While my book Marriage of Deceit sits on the desks of publishers (for over one year), I've decided to go all Amanda Hocking and sell some ebooks. Okay ebook. Singular. I do have many books, but they're in different genres and my agent has advised me to have a different identity for each genre.
So I experimented with the Kindle and iPad search engines and discovered the Kindle is much more search friendly. I love apple products. Between my husband and me we have every type of "i" product out there. I have many generations of apple computers. I am completely PC free, and the only microsoft product I use is microsoft office - which I don't like but tolerate.
Where apple loses is in its searching prowess. When I want to look for a book, I can search an author or title, best sellers that are free or paid, but not by keywords. Let's just say I want to find a thriller: I can search the category "mysteries and thrillers," but that only brings me the top authors in alphabetical order, for the paid/free books. That means if you are not already selling a lot of books, and your name is not already well known, it is not possible to discover someone new and up-and-coming. As a buyer and a seller I am frustrated with the iBookstore searching ability.
Luckily, there is the Kindle. I'm not sure why Steve Jobs is allowing their competition to have a free bookstore alongside their own, but I'm glad. The Kindle app is superior in its searchability. If I want to find a thriller, I click on the category "mystery and thrillers" and then the subcategory "thrillers." What makes it user friendly is the "sort by" feature. I can sort by ratings, price low to high, high to low, best selling, and publication date.
Thus, I decided to first publish on the Kindle format. This allows me to use it on the Kindle and iPad platform. Of course, this meant getting the product ready for upload, and my word document did not translate well. I was forced to slog through the HTML and CSS in order to get an acceptable appearing document.
I am not a programmer. When I was a kid I learned BASIC, but never evolved into a hacker. A few years back I taught myself rudimentary HTML with the hopes of designing my own website. Only I realized that the time commitment was not worth it. And I scrapped that idea and simply went with a blog that allowed me extra tabs to include other pages. In other words a website blog. Blogspot.com allowed me to do all of this AND it has the "edit HTML" feature to make me think I can play around with the programming if I choose. Usually I don't.
I re-taught myself HTML and added on a quicky version of CSS to interpret the microsoft word generated HTML and clean it up. I did this painstaking process, and think I came up with a pretty good document. I have since uploaded it all to kindle and in a few days, I should have an actual app to buy. Then, I'll see how it looks in real time, and if it is okay, command people to buy it.
Of course, my neighbor can't wait to read it, but only on her Nook. It took me 30minutes to even locate the part of the barnesandnoble.com website where you can even consider adding an ebook. They accept HTML so I did the upload and...well...it did NOT look pretty like on the kindle. The word file itself needed some help, but looked better than the HTML version. In the next week or so I'll pretty-up the word doc and upload a Nook version.
And soon, I'll post some material from my book.
Signing off,
Bayla
PS I know I'm not gonna sell like Hocking, but I would like to move my book forward. Mostly I'd like to take some control over a system that moves so slowly it is amazing ANYTHING gets published.
I still way too comfortable with the physical book, love the smell and texture of the pages. I've never held a kindle and don't know what smashwords are or any other app. My novel is due out in May and will be sold on Kindle, might familiarise myself at a later date. All the very best with your novel.
ReplyDeleteOlive
http://olivecollins.wordpress.com
Olive, thank you for your comment. Physical books are great, I agree. However, ebooks are the wave of the future and understanding that market can be critical to making money and earning a living writing.
ReplyDeleteIf you are having your book traditionally published, congrats! You don't have to worry about other formats, mainly, because you have no power to change it.
FYI if you own the rights to your book, i.e. self publishing, or old rights reversion to author, you can create an ebook to sell. The outlets to sell are larger than Kindle, though that certainly is the biggest (and IMO the best). There are the palm format, sony, apple ibook, barnes and noble Nook and others. If you use smashwords, you publish to them, and they distribute to all available outlets you want. Your publisher publishing only to kindle can limit your ebook sales, however, due to the kindle's flexibility, not by much.
Some well-known authors are eschewing a book deal in exchange for self-publishing an ebook instead.
If this continues, what is the role of traditional book publishers? See my recent blog. I'm going to talk about this interesting issue.