the start, you are very likely to get a finished product that you will be proud to sell under your name.

ePub Author Question – What Is EPUB?

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EPUB (which stands for Electronic Publication) is today’s eBook standard format. EPUB was developed by the IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum). EPUB files always have the ending (surprise!) .epub. e-Readers usually read .epub files.

An EPUB file is, for all practical purposes, a mini web site and EPUB e-Readers “view” EPUB files in nearly similar to the way that Internet Explorer “displays” a web site.

Just like a regular web site, the content pages of an EPUB file are written in XHTML code. And, like most web sites, an EPUB file also has a CSS style sheet along with and images folder full of .jpeg, .gif, or .png images. An EPUB creator should be skilled in writing HTML and CSS.

The EPUB format has the following major characteristics:

- EPUB is an open standard that is free. 

- Text is an EPUB document can reflow and resize to adapt to the size of the e-Reader’s display and also conform to the font-size settings that the viewer has set on his or her e-Reader. Reflow has nearly the same meaning as the term “word wrap,” which occurs whenever text size or screen size are changed.

- Images are usually shown “in line” with the text. Images can also be positioned using basic CSS, such as “float left or right.” Images appearing in EPUB filess can be raster (.jpeg, .gif, or .png) or vector-based.

- CSS controls all styling in an EPUB document. Each EPUB document contains a cascading style sheet with all of the styles and formats that are used used in the document. An EPUB creator needs to be highly skilled at writing CSS.

- EPUB documents can containing “metadata.”  Metadata is embedded, useful information about the EPUB file such as the author’s name, the eBook’s ISBN, and date of publication.

- EPUB documents should to be “validated” before they are uploaded online book stores. Validation is the process of verifying that the EPUB file conforms to the current EPUB standard set by the IDPF. Most online book stores will reject an unvalidated EPUB file.

- EPUB supports Digital Rights Management (DRM). DRM refers to technology that allows copyright holders, publishers, and hardware manufacturers to control access to digital content. DRM is one way to authors receive compensation for the promulgation of their material.