Know-How Exchange : Other

It's relatively easy to publish an e-book, and Amazon has instructions on how to self-publish for Kindle. You can get the information here:

https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/signin

It used to be that you needed to use an Amazon-approved publisher at a cost of several hundred dollars, but the new popularity of Kindle has had them re-think that process. It's also different if you are starting with a hard-copy book and trying to make it electronic than if you are starting with an electronic version in the first place.

I have not tried this new approach, and I'd be interested to know how satisfied you are with it.

As you can imagine, the whole e-book thing has changed dramatically in the last 2-3 years, and my publishing experience predates that.

The big driver for the change in publishing (and e-publishing) is the explosive growth of Kindle and other electronic readers.

Before Kindle, the way you had to read an e-book was either on a computer (not so much fun if there are a lot of pages) or by printing it out on a local printer (and using a lot of paper and ink). Most folks voted to just buy the hardcopy book -- not terribly expensive, easier to read, tactile experience, cultural value for books, etc. (Books are pretty cheap, too, when you think about it.)

But Kindle changed that. Light weight, easy to read, portable, etc. So publishers who had previously shunned e-books (for good reason) are now tripping over each other to jump on the bandwagon. And consumers who have purchased e-readers are eager to make their investments payoff, so they're actually buying more books!

The one thing that has NOT changed in publishing is that people only buy books (or e-books) when they are promoted. People have to be aware of a title before they're going to buy. And the only person who can really promote a book is the author. This is true with hardcopy publishing (where traditional publishers are terrible marketers), and it's even more true with e-publishing.

And marketing books, like marketing everything else, costs money.

Net, be sure you have thought through your objective and your marketing plan/budget before you spend a lot of time and effort writing the book. The big cost is in the marketing, not in the development of the content.

Dear Juilet,

Hello and hope all's well in Scotland. Here's my humble two cents worth.

First up, here are a few resources that might help you create a PDF on the fly:

https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/save-as-pdf-HA010064992.aspx#_Toc29...

https://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

https://www.pdfforge.org/

https://apps.foxtab.com/pdfconverter/

Secondly, saving your file to an appropriate format for Amazon's Kindle might not be enough. You might want to look at saving your file as a .mobi format, which will allow Barnes and Noble Nook readers and iPad users to read your masterpiece.

Here's another list of resources:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18968

https://www.ehow.com/how_4494481_convert-ebooks-kindle-format.html

Other things to think about:

Mindset and market. What do you offer and what is your ideal buyer looking for? How are you placed to meet that buyer's exact need?

What phrases are your buyers searching for? Connect those phrases with a matched domain and you rise in the search engine rankings. Add a YouTube account with that exact phrase in its title and you gain more SEO ground.

Example: if your buyer is searching for "ways to find purple tree frogs in Galloway", you need to think about buying variations of the domain name

WaysToFindPurpleTreeFrogsInGalloway.com

... then, do podcasts and PDFs of the first, third, and fifth chapters, or parts of them, and use these as giveaways to help build your list. You can then send these people offers on your great buy.

There's more to this, but this ought to be enough to get you thinking. Lemme know if I can help in ay other way.

Gary Bloomer
The Direct Response Marketing Guy™
Princeton, NJ, USA