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Authors Get New Avenue To Readers Through eBooks

As many authors locally will tell you, getting a book published is not an easy task.  New avenunes have opened up over the years such as 'Print-On-Demand' through services like iUniverse, Xlibris, Lulu, and others.  These fee-based services allow authors to submit their manuscript to the publisher which is then made available on-demand through multiple major booksellers.  These services make it very easy in terms of handling printing and the logistics of distribution, but they do not fully accomodate the barriers to actually getting the books onto shelves in physical stores.  The issue is that booksellers want to stock books in stores that provide them the opportunity to return stock to distributors that is in excess of their sales trends else they are faced with eventual markdown costs and 'margin hits'.  Authors tend to spend a great deal of time and expense working to get their books into stores.  Well, now there is a new avenue . . . ebooks. 

eBook sales are growing at explosive rates as a popular new book format.  eReaders that are affordable and easy to use are being scooped up by readers everywhere.  B&N's NookAmazon's Kindle, Apple's iPad, etc. are all showing up as reading devices in the hands of every generation.  Authors who make their book available as an ebook now have similar access to readers everywhere.  They are on the vitrual store shelf the same as major authors like Grisham, King, Patterson, etc.

So how does one get their book available as an ebook?  There are several different options:

  1. Already published (or going to publish with) with a Print-On-Demand Publisher - If this is you, many of these services are including the ebook format and distribution to ereaders in their fees. Simply check with your publishing service to see if your book is already available as an ebook, and if not find out what you need to do to make it available. 
  2. Self-Published - There are new free (or virtually free) services that you can publish straight to ebook such as Smashwords.com, and Barnes & Noble's PubIt (coming this summer).  Both services allow you to get your book available through Barnes & Noble huge ebook store and Smashwords.com also provides distribution to Amazon's Kindle book store.  These services typically allow you to set the price.  Since there is little cost in producing the book it allows authors to test out pricing.  For example, pricing your book at $1.99 might seem extremely low; but keep in mind . . . volume!  If you sell 2000 ebooks at $1.99 and you receive 70% to 80% of sales (Smashwords.com's distrbution), you're looking at making around $3,000 with little upfront cost (if any). 
  3. Make it an App! - This is a great option for authors of children's books which creates your book as an app available to iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android device users.  Basically you are bringing the book to life in interactive ways.  The difficult part with this is finding a developer and you'll need to work out the financial end with the developer.  A great example of this type of publishing is what Oceanhouse Media has done with Dr. Suess books as apps for Apple products like the iPad.

Now, the next part is . . . is how do I promote my book as an ebook and get people to buy it?  It's actually easier in many respects.  The first step is making sure everyone knows it's available as an ebook.  It should be a part of all your advertising (i.e. print ads, promo materials such as bookmarks, email campaigns, etc.) and link to where it can be purchased when possible (i.e. email campaigns, social networking sites like Facebook, etc.).  And the most important . . . look for the owners of ereaders and mention your book is available for $x.xx on their Nook, Kindle, Sony eReader, etc.  It's a great conversation starter and opportunity to sell a book.

What are your thoughts?

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diablo
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diablo 06/17/10 - 05:48 pm
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Nice Gateway

A great gateway for up and coming authors who would like to get their name out there. I'm excited to see what this could bring to the table for many of them. I consistently buy ebooks (mainly use booksonboard.com for my sources since they have a tremendous amount of titles on the website as well as audio books), so to be able to have more to choose from is outstanding. Can't wait!

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