Great! You’ve gotten a potential reader to visit your book’s product page. Maybe it was your fabulous cover that intrigued them, or the brilliant title, or — hey! — maybe it was your name, you celebrity author you!
In any case, it’s now time to seal the proverbial deal. Make the sale. Get the interested customer to become a reader and, hopefully, a fan.
How? Continue reading Book Descriptions 101: Have I Got a Book for You!
Your mother probably taught you many things, among them the truism “You can’t tell a book by its cover.”
Now, while that wisdom holds in most of our lives, one place where it doesn’t, ironically, is in publishing. Continue reading Book Covers 101: You CAN tell a book by its cover
The first thing you need in order to sell your book(s) is a quality product — well-written, well-edited (not by you), and well-designed (both the ebook, the print edition, and, possible, the audiobook — not to mention the cover). But that’s not enough. If you build it, they probably will not come.
Creating books is only the first half of the job. The other half is actually making sure that you’ve created an audience who want to buy them.
Now, when I say that to new author-publishers, they immediately think I’m talking about paid ads on Facebook, Google, Amazon, BookBub, etc.
But that’s not what I mean. Continue reading Book Marketing 101: What to do BEFORE you pay for ads
I originally published this post on Joel Friedlander’s wonderful resource for self-publishers, TheBookDesigner.com
If HTML is the blueprint, showing how an ebook (or a web page) should be laid out, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are the interior design, saying how everything should look. While that may sound superficial, in fact learning to use CSS can have a profound impact on your ebook.
This is a somewhat complicated topic, so I am going to take three posts to cover it. This time round, I’m going to show you what CSS is and how to apply it. In the second post, I’m going to look at some of the different properties that you can use to define how your ebook looks. And in the last post, I’m going to talk about how to know which rules take precedence when.
Don’t call it a comeback! Here’s the second installment in our now weekly roundup of interesting articles in the world of eBook publishing. Continue reading Weekly Roundup – 6 Fresh Topics in Ebook Publishing
This post originally appeared on Joel Friedlander’s wonderful site, TheBookDesigner.com.
If, as I keep saying, an ebook is just a website a box, then in order to know how to get in and edit your ebook, you’re going to want to know some HTML. However you choose to work on the file, knowing the basic building blocks is essential in creating a finished product that presents your book to its best advantage.
When we talk about HTML, we’re actually talking about two separate things:
As a matter of principal (both personal and professional) I spend quite a bit of my time keeping up to date with what’s new in the eBook publishing world. Having built up a relatively substantial feed to scroll through, it recently occurred to me that I’m not the only one who could benefit from a list of new ePublishing articles to peruse while I’m going about my day.
With that in mind, I’ve decided to start publishing a weekly list of recent articles I think are important, interesting, innovative, etc. Here are this week’s choices:
Continue reading Weekly Roundup: 7 Interesting Articles on eBook Publishing
On Monday, October 3, author/publisher David Kudler will read from his new teen novel Risuko: A Kunoichi Tale at the Left Coast Writers monthly salon. In addition to sharing sections of the book, he will discuss the process of publishing his first novel. The salon takes place at Book Passage in Corte Madera. Copies of the book will available, and he will be signing as well. Continue reading Signing: Risuko Author David Kudler to Read at Book Passage
I just had a conversation with a friend about the issue of piracy. I thought I’d share this post on the subject I wrote for Joel Friendlander’s TheBookDesigner.com:
I hear from a lot of authors — traditionally and self-published — who are panicked to find their work being stolen. “I just did a Google search,” they’ll moan, “and found a site that’s giving my book away!”
I take a deep breath, pour myself some (metaphoric) rum, and prepare to repel pirates — but mostly imagined ones.
It’s true: as long as there has been a commercial internet, there have been sites and apps that operated to “share” intellectual property illegally, to indulge in what is colorfully known as piracy.
Everyone remembers Napster: it was a peer-to-peer (P2P) app dedicated to sharing MP3 files across the internet back at the height of the so-called dot-com boom at the turn of the twenty-first century. The music industry did its best to shut Napster down by attacking its servers, its founder, and its users, and it did eventually force it out of business in 2001. But this didn’t stop P2P sharing; it simply moved the sharing on to other vectors — Limewire, BItTorrent, and many more.
However, a funny thing happened, also in 2001, that made music sharing less of an issue to the musicians and music companies: the launching of Apple’s iTunes (along with the iPod) made it easy actually to buy music through legitimate channels. Some folks still shared music online — but far more bought the music and downloaded it legitimately. iTunes became to music what Amazon has become for books: a way for even the smallest label to reach an audience and make some money. In some cases a lot of money.
In the interview, Kudler discusses the writing process, including:
Continue reading Interview: Risuko author David Kudler talks writing
