How to Self Publish - Part 5 - eBooks and Kindle

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Most of my discussion so far has been regarding paperback books. However, it's pretty simple to also offer eBooks, and a great way to increase your readership. One way is to use a converter like Calibre and convert your PDF to ePub, and offer it as a file on your own site. However, Lulu.com and Kindle Direct Publishing also offer ways of doing that, as do many of the other self publishing sites. CreateSpace makes it especially easy to offer an eBook of your work. At the end of your publishing process, they will ask if you want them to convert your existing work to Kindle. Then they send you over to Kindle Direct Publishing, where you can set your prices and territories. You have to wait about a day for review on those as well but it's not a big deal. There is no fee for that either. You can even offer a package where someone can get an ebook version of your book, either cheaply or for free, when they buy a print copy. When you say that you want to bring your book over to Kindle, I highly recommend taking a copy of your book and converting it to .doc. That makes a much better looking product and the Kindle software has an easier time converting. LibreOffice does that easily, it's just a matter of hitting "save as" and selecting ".doc" in the file dropdown. You will also be offered to join Kindle Select. I usually do this as it offers some great benefits. It lets you run promotions for your book at no cost to you, lets you take a bigger cut of the profits, and gives you more options. The only tradeoff is you are agreeing to only sell your eBook on Kindle while you are a member of Kindle Select, but it's a limited term in case you change your mind later. I've never regretted it. Another really cool thing about Kindle Select, is it makes your book free to people who have Amazon Prime. And you still get paid when they read it - you are paid a proportion of the profits, and it works out to be about a half a cent a page. It's great to be able to say to your buyers "check out my book for free if you already have the Kindle subscription." If you end up using CreateSpace, your paperback and Kindle versions will show up on the same listing and that makes it really easy for customers to pick what they want. The only other note about eBooks as opposed to print books, is the cover is a little different. You only need the front half of the cover. I generally go into Gimp, use rectangle select to isolate the part I want, hit "crop to image," save that new file, then boom. Done. Let me know if you still have questions, and I'll probably write another post answering them! I've collected all the material on self publishing on this page, where I'll add all new stuff as it is written.