Articles tagged "content"

Turning Your Blog Into Your eBook

One of the most frustrating truths of running a website is the ascendancy of new content. No matter how you lay out your website, more often than not, new content will take center stage, relegating older content to the recesses of your website, only reappearing when someone happens upon it through an internet search. It’s sad to see such good material get buried, and is clearly a limitation of the blog format.

But the blog isn’t the end of content, by any means. To get more mileage out of their content, bloggers have begun turning their webpages into eBooks. By turning old content into new profit, they also give some pieces that might deserve another look the chance to get one. This tactic helps bloggers advance their brand and provide offline consumption of their writing. Not only that, but bloggers already have access to a targeted audience (their site visitors) which makes publishing an eBook that much more viable. Besides the ever-present Tumblr-books (think cats doing funny things), some successful books have started out as blogs, including the basis for the film Julie & Julia.

EBooks also give a website the chance to showcase work around a specific theme or topic. If you run a cooking website, it might make sense to publish an eBook around Halloween that presents recipes for candy or other sweets. Or if you run a political website, an eBook that comes out highlighting your best writing about the upcoming election might also be a smart idea.

EBooks push the pause button on the lighting fast internet, and allow for reading to be more reflective and not reactive. Revisiting pieces before publishing them in an eBook, with updates of course, compels readers to get the eBook, and not just find the pieces on the blog itself. An eBook can also be a better way to engage contributors to the blog, who will see their writing published across multiple mediums, instead of flaming out quickly on the front page.

Turning a blog into an eBook gives old material new life, helps disseminate your content farther, and gives it an even better chance of earning money. What does a blogger have to lose?

Ready to start you own eBook?

Lulu eBooks Just Got Even Better

Tables and columns have been around for so long that we don’t give them much thought – even though our daily lives often rely on them.  One supports our dinner plates, silverware, fruit bowls, lamps, and books while the other literally supports the roof over our heads.  In recognition of all that tables and columns have contributed to civilization, we are returning the favor by supporting their use in document-to-EPUB conversions.

What are the benefits? 

For authors, uploaded Word documents that include tables and columns will now pass conversion.  This is especially good news for educators publishing text books, developers publishing tech manuals, or businesses publishing data-heavy intellectual property – all of which make excellent design use of tables and columns.

For consumers, simply clicking on the table image in an eBook will provide access to the original, raw table data.  This allows readers to interact with the data in various ways such as accessing embedded links or copy and pasting information directly from the table.

The really big news is that Lulu is currently the only platform providing this type of document support – all absolutely free.  Compare this with other services that can cost upwards of $400 per conversion.

What’s Next? 

We’re always looking for ways to make our great self-publishing tools even better and more accessible to everyone.  We love hearing your feedback, and work continues to provide support for all the items that matter to our authors and our readers.  Check back for more Lulu news in the coming weeks.

What is Metadata?: How to Save Yourself Some eBook Distribution Headaches

As eBook sales continue to rise, Lulu wants to be sure you have access to all the latest and greatest tools and resources to help you sell more books in this exciting new market. In order to reach the millions of customers who own e-Reading devices, it is important to stay up to speed on best practices for making an electronic book quickly and easily.

One term you’re likely to come across when publishing your eBook is “metadata.” It also happens to be one of the main causes eBooks get bounced back from distribution.  In many cases, a quick revision of your eBook’s metadata is all it takes to push your content out onto digital shelves and increases your work’s marketability.

Simply put, metadata is the who, what, when, and where of your eBook.  Items such as your title, author name, volume number, etc. are all types of metadata and are what most retailers use to appropriately list and categorize your content.  When your eBook is listed on an online store, customers will see an image of your cover, which they can click on for more information about your work and to access the actual content of your work.  Many retailers treat the cover image and the actual eBook’s content as two separate pieces and it is vital that the metadata for both match (including upper and lower case letters) so your customers are linked to the correct book interior.

For example, lets say your book title is The Greatest Book Ever: A Tale of Suspense and Intrigue by Samantha Thomas. If the metadata for your cover is only listed as The Greatest Book Ever, by Sam Thomas, without the subtitle and a different author name, then the retailers can’t be sure if it’s the same work.  With the thousands of new eBooks being submitted everyday, it becomes too difficult to try to match the cover to the content.

Luckily, on Lulu it is pretty simple to ensure all your metadata matches. When you start a new project and name it, whatever you enter into the title and author fields will autofill the empty fields in the cover step. Whenever a colon is used in the project title, the system automatically treats any text after it as a subtitle. Once you get to the cover step, you can still edit your title, author name, etc. just be sure if you do make changes, you also go back and change the project information you started with too. For authors uploading a one-piece cover, again, just be sure all the text matches the project information you enter.

Be sure to check out our knowledge base for more eBook metadata tips to help you reach more readers in more markets all over the globe.

 

The Telepathy Standard

Once upon a time, there was a clear distinction between author and publisher.  Despite everyone’s knowledge and expertise, not everyone had access to the tools and resources necessary to make content public. Publishing was a closed system. Now, thanks to the Internet and digital text, publishing is open and more and more opportunities are becoming available to creators, businesses, developers and publishers alike – everyday.

Today we live in a world where it’s possible for someone to share their ideas instantaneously across multiple devices and platforms – electronically or in print.

But what comes next?

Lulu Founder and CEO Bob Young shares his thoughts on that question in the The Telepathy Standard below as he highlights why telepathy is the gold standard by which authors transfer content to their readers and how we are getting closer to that standard everyday with advances in technology.

UA-30214-1
http://www.lulu.com/blog/tag/content/
www.lulu.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-36
38704
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:JAASOQ7TNX4IUQVEX5DYSIOWGOXYYNL2
<urn:uuid:9856d882-67df-4968-a58e-95a27c8a87bc>
2016-08-26T17:58:40Z
216.27.62.241
sha1:XGQLDTMAPW42HQUAJ6IAE5WRGITDWHPQ
<urn:uuid:38f1d676-134d-4881-a452-1dbe7d490985>
http://www.lulu.com/blog/tag/content/
length
response
<urn:uuid:b2cfe6d7-063d-4e3f-b2a9-4b7a0250cf29>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-153-172-175.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-36
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for August 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf