E-books Are Not That Easy

http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2012/01/e-book-publishi.php

by DanielBMarkham • 15 years ago

106 82 15 years ago

happywolf• 15 years ago

Usually market research is done before a product is being made to decide what the target market is and product features needed. Not sure why the author is doing it the other way round.

jeremymcanally• 15 years ago

If you spend "a couple thousand" on your eBook, you got screwed somewhere. Hosting isn't expensive, domain registrations aren't expensive, format conversion can be handled by you, editing can be crowdsourced (usually), the cover design can be had for cheap-ish (or learn to use Gimp yourself), and so on.

Having written 3 of my own eBooks now and been involved with a few others, I can't fathom what you'd spend that much money on.

bloggergirl3• 15 years ago

I agree that it shouldn't be expensive.

My hubby and I did the first 4 CopyHackers ebooks for under $1000, and I'm totally sure anyone could do it for less. We paid:

$700 for book cover designs on 99designs.com. $10 for the domain. $89 for a bunch of WordPress themes that ended up not meeting our needs. $29 for the WooTheme that did meet our needs.

I had a PDF-converter already, so I just launched with PDF. And I didn't do a mobi version until well after the concept proved itself and I could pay for it with the income from the ebooks.

As for marketing, hey, HN is free! So's Twitter. And MailChimp has a free option, too.

Hope it works out for you!!!

peterarmstrong5• 15 years ago

What program did you write the books in, and would Markdown have worked for you as a writing option?

I'm asking since I'm doing customer development for my startup Leanpub, and we're trying to solve this exact problem. As an author, you shouldn't need to pay for PDF, MOBI or EPUB conversion, a storefront, blog theme, etc. You should only need to write the words -- and do your promotion on Twitter, of course.

My cofounder Scott posted above in this thread. Please feel free to email either of us if you have any questions; I'm peter@leanpub.com.

bennesvig4• 15 years ago

The CopyHackers books are amazing, both content and design. Just curious, how did promoting your book through AppSumo work out? Or how did it compare to the initial launch on HN?

keeptrying• 15 years ago

I think you guys had a distinct advantage as you guys are copy-writers in the first place and you have someone to edit it for you.

DanBC3• 15 years ago

I wish people talking about their products on HN would include some kind of link to those products in their profiles.

Please - it's acceptable to do so. It is polite to do so.

Avshalom2• 15 years ago

It's hard to tell what all he's including but: art adds up fast; chuck in a professional editor, layout if you don't know how to do it yourself, web design if you don't know how to do it, advertising.

A couple grand isn't any where near the "screwed" mark.

spatten7• 15 years ago

Sounds like a lot of the pain points that Peter Armstrong and I ran into when writing our books, and that we're trying to solve on Leanpub (http://leanpub.com).

It's free to sign up, you write your book in Markdown and we convert it into PDF, epub and mobi for you. We pay you 90% - $0.50 for sales on our site.

You can put it on the iBookstore and Kindle store yourself (or be patient for a few weeks and we'll do that and provide an ISBN for you as well...).

If you've already written your book in HTML, we can convert it to Markdown for you automatically -- throw your HTML files into a Dropbox folder and click a button on Leanpub.

As for technical editors, our approach is to publish early (before you're done the book, preferably before you've written 100 pages) and have your readers function as development editors.

It's not a complete solution (yet), but I think we would have saved you tons of pain.

Drop me a line (scott@leanpub.com) if you have any questions.

chubs• 15 years ago

I just had a look at leanpub for a friend whos about to start writing a book, it looks fantastic! I love the idea of writing markdown files into a dropbox folder, that sounds like a workflow made in heaven to me.

Samuel_Michon4• 15 years ago

You're confusing books with manuscripts. Please don't call these things you sell 'books'.

"A manuscript is not a book. The author's job is to write the manuscript. The publisher's job is to turn a series of manuscripts originating from different suppliers into consistently produced books, mass-produce them, and sell them into distribution channels.

[...]

While it's true that the author is the one with the creative input, they only do about half the work. And the other half of the job is not optional. The reason publishers exist is to provide for division of labour; if I did the other 50% to bring my rough manuscripts up to published-book-quality, I'd only be able to write half as many novels."

As per Charlie Stross, accomplished fiction writer: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-h...

_delirium• 15 years ago

There are definite value-adds by publishers, but it varies hugely by author, publisher, and genre. I can certainly see it for novelists, but a lot of technical-book publishers, especially the lower-tier ones, do very minimal editing of manuscripts, and are as likely as not to screw something up when they do (they rarely have subject-matter experts on staff). Academic book publishers also vary hugely, both in how involved they are, and in how good their editing is.

JoshTriplett3• 15 years ago

Such a distinction might exist in the traditional publishing world (the one with a sign "deposit manuscripts here" right above the trash can), but no such distinction exists in an all-electronic medium. Authors produce books; editors, illustrators, graphic designers, and others might provide help that improves the quality of the book, but they don't magically imbue it with a "book" status that it didn't already have.

peterarmstrong5• 15 years ago

"A rose by any other name..."

I'm the author of 2 traditionally-published books. ISBNs, dead trees, the works.

The first one (Flexible Rails) was something I self-published on Lulu as I wrote it. It started at about 200 pages and ended up over 500 pages before I did a deal with a traditional publisher.

At what point was it a book? My publisher approached me about publishing my book, not my manuscript (or rose). People all over the world bought my book when it was just a PDF. It made my mortgage payments for a while. In fact about 70% of my profit over my book's lifetime was from PDF sales.

As its author, I considered it a book when I first published it. My readers did too. Publishers like O'Reilly, the Prags and Manning probably consider their beta / early access books to be books.

Finally (since I'm typing on a phone), ebooks are to physical books like web apps are to shrinkwrapped software: you can do way more releases. At what point is a release real? Our answer is it is when you have paying customers. That is a commitment to your readers, and it helps you write and keeps you motivated.

So, to sum up the ramble: in 5 years almost all books will be ebooks, most will have multiple releases (including before being "finished"), and this author's opinion will be quaint.

jeffreymcmanus2• 15 years ago

Johannes Gutenberg would beg to differ. A publisher is not a requirement for a book any more than a record company is a requirement for a song.

halostatue4• 15 years ago

I'm sending you a note via email, but…how close to print-ready are the PDFs that are generated? My wife has been working on a novel (and 90%) of a sequel that we're getting ready to self-publish through Lulu and KDP and I'm tired from the formatting hoops.

We're using Ulysses (similar to Scrivener) and exporting to Word and importing to Pages (because the epub export was somewhat disappointing compared to the Pages epub export, and Pages layout tools are more powerful than Word's) because we need both epub and 6"x9" (US trade) print-ready PDF. She's got a cover and a back cover. She wants to have both ebook and hardcopy, and you guys don't offer hardcopy.

I don't have the time to write the software I would need to prepare this stuff myself—and I don't know that I want to learn all the standards that I'd need for it, either. If your PDFs are print-ready or I can somehow specify the size so that it can be print-ready, I'd happily pay to convert her novel—because this is just one of four books that we're going to have to do in the next few months.

(Shameless promotion for my wife: If anyone is interested in a late 70s rock and roll novel set in Canada and the UK, let me know—an email is in my profile. I'll send a note out when it's available, regardless of the process we use to produce it.)

dangoor• 15 years ago

FWIW, I recently wrote a novel in Scrivener and with very little tweaking it did a nice job converting for print and ebooks (and it allows a fair bit of tweaking). All depends on your needs, of course, but I was pleasantly surprised at the output I could get directly from Scrivener (which I really like for its organization and writing capabilities)

spatten7• 15 years ago

The short answer is that they're print ready as-is. Eric Ries printed a Leanpub book of his first year's worth of blog posts (we sold them at the first Startup Lessons Learned conference). They looked pretty good.

The slightly longer answer is that we are working on some features for a more print-ready PDF. Right now our PDFs are optimized for on-screen reading. Sone small changes such as gutters and page numbers that alternate sides will make a nicer looking print book.

alexchamberlain2• 15 years ago

Is there any DRM on the mobi files? Will there be when you have connection to Amazon?

spatten7• 15 years ago

No, there is not and we don't plan on adding any when we submit them to Amazon.

Here's Peter's/our take on DRM: http://www.peterarmstrong.com/?p=257 (this is slightly out of date, since Peter only talks about PDFs in the post).

davidw4• 15 years ago

How do you upload the mobi files to the Kindle store?

spatten7• 15 years ago

If you want to do it yourself, it's a somewhat involved process where you get an account with Amazon, provide a US tax id (annoying for those of us out of the US, but we got ours in less than a week) and then upload the mobi file through a web interface.

When we get the feature completed on Leanpub, it will involve you filling out a form (we need to know a few things like the description and what categories you would like your book listed under) and clicking on a button on Leanpub. We'll do the rest.

We'll charge a one-time fee for the service, and you'll get an ISBN as part of the deal, but you will get 100% of the money from Amazon or Apple -- we won't take a cut of the sales.

bennesvig4• 15 years ago

Anyone who says it's easy either hasn't written a book or they're referring to getting the finished product into the Kindle store.

Everything else (writing/editing/marketing) takes serious effort that most people aren't willing to do.

It's almost like learning an instrument. Anyone can do it and everyone wants to, but it's only a small percentage of people who will actually commit to it.

Avshalom2• 15 years ago

More specifically self publishing basically means that instead of writing you're running a small business. Which means you're engaged in a massive time suck that is distracting you from doing what you're actually passionate about.

JohnsonB• 15 years ago

Amazon only pays $17 out of $50, since when? I thought the common knowledge was Amazon pays 70% the full retail price to the authors of e-books.

bennesvig4• 15 years ago

I think royalties drop back down once the price hits above a ceiling price. The floor for 70% is $2.99. Not sure at what point it drops back down to 35%.

skottk• 15 years ago

It drops back down to 35% at $9.99. Here's the pricing table from the Kindle Direct site: https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A301WJ6X...

halostatue4• 15 years ago

$17/$50 is roughly the 35% royalty rate. KDP offers both a 35% and a 70% (less delivery at about $0.15/mb in rounded kb increments) royalty rate[1]; however, the 70% royalty rate is only available in about 14 countries and you fall back to the 35% royalty rate elsewise.

[1] https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26O...

[2] https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A30F3VI2...

cstross2• 15 years ago

You have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get 70% out of of Amazon. In particular, you give up all pricing control -- not only do you have to agree to a ceiling and floor price, but you have to agree not to sell for a lower or higher price elsewhere, and to allow Amazon to change their selling price at will. Which means if AMZN decide your book would make a really cool free promotional item, they can give away some tens of thousands of copies to draw customers in and pay you bupkis. Your book gets to be a loss-leader, and you're the loser.

waterside81• 15 years ago

Might be different in the US, but in Canada, ISBN numbers are free. We have a different ISBN for each of our products (hard cover, soft cover, ebook version, plus english, spanish & french versions) and they were all free.

However the rest of the list really paints an accurate picture of what selling an ebook and trying to get some market penetration is all about.

rst• 15 years ago

U.S. based pricing is here: https://www.myidentifiers.com/isbn/main

And it's truly ridiculous. A single ISBN is $125. In lots of 1,000, they're a dollar apiece. I can't think of any principled way to justify this, other than as a way of sticking it to would-be self publishers and very small presses just because they can.

JoshTriplett3• 15 years ago

I can think of quite a few straightforward ways to justify pricing like that, if you set pricing based on the involvement of a human in the processing of applications. Under such circumstances, it requires about as much work for the human whether you order 1 or 1000.

Imagine ordering a paperclip: how much do you expect it to cost to order one paperclip, versus 1000 paperclips?

Similarly, it requires about as much work for a business to issue a check for $10 as for $10,000, hence why many businesses say it costs them much more in accounting costs to issue a small check than the actual value of the check.

The pricing for ISBNs makes zero sense given modern technology, where no human should ever need to get involved in the process. However, that assumes some degree of sense involved in the process...

notatoad• 15 years ago

being that the IS in ISBN means International Standard, how can they be free in one part of the world and cost in another? can't an american author just get an ISBN from canada?

onemoreact• 15 years ago

If those where the only options that would be one thing but 10 ISBNs for $250.00 does not seem that bad for a self published author.

If you plan to publish a version in hard cover, soft cover, ePub, PDF, with or without illustrations, you will need more than one ISBN for each book title.

wiradikusuma• 15 years ago

Very new in this book publishing thing. What software do you use? Word/Pages? Do you do the layout in that program too along while writing?

Samuel_Michon4• 15 years ago

Most manuscripts are written in a word processor like Word or Pages, without any formatting. 12 pt Courier at 1,5 line height. I like it when writers send in their work in Adobe InCopy format, but few of them do.

http://www.adobe.com/products/incopy.html

johnohara• 15 years ago

It's a lot of work to do it well.

Strong cross-currents between e-books, online course content and the programming paradigm also seem to be e/merging.

nicw3• 15 years ago

There is definitely a misnomer that ebook creation is easy, especially as so many creation tools seem to output to .EPUB. The key isn't creating an EPUB, it's creating a good-looking EPUB.

This stuff is hard and I totally understand your pain - I'm the digital product manager over at Blurb.com (ebook!). We're primarily focused on fixed-layout epubs which ensures that the picture you laid next to the text will always stay in the same place. Reflowable epubs are technologically easier to create but the output can vary so much that it makes the author look sloppy at times. Not cool.

You can create a Blurb book and then convert it to an ebook for $1.99. We create them to Apple's strict epub standards so you can even submit it to their iBookstore. No DRM. :) (http://blurb.com)

Looking forward, I think we are going to see a larger focus on fixed-layout ebooks in the future as more tablets are created (Kindle Fire, iPad) and authors see the limitations of reflowable ebooks. I'm not knocking reflowable ebooks, but just writing a book in itself is a huge undertaking (congratulations!); trying to maintain formatting and a clean layout afterwards feels like you're being punished.

As to anyone else who has gone through ebook creation/conversion with Blurb (or elsewhere), feel free to send me a note or comment with your questions. It's rare that a HN thread directly relates to my work :)

- Nic.

ChuckMcM2• 15 years ago

I can totally understand why this would be hard once, I'm trying to understand how this would be hard in repetition.

Lets say you do the work of creating an EPUB formatter that works to your satisfaction, then is it like a pipeline where you can feed new material in and get books out repeatedly, or do you have to tweak it for each book?

nicw3• 15 years ago

It's a little bit of both. What really happens is that you're looking at a moving target in terms of both inputs and outputs. Think of this like the early browser wars, where even a standard chunk of HTML could look different.

You can create an EPUB formatter that works to your satisfaction, but you've only coded it to work with that set of books. The next set of books may have different layout requirements, like padding between the text and the images.

Secondly, the epub world is evolving, and the readers that display the epubs all have their own interpretation. EPUB is simply HTML/CSS inside a .zip. e-readers are essentially browsers wrapped in their own chrome.

So, the real trick is to automate as much of the formatting as possible, but then have easy tools for the Author to make the final tweaks.

rkudeshi• 15 years ago

Can you please explain the difference between reflowable and fixed-layout ePubs?

I thought the entire point of using ePub over PDF was so that it would be more adaptable to each reading device and/or reader (e.g. larger font sizes).

nicw3• 15 years ago

A really good explanation is here: http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-fixed-widt...

but the tl;dr is: Different needs for different book types. Think of a reflowable epub as a .TXT file and a fixed-layout epub as an HTML file w/CSS. Yes, a .TXT file is indeed reflowable and adaptable for a screen size.

But what if you're writing an instructional book? Or you've made an awesome photo book of your travels? This is where presentation is more important over reflowable. It's important that the images you are referring to in the text are on the same page. Fixed-layout doesn't have to mean exact pixel representations just as most modern-day web pages adapt to user screen size. You can still "reflow" your text into a fixed-layout epub, the creation tool helps make this easy.

At the end of the day, the screen ratio of tablets is fairly similar, and epubs are just HTML + CSS. A fixed-layout epub gives the author the choice of control - they don't have to specify rigid container widths just as much as they don't have to specify a font.

levifig• 15 years ago

So, "writing and publishing a book isn't easy so I'm charging you $50 for an e-book so I don't have to give up the work and percentage to a publisher that would make it available to you for $20".

I don't stand by publishers but this seems to be the other extreme. The consumer loses in both, IMO…

mharrison2• 15 years ago

I originally wrote my ebook as preparation for a 3 hour long conference tutorial. I had given the tutorial previously and thought that I would prepare by writing a book. Well, the book was published in November, the conference was in July. Yes it is hard work. Especially when you have a full time job and family.

Amazon really wants ebooks to be priced under $10. Hence the 70% margins from $3-$9.99. The Hockings, Lockes and Konraths who spit out a novel a month can go down in the $.99 - $2.99 35% margin and make it back by selling 50K copies a week. I don't know that any technical book sells that much in a month. Hmmm, maybe technical books aren't exciting enough and could be spiced up a bit.

WRT formatting, I ended up writing my own restructuredText to epub converter[0]. I format my html specifically so it will go through KindleGen and make acceptable mobi's. (I'm convinced that the author(s) of KindleGen outsourced every other line of that program, then blindly merged them together. I'm not sure how else it could generate such horrible markup... A first year intern should be able to do much better in a month of a summer). Then I also created a mobi/epub friendly css project that has had some contributions from professional ebook creators. [1]

It took a lot longer to write than I would have thought, I had an in-law that writes grants for a living give it an overview, and then got a professional Python editor to give it a wonderful overhaul.

I did cover design myself with Inkscape. It's OK, better than a lot of covers, but not stellar.

As for distribution, e-junkie has a horrible interface (for admins) but does the job for self-distribution. Amazon has about 60+% of the US market, so even though mobi sucks, I put all my focus on making it look great on the Kindle. (In fact I'm in the middle of another book on mobi-friendly epubs) Getting published on KDP is easy, no ISBN required. BN has another 20% of the US market, pubit also easy, no ISBN required. Apple is a pain, and from my research most ipad users buy content from Amazon... Smashwords is fine for novel writers but requires writing in Word (at least until mid 2012), so I just can't justify spend time tweaking Word documents, for a book on Python where it is imperative that spacing and whitespace are correct, for a small slice of the pie. If Smashwords accepted by epub or mobi, I'd put it up there yesterday.

I'm horrible at marketing. Getting reviews and feedback is longtail behavior. Send out 40 copies to people who say they'll give feedback and maybe one or two will respond. (Maybe my peer group is bad) I need to spend more time prettying up the website and on marketing, but I feel good about my book and the reception it has gotten.

Yep it is hard work, but for some reason I'm in the middle of writing two more books.

0 - https://github.com/mattharrison/rst2epub2 1 - https://github.com/mattharrison/epub-css-starter-kit

emeraldd• 15 years ago

Have you looked at sphinx? I've used it to generate epub format files with some success.

mharrison2• 15 years ago

Yeah, being a docutils contributer and a creator of another rst2X tool, I just wanted my own bikeshed. There are some compelling features of Sphinx. I'd love to see how their epubs fare against kindlegen....

asdf333• 15 years ago

There are companies like Hyperink www.hyperink.com who will partner with experts and help them publish (and write) the book in return for a revenue split. I think its a great place for people who have some expertise to contribute, but don't necessarily want to deal w/ all the hassles of self-publishing and promoting.

cstross2• 15 years ago

That is a weirdly accurate description of how Traditional Publishing works.

Believe it or not, a typical trad publisher's profit after handling production and distribution overheads for a typical midlist book is roughly the same as the author's. Because publishing books is not, in fact, terribly profitable, because with vanishingly few exceptions most books have on the order of a few thousands to tens of thousands of consumers. (Traditionally the way publishers got large was to publish lots of stuff, and be prepared to follow through on the one in a hundred or one in a thousand titles that broke big.)

shanmoorthy• 15 years ago

I think of an eBook in the same vein as a web app. While anyone can cobble together a basic website using a WYSIWYG editor, making a good eBook that gives the reader a great experience is like building a fully featured, cross browser compatible, elegantly deprecating website (and all the rest of the best practices and QA that goes with it).

There's a massive disparity in people's minds about the difficulty involved in crafting a great website, and crafting a great eBook... when they're essentially similar in composition and complexity.

pace• 15 years ago

Who said that e-books would be easy?

callmeed• 15 years ago

I have an open source Rails app for selling ebook a with Stripe https://github.com/2tablespoons/thylacine

davidw4• 15 years ago

Nope, they're not. Now think about how hard a lot of this stuff is for someone who's not even that great with Word.

http://www.liberwriter.com/testimonials

These are real quotes, and are just a selection of many. Making something hard easy for 'regular people' is a good business. I don't think it's actually that big a niche, and probably doesn't scale up hugely, because there is a human component involved, but so far I'm enjoying myself a lot.

newandimproved• 15 years ago

Zero to Superhero: http://zerotosuperhero.com took me four and a half years to research, write then format and self-publish, so I know how much work it can be.

Then again, my second book Economtricks: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/economtricks/6123536 took only a year and a half, and every aspect of it went smoothly.

So maybe there's something to be said about having gone through the process once, it gets easier.

E-books Are Not That Easy

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