Self Publishing

Digital publishing technology company FastPencil has a new publishing platform to make your own eBooks. The company announced the new platform today which has various different tiers. Self-published authors can use the tool for free to make a book and publish it to the Kindle Store, iBooks, Nook and distribute through Ingram. They can also make up their own imprint using the tool.

There is also a tier in which authors can pay for design and editing services. Publishers can use the tool to format and distribute eBooks. In addition to these DIY tools, publishers can now license FastPencil software to convert content to an eBook. Read more

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eBookNewser caught up with Francis Tapon, author of the new book The Hidden Europe, to talk about self-publishing, crowd sourced editing and eBook pricing.

EBN: Why did you decide to self-publish your book?
FT: My brother, Philippe Tapon, went the traditional route. He had an agent and published two books with Dutton Press. He got a modest advance and so-so marketing support. It was clear that publishers do little marketing. They depend on authors to do it.

Even in 2006, when eBooks were just 1% of the market, I believed that they would grow to over 50% of the market within 10 years. (Today it’s about 20%). eBooks destroy two of the key advantages and costs of publishers, printing and distribution. Although their costs have decreased, publishers have hardly shifted their royalty rates. They are unwilling to pay more than 20-25% royalty for eBooks, sometimes they pay just 10-15%. Meanwhile, if you self-publish with the major eBook distributors you’ll get 65-70%. Is the editing and cover design that publishers do worth giving them such a big slice of the pie? I didn’t think so, especially when they provide little or no marketing support. Read more

BookBaby announced Thursday that they now have now 3 new retail partners. Baker & Taylor, Gardners, and eBookPie have each agreed to add titles distributed via BookBaby to their catalogs.

For a self-pubbed author, this is a fairly important piece of news. BookBaby is now the most widely distributed self-pub service. They’ve even passed Smashwords in terms of the number of channels. Baker & Taylor is a name all should recognize. They’re a major book and media distributors in the US, with over 1.5 million eBook titles in their catalog.

Gardners is one of the larger retail distributors in the UK, and BookBaby’s 8 thousand current titles will be available to Gardners’ partners via the Gardners Hive, their web-retailing platform. BookBaby will be joining the Google eBookstore and other distributors carried by Gardners in their catalog of over 150,000 eBook titles.

eBookPie is an innovative eBookstore startup that is experimenting with selling eBooks by the chapter and section. They currently stock over 300,000 titles.

In another ode to self publishing, DIY author J.A. Konrath posted a blog this week where he revealed that he earned $100,000 grand on Amazon in the last three weeks.

Here is more from his post: “This is just for my self-pubbed Kindle titles. It doesn’t include Shaken and Stirred, which were published by Amazon’s imprints. It doesn’t include any of my legacy sales, print or ebook. It doesn’t include audiobook sales. It doesn’t include sales from other platforms.” He shared his sales report of sales from this year on his blog and we’ve included the infographic above.

Despite the fact that the holiday retail season is over, Konrath is still doing well this month. In fact, the author says he has is averaging “well over $3500 a day” for January.

The eBook distributor BookBaby announced yesterday that they’ve gone analog. In addition to distributing your eBook to iBooks, B&N, Amazon, and other eBookstores, BookBaby can also now provide short production runs for paper books.

The new service is intended to offer authors an option to print between 50 and 100 copies at a time. That’s not really enough to compete directly with POD, but it does give authors a chance to print a enough copies to have them on hand at conventions and book signings.

BookBaby set itself apart when it launched back in 2010. Rather than take a cut of your eBook sales, BookBaby distributes eBooks for an upfront change and a small annual fee. It was launched by the folks behind CDBaby, the CD production service.

BookBaby

It’s only been a couple weeks since the release of the German and French translations of the Style Guide, and today Mark Coker, the CEO of Smashwords, announced that the Smashwords Style Guide was now available in its 4th language. Thanks to the generous volunteer effort of Giuseppe Meligrana, authors now have a chance to make molto bene eBooks.

Joking aside, this translation is part of Smashwords efforts to expand to support more countries and more languages. Smashwords supplies ebooks to iBooks and Kobo (among several other eBookstores). iBooks recently expanded to include 26 more countries in Europe, including Italy. Kobo is also planning to launch in Italy in the near future.

With the growing market and the growing need for authors to self-publish, Smashwords plans to get ahead of the curve. They’re also going to release translations in more languages, and they have translations are in process for Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and Bengali.

Earlier this week, Penguin announced that its social networking site for writers has added a self-publishing feature, but not everyone is recommending it.

Best selling self-published author J.A. Konrath has written a blog post warning new writers who are considering self-publishing to consider other routes. In the post, he warns writers about Book Country’s fees for formatting eBooks and the cost for uploading these eBooks to retail stores.

He writes: “Why would you pay Penguin to upload your titles? That’s the easiest part of the self-publishing process. But wait, there’s more. Penguin also keeps 30% of your royalties. So not only do you pay them, you also keep paying them.”

In the post he advises young writers of less expensive or flat out free ways to get your eBook formatted and submitted to eBook retailers. Konrath punctuates his point with dollars and cents. He goes on: “These people charge a flat fee and you keep all of your rights. Which means that when you upload to Amazon.com and sell an ebook for $2.99, you keep $2.05, not the $1.47 Book Country gives you. And trust me. That adds up.
I’ve sold 500,000 ebooks. If I’d published with Book Country, they would have taken $290,000 in royalties from me. That’s just awful.”

The self-pub service Smashwords has just released a couple new editions of its guide for formatting ebooks.

The Smashwords Style Guide is primarily focused on prepping an eBook for Smashwords, but it also contains a number of useful tips on general eBook formatting. It’s well worth a read for the beginning eBook maker.

The original English language guide has been downloaded over 130 thousand times by Smashwords’ more than 85 thousand authors. The new editions of the style guide were translated by volunteer writers, and Guide des Styles Smashwords and Der Smashwords Formatierungleitfaden are now available for free download at Smashwords. They will also soon be available at Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, and Amazon. I’m also told that translations for Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Bengali, and Portuguese are in the works.

Mark Coker, founder and CEO of the Smashwords self-pub service, announced earlier this week that Smashwords would soon offer authors a new submission option.

Smashwords is well known for Meatgrinder, its automated conversion platform. Meatgrinder is the reason why Smashwords can sell ebooks in many formats, including everyhting from HTML, RTF, and DOC to Epub and Kindle.

But one problem with Meatgrinder is that it doesn’t offer  output that satisfies ebook design pros, many of whom think that (compared to making an eBook from scratch) it’s not easy to control the quality of the output. A lot of the pickier eBook creators (like myself) don’t like it for just that reason.

Starting in 2012, Smashwords is going to allow everyone to submit other eBook files instead of the DOC file that is used as the source for Meatgrinder. This new service will be called Smashwords Direct, and it means that an author can make a beautiful Epub and offer that as the preferred format.

I got an email yesterday from Miral Sattar, the developer behind BiblioCrunch. She’s taking her new self-pub platform out of stealth mode and into public beta.

BiblioCrunch is similar to Feedbooks, with a few elements of GoodReads thrown in.

The main purpose of the site is to help authors create eBooks, but it is also intended to help share them. You can sell your eBook via the BiblioCrunch eBookstore, yes, but you can just as easily give them away. the site is designed to help you share your work via social networks like Twitter, Facebook, etc.

There’s one key way that BiblioCrunch beats Feedbooks, Smashwords, and most other self-pub platforms; it offers more than just converting your source files into eBooks. You can also use BiblioCrunch to connect with cover designers, book editors, and you can even find some publishers keeping an eye on the site. Who knows, they might be interested in signing a new author.

BiblioCrunch