There is nothing like the tactility of a book: the smell of an old book, the ritual of turning the page, or cracking the spine. Nothing can beat your bookmark collection made-up of business cards from new acquaintances, a picture of your grandma and Tim Tebow, and cut-outs from The New Yorker‘s cartoon page.
Yet! As social media and digital information continues to define how public knowledge is shared, archived, and regulated, ebook sales are going to continue to rise.
The Campus Clipper Bloggers are each publishing an ebook this month. We have been diligently writing, editing, and going through the motions of self-publishing.
The advantage to publishing an ebook? The writing process isn’t regulated through normal publishing constraints. Therefore, you may find that anyone can publish anything– from conspiracy theories about alien telecommunications to cookbooks by an old Ukrainian woman who has acquired recipes throughout generations.
A good place to buy and publish ebooks is smashwords.com; firstly, it is free, and secondly, Smashwords makes the publishing process so simple that anyone could publish his or her writing.
Some quick tips for publishing an ebook:
- Design your own cover. Some authors pay for “professionals” to design their cover page. If you are having trouble, check out Microsoft Word’s Templates for “book covers” or look at Amazon’s Kindle library to get inspiration from how other authors format their cover page. In addition, be sure to only use images that are Public Domain Images.
- Also look at how different authors describe their ebooks. The best descriptions I’ve come across are brief and direct summaries. Be sure to use words that are easily pulled up in Search Engines. For instance, if your ebook is about Lil Wayne, be sure to use “Carter IV” or “Young Money.”
- If your ebook doesn’t have a title yet, also utilize Search Engine Optimization to generate a title. There are great and free facilities online that help generate words including Google’s AdWords application.
and finally…
- Copyright law says: “Copyright is secured automatically when the work is created in a fixed or tangible form (notated or recorded).” In other words, anything written in a fixed form such as an ebook is automatically copyrighted. Therefore, add a copyright page as the first page of your book, a standard for copyright is the
“©2012 Author” format.
If you know of any other great ebook facilities, recommendations, or favorite ebook authors, be sure to leave a comment at the bottom of this post!
Katheryn, The Cooper Union
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