How To Self-Publish On Amazon, Kindle And iBookStore

For the last 14 months I’ve been learning how to become a self-published author. And by that, I mean not only PDF ebooks available on the blog, but also printed books on Amazon, Kindle versions and, of course, for the latest hype in town, ePub-based ebooks in Apple iBookStore. What follows is a (very) distilled story of my own experiences. But as distilled as it is, prepare for a few thousands words article (I suggest putting aside at least 20 minutes to read it from the top to the bottom).

Digital versus Printed

This used to be a very hot topic a few years ago. Traditionally, the printed books industry was very hard to penetrate. The most common approach was to use a publishing house (or, to be more precise, to be used by a publishing house). It was also the most difficult one. But it worked.

During the last few years, things have changed dramatically. Now you can use online tools to make your book available in printed format and you can do this at a very affordable price. Just keep in mind the following differences between digital and printed:

• printed books are slower to reach the market. It can take weeks or months until they become available to major book resellers
• digital books have a huge variety of formats (ePub being one of the most populars) but they can also have a high rate of piracy
• in both cases, if you are a self-published author, you will need a (very) strong presence online to promote your books. Because nobody else will do it for you. Getting them “in the system” is just the first step.

Now, let’s get practical.

Self-Publish With CreateSpace

If you don’t know what CreateSpace.com is, it’s time to find out that this is Amazon’s self-publishing company. The site offers a variety of tools to make your content available on Amazon’s online selling platform (which happens to be the largest in the world, by my knowledge). You can publish a variety of content, from multi-media DVDs to songs and, of course, books.

Signing up is free and there are no upfront costs. When you sign up, you can chose what type of product do you want (a book or a mp3 or a downloadable video) and then the type of setup do you want (expert, if you’ve been there before, or guided, if you’re just starting up). Feel free to start with the guided setup, just to get s glimpse of what you can do around. Here’s how the dashboard of the guided tour looks like (the red dots means those steps aren’t yet completed, click on the image for full view).

And here’s how it looks after you completed all the steps.

The Book Setup

Once you added the title of your book, it’s time to add the rest of the metadata (author name, contributors, subtitle, volume, etc). After that, you go through the physical setup: what type of interior do you want for your book (black and white or color – of course, the color interior will mean you’ll pay more for each copy). An important step is what they call “Trim Size” or the actual physical size of the book. I recommend using an industry standard size. If you created your book with a standard word processor, you can mach the “Page Setup” sizes of the word processor with the sizes you can have in CreateSpace. In my experience, it’s better to go with a standard size, at least for your first titles.

The next step is to add your ISBN. Very shortly, an ISBN is a unique identifier for your book, which is now an international standard. ISBN used to be a tough rock for many self-published authors and, in some respect, it still is. Luckily, CreateSpace can give you an ISBN for free if you don’t have one. If you want to buy your own, you can go to Bowker if you’re in US, or you can get one for free, provided that you will send copies of your books to the national library of your country. This is the case in Romania and New Zealand, for instance.

What’s the big deal with these ISBN numbers and why is important to have your own? Because if you have your own ISBN number you will be listed as the publisher of your book too, not only the author. So, if you want to make a business out of publishing books, you should consider getting your own chunks of ISBN numbers. Other than that there is no other major impact of ISBN. If you use CreateSpace assigned ISBN, the only difference is that CreateSpace will be listed as your publisher.

Once the ISBN thing solved, you can add a cover for your book. Now it can get tricky. You can either use their online cover creator, or you can get smart and do your own. Either way, CreateSpace will provide a few templates, based on the format of your book. This is where the “Trim Size” thing become important, your cover will obviously have to match the size of your book and if the book is non-standard, well, there will be problems. A printed book cover is not just a plain PSD file with fixed margins, you have to leave some tolerances and be sure to have enough space from the margins for your title or images. Once again, start exercising with the templates offered by CreateSpace.

A very important step after you did all of the above is to upload your book. CreateSpace allows PDF file formats. That’s relatively convenient, since many word processors can save your content in PDF too, but it can become tricky if you have embedded fonts. You must be sure that you will embed your fonts in the final PDF uploaded to CreateSpace.

The Review Step

Once you uploaded all the necessary data for your book (including the actual book file and the cover) you gotta review it. This is the place where you can start spending some money, Because you will have to order a proof copy for your book. If you don’t live in US, this could add a lot of time to the entire process. You do have several shipping options, but the fastest one will be actually more expensive than the book. I usually choose the medium one, which is only a couple of weeks and around 10 USD.

Be aware that you get in the mail (in the snail mail, that is) is the actual book that will be shipped to your readers. Do not try to overlook this step. Once the whole publishing machinery is started, it’s becoming very intertial and any change to your book may take weeks or months until it is propagated. Not to mention that you will still have “wrong” items on the market.

So, make the necessary changes and restart the whole proofing process.

The Selling Process

Once you are ok with the proof copy, you can move to the selling process. In this step you’re adding a description for your book (the one that will be seen on Amazon book page) a BISAC description (a standardized, category based descriptor used by libraries), search keywords, publication date and so on.

Once you’re satisfied with it, you can go to the next step, which is the price of your book. The interesting part comes immediately after that, in a zone called “distribution channels”. With CreateSpace you have 3 options:

1. sell it through CreateSpace store (which is like your own ecommerce site) by giving the direct link to your potential clients.
2. sell it through Amazon (and making it available to Amazon searches and ranking system)
3. sell it with the Expanded Distribution Channel (which comprises, among others, libraries and academic institutions or other online book sellers)

The royalty you can get for each channel will decrease proportionally, meaning the highest royalty will be on CreateSpace and the lowest on the Expanded Distribution Channels. But there is more than that. The royalty calculation is a little bit more complex and it involves the enrollment in a so-called “pro-plan” (where you have to pay upfront and only once a fixed price for each book you want to enroll) and the number of pages of your book. The “pro-plan” is an interesting option, because it doesn’t only guarantees bigger royalties but it will also gives you lower prices when you order your own copies.

And Now We Wait

After you completed all the steps, your book will be published shortly. And by shortly I mean hours or, at worst, days. But, as I already told you, getting your book out is only the first step. Now it’s time to start your marketing campaign (if you ever thought of something like this) and start creating some buzz around your titles.

Self-Publish On Kindle

Another interesting option for self-published authors is Kindle. Until a year ago, Kindle was just a device. But in the last 6 months, Amazon made a very interesting move with this. Namely, they created Kindle apps. These apps are book readers connected to the Kindle repository, just like the actual device, only they “live” in other operating systems. So now you can have access to your Kindle books not only from your device, but also from your PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android or whatever device you may think of. That makes Kindle a very interesting option for self-published authors.

The Easiest Thing

Compared with CreateSpace, Kindle publishing is a breeze. Just a word of caution: if you previously published your book on CreateSpace they do offer a conversion service. Namely, they will take your printed book and convert it into a Kindle ready file. But at 69 USD I consider it pretty much a robbery. Read on and see why is that.

In order to start publishing on Kindle you gotta sign up at kdp.amazon.com. You may use the same username and password you usually use with Amazon, or you can create a new one, just for that. Here’s what you see when you log in (this is my real dashboard, with all the titles I published so far, click for full image)

After adding your title, you have a two steps wizard. In the first step you add your book metadata and files, while in the second you manage your publishing rights, add the price and choose your royalty level. More on that in a second.

When you add your book files, you can also add a separate file for the cover, just like at CreateSpace. But you can also choose to protect your book content via DRM (digital rights management). I’m not a big fan of DRM, so I didn’t went for it. The file format accepted by Kindle is PRC, and you can use a variety of tools to convert your book to it. But it also accepts ePub file formats and that’s quite a relief. Because the latest version of Pages for Mac is transparently creating ePubs from any document you want (as long as it is a WordProcessing based document). If you’re on Windows, I recommend checking out the Kindle formatting guide.

In the second step of the wizard, you establish the price and your royalty level. Also, you state what your distribution rights are (worldwide, or differentiated for countries / territories). I always chose “worldwide” because it was my own content, but your mileage may vary.

For the royalty, you have two plans, a 35% royalty and a 70% royalty. The 35% applies to titles under 2.99 USD, while the second plan applies to titles priced between 2.99 and 9.99 USD. You can also have the option to choose the price for Amazon UK and DE separately or based on the US Amazon price (I usually let it do it automatically).

And that’s it. Publishing your book may take a few days after you completed the two-steps wizard. In my experience, the shortest waiting time was 2 days while the longer was 5 days (but it included a week-end too). Once the ebook is published you can test it on your Kindle by partially downloading it (Amazon allows this for many of its titles).

One last word: the formatting of a Kindle ebook is very different than the formatting of a printed book. So expect your Kindle ebook to look strangely different than the printed version. Also, keep in mind that Kindle automatically converts your color illustrations to black and white.

Self Publish With iBookStore

Backed up by Apple legendary hype, iBooks is a recent player in the self-publish area. To be honest, I came to it after a (very) long detour. As you may already know, I do write iPhone and iPad apps for a living (iAdd being one of them) and that made me quite familiar with the AppStore. So, at some point I decided that it would be interesting to publish my ebooks on the AppStore, by creating them as standalone apps. It seemed like many people were doing this. I created an app, imported the book content on it and submitted to AppStore.

Surprise! My app got rejected. The message said something about publishing my app as a book, in the iBookStore. I went back and forth a few weeks with the Apple support guys until I finally got somebody on the phone. Yes, Apple is legendary for its opacity too, it may take weeks until you get a support guy to talk to you on the phone. After I discussed with him for like half an hour, I finally understand that I have no other option than to publish my books in the iBookStore.

For hose unfamiliar with the Apple ecosystem, publishing a book in the iBookStore means it will be available in the app iBooks, not under the Books category in the AppStore. It’s a little bit confusing and it took me a while to understand that. Apparently, Apple has an AppStore for apps (which may include a category called Books) and another store for books, called iBookStore, which mimics the same structure of the AppStore.

Well, it all came into pieces when I read the requirements for publishing in the iBookStore. Among other common sense things you need in order to publish your book, like an Apple account, there was something new: an ITN number (or, if you’re an individual, a Social Security Number). And that is because the revenue you get from selling a book has a different taxation process than the revenue you get from selling apps. I don’t know why is that, it’s just the way it is. Apparently, royalties have also a different cross-country taxation, so if you get royalties from US into a company based in New Zealand (which is precisely my case) you can get some sort of tax credit back. Luckily, my accountant, which whom I spoke a number of times on this topic, knows much more than me about that.

To make a long story short, I applied for an ITN number for my company, Mirabilis Media (NZ) Limited and after I got it, I started the publishing process.

The Apple Uploader

Another well known tradition of Apple is that it makes things extremely difficult for its contributors (iPhone developers are well aware of that). So, after incredibly long logistic delays and lack of information, I was finally in the position of uploading my ebooks. From this point on, things were starting to get extremely smooth. Apple created a Mac app for uploading your book. It’s called iTunes Producer and it has a very simple, wizard-like interface and it makes uploading your book to the iBookStore a really pleasant experience. I’m absolutely honest about it, it’s really simple to use and a big step forward made by Apple towards a better user experience.

I won’t go through the whole process, because the metadata is pretty much the same as for CreateSpace or Kinde. One important thing that has to be mentioned, though, is that the format accepted by Apple is ePub. As I already told you, converting a Pages document to ePub is just a matter of two clicks: “Export” and choose “ePub”.

Another important thing is that you may have free ebooks in iBookStore. Important if you plan to make available some of your content for free, for whatever reason you may think of.

Oh, and the royalties you earn in Apple iBookStore are following the general AppStore rule, 30% Apple – 70% you.

After you submit your book to iBookStore you gotta wait to be reviewed. In my experience, iBookStore had the longest delay from the moment you finished all your job, until the book is live. Minimum two weeks. So it’s a little bit of a time consumer, you should take that into account when you start publishing your books. Here’s how my iBookStoe dashboard is looking right now.

My Books

Well, this is it. As I told you, this process started 14 months ago, when I first published my books on Amazon. It wasn’t a continuous process (I’m not that slow in learning ) but rather one based on the opportunities. Basically, when a distribution channel looked both affordable for me and mature enough, I went for it.I started with CreateSpace but when Kindle and iBookStore became affordable and worthwhile, I started to use them too.

Now, here’s how my self-publishing portfolio is looking like:

Brilliantly Better

Amazon | Web | Kindle | iBookStore

 

 

 

 

 

100 Ways To Live A Better Life

CreateSpace | Amazon | Kindle | iBookStore

Korean version

 

 

 

100 Ways To Screw Up Your Life

CreateSpace | Amazon | Kindle | iBookStore

Korean version

 

 

 

The Productivity Trap

CreateSpace | Amazon | Kindle | iBookStore

 

 

 

 

The 7 Ages Of An Online Business

CreateSpace | Amazon | Kindle | iBookStore (free)

 

 

 

 

Natural Productivity – Assess, Decide, Do

Amazon | Web | Kindle | iBookStore

 

 

 

 

If you clicked through the links you may have noticed that there are very significant price differences between the same editions of the same book, based on the publishing channel (Kindle, Amazon, iBookStore) but also based on the territory too (in UK prices are slightly higher). Wonder why?

It’s a little bit more complicated and it will not fit in just one blog post. What I can tell you though, is that it’s partially because of some limitations in the distribution channels (Kindle doesn’t allow a difference wider than 30% between a printed title and its Kindle version) but also because of some personal marketing strategies.

Now, if you have any more questions about this article, feel free to ask them in the comments, I’d be happy to answer.

How I Wrote And Published 4 Books on Amazon in One Month

I don’t really believe in advertising as a valid, long-term monetizing strategy for a blog. There are more cons than pros, if you take the time to really look at it. Yet, many bloggers are rushing towards advertising and fill up their blog real estate with tons of banners and then dumbly wait for money to pour in.

Advertising has a very low entry point, all you need is some traffic and traffic building is relatively cheap, that’s true. But advertising also have a very, very low output: you need incredibly high amounts of traffic to make a decent amount of money. I won’t talk about the pros and cons of advertising as a blog monetizing strategy in this post. What I am going to talk about is my blog monetizing strategy for 2010.

The Strategy

First of all, let me tell you that I intend to make a huge change in my blog revenue in 2010. And by huge I mean huge, period. Second, I intend to make this happen by increasing my throughput. Delivering more value. This extra value may be contained in the form and the structure of this blog or it may be just an extension of the blog. Precisely, I’m going to build my own line of information products.

In the first 3 months of the year (including January, which is gone) I will create a series of ebooks. After that I may try a line of podcasts and/or video. If talking to a microphone is not at all unusual for me (I worked as a radio host for more than 7 years) doing some vlogging is certainly something intriguing. Which for me translates into “I have to do this”.

The very first items of my information products line are already out and they have been out for at least 2 weeks now. If you’re reading my blog on the web (as opposed to being an RSS subscriber) you noticed some changes. To make a long story short: during January, I already wrote 4 new books and also published them on Amazon. I won’t describe them now, I will let you download the free previews, if you want. Word of caution: there is one book which doesn’t have an associated ebook version and that would be The Productivity Trap (Amazon affiliate link).

Now let’s move on the “why” part of this decision.

Why Selling My Own Information Products

Because it’s more suited to my own lifestyle, to be honest. And because I find it much more appropriate to the whole concept of blogging as a business. A highly successful blogger should focus on increasing his throughput and deliver more of his personal experience, rather than relying on external, adjacent businesses, like advertising or affiliate marketing. I have nothing against that, and as a matter of fact I’m doing pretty well on affiliate marketing, I just came to a point where I want to do more. And here’s why:

1. Bigger Input

If I will build my own series of information products I will have greater control over the audience response. I can see what products are performing well and what products are not. I will see exactly what parts of my efforts are making the biggest impact. And adjust. We will grow together.

2. Better Connectivity

I will get in touch faster and deeper with my readers. Each of their responses will help me provide more value. Or, if I’m on the wrong path, I could be warned earlier. Anyway, creating more value on top of an already existing layer will streamline the existing communication.

3. Better Return

Let’s face it: in advertising, you’re the last layer from a huge pile. Each layer on this pile is retaining something of the value you deserve. At some level, this is understandable and I have nothing against it, as I already said it. I just choose to minimize this pile and keep fewer layers of interaction.

How I Did It

I started to write. Ok, it was a little bit more than that. Before sitting at a table and write, I tried to find the answers to 3 simple questions:

1. What Are You Going To Write About?

Not that I don’t have a gazillion topics ready to be extracted from my brain in the form of a readable ebook. It wasn’t the lack of topics, on the contrary, it was the prioritizing and selling strategy. What exactly would be the most fit and useful range of topics for my audience? And then it hit me: since I already have a lot of topics covered in this very blog, why not just run a content analysis and see which type of content performed better than the other?

I think the technical term for this is “crowd-tested”. Selecting topics which were already doing great in terms of traffic, comments and social media exposure. That’s one of the biggest advantages of a blog. You get all the interaction with your readers and deliver your message to a live audience, ready to validate or invalidate it. Oh, and in the process you do have a lot of fun too. Well, to keep a long story short, I chose to write ebooks based on the most popular posts I had in the last year.

2. How Much Do You Want To Write On Top Of These Posts?

I was fortunate enough to have a previous experience on this: my first ebook. It took me about 2 months of on and off writing to get that done. But it was like 90% new content. And, to be honest, it really felt like huge.

So I decided this time I will only go for 60% new content on top of the blog posts. That would lower the pages number, but this is not necessarily something bad. On the contrary. My aim is to provide easy to use and to re-use information. I’m not writing a philosophy manual. If I would write something like this, I would make revenue plans not for a year but maybe for 50. Or even 150 .

Now, one would argue that you can’t write tons of good, easy to read, appealing books just by using crowd-tested blog posts, and I would very much agree with that. I have more than 350 personal development articles on this blog now but I won’t go for more than 10-15 good books using only the best of the best.

I intend to freeze this strategy somewhere around book number 15. By that time I hope to gather enough experience and ability to be able to start writing books from the scratch, without the skeleton of a blog post. To be honest, I have 3 book projects (on personal development) that are waiting in my Someday/Maybe folder. Maybe that Someday is sooner than I thought

3. In What Form Are You Going To Sell Those Ebooks?

That was tricky, but in the end I come up with something really neat. I decided to have both electronic and printed formats. If there’s nothing to be explained about electronic formats (I already did it for my first ebook and I explained a little bit the process in the launch post) I think the printed part of this decision deserves a little bit of an explanation.

I was studying self-publishing platforms for a few months and sometimes during November last year I decided to give a try to CreateSpace.  The whole process looked clean and also easy to manage. All you have to do is to upload a PDF containing your book and a cover. You get an ISBN number and your own eStore, handling the whole selling process. The book is printed on demand, of course.

After I played a little bit with the site I abandoned the idea. And then, just a few weeks after, I saw that one of my fellow bloggers, Steven Aitchison, started to do exactly that. He published his first book on CreateSpace and… Amazon! Wow. It was like a thunder for me. I knew all the time that CreateSpace was an Amazon company, but for some reason my mind refused to make the connection. Of course! If you self-publish via CreateSpace you can make your book available on Amazon.com too.

And why is that important? you may ask. Why that thunder? Because Amazon gives exactly what you don’t have as a blogger: marketing and a HUGE captive audience (you may have a big community as a blogger, but not a HUGE captive audience).  It was really enlightening. So, I re-started the whole self-publishing process. The first one was 30 Sentences For A Millionaire Mindset (Amazon affiliate link), just to have a printed peer and then moved on the new ones. Everything was going on smoothly, but something was missing.

And I didn’t know exactly what, until I decided to start a challenge with Steven. We decide to race: whoever will be the first to have 5 books published on Amazon during January, will win. Strangely enough, I won that one. But the February challenge is already on, and we’re targeting 4 new books with that. So it’s complicated.

I started a challenge not because I wanted to win, in the first place (although the desire to win was there too) but because I wanted to be held accountable. To have somebody who can tell me: I will do it regardless of what you choose to do and I may win this. These types of challenges are a fantastic motivator. At least for me.

The Routine

If you’re going to follow this monetization strategy, you have to be aware of some of the pitfalls.

First of all: you will write more. Much more. So be sure to put aside some extra time for that, if you’re not a full time blogger. Writing blog posts is one thing, but committing to a book, even if you already have a scaffold for it, will take more energy and focus. Prepare to spend more on this side. The good thing is that books have a bigger inertia than blog posts: they tend to remain alive much more time than a blog post. So the passive income revenue potential is bigger.

Second: It will take some time. It’s not only the approval process for the printed books, this one is relatively manageable, somewhere between 24 and 48 hours. It’s about the extra work you should do AFTER everything is done. You will have some new activities or you’ll have to put more time in activities you already perform, like writing landing pages, communicating with your affiliates (if you already have a network of affiliates) and analyzing market inputs (sales, evolution, etc).

Third: balance it. It will be a huge effort. Be aware! Balance your extra work with some rest or other activities. I did feel a few times the gentle touch of a potential burn out during this month, but hopefully I made it without it.

The Goodies

Now, I know you’re curious about what’s in those ebooks anyway. I can feel it. Since you made it till here I can tell you have a genuine interest in them and you could really, really find a use for one or all of my ebooks. So, without further ado, here’s my proposal.

Are you ready?

Really?

Ok, let’s do it:

I’m going to give free copies of any of my ebooks in exchange for a review. How does it sounds? Yeah, I heard that Oh, and the best part is that you DON’T need to have a blog to get a free copy! Because you can write a review at Amazon.com too. How cool is that? You get a free ebook and all you have to do is to write a review on your blog OR on Amazon.com. Kinda neat, if you ask me .

Now let’s get practical. Here’s what you have to do: leave a comment and let me know which ebooks are of interest to you. You can have any of the ebooks, including the flagship of my fleet, 30 Sentences For A millionaire Mindset! If you want, you can have all 4 ebooks (The Productivity Trap [Amazon affiliate link] is available only in printed form, I’m afraid, so that one should be bought directly).

Also, please let me know if you want or not to become an affiliate. Ups, I almost forgot: you can promote and resell my ebooks and you’ll get 50% off of each sale. I could have pick a smaller amount and then try to lure you in with some ”extra“ discounts up to this number, but I choose to do it upfront: 50% no questions asked. And since the printed versions are on sale on Amazon, you can promote them just as you promote other Amazon books on your site, if you’re an Amazon affiliate.

Ok, after you let me know which ebooks are you interested in, I will email them to you for free. The only thing I ask is to let me know when you’re going to publish the review, where (your blog and/or Amazon) and if you found some value in what I wrote. If you think somebody else would be interested in this giveaway, feel free to spread the word.

I don’t know for how long I’m going to do this, so be sure to act now, because, based on the response I get, this offer may end really soon.

That’s all.

Go!