Tag Archives: Amazon

Weekly Roundup

With the summer solstice comes longer days. With longer days comes more time for reading! Here’s this week’s roundup of what we found interesting in the world of ePublishing.

Continue reading Weekly Roundup

Weekly Roundup — What’s new in digital publishing?

From a scandal that rocked the world of digital publishing to some nice, relaxing podcast recommendations, here’s our latest weekly roundup. Continue reading Weekly Roundup — What’s new in digital publishing?

The Convertible Cloud: Ebook Conversion Online

This is the next in my on-going series of post on ebook creation; it focusses, obviously, on ebook conversion online. It was originally posted over at Joel Friedlander’s wonderful site for indie publishers, TheBookDesigner.com

The Convertible Cloud: Ebook Conversion Online

Previously, I’ve compared some of the computer apps that you can use to convert your manuscript into an ebook.

This month I’ll talk about online conversion tools — all of the ones I’m going to discuss are attached to the retailers and distributors that you are going to be interested in.

 

Eye of the Hurricane: Top Ebook Retailers

 

Let’s start with the most popular retailers and their conversion tools (or lack thereof).

 

Once again, I’m assuming that you’re in the US — which isn’t a given, I know. (Most of this information is true for non-US publishers as well.) Also, I’m defining “manuscript” as synonymous with “Microsoft Word document” (either .doc or .docx), since that’s the most common file format for authors to work with, and that’s the format I used in comparing the desktop conversion tools.

 

As before, these are the major retailers you will probably be looking at:

Continue reading The Convertible Cloud: Ebook Conversion Online

Risuko Release Day Events!

Release day for Risuko (June 15, 2016) is almost here
The Squirrel has landed! (The first shipment of Risuko first editions arrives)

Release day for Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale (June 15) is almost here! We’ve got lots of exciting news for you — and more on the way. So keep checking on Stillpoint Digital Press, Risuko.net, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter!

If you haven’t read it, check out David Kudler’s post on writing Risuko, The Magic of History: Writing historical fiction as fantasy.

See below for some of what we’ve got in store for you! Continue reading Risuko Release Day Events!

The Ebook Retail Universe

This is the sixth installment in my series of posts about ebook creation. Like the others, it was originally posted on Joel Friedlander’s wonderful resource for indie publishers,TheBookDesigner.com

The Ebook Retail Universe

I realized after my last post (looking at ebook conversion tools) that in my excitement in finally getting to the nuts and bolts of ebook creation that I’d skipped over online conversion tools. Most of those tools either are directly attached to ebook retailer websites or are attached indirectly through distributors/aggregators. So I’m going to have to backtrack.

 

This month I’ll talk about the retailers and distributors that you are going to be interested in, and next month I’m going to talk about the conversion tools that they offer.

 

Continue reading The Ebook Retail Universe

Free for all: giving your ebook away on Amazon

“Selling” for free

I had a client ask me recently why you can’t price an ebook as free on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform. The author wanted to promote her first book by giving it away — she’d been told that was the best way to make a splash.

I told her that you CAN “sell” your ebook for free on Kindle Direct Publishing — they just don’t make it easy. And it often isn’t a good idea.

Why don’t Amazon make it simple to set the price of a KDP ebook to $0.00? Continue reading Free for all: giving your ebook away on Amazon

4 Ways to Create an Ebook

This is the second in my series of blog posts about ebook creation. It was originally posted on Joel Friedlander’s wonder resource site, TheBookDesigner.com.

Last time I talked about just what an ebook is — a website in a box. Ebooks come in a number of flavors, but for the purposes of this discussion I’m going to stick with the most common and most malleable format of ebook, the ePub file that is the basis of all of the major retailers’ ebook offerings.

There are four basic ways to create an ebook (that is, an ePub file):

  1. From scratch
  2. Saving from a word-processing or page-layout application into ePub format
  3. Using a conversion app or online service
  4. Hiring a designer

The trade-off among these methods involve quality, time, and price. As the old saying goes, you can generally pick two. In order to get all three, you’re going to need to become an ebook maven yourself, which will take a fair amount of time, but which will allow you to control all of the variables yourself. Let’s look at the options, and you can see whether that’s the road you want to take. Continue reading 4 Ways to Create an Ebook

Is Big Brother watching what you read?

Earlier this year, at the Digital Book World conference, a company called JellyBooks announced what it called “Google Analytics for ebooks.”

For some readers, this raised the specter of Big Brother — or his corporate brethren — reading over their shoulders. Should we be worried about what we’re reading being tracked? Continue reading Is Big Brother watching what you read?

Everything Amazon Slides

DREAMHOST

Here are the slides from my presentation with Ruth Schwartz on Everything Amazon:

It was — as always — a great meeting! If you have any questions about any of the slides, please comment.

ETA: The URL for CreateSpace (slides 8–12) should be http://createspace.com, not createspace.amazon.com.

All Things Amazon

Along with Ruth Schwartz, I’m going to be offering a presentation at the monthly meeting of the Bay Area Independent Publishers Assocation ambitiously titled All Things Amazon!

Come join us in lovely Novato — the meeting is from 9:00–4:00, but our presentation is from 11:00–12:15. (There are going to be break-out sessions in the afternoon.)

Here’s the blurb: Continue reading All Things Amazon