Indie Writers & Social Media - Part 4

David Shaw © 2010

eBooks are Happening Now

[updated 20100720] Several events in the last six months have heralded the maturing of eBooks. Don’t get me wrong. I like print. As Isaac Asimov said years ago at a Folio magazine conference, if digital had come first, some one would invent print and we would all think it was amazing: portable, tactile, durable, high resolution, reflected not transmitted light, open standard, long lasting and so on.

I don’t like reading online. Transmitted light is tiring and the environment is not immersive like a magazine spread. Higher resolution shrinks the size of type. The new ultra-landscape form-factor of LCD screens is best for wide spreadsheets or multiple open windows, but not long documents. A thousand is the most words most people will tolerate reading on screen before they get twitchy.

But I’ve decided the technology is now good enough. Hot type, cold type, laser printing, multimedia – things move on. Here are my reasons.

• eBooks are outselling dead-tree hardcovers on Amazon

In the second quarter of 2010 Amazon sold 143 e-books for every 100 hardcover books, and the rate is accelerating. Say no more.

• ePub has become the de facto standard, displacing several others.

eBooks have been confusing until recently because there were numerous competing standards tied to proprietary readers. Even PDF, which requires Acrobat Reader, was considered to be an eBook format. PDF was designed originally as a tool for printing.

ePub was developed as an open standard and when Apple adopted it for the iPad and Amazon also adopted it, it became the de facto standard. ePub is compatible with hardware eBook readers like the iPad and Kindle and software readers like Calibre, FBReader and Stanza. Personally I use an ePub plug-in for the Firefox browser.

ePub doesn’t include DRM (digital rights management) but I don’t see that as a big issue. I’m not a fan of DRM and its inclusion in the proposed copyright act, but that’s another conversation.

• ePub books cost $0.00 to produce and store.

Well, close enough that it’s not worth counting the decimal places.

• ePub books are easy for indies to produce.

You can take a semester course at a college, or I can teach you how in less than a day. That way you can get to market this year instead of next.

• Like the iPhone before it, the iPad is a game changer.

Apple sold one million iPads in the first month and suddenly everyone was making a tablet device for eBooks. Here are some examples:

• Adam
• Archos
• Astak
• Cool-Er
• Entourage
• iPad
• Irex
• Kindle
• Kobo
• Nook
• Sony Reader

• Apple announced the iBook store and Google announced an eBook store.

The game is on. We have a decent open standard, a multitude of compatible hardware and software readers, and major distribution channels through Amazon, Apple and Google. The de facto price for an eBook is $9-12 so these channels cater to impulse buying and volume sales.

Time to jump in.

Our eBook Strategy

In Part 3 of this series for indie writers we outlined a social-media framework around a print-on-demand strategy. As shown in the below graphic, this uses a PDF format sent to a publishing service such as Lulu or one of the others listed in Part 3. Lulu takes care of listing the book with Amazon. Amazon sells the book for a reasonable fee.

You can readily produce the PDF yourself if your book is one colour, but be sure to get a specification from the service you plan to use. If you're ambitious you can use a desktop publishing program like the open-source Scribus. I used to use Microsoft Word with Acrobat Distiller but lately I've switched to OpenOffice and its built-in PDF converter.

If you want to include four colours, then I recommend that you take your document to a quick-print shop and have them preflight the PDF for you. Just remember that services like LuLu have a sweet spot in their business model that excludes 600-page full-colour books.

(That's why my book about trawlers was still-born. As an alternative I started to convert it to a free blog book, but then that got derailed when I decided to turn it into a social-media portal for boaters. That's coming soon I hope.)

In this Part 4 we continue to build on this print strategy by adding eBooks.

Other Professional Networks

While this series is mostly about using social media to promote your book by executing an engagement or communications plan, we shouldn't forget other professional networks as an ingredient in creating market buzz.

In Part 3 this was partly shown by mentioning speaking at events to promote your book. But it also includes sending review copies to the traditional media and bloggers, and press releases to various book networks. A full discussion of this is outside our scope here - just remember not to be blinded by the hype around social media, and to explore, use and test all promotional avenues.

Even if your strategy is to publish eBooks, it might be worth printing a few to send to reviewers and others. They might be more receptive to dead trees.

Do It Yourself

The nice thing about eBooks is that they are easy for an indie to produce. The ePub format is a bit technical but once you get your head around it, it's pretty simple. (Of course, I used to think the same about sex.) Just kidding.

eBook distribution is through our familiar friend Amazon and new channels like the Apple iBook store and Google's eBook store. Today eBooks can be read on desktop computers, laptops, eBook readers and smart phones.

In the graphic, we show a single text source feeding separate processes for PDF and ePub. This is again a bit techie but not that difficult. We'll explore this a bit more in Part 5.

Audio Books

Another digital book format is MP3. Audio books are a somewhat untapped market that is on the verge of kicking off. Folks everywhere are listening to pods on the go. And eBook readers like the Kindle and iBook for iPad have been updated to handle audio and video.

This deserves serious consideration. The best audio books are done like radio plays of old, with different voices for each character. This too segues into the next part of this series when we discuss collaboration.

Next Time

In the final and Part 5 of this series, we will look at ways of using social media as a collaboration tool for indie writers.