Attention Indie Authors - Apple wants your books

Apple is now allowing Indie Authors to submit their books (in EPUB format) to the iBooks store. They're offering the same deal to authors as they do to app developers - Apple takes a 30% cut and the author gets the rest. That's a pretty sweet deal.

There are some criteria that need to be met before a book will be accepted (needs to be valid EPUB, you need to have an ISBN, etc), but I think that this is great news for Indie Authors.

Here's a link to start the application process:

http://itunes.com/sellyourbooks

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Publishing on a shoestring budget

For the longest time, there were only two paths to publication.

The first was the so-called "traditional" route, in which an author spent months or years searching for an agent, who then spent months or years shopping the book around to various publishers, in the hope that one of them would purchase it and publish it after several more months or years.

For those that did not want to wait that long, there was the self-publishing option. However, this option was an expensive one, and the upfront expense was entirely the author's responsibility. Most authors could not afford such an endeavor, and so they put their dreams of publication on hold.

Thankfully, the past few years have brought around a revolution in the publishing industry. The Internet, eBooks, and the rise of print-on-demand publishers have helped to remove the financial barrier to self-publication.

Lack of money is no longer a barrier to publication. To be published nowadays, one merely needs to invest the time.

Here are some tips for publishing on a shoestring budget. These tips assume that you have already done the hardest part of the entire process - you've finished writing your book (perhaps using something like My Writing Nook?) and are ready to share it with the world.

Layout, Formatting & Cover Design

The layout and formatting of your book depends on how you plan to publish it. If you are planning to use a print-on-demand company, you'll need to layout your manuscript in a format suitable for publishing. Thankfully, these companies make the process as easy as possible. For example, Lulu provides a template for designing your cover as well as a Word document template with the margins and spacing already configured. CreateSpace offers their layout guidelines here.

If you don't have Word or another word processing program that allows you to format your document, I'd suggest checking out Google Docs. You can upload your manuscript, format it appropriately, and even export it as a PDF document file.

The saying goes "Don't judge a book by its cover," but the fact of the matter is that most people do. An amateurish cover design may cause people to dismiss your book outright.

If you have an artistic flair, you can design your own cover using a free image editing program such as Paint.NET. If you prefer an online option, check out Pixlr.com.

If art isn't your thing, you can visit sites like 99 designs or crowdSPRING to crowdsource the design of your cover. These sites won't get you a cover design for free, but they allow you to control the entire process, and really provide a great bang for your buck.

Publishing

Publishing a book requires very little upfront money. There are several different options for publishing your book.

You could choose to publish your book via a blog. Many authors have started to publish their novels online as webserials. If you choose to this route, there are several blog platforms to choose from. Blogger is the platform run by Google, is easy to use, and has the best integration with Google's other services, such as AdSense, Analytics, and AdWords. WordPress is another strong option. If you'd like to host your blog on your own site, WP is probably the best way to go.

If you'd like to publish real, physical books, then print-on-demand publishing is the way to go. PoD publishers will store your book in digital form until someone purchases it, at which point they will print a physical copy of the book and send it to the customer. The author can set the price of the book, thus determining how much in royalties they earn per sale. Royalty rates from PoD publishers are much higher than those from traditional publishing companies, with the author earning a greater portion of the proceeds (as it should be!). PoD books can have their own ISBN, and can be listed on sites such as Amazon or B&N.

There are two big players in the PoD space these days. Lulu had been around a bit longer and is very author-friendly, providing downloadable sample templates for cover and book layout. CreateSpace is newer, but is owned by Amazon, arguably the biggest book-related company in the world.

If you're looking to publish eBooks, both Lulu and CreateSpace offer this option. If you're looking to target the Kindle, you can publish your eBook via a catalog like Smashwords, or you could get in the Kindle store by working with Amazon directly.

Once you've gotten your book published, it's time to let your audience know about it. If you don't already have an audience, you need to grow one. That means marketing, which calls to my mind well-dressed, fast-talking, brash young salespeople. People-people. If you're the type of person that thinks "I could never be in sales," I'll help to disabuse you of that notion in my next post.

In my next post, I'll tackle marketing yourself and your book on a shoestring budget. Stay tuned!

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Dawn of the Indie Writer

The dawn of the indie writer is nearly upon us. We're fast approaching the point in time when the stigma will be erased, and self-publishing will become not just an option but the norm for authors. As brick-and-mortar stores give way to the online marketplace, independent authors will finally be able to compete fairly with "traditionally published" authors. Instead of spending time struggling to get their books on the shelves, indie writers can concentrate on marketing their product on the shelf space of the Internet, side-by-side with traditionally-published titles.

Detractors have always said that self-publishing is for writers that aren't good enough to be published traditionally. But these days, what that really means is that a writer's work doesn't fit neatly into some corporate pigeonhole. As indie writers fill the voids and satisfy the audiences left behind by traditional publishers, self-publishing is becoming accepted as a legitimate alternative.

There's been a recent trend among traditional publishing houses of jettisoning their "midlist" authors - authors that are moderately successful but are not bestsellers. By eliminating these authors, the publishing house is taking choices away from the reader, narrowing the marketplace. They are doing this so that they can spend their diminishing marketing dollars on "sure-thing" titles, but ultimately I think they are speeding up their own demise.

Abandoned midlist authors will have no choice but to self-publish, and they will take their solid work, their years of experience, and their established audiences with them. These writers will lend more credibility to self-publishing, raise the quality bar, and help remove the stigma.

If the Internet has shown us anything, it's that there's an audience for just about anything. That said, those audiences still expect a certain level of quality. Books of poor quality will be quickly panned by readers. Solid writing and good storytelling will be recognized, and will find an audience. The difference is that these titles will no longer need some subjective seal of approval from a traditional publisher to reach those audiences.

For the first time in history, it will be the marketplace that determines the successes, not some suit in a large publishing house concerned primarily with the bottom line. Having more titles in the marketplace empowers readers. As indie publishing becomes more prevalent, and brick and mortar gives way to cyberspace, it will be the readers that get to choose which titles rise to the top and which sink to the bottom. On the Internet, the lines between self-published and traditionally-published authors will be blurred, and the reader will choose the writer not based on the publisher on the spine, but by the content inside the book.

The fuse is ready to be lit. Indie writing is set to explode into the public eye as the next major phase of publishing. All it will take is a single spark - some shining example of self-publishing that will capture a large enough audience to really showcase all that the self-publishing paradigm has to offer. The day that Oprah picks a self-published title for her book club. The day that the New York Times bestseller list contains a self-published title - these days are not too far off.

Will you be ready for it? Will you provide the spark?

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