Monday, August 16, 2010

e-Publishing

Essential 10 Publishers:

Last Saturday, I attended Rocky Mountain Fiction Writer’s (RMFW) monthly program for e-publishing. This was very timely for me since I intend to go this route to publish my fantasy novels. The guest speakers were two publishers who are self-published authors and business owners of Essential10.com.

Essential 10 began as a way for the computer wizards that own it, to self-publish their personal books. This company initially offered writer’s who had small books, with ‘essential’ information in their book, to publish through them. Since they were also writer’s and had attempted the more traditional routes, they were familiar with the frustrations that many authors face and set up their program with lower fees than what you would normally pay. Now, they are opening their publishing house to genre fiction. The only thing they won’t touch is porn, two thumbs up from me for that policy.

There are a number of publishers offering e-publishing including the do it yourself programs through Amazon.com for the kindle devise and smashwords.com which is known to those of us researching e-publishing as the one who will publish to all e-readers, iPhones, etc.

So, what is the difference?

If you publish yourself to Amazon’s kindle you must format your manuscript yourself to their guidelines. If you use smashwords.com, you also must format yourself to their guidelines which are different than kindle. (I feel a headache coming on). If you go through other self-publishing houses, and there are many of them, you must format yourself to their guidelines and then pay whatever fee they charge. Including CreateSpace.com who will submit for you to Amazon’s kindle and give you a hard cover book you can sell yourself. At this writing, CreateSpace.com has the best pricing in the business for hard-cover self-published books, and they offer an ISBN number.

So, how do you feel right now? Confused? Wondering who you should go through?

Here is the short and fabulous news about essential10.com. They will take your word file and format it for you and upload that to Amazon’s kindle for $99.00 and 10% royalty. (Let’s repeat that, they will take your WORD FILE)! They will track your sells and make sure that your book is uploaded to the file(s) in kindle that are the best for what you’ve written. They are a publisher, so they can assign you an ISBN number for a small fee, which I recommend but isn’t completely necessary since Amazon does have ISO numbers. And, news flash, once you have your book on kindle there is no need for smashwords.com since Amazon will upload to ALL e-readers too. Smashwords.com has a payment plan that is much slower than Amazon and therefore less desirable.

I repeat: News Flash, even if you don’t go through essential10.com to publish your manuscript, you can upload ONLY to kindle and not bother with smashwords.com since Amazon will immediately upload to ALL e-readers but a select few that smashwords.com doesn’t do either. Once a deal is worked out with the others, kindle will be available almost everywhere. Barnes & Nobles ‘nook’ is in question, as well as Sony’s e-reader, but essential10.com is working to take care of that too and I am not sure if kindle or smashwords.com does nook or Sony. I’m still learning and by the time I have this posted in this age of daily changes, some information will change with it like who, what, where and when your book is uploaded to.

This has been a short synopsis of what I learned and certainly not every detail. The two things essential10.com will not do are book covers. I recommend that you hire someone to do this. Kindle has some book cover choices, but if you go that route remember your cover may be identical with ten or more other books. The other thing essential10.com won’t do at this time are hard copies. But they are looking into CreateSpace to see if they can use them to fulfill this line. It may be too expensive to offer this to their clients. I for one would be happy to pay a small fee just to have my manuscript formatted to CreateSpace.com (s) requirements for a self-published hard cover book.

Short recap: Yes, you can do all this work yourself. Or you can pay a small fee and let essential10.com do the work for you and track everything for you. This leaves you more time to be creative.

Payment from essential10.com is 30-days after they are paid from Amazon for their e-reader sales, and Amazon like smashwords.com pays quarterly. However, smashwords.com seems to put an additional hold on the money which may or may not change.

Does this information help you? Are you planning to e-publish your book? Please let me know and other visitors too, leave a comment.

Thanks for stopping by.

10 comments:

Alex J. Cavanaugh said...

After reading this, I'm glad my publisher does all the work!

N. R. Williams said...

Thanks for stopping by Alex.
Nancy

Anonymous said...

I've recently ePublished with Smashwords and Kindle. It was fairly easy to do this myself although I did need help formatting the Word doc.

Stephen Tremp

N. R. Williams said...

I am sure it is easy for some, but I can guarantee it won't be for me. That's why I shared this information. For those doing it themselves and for those who would prefer someone to help them. Thanks for dropping by and sharing your thoughts Stephen.
Nancy

KK Brees said...

This is exactly why I went with a small press (Chalet). I admire your skills. All this is way beyond my capabilities. A small press will do this work for you, thank goddess.

N. R. Williams said...

Way to go KK. Thanks for stopping by and leaving a comment.
Nancy

Sylvia Dickey Smith said...

Great information. I'd likely go this way to epubish since to do otherwise makes my brain feel like a french fry!

Sylvia Dickey Smith

A War of Her Own

N. R. Williams said...

I'm with you there Sylvia.
Nancy

QuadsMoon said...

Thanks for researching and sharing this info, Nancy. Our culture has come a long way. First, oral tradition with stories spoken around the campfire. Then books, first handwritten, later typeset. Now cyberspace. E-publishing is here to stay. I'd sure like to learn the process and perhaps go this route.

N. R. Williams said...

The fire is crackling, the story teller is in the midst of her oration, and next to her is a fabulous device putting her spoken words in a word document on her laptop, next week it will be for sale on Amazon. Thanks for stopping by Deb.
Nancy