Have you ever written a book that you want to publish or make available in electronic book or ebook format? This tutorial will guide you through the process of preparing the manuscript for e-publishing, formatting the manuscript, and following up when the e-book is finished. This information is useful whether you are an experienced author with copyright to independently publish your previous works electronically or as an author trying to self-publish your first book. Read the article below to get started.
Step
Method 1 of 4: Determine the Method
Step 1. Choose self-publishing
If you want to maximize your share of sales, exercise absolute creative control, or participate in nontraditional copyright structures, then self-publishing e-books may be the right choice for you.
- This method sounds much more difficult. This will require you to do all the marketing and editing yourself, as well as handling the salespeople. While this method allows you to have more control, it also requires significantly more effort.
- Creative Commons licenses are useful for those planning to self-publish. This license will provide a template for legal language to protect your work, as well as give you the freedom to determine how much you want to control your work.
Step 2. Choose a traditional publisher
You may not want to take care of publishing your own e-book. You may not have time to take care of marketing, design, editing, or formatting e-books. There's nothing wrong with this. If self-publishing sounds too complicated, you can find a traditional publisher to produce and sell your e-book.
- Remember, traditional publishers will take a larger share of your book sales and will often exercise control over the content and copyright of the book.
- Publishers are often reluctant to take on new authors. If you prefer, find an agent who will help find a publisher and advise on the quality of your work. An agent will also help negotiate a good contract.
Method 2 of 4: Before Publishing the Book
Step 1. Edit the book
Editing is one of the most important aspects of book publishing. A poorly edited book will not attract potential readers, observers, or publishers. Editing makes your e-book look professional and more fun to read.
- Improve grammar and spelling. Too many grammar and spelling problems can make a book's text unreadable. Use a word processor such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs to look for basic spelling and grammar mistakes. However, these programs are no substitute for the human eye. These programs can only detect misspellings for words that don't exist. If you have typed their/there/they're incorrectly, the computer may not detect it. This is the same as detecting grammatical errors.
- Read the book. Read the entire contents of the book. This will help you spot grammatical and spelling mistakes, but it can also give you a better idea of whether the book is an overall fit. Look for scenes that don't match, characters that seem to change personalities from chapter to chapter, or major changes in writing style. Because authors usually write books over long periods of time and rarely write continuously, this can make the parts of the story do not fit together.
- Read it aloud. When you have read the entire text of the book, then one of the best ways to edit is to read the text aloud. This will prevent the brain from automatically correcting missing words, misspelled words, and grammatical and spelling errors. It can also make you scrutinize dialogue that sounds unnatural.
Step 2. Ask someone to look for errors in the text
Ask a co-author to read your book from beginning to end. They will be able to see it from the writer's point of view, looking for flaws in structure, character, and word choice. This will work well if the person is a neutral party, but an objective friend can do well too.
Ask someone to read it normally like reading a book in the same genre. Only someone who reads a similar book will be able to truly appreciate your book. They will help determine if you have written your book in such a way that it reaches your targeted audience and connects with readers
Step 3. Hire an editor
If you don't have the skills or resources to edit a book yourself, you can hire a book editor. There are many freelance book editors. Choose a reputable and reliable editor. If you want to do it at an affordable cost, you can contact the English literature department at the university in your city and create an editor's vacancy. Students in this major will try to build a job resume and will appreciate the job opportunities and the money it brings, but the quality of the work may not be that great.
Step 4. Use a book aggregator
If you don't want to deal with editing or publishing e-books, you can use the services of a book aggregator (one who distributes and sells books to a wider range of online retailers), who will do all of this for you. However, be careful. Not only are these services expensive, but there are many opportunities for you and your work to be taken advantage of. Use a reputable service and don't sign anything that makes you uncomfortable.
Step 5. Determine the device
Before you start creating an e-book format, you need to decide on what devices you want your book to be available. Your books can be made available on all e-readers to maximize readership or you can make them available on one device and take advantage of programs offered by companies like Amazon if you create books exclusively.
Step 6. Determine the book distributor
If you have determined the device, then you need to determine the distributor. Where do you want to sell your e-book? You can make it available on sites like Barnes and Noble, Amazon, or Google Pay. You can also make them available to lesser-known distributors or on the book's own website.
- If you sell the book on its own site, you'll get a bigger share of the profits but lose out on a bigger readership and marketing tools.
- Again, certain distributors offer incentives to make your book exclusive to their services. Investigate these programs to help you make an informed decision.
- Kindle Direct Publishing: this is a distribution service from Amazon.
- Smashwords: this service publishes books to almost all major booksellers except Kindle.
- Nook Press: this is a distribution service from Barnes and Noble.
- Lulu: this service is famous for distributing e-books to Apple stores, which is otherwise a complicated process.
Method 3 of 4: Creating a Format
Step 1. Understand how ereader works
It's important to understand how an ereader works and how text is displayed on the screen. In understanding what to expect, you'll know what your e-book should look like when formatting.
- To find out what an e-book looks like, get or borrow an ereader. Take a look at e-books and see how you can interact with them and change them.
- The important thing to know is that there are no “pages” in e-books like traditional books. E-books are designed so that the text changes and can be resized at any time. You can't format a book by specifying pages or page numbers as you think.
Step 2. Learn and use a hypertext markup language (HTML)
Ereader works by converting the text of a book to HTML, the same technical language used to create web pages. HTML is basically a language for creating formats. This language tells the computer how text and images should appear, regardless of device or screen size. You will need to learn basic HTML skills to format your e-book so that it appears correctly on all ereaders. You need to know how to use tags (specific words that are enclosed in angle brackets) that correlate with normal formatting built into the word processor.
- Tags almost always appear in pairs: an opening tag and a closing tag. The opening tag contains a word in angle brackets and the closing tag contains the same word but preceded by a slash. The text between the tags is all the text you need in the type of formatting indicated by the tag. In other words, all text in a sentence that you want to italicize needs to be inserted between italic tags.
- Certain characters cannot be translated properly in HTML, especially if they are automatically formatted with programs such as Word, and need to be changed or coded directly so that they can be displayed correctly in e-books. These characters include quotation marks, apostrophes, and ellipsis. Use the text editor's search function to replace these characters with HTML-specific code. For example, to ensure that the ellipsis is always correctly coded (regardless of the ereader), replace the character with “&hellip”.
Step 3. Recognize the tags
There are a number of tags you need to know to properly format the text. Of course there are tons of HTML tags, but here are some of the most relevant and basic examples for eBook creation purposes:
- text will produce bold text.
- text will result in italicized text.
-
text
will convert the text into a paragraph.
- Another important HTML tag is the image tag, which works slightly differently from the tag above. You will need to enter the address of the image, which is how a web address or file on a computer is registered. You'll also need to add a basic description, such as “cover”, so the publishing program will know what the image tag is for. Image tags are formatted like this:
Step 4. Make the text font size
As discussed above, the font size of text in an e-book is not fixed. Readers can adjust the font size, making it bigger or smaller, according to their needs and preferences. This means that you cannot use normal font sizes, such as those used in word processors. Instead, you'll be using HTML and a text sizing system. The best unit of measure used is called “em”.
- Size 1 em becomes the base size. 2em being the measure above it, and so on. Naming the text in this way will allow the text to change its font size relatively, so that when the reader changes the text size, the font will remain proportional and still readable.
- Likewise, indentation (writing indented paragraphs) will also be determined in the same way. However, whatever the size, it's all up to you.
- The size of the em can also be made in half levels (eg: 1, 5, 2, 5, and so on). Use this half level if you don't get the appearance of the text you want using normal sizes.
Step 5. Create an HTML page
When you have finished creating all the text formatting, then you will need to create an HTML file, with proper code generation, to be placed inside the text. This needs to be created with all the normal tags associated with a basic HTML page, such as, < body >, and so on. You can read the article on how to create a basic HTML page or you can use the templates in this tutorial.
The BMHT page also needs to include a style section. The Style section will help to format all the text in the eBook and keep it looking consistent. You can read about this online or use and modify the templates in this tutorial
Step 6. Format for EPUB and MOBI
The easiest and cheapest software that can be used to create e-books in this format is Caliber. This software is available for free. However, make sure you download it from a reputable source.
- Start by opening the program. Press “Add Books” then the HTML file you have created.
- Mark your book in the list and hit “Edit metadata”. It allows you to change the author's name (Author Category/ Author Sort - last name format, first name), product description/ flap copy (short description of the book on the inner sheet that connects to the book cover) / synopsis (comments), also add images book cover, ISBN number, publisher info, and so on. Make sure to save all this data by pressing “OK”.
- Now, select “convert books”. Select the format you want from the drop-down menu. The EPUB and MOBI formats cover the largest number of erasers.
- Next, you need to create a Table of Contents format. If you have followed the templates in this tutorial, then this should be very easy. Of course there are other ways to code the Table of Contents. You can use whatever method suits you. If you follow the template in this tutorial, you will go to the section called “Level 1 TOC” and enter the following code: //h:p[re:test(@class, "chapter", "i")]
- Once the Table of Contents format is created, switch to “Epub Output”. In the left toolbar, look for “Preserve Cover Aspect Ratio” and make sure to tick it.
- Press “OK”, let the program run, and when it's done, you can save your e-book file. Now you're done!
Step 7. Format from Word
Many e-book publishing services work on raw files from Word. Smashwords are the most common. To format a Word document properly for electronic publishing, you will need to return to the document when manually re-entering all automatic formatting (such as indenting and capitalization). This will ensure that everything displays correctly when it's converted to HTML.
Method 4 of 4: After Publishing the E-Book
Step 1. Set the right price
If an e-book is too expensive, you may not be able to sell many books. If it's too cheap, you'll only make a small profit. Good and moderate prices maybe around Rp. 29,000, 00.
Step 2. Promote your book
Promoting your book is crucial to making a profit. The internet is a big place and many authors are taking advantage of this new convenience with which books can be published. If your book wants to steal the spotlight, you'll need to make an extraordinary book promotion effort.
- Take advantage of social media and blogs. Look for popular blogs that include books in your genre and present a book of yours to the blog owner for review. Spread the word about your book release through websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Most importantly, interact with your customers and fans and encourage them to spread the word.
- Advertise your book. You can also advertise your book, either on the website of the book you choose to sell or through other websites. Use advertising services or contact individual websites and blogs to advertise. Make sure all the websites you advertise will reach the right readers for you.
Tips
- Make a great book cover. An old adage is a proverb that makes sense. People often judge a book by its cover. Make a professional-looking cover if you want the book to sell. You can do it yourself, if you have extensive design experience and the right tools, or you can hire someone to do it. Many publishing services will also offer book cover designs for a high fee.
- Make a good title. Nobody wants to read a book that sounds boring. Come up with a fun title that grabs attention and curiosity. You also need to make sure your title matches the content of the book. People don't like buying a book called “The Best Cheesecake Recipe” which turns out to be a vampire romance novel.
- Find your niche market. You will find it easier to sell books if you find your niche market. Look for what is popular and what is not. Create something unique and quality that attracts into your niche market and it will sell out fast.
Warning
- Don't set expectations too high. The publishing world is very competitive and it's rare that people become famous overnight. While your book would make a great novel candidate, it won't sell if people never hear of it or luck isn't on your side. Many classical authors were either unknown or underappreciated throughout their lifetime. Don't take it to heart or let it discourage you.
- Beware of people who try to take advantage of you. Many fake companies will take your money or the copyright of your book if you are not careful. Do some research on each company you want to work with before giving up anything.
