Getting Your Book Online

If you have any interest in publishing your own ebook, then may I direct you to ‘how to publish an ebook’ on C|Net. Not an imaginative name but an accurate one. It is largely thanks to this article that I managed to get Hiding out there. It is a great ‘how to’ and ‘who with’ article, and the author David Carnoy has updated it a few times, most recently in June 2012.

The article gives an overview of the various options you have, covering Amazon Kindle, Scribd, Lulu and several others. It gives hints and tips, contrasts and compares, and from what I can see is even handed. I have this permanently bookmarked and it is a constant reference.

With my book I chose to start off with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and I have to say it turned out to be easier than I thought. I downloaded a free ebook ‘Building Your Book for Kindle’ which was a big help. If you know how to format a Word document then you’ve nothing to fear. I enrolled in KDP Select for the first three months of publication as this provides significant perks. Once that period expired I decided to come out of it, so that I could then go with Smashwords. KDP Select has an exclusivity clause.

The benefit of Smashwords is that once you publish on their site, you can then have them distribute your masterpiece to most of the major ebook sellers, including Apple’s iBooks, Kobo, Barnes & Noble’s etc. When I first published Hiding and spread the word amongst my friends and family, there were a significant number of people who were asking if they could get it on their Nook or whatever. I decided to make my book as widely available as I could.

Smashwords has its own free guide to turning your manuscript into an ebook, called the Smashwords Style Guide. This is a bit more comprehensive than the Kindle equivalent, and at first looks a bit more intimidating. However I read through it once, and then used it to get my Word file into their required format and uploaded in less than two hours. You can now buy Hiding direct from Smashwords here.

The book passed review for their Premium Status, and so has been distributed to the other ebook sellers. Smashwords themselves have made it available in all the formats that I’m aware of, so it is possible for people to buy books for almost any device direct from them.

I am computer literate, and comfortable with word processing programmes, the internet etc. so will have found the process with KDP and Smashwords easier than some. However I am not an IT consultant or publishing magnate. If you’ve managed to write a book, and have mustered the required faith in it, then you’ve done the hard part. Getting the little blighter on line is easy.

Give it a go and let me know how you get on. Good luck.