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KinkyCalifornia -> Quickie Course on How to Self-publish a Book (3/29/2013 11:43:57 AM)
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Looking to self-publish a book? It's never been easier. Check out Amazon's createspace.com, (it's for hardcopy books, audio books, etc. but not ebooks). You can then easily transfer those hardcopy files you made for createspace.com, thanks to a link they provide, to Amazon's Kindle (ebooks). Take the hardcopy cover you made with createspace's cover creator, enlarge it at reshade.com (or somewhere else) and put in your Barnes and Noble www.pubit.com account for Barnes and Noble ebook self-publishing.
My experience though is that most of your sales are through Amazon.
Smashwords.com is a wholesaler but a pain in the butt, though still worth it. www.kobo.com is another distributor but pays only twice a year and I for one don't sell a lot through them, though I still suggest using them.
Everybody buys through Amazon including Apple's ibookstore.
Warning, don't just use your hardcopy createspace.com manuscript for your ebooks as there will be too many open spaces between pages, paragraphs, etc. Make a separate MS word copy of it with as few spaces between your paragraphs as reasonably possible. After you put your ebook up for sale, see what it looks like on it's webpage that B&N and Kindle offer it on. They each show the first 5-7%.
There is an art to making ebook manuscripts. It's even tougher to make epub files but there is one or more websites that will convert the files for not that much. (I've never used them.) Kobo automatically makes your MS word document into an epub file for free but there can still be problems if you gave them a bad manuscript to start out with.
Bookbaby.com charges you to do some or more of this stuff. I would avoid them. To pricey. Also if you have to make a professional cover (Amazon's cover creator in their createspace.com is self-service and free,) then it gets too expensive IMO. Also sometimes you can pay more than is optimal to get images for your cover. I usually use createspaces' cover creator's free images but very few are BDSM/sexually oriented, a real problem for me.
If you run into copyright free images that are 300 pixels or better (Amazon wants that) then I suggest keeping them for possible use down the road.
This has been a quickie lesson and I am still learning stuff. Good luck to all.
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