9 ms·

E-books Are Not That Easy

106 points by DanielBMarkham 15y ago

happywolf 15y ago
Usually market research is done before a product is being made to decide what the target market is and product features needed. Not sure why the author is doing it the other way round.
jeremymcanally 15y ago
If you spend "a couple thousand" on your eBook, you got screwed somewhere. Hosting isn't expensive, domain registrations aren't expensive, format conversion can be handled by you, editing can be crowdsourced (usually), the cover design can be had for cheap-ish (or learn to use Gimp yourself), and so on. Having written 3 of my own eBooks now and been involved with a few others, I can't fathom what you'd spend that much money on.
- bloggergirl 15y ago
  I agree that it shouldn't be expensive. My hubby and I did the first 4 CopyHackers ebooks for under $1000, and I'm totally sure anyone could do it for less. We paid: $700 for book cover designs on 99designs.com. $10 for the domain. $89 for a bunch of WordPress themes that ended up not meeting our needs. $29 for the WooTheme that did meet our needs. I had a PDF-converter already, so I just launched with PDF. And I didn't do a mobi version until well after the concept proved itself and I could pay for it with the income from the ebooks. As for marketing, hey, HN is free! So's Twitter. And MailChimp has a free option, too. Hope it works out for you!!!
  - peterarmstrong 15y ago
    What program did you write the books in, and would Markdown have worked for you as a writing option? I'm asking since I'm doing customer development for my startup Leanpub, and we're trying to solve this exact problem. As an author, you shouldn't need to pay for PDF, MOBI or EPUB conversion, a storefront, blog theme, etc. You should only need to write the words -- and do your promotion on Twitter, of course. My cofounder Scott posted above in this thread. Please feel free to email either of us if you have any questions; I'm peter@leanpub.com.
    - bloggergirl 15y ago
      I saw Scott's post and instantly thought, "Damn, I wish I'd have known about these guys back in October." Looks very cool. I love the idea of not having to worry about the various formats. That was the worst part for me... and still is, actually, as I haven't done the epub thing yet (just PDF and mobi). WooThemes was great, but, to be honest, my hub set up most of that, so perhaps if I'd been left to do it on my own it might not have been so easy for me. I'll def check Leanpub out.
      - davidw 15y ago
        I'm not so sure you don't have to worry about the formats. PDF can give you a much richer visual experience than, say, .mobi can. If you go for a lowest common denominator, ok, sure, you can generate both from the same sources, but likely you'll get a fairly plain looking PDF.
        peterarmstrong 15y ago
        There's nothing wrong with a simple, clean PDF. A book is great because of the words, not any fancy formatting. These are books, not magazines. If your book is worth reading, it's worth reading with any decent layout. Of course, there are exceptions to this. For example, books for very young children are very much about layout, art, etc. Also, books that are really multimedia projects, with heavy images, embedded video, etc are exceptions. However, these exceptions are the minority. The vast majority of books are just words and figures. An author can create this themselves, writing in Markdown and creating their own figures. Will it be as polished as what a publisher would produce? No, of course not! Will it be all the reader really needs and wants? Definitely! This is 90% of the value, and it's something that the author needs to produce. This is true even when working with a traditional publisher. For technical books, business books (like startup books) and fiction books, all a reader really wants is the words and (if applicable) figures. In bookstores, things like nice glossy covers, layout, etc are important because people flip through books and make purchasing decisions. For example, this is why technical books have large indexes: people look at the index when making purchasing decisions. On the internet, people make purchasing decisions based on Twitter, reviews, the book landing page, sample book content, price, etc. So that's what we focus on at Leanpub.
  - bennesvig 15y ago
    The CopyHackers books are amazing, both content and design. Just curious, how did promoting your book through AppSumo work out? Or how did it compare to the initial launch on HN?
    - bloggergirl 15y ago
      Thanks! The whole Copy Hackers endeavor is still going really well --- and it's super-fun. The AppSumo promo blew my mind. But nothing will ever compare to what happened on HN... probably because I feel so much gratitude toward this particular community. :)
  - keeptrying 15y ago
    I think you guys had a distinct advantage as you guys are copy-writers in the first place and you have someone to edit it for you.
  - DanBC 15y ago
    I wish people talking about their products on HN would include some kind of link to those products in their profiles. Please - it's acceptable to do so. It is polite to do so.
- Avshalom 15y ago
  It's hard to tell what all he's including but: art adds up fast; chuck in a professional editor, layout if you don't know how to do it yourself, web design if you don't know how to do it, advertising. A couple grand isn't any where near the "screwed" mark.
spatten 15y ago
Sounds like a lot of the pain points that Peter Armstrong and I ran into when writing our books, and that we're trying to solve on Leanpub (http://leanpub.com http://leanpub.com). It's free to sign up, you write your book in Markdown and we convert it into PDF, epub and mobi for you. We pay you 90% - $0.50 for sales on our site. You can put it on the iBookstore and Kindle store yourself (or be patient for a few weeks and we'll do that and provide an ISBN for you as well...). If you've already written your book in HTML, we can convert it to Markdown for you automatically -- throw your HTML files into a Dropbox folder and click a button on Leanpub. As for technical editors, our approach is to publish early (before you're done the book, preferably before you've written 100 pages) and have your readers function as development editors. It's not a complete solution (yet), but I think we would have saved you tons of pain. Drop me a line (scott@leanpub.com) if you have any questions.
- chubs 15y ago
  I just had a look at leanpub for a friend whos about to start writing a book, it looks fantastic! I love the idea of writing markdown files into a dropbox folder, that sounds like a workflow made in heaven to me.
- Samuel_Michon 15y ago
  You're confusing books with manuscripts. Please don't call these things you sell 'books'. "A manuscript is not a book. The author's job is to write the manuscript. The publisher's job is to turn a series of manuscripts originating from different suppliers into consistently produced books, mass-produce them, and sell them into distribution channels. [...] While it's true that the author is the one with the creative input, they only do about half the work. And the other half of the job is not optional. The reason publishers exist is to provide for division of labour; if I did the other 50% to bring my rough manuscripts up to published-book-quality, I'd only be able to write half as many novels." As per Charlie Stross, accomplished fiction writer: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-are-made.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-h...
  - _delirium 15y ago
bennesvig 15y ago
Anyone who says it's easy either hasn't written a book or they're referring to getting the finished product into the Kindle store. Everything else (writing/editing/marketing) takes serious effort that most people aren't willing to do. It's almost like learning an instrument. Anyone can do it and everyone wants to, but it's only a small percentage of people who will actually commit to it.
- Avshalom 15y ago
  More specifically self publishing basically means that instead of writing you're running a small business. Which means you're engaged in a massive time suck that is distracting you from doing what you're actually passionate about.
JohnsonB 15y ago
Amazon only pays $17 out of $50, since when? I thought the common knowledge was Amazon pays 70% the full retail price to the authors of e-books.
- bennesvig 15y ago
  I think royalties drop back down once the price hits above a ceiling price. The floor for 70% is $2.99. Not sure at what point it drops back down to 35%.
  - skottk 15y ago
    It drops back down to 35% at $9.99. Here's the pricing table from the Kindle Direct site: https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A301WJ6XCJ8KW0 https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A301WJ6X...
- halostatue 15y ago
  $17/$50 is roughly the 35% royalty rate. KDP offers both a 35% and a 70% (less delivery at about $0.15/mb in rounded kb increments) royalty rate[1]; however, the 70% royalty rate is only available in about 14 countries and you fall back to the 35% royalty rate elsewise. [1] https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26OKE7R7B https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26O... [2] https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A30F3VI2TH1FR8#1-2_why_35 https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A30F3VI2...
- cstross 15y ago
  You have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get 70% out of of Amazon. In particular, you give up all pricing control -- not only do you have to agree to a ceiling and floor price, but you have to agree not to sell for a lower or higher price elsewhere, and to allow Amazon to change their selling price at will. Which means if AMZN decide your book would make a really cool free promotional item, they can give away some tens of thousands of copies to draw customers in and pay you bupkis. Your book gets to be a loss-leader, and you're the loser.
waterside81 15y ago
Might be different in the US, but in Canada, ISBN numbers are free. We have a different ISBN for each of our products (hard cover, soft cover, ebook version, plus english, spanish & french versions) and they were all free. However the rest of the list really paints an accurate picture of what selling an ebook and trying to get some market penetration is all about.
- rst 15y ago
  U.S. based pricing is here: https://www.myidentifiers.com/isbn/main https://www.myidentifiers.com/isbn/main And it's truly ridiculous. A single ISBN is $125. In lots of 1,000, they're a dollar apiece. I can't think of any principled way to justify this, other than as a way of sticking it to would-be self publishers and very small presses just because they can.
  - JoshTriplett 15y ago
    I can think of quite a few straightforward ways to justify pricing like that, if you set pricing based on the involvement of a human in the processing of applications. Under such circumstances, it requires about as much work for the human whether you order 1 or 1000. Imagine ordering a paperclip: how much do you expect it to cost to order one paperclip, versus 1000 paperclips? Similarly, it requires about as much work for a business to issue a check for $10 as for $10,000, hence why many businesses say it costs them much more in accounting costs to issue a small check than the actual value of the check. The pricing for ISBNs makes zero sense given modern technology, where no human should ever need to get involved in the process. However, that assumes some degree of sense involved in the process...
  - notatoad 15y ago
    being that the IS in ISBN means International Standard, how can they be free in one part of the world and cost in another? can't an american author just get an ISBN from canada?
  - onemoreact 15y ago
    If those where the only options that would be one thing but 10 ISBNs for $250.00 does not seem that bad for a self published author. If you plan to publish a version in hard cover, soft cover, ePub, PDF, with or without illustrations, you will need more than one ISBN for each book title.
wiradikusuma 15y ago
Very new in this book publishing thing. What software do you use? Word/Pages? Do you do the layout in that program too along while writing?
- Samuel_Michon 15y ago
  Most manuscripts are written in a word processor like Word or Pages, without any formatting. 12 pt Courier at 1,5 line height. I like it when writers send in their work in Adobe InCopy format, but few of them do. http://www.adobe.com/products/incopy.html http://www.adobe.com/products/incopy.html
johnohara 15y ago
It's a lot of work to do it well. Strong cross-currents between e-books, online course content and the programming paradigm also seem to be e/merging.
nicw 15y ago
There is definitely a misnomer that ebook creation is easy, especially as so many creation tools seem to output to .EPUB. The key isn't creating an EPUB, it's creating a good-looking EPUB. This stuff is hard and I totally understand your pain - I'm the digital product manager over at Blurb.com (ebook!). We're primarily focused on fixed-layout epubs which ensures that the picture you laid next to the text will always stay in the same place. Reflowable epubs are technologically easier to create but the output can vary so much that it makes the author look sloppy at times. Not cool. You can create a Blurb book and then convert it to an ebook for $1.99. We create them to Apple's strict epub standards so you can even submit it to their iBookstore. No DRM. :) (http://blurb.com http://blurb.com) Looking forward, I think we are going to see a larger focus on fixed-layout ebooks in the future as more tablets are created (Kindle Fire, iPad) and authors see the limitations of reflowable ebooks. I'm not knocking reflowable ebooks, but just writing a book in itself is a huge undertaking (congratulations!); trying to maintain formatting and a clean layout afterwards feels like you're being punished. As to anyone else who has gone through ebook creation/conversion with Blurb (or elsewhere), feel free to send me a note or comment with your questions. It's rare that a HN thread directly relates to my work :) - Nic.
- ChuckMcM 15y ago
  I can totally understand why this would be hard once, I'm trying to understand how this would be hard in repetition. Lets say you do the work of creating an EPUB formatter that works to your satisfaction, then is it like a pipeline where you can feed new material in and get books out repeatedly, or do you have to tweak it for each book?
  - nicw 15y ago
    It's a little bit of both. What really happens is that you're looking at a moving target in terms of both inputs and outputs. Think of this like the early browser wars, where even a standard chunk of HTML could look different. You can create an EPUB formatter that works to your satisfaction, but you've only coded it to work with that set of books. The next set of books may have different layout requirements, like padding between the text and the images. Secondly, the epub world is evolving, and the readers that display the epubs all have their own interpretation. EPUB is simply HTML/CSS inside a .zip. e-readers are essentially browsers wrapped in their own chrome. So, the real trick is to automate as much of the formatting as possible, but then have easy tools for the Author to make the final tweaks.
levifig 15y ago
So, "writing and publishing a book isn't easy so I'm charging you $50 for an e-book so I don't have to give up the work and percentage to a publisher that would make it available to you for $20". I don't stand by publishers but this seems to be the other extreme. The consumer loses in both, IMO…
mharrison 15y ago
I originally wrote my ebook as preparation for a 3 hour long conference tutorial. I had given the tutorial previously and thought that I would prepare by writing a book. Well, the book was published in November, the conference was in July. Yes it is hard work. Especially when you have a full time job and family. Amazon really wants ebooks to be priced under $10. Hence the 70% margins from $3-$9.99. The Hockings, Lockes and Konraths who spit out a novel a month can go down in the $.99 - $2.99 35% margin and make it back by selling 50K copies a week. I don't know that any technical book sells that much in a month. Hmmm, maybe technical books aren't exciting enough and could be spiced up a bit. WRT formatting, I ended up writing my own restructuredText to epub converter[0]. I format my html specifically so it will go through KindleGen and make acceptable mobi's. (I'm convinced that the author(s) of KindleGen outsourced every other line of that program, then blindly merged them together. I'm not sure how else it could generate such horrible markup... A first year intern should be able to do much better in a month of a summer). Then I also created a mobi/epub friendly css project that has had some contributions from professional ebook creators. [1] It took a lot longer to write than I would have thought, I had an in-law that writes grants for a living give it an overview, and then got a professional Python editor to give it a wonderful overhaul. I did cover design myself with Inkscape. It's OK, better than a lot of covers, but not stellar. As for distribution, e-junkie has a horrible interface (for admins) but does the job for self-distribution. Amazon has about 60+% of the US market, so even though mobi sucks, I put all my focus on making it look great on the Kindle. (In fact I'm in the middle of another book on mobi-friendly epubs) Getting published on KDP is easy, no ISBN required. BN has another 20% of the US market, pubit also easy, no ISBN required. Apple is a pain, and from my research most ipad users buy content from Amazon... Smashwords is fine for novel writers but requires writing in Word (at least until mid 2012), so I just can't justify spend time tweaking Word documents, for a book on Python where it is imperative that spacing and whitespace are correct, for a small slice of the pie. If Smashwords accepted by epub or mobi, I'd put it up there yesterday. I'm horrible at marketing. Getting reviews and feedback is longtail behavior. Send out 40 copies to people who say they'll give feedback and maybe one or two will respond. (Maybe my peer group is bad) I need to spend more time prettying up the website and on marketing, but I feel good about my book and the reception it has gotten. Yep it is hard work, but for some reason I'm in the middle of writing two more books. 0 - https://github.com/mattharrison/rst2epub2 https://github.com/mattharrison/rst2epub2 1 - https://github.com/mattharrison/epub-css-starter-kit https://github.com/mattharrison/epub-css-starter-kit
asdf333 15y ago
There are companies like Hyperink www.hyperink.com who will partner with experts and help them publish (and write) the book in return for a revenue split. I think its a great place for people who have some expertise to contribute, but don't necessarily want to deal w/ all the hassles of self-publishing and promoting.
- cstross 15y ago
  That is a weirdly accurate description of how Traditional Publishing works. Believe it or not, a typical trad publisher's profit after handling production and distribution overheads for a typical midlist book is roughly the same as the author's. Because publishing books is not, in fact, terribly profitable, because with vanishingly few exceptions most books have on the order of a few thousands to tens of thousands of consumers. (Traditionally the way publishers got large was to publish lots of stuff, and be prepared to follow through on the one in a hundred or one in a thousand titles that broke big.)
shanmoorthy 15y ago
I think of an eBook in the same vein as a web app. While anyone can cobble together a basic website using a WYSIWYG editor, making a good eBook that gives the reader a great experience is like building a fully featured, cross browser compatible, elegantly deprecating website (and all the rest of the best practices and QA that goes with it). There's a massive disparity in people's minds about the difficulty involved in crafting a great website, and crafting a great eBook... when they're essentially similar in composition and complexity.
pace 15y ago
Who said that e-books would be easy?
callmeed 15y ago
I have an open source Rails app for selling ebook a with Stripe https://github.com/2tablespoons/thylacine https://github.com/2tablespoons/thylacine
davidw 15y ago
Nope, they're not. Now think about how hard a lot of this stuff is for someone who's not even that great with Word. http://www.liberwriter.com/testimonials http://www.liberwriter.com/testimonials These are real quotes, and are just a selection of many. Making something hard easy for 'regular people' is a good business. I don't think it's actually that big a niche, and probably doesn't scale up hugely, because there is a human component involved, but so far I'm enjoying myself a lot.
newandimproved 15y ago
Zero to Superhero: http://zerotosuperhero.com http://zerotosuperhero.com took me four and a half years to research, write then format and self-publish, so I know how much work it can be. Then again, my second book Economtricks: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/economtricks/6123536 http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/economtricks/6123536 took only a year and a half, and every aspect of it went smoothly. So maybe there's something to be said about having gone through the process once, it gets easier.

106 points by DanielBMarkham 15y ago

Usually market research is done before a product is being made to decide what the target market is and product features needed. Not sure why the author is doing it the other way round.

jeremymcanally 15y ago

If you spend "a couple thousand" on your eBook, you got screwed somewhere. Hosting isn't expensive, domain registrations aren't expensive, format conversion can be handled by you, editing can be crowdsourced (usually), the cover design can be had for cheap-ish (or learn to use Gimp yourself), and so on. Having written 3 of my own eBooks now and been involved with a few others, I can't fathom what you'd spend that much money on.

bloggergirl 15y ago
I agree that it shouldn't be expensive. My hubby and I did the first 4 CopyHackers ebooks for under $1000, and I'm totally sure anyone could do it for less. We paid: $700 for book cover designs on 99designs.com. $10 for the domain. $89 for a bunch of WordPress themes that ended up not meeting our needs. $29 for the WooTheme that did meet our needs. I had a PDF-converter already, so I just launched with PDF. And I didn't do a mobi version until well after the concept proved itself and I could pay for it with the income from the ebooks. As for marketing, hey, HN is free! So's Twitter. And MailChimp has a free option, too. Hope it works out for you!!!
- peterarmstrong 15y ago
  What program did you write the books in, and would Markdown have worked for you as a writing option? I'm asking since I'm doing customer development for my startup Leanpub, and we're trying to solve this exact problem. As an author, you shouldn't need to pay for PDF, MOBI or EPUB conversion, a storefront, blog theme, etc. You should only need to write the words -- and do your promotion on Twitter, of course. My cofounder Scott posted above in this thread. Please feel free to email either of us if you have any questions; I'm peter@leanpub.com.
  - bloggergirl 15y ago
    I saw Scott's post and instantly thought, "Damn, I wish I'd have known about these guys back in October." Looks very cool. I love the idea of not having to worry about the various formats. That was the worst part for me... and still is, actually, as I haven't done the epub thing yet (just PDF and mobi). WooThemes was great, but, to be honest, my hub set up most of that, so perhaps if I'd been left to do it on my own it might not have been so easy for me. I'll def check Leanpub out.
    - davidw 15y ago
      I'm not so sure you don't have to worry about the formats. PDF can give you a much richer visual experience than, say, .mobi can. If you go for a lowest common denominator, ok, sure, you can generate both from the same sources, but likely you'll get a fairly plain looking PDF.
      - peterarmstrong 15y ago
        There's nothing wrong with a simple, clean PDF. A book is great because of the words, not any fancy formatting. These are books, not magazines. If your book is worth reading, it's worth reading with any decent layout. Of course, there are exceptions to this. For example, books for very young children are very much about layout, art, etc. Also, books that are really multimedia projects, with heavy images, embedded video, etc are exceptions. However, these exceptions are the minority. The vast majority of books are just words and figures. An author can create this themselves, writing in Markdown and creating their own figures. Will it be as polished as what a publisher would produce? No, of course not! Will it be all the reader really needs and wants? Definitely! This is 90% of the value, and it's something that the author needs to produce. This is true even when working with a traditional publisher. For technical books, business books (like startup books) and fiction books, all a reader really wants is the words and (if applicable) figures. In bookstores, things like nice glossy covers, layout, etc are important because people flip through books and make purchasing decisions. For example, this is why technical books have large indexes: people look at the index when making purchasing decisions. On the internet, people make purchasing decisions based on Twitter, reviews, the book landing page, sample book content, price, etc. So that's what we focus on at Leanpub.
- bennesvig 15y ago
  The CopyHackers books are amazing, both content and design. Just curious, how did promoting your book through AppSumo work out? Or how did it compare to the initial launch on HN?
  - bloggergirl 15y ago
    Thanks! The whole Copy Hackers endeavor is still going really well --- and it's super-fun. The AppSumo promo blew my mind. But nothing will ever compare to what happened on HN... probably because I feel so much gratitude toward this particular community. :)
- keeptrying 15y ago
  I think you guys had a distinct advantage as you guys are copy-writers in the first place and you have someone to edit it for you.
- DanBC 15y ago
  I wish people talking about their products on HN would include some kind of link to those products in their profiles. Please - it's acceptable to do so. It is polite to do so.
Avshalom 15y ago
It's hard to tell what all he's including but: art adds up fast; chuck in a professional editor, layout if you don't know how to do it yourself, web design if you don't know how to do it, advertising. A couple grand isn't any where near the "screwed" mark.

spatten 15y ago

Sounds like a lot of the pain points that Peter Armstrong and I ran into when writing our books, and that we're trying to solve on Leanpub (http://leanpub.com http://leanpub.com). It's free to sign up, you write your book in Markdown and we convert it into PDF, epub and mobi for you. We pay you 90% - $0.50 for sales on our site. You can put it on the iBookstore and Kindle store yourself (or be patient for a few weeks and we'll do that and provide an ISBN for you as well...). If you've already written your book in HTML, we can convert it to Markdown for you automatically -- throw your HTML files into a Dropbox folder and click a button on Leanpub. As for technical editors, our approach is to publish early (before you're done the book, preferably before you've written 100 pages) and have your readers function as development editors. It's not a complete solution (yet), but I think we would have saved you tons of pain. Drop me a line (scott@leanpub.com) if you have any questions.

chubs 15y ago
I just had a look at leanpub for a friend whos about to start writing a book, it looks fantastic! I love the idea of writing markdown files into a dropbox folder, that sounds like a workflow made in heaven to me.
Samuel_Michon 15y ago
You're confusing books with manuscripts. Please don't call these things you sell 'books'. "A manuscript is not a book. The author's job is to write the manuscript. The publisher's job is to turn a series of manuscripts originating from different suppliers into consistently produced books, mass-produce them, and sell them into distribution channels. [...] While it's true that the author is the one with the creative input, they only do about half the work. And the other half of the job is not optional. The reason publishers exist is to provide for division of labour; if I did the other 50% to bring my rough manuscripts up to published-book-quality, I'd only be able to write half as many novels." As per Charlie Stross, accomplished fiction writer: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-are-made.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-h...
- _delirium 15y ago

bennesvig 15y ago

Anyone who says it's easy either hasn't written a book or they're referring to getting the finished product into the Kindle store. Everything else (writing/editing/marketing) takes serious effort that most people aren't willing to do. It's almost like learning an instrument. Anyone can do it and everyone wants to, but it's only a small percentage of people who will actually commit to it.

Avshalom 15y ago
More specifically self publishing basically means that instead of writing you're running a small business. Which means you're engaged in a massive time suck that is distracting you from doing what you're actually passionate about.

JohnsonB 15y ago

Amazon only pays $17 out of $50, since when? I thought the common knowledge was Amazon pays 70% the full retail price to the authors of e-books.

bennesvig 15y ago
I think royalties drop back down once the price hits above a ceiling price. The floor for 70% is $2.99. Not sure at what point it drops back down to 35%.
- skottk 15y ago
  It drops back down to 35% at $9.99. Here's the pricing table from the Kindle Direct site: https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A301WJ6XCJ8KW0 https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A301WJ6X...
halostatue 15y ago
$17/$50 is roughly the 35% royalty rate. KDP offers both a 35% and a 70% (less delivery at about $0.15/mb in rounded kb increments) royalty rate[1]; however, the 70% royalty rate is only available in about 14 countries and you fall back to the 35% royalty rate elsewise. [1] https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26OKE7R7B https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26O... [2] https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A30F3VI2TH1FR8#1-2_why_35 https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A30F3VI2...
cstross 15y ago
You have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get 70% out of of Amazon. In particular, you give up all pricing control -- not only do you have to agree to a ceiling and floor price, but you have to agree not to sell for a lower or higher price elsewhere, and to allow Amazon to change their selling price at will. Which means if AMZN decide your book would make a really cool free promotional item, they can give away some tens of thousands of copies to draw customers in and pay you bupkis. Your book gets to be a loss-leader, and you're the loser.

waterside81 15y ago

Might be different in the US, but in Canada, ISBN numbers are free. We have a different ISBN for each of our products (hard cover, soft cover, ebook version, plus english, spanish & french versions) and they were all free. However the rest of the list really paints an accurate picture of what selling an ebook and trying to get some market penetration is all about.

rst 15y ago
U.S. based pricing is here: https://www.myidentifiers.com/isbn/main https://www.myidentifiers.com/isbn/main And it's truly ridiculous. A single ISBN is $125. In lots of 1,000, they're a dollar apiece. I can't think of any principled way to justify this, other than as a way of sticking it to would-be self publishers and very small presses just because they can.
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  I can think of quite a few straightforward ways to justify pricing like that, if you set pricing based on the involvement of a human in the processing of applications. Under such circumstances, it requires about as much work for the human whether you order 1 or 1000. Imagine ordering a paperclip: how much do you expect it to cost to order one paperclip, versus 1000 paperclips? Similarly, it requires about as much work for a business to issue a check for $10 as for $10,000, hence why many businesses say it costs them much more in accounting costs to issue a small check than the actual value of the check. The pricing for ISBNs makes zero sense given modern technology, where no human should ever need to get involved in the process. However, that assumes some degree of sense involved in the process...
- notatoad 15y ago
  being that the IS in ISBN means International Standard, how can they be free in one part of the world and cost in another? can't an american author just get an ISBN from canada?
- onemoreact 15y ago
  If those where the only options that would be one thing but 10 ISBNs for $250.00 does not seem that bad for a self published author. If you plan to publish a version in hard cover, soft cover, ePub, PDF, with or without illustrations, you will need more than one ISBN for each book title.

wiradikusuma 15y ago

Very new in this book publishing thing. What software do you use? Word/Pages? Do you do the layout in that program too along while writing?

Samuel_Michon 15y ago
Most manuscripts are written in a word processor like Word or Pages, without any formatting. 12 pt Courier at 1,5 line height. I like it when writers send in their work in Adobe InCopy format, but few of them do. http://www.adobe.com/products/incopy.html http://www.adobe.com/products/incopy.html

johnohara 15y ago

It's a lot of work to do it well. Strong cross-currents between e-books, online course content and the programming paradigm also seem to be e/merging.

nicw 15y ago

There is definitely a misnomer that ebook creation is easy, especially as so many creation tools seem to output to .EPUB. The key isn't creating an EPUB, it's creating a good-looking EPUB. This stuff is hard and I totally understand your pain - I'm the digital product manager over at Blurb.com (ebook!). We're primarily focused on fixed-layout epubs which ensures that the picture you laid next to the text will always stay in the same place. Reflowable epubs are technologically easier to create but the output can vary so much that it makes the author look sloppy at times. Not cool. You can create a Blurb book and then convert it to an ebook for $1.99. We create them to Apple's strict epub standards so you can even submit it to their iBookstore. No DRM. :) (http://blurb.com http://blurb.com) Looking forward, I think we are going to see a larger focus on fixed-layout ebooks in the future as more tablets are created (Kindle Fire, iPad) and authors see the limitations of reflowable ebooks. I'm not knocking reflowable ebooks, but just writing a book in itself is a huge undertaking (congratulations!); trying to maintain formatting and a clean layout afterwards feels like you're being punished. As to anyone else who has gone through ebook creation/conversion with Blurb (or elsewhere), feel free to send me a note or comment with your questions. It's rare that a HN thread directly relates to my work :) - Nic.

ChuckMcM 15y ago
I can totally understand why this would be hard once, I'm trying to understand how this would be hard in repetition. Lets say you do the work of creating an EPUB formatter that works to your satisfaction, then is it like a pipeline where you can feed new material in and get books out repeatedly, or do you have to tweak it for each book?
- nicw 15y ago
  It's a little bit of both. What really happens is that you're looking at a moving target in terms of both inputs and outputs. Think of this like the early browser wars, where even a standard chunk of HTML could look different. You can create an EPUB formatter that works to your satisfaction, but you've only coded it to work with that set of books. The next set of books may have different layout requirements, like padding between the text and the images. Secondly, the epub world is evolving, and the readers that display the epubs all have their own interpretation. EPUB is simply HTML/CSS inside a .zip. e-readers are essentially browsers wrapped in their own chrome. So, the real trick is to automate as much of the formatting as possible, but then have easy tools for the Author to make the final tweaks.

levifig 15y ago

So, "writing and publishing a book isn't easy so I'm charging you $50 for an e-book so I don't have to give up the work and percentage to a publisher that would make it available to you for $20". I don't stand by publishers but this seems to be the other extreme. The consumer loses in both, IMO…

mharrison 15y ago

I originally wrote my ebook as preparation for a 3 hour long conference tutorial. I had given the tutorial previously and thought that I would prepare by writing a book. Well, the book was published in November, the conference was in July. Yes it is hard work. Especially when you have a full time job and family. Amazon really wants ebooks to be priced under $10. Hence the 70% margins from $3-$9.99. The Hockings, Lockes and Konraths who spit out a novel a month can go down in the $.99 - $2.99 35% margin and make it back by selling 50K copies a week. I don't know that any technical book sells that much in a month. Hmmm, maybe technical books aren't exciting enough and could be spiced up a bit. WRT formatting, I ended up writing my own restructuredText to epub converter[0]. I format my html specifically so it will go through KindleGen and make acceptable mobi's. (I'm convinced that the author(s) of KindleGen outsourced every other line of that program, then blindly merged them together. I'm not sure how else it could generate such horrible markup... A first year intern should be able to do much better in a month of a summer). Then I also created a mobi/epub friendly css project that has had some contributions from professional ebook creators. [1] It took a lot longer to write than I would have thought, I had an in-law that writes grants for a living give it an overview, and then got a professional Python editor to give it a wonderful overhaul. I did cover design myself with Inkscape. It's OK, better than a lot of covers, but not stellar. As for distribution, e-junkie has a horrible interface (for admins) but does the job for self-distribution. Amazon has about 60+% of the US market, so even though mobi sucks, I put all my focus on making it look great on the Kindle. (In fact I'm in the middle of another book on mobi-friendly epubs) Getting published on KDP is easy, no ISBN required. BN has another 20% of the US market, pubit also easy, no ISBN required. Apple is a pain, and from my research most ipad users buy content from Amazon... Smashwords is fine for novel writers but requires writing in Word (at least until mid 2012), so I just can't justify spend time tweaking Word documents, for a book on Python where it is imperative that spacing and whitespace are correct, for a small slice of the pie. If Smashwords accepted by epub or mobi, I'd put it up there yesterday. I'm horrible at marketing. Getting reviews and feedback is longtail behavior. Send out 40 copies to people who say they'll give feedback and maybe one or two will respond. (Maybe my peer group is bad) I need to spend more time prettying up the website and on marketing, but I feel good about my book and the reception it has gotten. Yep it is hard work, but for some reason I'm in the middle of writing two more books. 0 - https://github.com/mattharrison/rst2epub2 https://github.com/mattharrison/rst2epub2 1 - https://github.com/mattharrison/epub-css-starter-kit https://github.com/mattharrison/epub-css-starter-kit

asdf333 15y ago

There are companies like Hyperink www.hyperink.com who will partner with experts and help them publish (and write) the book in return for a revenue split. I think its a great place for people who have some expertise to contribute, but don't necessarily want to deal w/ all the hassles of self-publishing and promoting.

cstross 15y ago
That is a weirdly accurate description of how Traditional Publishing works. Believe it or not, a typical trad publisher's profit after handling production and distribution overheads for a typical midlist book is roughly the same as the author's. Because publishing books is not, in fact, terribly profitable, because with vanishingly few exceptions most books have on the order of a few thousands to tens of thousands of consumers. (Traditionally the way publishers got large was to publish lots of stuff, and be prepared to follow through on the one in a hundred or one in a thousand titles that broke big.)

shanmoorthy 15y ago

I think of an eBook in the same vein as a web app. While anyone can cobble together a basic website using a WYSIWYG editor, making a good eBook that gives the reader a great experience is like building a fully featured, cross browser compatible, elegantly deprecating website (and all the rest of the best practices and QA that goes with it). There's a massive disparity in people's minds about the difficulty involved in crafting a great website, and crafting a great eBook... when they're essentially similar in composition and complexity.

pace 15y ago

Who said that e-books would be easy?

callmeed 15y ago

I have an open source Rails app for selling ebook a with Stripe https://github.com/2tablespoons/thylacine https://github.com/2tablespoons/thylacine

davidw 15y ago

Nope, they're not. Now think about how hard a lot of this stuff is for someone who's not even that great with Word. http://www.liberwriter.com/testimonials http://www.liberwriter.com/testimonials These are real quotes, and are just a selection of many. Making something hard easy for 'regular people' is a good business. I don't think it's actually that big a niche, and probably doesn't scale up hugely, because there is a human component involved, but so far I'm enjoying myself a lot.

newandimproved 15y ago

Zero to Superhero: http://zerotosuperhero.com http://zerotosuperhero.com took me four and a half years to research, write then format and self-publish, so I know how much work it can be. Then again, my second book Economtricks: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/economtricks/6123536 http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/economtricks/6123536 took only a year and a half, and every aspect of it went smoothly. So maybe there's something to be said about having gone through the process once, it gets easier.