Listen to Your Audience
What far too many self-published authors do is pay for a fancy cover and/or editing services for hundreds of dollars, put their finely polished e-book on the market, and inevitably get disappointed...
View ArticleComic Strip Artist Uses iBooks Author
When comic strip artist Rich Stevens wanted to put together a collection of his past comic strips, he decided to use iBooks Author. “I needed to work in iBooks Author,” Rich said, “because I wanted...
View ArticleClearing Up Confusion About Self-Publishing
Computerworld recently published an article about self-publishing. While informative, this article tends to make self-publishing far more complicated than it really has to be. The article makes a big...
View ArticleTracking the News
When you multiple news stories about the same topic, chances are good that particular topic is something important. If you’ve been scanning the financial news lately, you’ll see that multiple news...
View ArticleGetting Paid Twice
The four most popular e-book retailers are Amazon, Nook, Kobo, and iBookstore. Since Amazon has captured the majority of the e-book market, you could achieve success simply by focusing on Amazon...
View ArticleCreateSpace and Kindle
To create an e-book, you just need to start with a word processor document. However, before you start creating e-books, you might want to consider using CreateSpace first. CreateSpace is a...
View ArticleThe Curious Case of Print-On-Demand
I have to admit I’m a bit puzzled. Initially I was selling more e-books through Kindle and then people started asking me if a print version of my most popular e-books were available. That’s when I...
View ArticleNetflix for E-Books
Amazon recently announced their Amazon Unlimited program where a $9.99 monthly fee lets you read all the e-books you want, which has been dubbed “Netflix for e-books.” Two other services called Scribd...
View ArticleAmazon vs. Hachette
If you’re self-publishing any books, the first place you need to put your books is on Amazon. Amazon gets roughly 200+ million visitors compared to Nook’s much smaller 6 million visitors, so sheer...
View ArticleAmazon’s New E-Book Creation Tool
Back in 2012, Apple introduced iBooks Author, a free program to let people create interactive iBooks that could incorporate text, graphics, audio, video, and HTML5 interactive images. The goal was to...
View ArticleNook Press Print
In a desperate attempt to stay relevant, Nook has ventured outside its e-book market to offer a new service called Nook Press Print. Basically this is a print-on-demand service that lets you upload a...
View ArticleMicrosoft Dissolves Nook Partnership
Back in 2012, Microsoft and Barnes & Noble announced a partnership and where the software giant invested $300 million for a 17.6 percent equity stake in the company valued at $1.7 billion overall....
View ArticleThe Dying Nook
Back when Amazon introduced the Kindle, Barnes & Noble countered with the Nook tablet. In some ways, people believe the Nook is actually the slightly superior tablet but superior technology means...
View ArticleiBooks Gaining 1 Million Subscribers a Week
When Apple launched iBooks (their e-book reading program) along with iBookstore (their e-bookstore), they didn’t make much of a splash because iBooks only ran on iOS. Then Apple introduced iBook on OS...
View ArticleMaking Textbooks Interactive
It’s no surprise that colleges make huge amounts of money selling textbooks. Textbook publishers keep changing editions to keep students from relying on used textbooks, which publishers can’t profit...
View ArticleThree Cases for Self-Publishing
There’s a comprehensive essay about self-publishing called The 7k Report. This report tries to track the e-book and self-publishing markets and contains lots of information, but some of the most useful...
View ArticleIsraeli Law to Boost Book Sales Kills Them Instead
To give authors a living wage, Israel recently passed a law preventing book stores from discounting new books. The idea was to keep new book prices artificially high so authors could earn higher...
View ArticleThe Strategy of E-Book Pricing
With most e-book distributors like Amazon, Nook, and iBookstore, you get 65% – 70% of the profits if you price your e-book within a certain range such as 99 cents up to $9.99. At a higher price than...
View ArticleThe Book is Out of Its Cover
The Financial Times recently published an article about the future of books. The article initially focuses on Amazon’s latest decision to pay authors per page someone reads of their books in a book...
View ArticleWhat Killed Traditional Publishers
A long time ago in the good old days, publishers served two purposes. One, publishers offered editing services to turn rough manuscripts into polished books. Two, publishers offered a distribution...
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