Additional Elements
Here are some additional elements you may wish to consider for your ebook. You may or may not wish to incorporate the following items to complete your ebook.
If you are going to consider publishing through a service (which we will discuss further down), you may want to base your choice to utilize any of these (copyright, ISBN, and bar code) based on whether or not they will provide any of them for you. So check with them before you invest in any of these.
Copyright
Technically, you could go get Copyright protection through the United States copyright office. This files an official copyright for your work to register it as your personal creation. However, you don’t need to. A work is copyrighted from the moment you put it down on paper (or in a computer document).
To protect yourself fully, especially if you are going to make your work available for public sale and download, you might wish to go through the process of filing for the copyright to make sure there is no dispute that the work you are selling is truly yours.
If you were to go through a traditional publisher, they would file the copyright for you, but it would remain your work. It makes sense to add this bit of legal protection to a work you intend to sell as yours.
ISBN Number and Bar Code
An International Standard Book Number (ISBN) number is a unique 13 digit code that identifies your book, differentiating it from all other books out there. A book sold through a publisher will always have one, as well as a bar code, which is the unique scan details that relate to one product and no other.
What is the benefit of having an ISBN number? The main one is that you can list your novel in Books in Print. Books in Print is a database that is used to order most any book. If you’ve ever gone to the library or bookstore and asked for the staff for a title they do not carry, chances are they turned to Books in Print.
You can order both of these on independent sites for varying prices. Like a copyright, neither is totally necessary, especially if you are planning to sell your ebook through your own website. However if you wish to sell your ebook on a market such as Amazon or another self-publishing service, you might wish to invest in one or both of these. If you want someone to be able to find your novel in Books in Print, you will have to have an ISBN number. For further reading, you can consult How to Get Your Book Added to Bowker’s Books in Print.
Note that CreateSpace assigns their own ISBN numbers if you choose to publish through them. Similarly, an ISBN you purchase elsewhere might not be valid for a book you publish through CreateSpace. In other words, the ISBN may be “nontransferable” if you move from publisher to publisher. You will want to do some careful investigating before purchasing an ISBN to make sure you know the “fine print”.
Bowker offers packages of all of the above services: editing, ISBN, and copyright for the self-publishing author. Which brings up an important point:
If you do all of this, ultimately selling your own work through your own efforts on your website, a self-publishing site such as Lulu, or through Amazon’s self-publishing program, you are self-published.
This means that you cannot later sell what are known as First Rights (in the USA, these are known as First North American Serial Rights) to another publisher. Those rights basically state that the publisher is getting a work that has not been published elsewhere. This is important to keep in mind. Even if you place your work for sale (or even for free) on your website, many publishers will consider it to already be “published”. This is true even if you don’t purchase an ISBN or a copyright, or even put your writing in ebook format. Just putting it on the web can be considered as “publishing” it, in the eyes of a publisher.
There are other rights you may be able to negotiate with a publisher, but First North American Serial Rights are commonly what publishers in the United States want, so proceed with caution.
In other words, if you decide to self-publish, decide to self-publish. If you really want to bring your work to the attention of a publishing house (or think you will want to later), don’t self-publish it now, not even by making it available for download on your website or by posting it chapter by chapter on your blog.
Putting it all together
By now, you should have the whole cover together on your Microsoft Word program.
You’ve arranged the design of the cover, adding the ISBN number and bar code, if you are utilizing these, as well as the design and layout.
All you have to do now it make it an actual “ebook”.
To do this, all you have to do is go to Save As:
A dropdown menu will appear, and you can select PDF. This saves your work in a Portable Document File. This format was popularized by Adobe, who sells Acrobat, another program you may choose to purchase in order to create PDFs. To save it through the actual Adobe Acrobat program, Go to Open file, select the document you created (which will be in Word or other format) and click “create PDF from file.”
You’re done! Your document is now a downloadable “ebook” you can share with the world.
You can even print and ship your own ebook as a physical book if you choose. You can set whatever price you want, and deliver them “print on demand”. Meaning, you pay to print it when -- and only when -- someone orders a physical copy of your book.
You can set up such a “print on demand” empire at sites like:
Book1One
The Book Patch
Lulu
Xlibris
Keep in mind that these outfits all have specifications regarding how they wish to receive your work prior to publication. Read and carefully follow their guidelines if you choose to utilize one of these services.
How to Develop Your Sales Funnel
Now that you can say you are an ebook author, you need a place to sell it. I highly recommend having a website on which to sell your work. In fact at the very least, I would recommend setting up a website with a blog. Here are some of the tasks you will want to consider in order to make your ebook a smashing success!
There are 4 basic parts to the process: Drive traffic to your website. Offer value. Collect visitor’s email addresses. Keep sending them quality content to increase the chance that they will buy your book.
Design your website
Your website is your first sales vehicle. It’s the place others go to find you. Post on website – You want a way for visitors to quickly and easily purchase your book.
To do this, you’ll need to do several things:
A word to the wise: Do not go through a free service for web hosting. Your goal should be to make your site as professional as possible, and free hosting just won’t cut it.
Another word of caution: Purchase your domain name separate of your hosting. You don’t want your domain name tied to your hosting account. That’s because you might decide to switch hosting later. You don’t want to be tied to one company because they own your domain.
You should also hold on to your domain name at all costs. If you register your name as a domain (recommended, as you could maintain a blog advertising not only your first book, but many more to come), you want to maintain it. The last thing you want is to see someone else “own” your name.
WordPress is free to use. However, you will need a domain name and web hosting with which to connect your WordPress site.
There are many guides to learning WordPress, including on their own site. Another good source for information is WordPress.org.
Once you have WordPress installed, you’ll want a theme that allows you to develop an effective sales funnel. Optimize Press is a great “sales” theme that I use a lot. One of the templates even has a space for an ebook image. Just “fill in the blanks” (more or less), upload the image, and you are done with the sales page of your site. You can make it your front page, or you can set up other pages that lead to or link to this page.
Optimize Press comes with complete instructions on how to use this powerful WordPress theme.
One good way to drive visitors to your site is to create a free offer or interesting content on your site. You can keep the content fresh by maintaining a blog (an online journal) of sorts. On your blog, be sure to mention your book and offer it for sale. WordPress was originally designed for blogging, so you should find it a good platform on which to start your own blog.
You may also wish to use Clickbank, which can be easier to use for several reasons: Clickbank charges a one-time fee to provide a platform to sell your product (unlike Paypal, which can incur ongoing monthly fees). Through ClickBank, you can also enlist others, affiliates, who will be willing to sell your new ebook for you, if you give them a percentage of your profits. As they will do marketing efforts on your behalf in exchange for these commissions, this can be well worth it.
You don’t want to just add people to your address book in Outlook or Gmail to maintain a mailing list. For many reasons, its best to go through a special service to do this. For one thing, people can complain that you’re sending them spam mail (even when they requested to be on the list) and your internet service provider can shut you down. Using an email marketing service like Aweber, Mail Chimp, or Get Response can help protect you from this. This may not completely stop you from getting spam complaints, but it can certainly help and save you from your own ISP penalizing you if you do.
I can’t stress it enough: If you are struggling with the technical details of setting up your website, adding a Paypal button, setting up a mailing list, or any other aspect of setting up an online presence, consider outsourcing to a freelance site. Let someone else set this up for you quickly, inexpensively, and hassle-free. You can also join Fiction Jackpot Revealed, where you can learn how to get step-by-step on these technical aspects of getting a web presence up and running.
How to Publish Through an E-Publishing House
You can do everything I’ve outlined above. It requires hard word, diligence, and persistence. However, maybe after reading all of this, you’ve decided that this is not what you want to do, and you would just rather go through an ebook publisher.
There are some benefits in doing so.
Some of these self-publishing outfits do cost some money, but if it suits your goals, it may be worth it.
There are plenty of places you could potentially choose to publish the ebook to, such as:
Amazon Independent Publishing
Lulu
Smashwords
Scribd
Outskirts Press
The prices and packages can vary greatly from one to the other, so please, do your research carefully. I do not have personal experience with any of these (except publishing free guides on Scribd), so it will be up to you determine which service will best suit your end goal.
One of the benefits of using this type of service is that there will be a built-in amount of publicity done for you to promote your book. These sites often help authors show up in search engines and receive lots of traffic, which can translate to more sales.
Obviously, there are other benefits in that they take the hassle out of the process. They offer (or give step-by-step how-to instructions) formatting, the book cover, and distribution.
Whether you publish your own ebook on your own website, or ultimately decide to go with an e-publisher, you will have to decide how to market your new ebook. Even e-publishers want to know that you will be actively engaged in trying to sell your own book.
How are you going to get word out about your new ebook? The plan does not have to be complicated, but putting it down on paper can help you develop goals and timelines for meeting those goals. Tasks like blog posting are ongoing and need to be maintained regularly (monthly, if not weekly).
Even if you do decide to use any of these services, maintaining your own website with your personal blog is still a good idea. It will give readers a slice of your personality and allow them to relate to you as a person. It also provides a way to get valuable reader feedback.
You might have heard it said before, but having a website does not guarantee that it will get any visitors.
Especially if you build your own website, it will be important to develop ways to get word out about your new ebook. It’s been said before, and it’s true, that just having a website does not guarantee visitors will come to it. You will need to do some other things to get the word out about the website itself, your ebook, and yourself as a writer. Here are just some ways to accomplish this:
Although this is the last chapter of this ebook, it is actually important information to keep in mind from day 1.
With your first book, unless you are planning to be a “one hit wonder,” you should be already thinking about your next. One thing you might consider is how to brand yourself as an author. If a person buys your ebook and likes it, chances are, they might seek out your next. To accomplish this, be thinking of your brand, your unique way to make yourself stand out.
Here are some ways to do this:
Even if you write under a pseudonym, there are ways to avail yourself through these channels and still be authentic. What can you reveal about yourself that does not reveal too much?
Activity
Decide whether you would like to sell your book through your own website, or through an online publishing service.
Use this to research whether you wish to pursue purchase of a copyright, ISBN, and bar code.
Develop your marketing plan.