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EPUB an excellent book by Elizabeth Castro on writing ePublicatons for the Apple iPad and other eReaders

Elizabeth Castro has been my favorite author of books on HTML. Her book on ePublishing, EPUB Straight to the Point is for you.

Here you will find how to use Microsoft Word, InDesign, or your favorite HTML or text editor to create your ePublication files. 

If you're interested in ePublishing, this book is for you.

Want to sell a million books? Choose a topic that appeals to a million people.

Many writers have it all wrong. They write a book and then try to sell it. It is far better to look at your book as a project with definite parts.  Note some of these points will vary if you are publishing an eBook, or perhaps if self publishing.

• Market research. What is selling currently, and what do you expect to be selling when your book hits the market? Here is a clue. A glut of books on any particular subject tend to indicate that another book in that field will not be popular. After all the market is glutted.
• Research who your target buyer is, how you will notify your audience that the book exists, and where it can be purchased. Begin thinking marketing and advertising, agent, and publisher if going the traditional route.
• Chose your topic.
• If nonfiction do your book proposal before you write the entire book. Should no one want be interested in this project, cut your losses and move on to a project that is lucrative.
• Online and offline research and perhaps interviews.
• Collation of all your data.
• Make a rough outline that contains everything you want in the book. This will be cut down later as you see how much material you have and what does not fit or is not pertinent.
• Finalize the outline, including the timeline or sequence of events. Put everything into chapters, each with a working title.
• If you will use a quotation at the beginning of each chapter add them now.
• Get your graphics photographs lined up, edited and saved. Know where each will appear in the manuscript and how you will indicate such. 
• Begin writing.
• Get started on cover design.
• Finish the book. Send the manuscript, cover, graphics, photos to the publisher. 
• Market the book aggressively online, offline, write and send press releases, and line up an author speaking tour. Now its time to sell.

 

Want to get published? Here's how hot dogs and a song can help.

Here are a couple, strange but helpful, ideas that may assist you in getting published. The first relates to hot dogs, and the second to the song, The Gambler. An unlikely pair, but truly a couple none-the-less.  

Hot Dogs

Consider hot dogs. Specifically those sold at ball games across the country. They come steamed to perfection, in a wonderful bun, with mustard, relish, sauerkraut, and are absolutely delicious. These are sold by seller number one. They sell very, very well.

Seller number two trudges up and down selling hot dogs too, except his dogs are frozen solid, packed twelve dozen to a box. Who do you think will sell more woofers?

Seller number one, of course. Why is that? Well, he or she, has brought the product that the market wants to market.

Stay with me here. This ain’t fluff.

The Gambler

In the song, The Gambler, by Kenny Rogers there is a line something like this, “... every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser....”

When you have an idea for an article, or book, it's meaningless without a market. to write and try to sell your work can result in frustration and wasted time. Every idea is a winner and every idea is a loser. The deciding factor may not be the material, but where, and when you send it.

So, if you’re trying to publish articles be sensitive to who you are querying. You are querying, aren't you? To blindly send articles is a waste of time. First, get a willingness to read your material from the editor, then send the article. Once published, you can send the article to other appropriate magazines, blogs, and Web sites because it is then re-printable work.

And you thought that hot dogs and music had nothing in common.

Ebook publishing is the future of publishing. Position your books and marketing to take advantage of it.

Ebook publishing is killer. There is a marked decrease in the number of hard, that is paper, books being sold. Our first book was done the traditional way. We successfully published with Career Press. They were great to work with and we will miss publishing with them again. I did send them a proposal but they have not had good luck publishing social networking books, so my project was not brought to the board.

We are going the ebook route for several reasons.

1. Time from manuscript completion and final editing to a money making product is much reduced with an ebook.
2. We control the cover art.
3. We control the quality of the final editing.
4. We control the number of words and ensure that no portions of the manuscript are lost, become missing, only to be found later.
5. Our portion of the income from the book is deposited directly into our PayPal account. We do not need to wait for twice yearly payments.

What We Lose

• The ability of worldwide publication of a hard cover book.  
• The professional input from people who know and understand the book business.  
• The ability to give prospective clients a signed copy. 

Our platform of choice id the Amazon Kindle. It is a wireless product with more and more functionality being added all the time. For example, there is the ability to send files from you Windows PC to the Kindle. also, there is the acknowledged success of amazon and their ability to stay abreast of technology and publishing. As far as marketing is concerned this is the place to be. Consider these sites.

• eBooks.com
• eTextbooks where you can rent or buy textbooks

See a trend?

We think you do. So do we. And so our next work and many to follow will be eBooks. We mentioned 99centTECT. We've purchased 99centTECH.com. Our first ebook is about 50 percent complete, and will retail on Amazon for 99 cents. Many more will follow. All created and edited in-house, including cover art, and online and offline publicity.  

Page Count and Retail Price

On January 4, 2012 we blogged on how many pages to include in your eBook in relation to the retail price. Publishing a Kindle book? How many words do you sell for 99 cents? We read comments online stating that for 99 cents you should provide 50,000 words. We do not agree. Our book retailed at $17.99 and contained 75,000 words. At 99 cents per 50,000 it would have retailed for about $ 1.50. Can't do that.

 What do you think? Click on the title of this post and let us know.