Tag Archives: publishing

How Much Money Can a Self-Publisher Make?

More retro clipart at http://www.clipartof.com/Here’s a question I’ve been asked a number of times: What’s the average income from self-publishing a book?

My answer isn’t necessarily a terribly helpful one. It truly depends one what you mean by average — do you mean the total amount earned by the number of authors (the mean), or do you mean the amount that the average KDP author/publisher earns (the median)? Continue reading How Much Money Can a Self-Publisher Make?

How Long Can Video in Ebooks Be?

Video PixelsEnhanced ebooks have been a cause of much excitement over the past few years — and with good reason. One of the things that an ebook can do that a paper-and-ink book can’t is to add embedded video and sound. (There are many other ways to enhance an ebook— but those are the most common enhancements.) Here’s a chance to make the book something truly new!

At Bay Area Independent Publishers Association, we have a group that is meeting regularly, discussing enhanced ebooks, led by a long-time digital publisher, Joe Sinclaire. One of the members of that group recently shot me an email recently asking about how long a video she could reasonably add to an ebook — two minutes? Five minutes?

Here’s my answer: Continue reading How Long Can Video in Ebooks Be?

From BAIPA Audiobook Presentation

Here are are the PowerPoint slides for the presentation that Becky Parker and I gave at BAIPA today (and the audio files, since the audio was on the fritz!): Continue reading From BAIPA Audiobook Presentation

The Law & the Heart Book Launch!

Release Day: May 16!

Do you know the way to San Jose? Join author Kenneth Schneyer and Stillpoint publisher David Kudler for the official launch of The Law & the Heart on Friday evening, May 16 at the Nebula Awards book-signing!

The signing will be from 8:00pm–10:00pm at the San Jose Marriot. The event is open to the public, so you don’t have to attend the conference to be among the first to get your copy of Ken’s exciting new book — though of course, you’re also welcome to attend. While you’re there, you’ll have the opportunity to meet some of the other best science fiction writers in the world.

For more information or to sign up for our launch event, go to the event page on Facebook.

To find out more about the Science Fiction Writers of America or to register to attend the Nebulas, go to their page here.

See you there!

1 Thing That SHOULDN’T Go at the Front of Your Ebook

InterrobangSo I’ve written about what you should put at the back of your ebook. Over on LinkedIn, Denise Wakeman raised the issue, sparking an excellent discussion. (She suggested a great possibility that I hadn’t thought of: an opt-in link for your newsletter/mailing list.)

The discussion then turned to what should go at the front of an ebook.

You know those pages at the front of a print book that get lowercase roman numerals instead of regular arabic page numbers — the boring stuff that you usually flip through so you can start reading? That’s called the book’s front matter.

Now, tradition has set the front matter of print books fairly rigidly for a while now. According to my trusty Chicago Manual of Style, it runs something like this, with each item given a separate page or section: half-title page, series title or frontispiece, title page, copyright page, dedication, epigraph, table of contents (TOC), list of illustrations, list of tables, foreword, preface, acknowledgements, introduction (unless it’s part of the body of the book). Then you get, you know, the book. (Except for the title page and copyright page, these are all optional, by the way.)

In an ebook, where navigation can be non-linear, we often move some of the less essential, bulkier bits (i.e., TOC, lists of illustrations and tables) to the back, trusting that the reader will be able to find them easily using the Contents button. (I often link to the appropriate entry in the list of illustrations from the image’s caption.) The half-title page (the one often signed by authors and gift-givers) has been jettisoned. Not too many ebook signings.

You’ll notice, however, that there’s a commonly used section that’s missing from that list, and it became a major topic of debate in the LinkedIn discussion: blurbs. Continue reading 1 Thing That SHOULDN’T Go at the Front of Your Ebook

1 Thing That SHOULDN'T Go at the Front of Your Ebook

InterrobangSo I’ve written about what you should put at the back of your ebook. Over on LinkedIn, Denise Wakeman raised the issue, sparking an excellent discussion. (She suggested a great possibility that I hadn’t thought of: an opt-in link for your newsletter/mailing list.)

The discussion then turned to what should go at the front of an ebook.

You know those pages at the front of a print book that get lowercase roman numerals instead of regular arabic page numbers — the boring stuff that you usually flip through so you can start reading? That’s called the book’s front matter.

Now, tradition has set the front matter of print books fairly rigidly for a while now. According to my trusty Chicago Manual of Style, it runs something like this, with each item given a separate page or section: half-title page, series title or frontispiece, title page, copyright page, dedication, epigraph, table of contents (TOC), list of illustrations, list of tables, foreword, preface, acknowledgements, introduction (unless it’s part of the body of the book). Then you get, you know, the book. (Except for the title page and copyright page, these are all optional, by the way.)

In an ebook, where navigation can be non-linear, we often move some of the less essential, bulkier bits (i.e., TOC, lists of illustrations and tables) to the back, trusting that the reader will be able to find them easily using the Contents button. (I often link to the appropriate entry in the list of illustrations from the image’s caption.) The half-title page (the one often signed by authors and gift-givers) has been jettisoned. Not too many ebook signings.

You’ll notice, however, that there’s a commonly used section that’s missing from that list, and it became a major topic of debate in the LinkedIn discussion: blurbs. Continue reading 1 Thing That SHOULDN'T Go at the Front of Your Ebook

6 great file formats to send to ebook designers (and 2 awful ones)

Express Delivery by Kamyar Adi/flickr.com. Used through a Creative Commons license.So you’ve decided to have an ebook designer convert your book into ePub (iBooks/Nook/Kobo) and mobi (Kindle) formats. Great! What formats are best to send?

I mentioned in a rant a couple of weeks ago how not to do it. However, what should you do?

The designer/conversion house will hopefully tell you how they want the book delivered. Well, an ebook is essentially web pages in a box, so if you hand the designer clean HTML, she or he will want to kiss you; it’s very simple to turn that into an ebook. Beyond that, a good ebook designer should be able to work with whatever format you give them, whether it’s an InDesign or Quark file, a Word or Pages or OpenOffice doc, a PDF (see more below, however) — heck, I’ve managed to work from a copies of the print book, and typed or handwritten manuscripts. Still, it’s good to be prepared.

What are the best formats to send, in terms of keeping your cost low and your quality high? Continue reading 6 great file formats to send to ebook designers (and 2 awful ones)

A Plea to Book Designers: InDesign Is Not a Linotype Machine

Lead Type by Andre Chinn (andrechinn) @flickr.com. Used through a Creative Commons license.This is a plea from the heart to all of the page-layout/book-design folks out there on behalf of us lowly ebook designers, but it’s also, I’m afraid, a bit of a rant. Bear with me.

Here’s the gist: PLEASE DON’T USE THE SPACE BAR OR THE RETURN KEY TO MAKE YOUR LINES LOOK PRETTY!

I’ve worked on two ebook conversions recently where the designers had used spaces (or possibly hairspaces) and line feeds to make the pages flow cleanly and attractively on the printed page. They would use the hairspace/space between letters in a word and resize it to make the letters space out attractively — this was usually in the chapter heads or subheads, since spacing in display type can sometimes be tricky. And they’d use the return key (or possibly the shift-return combination) to force a line break in the middle of the paragraph — to avoid hyphenation, for example.

The problem is that when an ebook designer takes your book and converts it into HTML (since ebooks are just self-contained web pages), those little adjustments lose their meaning and are treated for what they are: spaces in the middle of words or paragraph breaks in the middle of sentences.

Continue reading A Plea to Book Designers: InDesign Is Not a Linotype Machine

Laura English by Lynn Arias Bornstein — Now at a Bookstore Near You!

Laura English by Lynn Arias BornsteinStillpoint Digital Press has released Laura English, the debut novel of glamour, intrigue, and heartbreak by author Lynn Arias Bornstein.

A fairy tale of Hollywood glamour that shows that even the most blessed lives may not have the happily-ever-after that we would expect, Laura English follows the life and loves of a young British actress who rises to fame and yet struggles to find what she actually needs. By turns heart-warming and heart-wrenching, funny and tragic, this novel takes you on a journey around the world and into the deepest recesses of the human heart.

This is a book of joy, loss, rejection, as well as fear and happiness. The author weaves a complicated web of intrigue, passion, and profound loss, which I found captivating. Definitely a must-read— Patricia Day for Readers’ Favorite

Laura English  is available in trade soft-cover and ebook formats through Stillpoint Digital Press, through IndieBound and independent bookstores, Amazon, Barnes and Noble. Apple’s iBooks Store, and wherever else you buy books.

Continue reading Laura English by Lynn Arias Bornstein — Now at a Bookstore Near You!

Advice for the Self-Publisher

Last week, I gave an interview to Inkspokes, a website dedicated to independent authors and their readers.  The interviewer, Nelson Suit, who is one of the editors at Inkspokes, asked me a number of questions about my own experiences as an author who published his own work, but then asked me — as both a writer and a publisher of others’ writing — what would be my advice for folks who were looking at self-publishing. Well, a lot of people who are smarter than I am have given thought to that subject, but after considering the question for a bit, here’s what I came up with:

DK: My two biggest pieces of advice will both seem a bit heretical.

The first is that self-publishing doesn’t mean that you have do everything yourself — or that you should. The chairman of Penguin/Random House doesn’t copyedit every book, nor does he try to design his own covers. He’s your competition. Budget in the time and (if you can) the money to outsource the parts of the work of publishing that you really can’t (or as I said shouldn’t) handle yourself.

The places where you will really serve yourself best by finding someone else to help out? Highly technical processes like print layout and cover design. It’s possible to create your own ebooks if your work is narrative and doesn’t include much in the way of complicated formatting or images.

stillpoint-shlomo

You should absolutely have editors at each of the three stages of editing — development (before the “final” draft is finished); copyediting (after you’re done developing the book but before you’ve had it laid out); and proofreading (after layout/conversion and just before publication). Do you have to hire professionals? I’m not unbiased, I recognize, but I highly recommend it.

Continue reading Advice for the Self-Publisher