E-Publishing

I attended an excellent presentation by Steven Lewis at the Sydney Writers' Centre (link on the web page)   about publishing with Amazon. (Amazon is the largest provider of E-books so he concentrated on them.

Main things I learned were:

. you must have an Amazon account first. (very easy to do)

. the importance of formatting your manuscript correctly before submitting to Amazon (The most frequent complaint in E-books is about the inconsistent formatting) Naturally I went straight to my memoir the next day and realised it is not in one document so have opened a file in a set format and am adding chapters after proof reading them.

.  don't fill the front of your book with dedications etc because Amazon lets readers download a 10% sample of your book and you don't want five pages of title, acknowledgements and dedications etc, before the possible buyer gets to the meat of the thing.

.  learn how to convert your document using HTML/KF8 (soon to come here) so you can save it as a web page.

. the cheaper your book is the more likely you are to make money even if you opt for the lesser of the two royalties. i.e. 35% versus 70%

. Amazon will only start paying when you have earned $100.00, and then they keep 30% against possible taxes. The paper work to redeeem that 30% is horrendous, especially if you are a private individual. This last bit put me right off!

There was a lot more of course but some of it is too technical for me to explain. I'll continue exploring this option but find myself leaning to self publishing, doing it all myself. More on that in the next blog.