Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Making Your E-Book Available

As an independent publisher, Newcastlewest Books doesn't have an office filled with techs who can turn the written word into digital content. Neither do we need such a staff.

You may have explored Amazon's Kindle Direct site, but Kindle's formatting will leave you with an e-book that can only be read on Kindles. While that's a large part of the market, it's not the whole.

If you're looking at publishing your own works, you could easily make your books widely available through Smashwords.

The service is free, and it's remarkable how much it does at that price.

On site you'll find a formatting guide that will take you through the process of removing problematic formatting that would muck up the conversion of your manuscript to multiple platforms. The process is time-consuming and very dull, but it's absolutely essential that stray commands aren't lingering. Such unwanted bugs would distort the final product, often leaving you with an e-book that is unreadable....and therefore useless.

Once you've prepared your manuscript, it's only a matter of downloading your cleaned-up version to the Smashwords website, and their computers do the rest. You'll end up with several versions of an e-book, ready to go in whatever form a Kindle or an iPad prefer, along with HTML and PDF and several more too numerous to name.

Like any other e-book, of course, you'd want eye-catching cover art, and you'll need an ISBN to identify your opus. But when it's time to publish across multiple platforms, you can do it yourself with ease.

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