Creation Services
One way to ease the learning curve is to
utilise an e-book creation service. Using such a service will let you
concentrate on the writing and editing aspects of the book. After all, the
story and writing quality are of paramount importance.
The demand for self-publishing has spawned
a sizeable collection of online services, specifically aimed at simplifying the
text to e-book transformation process. The choice includes new digital-only
start-ups, many traditional paper-based book publishers and numerous writer
communities.
They invariably look to entice the author
with a simple, step-by-step creation process. Quite often there's a choice of
e-book output formats. And many also offer to host the resulting e-books on
their own e-commerce servers.
However, it's not all plain sailing. When
signing up to a service, it's very important to carefully read the small print.
Your rights and, in particular, sale revenue percentage will vary immensely
from service to service. You may also discover e-book availability is
restricted to certain online sites, sometimes with no possibility of it
appearing on the bigger stores, such as Amazon or the Apple Store.
With such an extensive collection of
services on offer, there are far too many to cover here. However, it's worth
highlighting one of the most notable players in this marketplace.
LuLu is an old hand at the DIY book
publication game and has generated considerable respect, many complementary
reviews and a loyal following. The range of services on offer, flexible options
and attractive deals for authors means LuLu is a useful benchmark when
comparing competitive e-book publishing services. A big plus is the financial
deal: 90% for the author and 10% for LuLu - pretty much the maximum you're
likely to receive anywhere.
To get started, the site presents a
straightforward six-step process. It leads you through uploading the book
content, creating a cover, adding a book description and setting the sale
price. At each step there's plenty of helpful information about the options
available and the implications of certain choices, such as using a LuLu owned
ISBN rather than your own to reduce costs. The last stage of the process
provides details of its optional promotional services aimed at raising your
sales figures.
LuLu's e-book creation process is focused
around handling textual content and images. Input formats include the various
Microsoft Word document types plus the universal RTF format. And there's plenty
of advice on offer, such as discouraging the use of tables, charts, scientific
equations as many e-readers will not display them correctly.
Document styles are recognised and utilised
by the conversion software. For example, heading styles are used to identify
chapters or sections, and to build the table of contents. Therefore, it's best
to use a word processor application (rather than a simple text editor), which
can embed these style definitions as part of the saved document file. LuLu
provides a very helpful formatting guide (see Resources) to walk you through
the various style settings, with plenty of examples based on Microsoft Word
2007.
