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  E-Books – ISBNs and Marketing

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  Are you considering self-publishing your book? Willing to invest a few minutes or your time to get some suggestions and, just maybe, save yourself a false start and wasted money? Just email self-publishing mentor Walt@FiveRainbows.com or call him toll-free at 866-341-3705 to discuss your project. Initial consultations (email or phone) are always f*r*e*e.

  And don’t forget our f*r*e*e How-to-Publish Quiz at FiveRainbows.com. Answer a couple of simple questions and receive information targeted to your needs. You may be surprised by the answer!

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  Walt's Notes

  Heard of the website Flickr.com? It’s a very popular venue for sharing photos across the Internet.

  But nothing says those photos have to be your typical snapshots of people and places. Why not post your book covers on Flickr? Setting up a Flickr account is free and easy.

  One of the neat things about Flickr is that you can add all kinds of data about your book in the description field – title, subtitle, author, ISBN, website URL, reviews, summary. You could probably also add an excerpt.

  Once you upload the cover image, give it a name (like the book’s title), and add whatever descriptive data you want, Flickr creates a thumbnail image that, when clicked on, opens a page with a larger image and the complete description.

  We just uploaded all of our book covers and descriptions to Flickr. You can see our Photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/slipdown_mtn_pub/

  Will Flickr help sell books? I’ll let you know after we’ve been running this for a while. I suspect it would help to upload new images periodically – like maybe the back cover or, for books that include photos, some of the interior photos. Hey, maybe adding an image of a page from the book, changing if regularly, might work? Or maybe adding some images of things related to your book with a description that explains the tie-in?

  One thing I have seen is that Google almost immediately – well, within a couple of hours – indexed our Flickr Photostream. That’s got the help with search engine placement. At least, it can’t hurt.

  One more thing. . .Flickr offers a free bulk uploader tool that makes it very easy to upload as many photos, with associated descriptions, as you want using the easy desktop tool

  Moral: The only way to find out for sure what works to sell YOUR books online is to try as many different avenues as possible. Experiment. Evaluate. Regroup and modify. Or drop it and try something else. Just don’t give up when one of those experiments doesn’t work as well as you hoped.

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  E-Books – ISBNs and Marketing

  Reader Mara Feeney of Gaby Press emailed me a question that I thought might be of interest to other readers. So, here’s her question and my response:

  Hi Walt--just wondering about burning another ISBN on an E-book, which I have no idea about marketing. I've never seen an actual e-book, and think of it as just a pdf version of the novel. Does such an electronic file really need to have a unique ISBN on the back cover and verso page??

  Thanks--it is on my list to join Twitter soon!
  Mara

  Whether an e-book needs an ISBN is something that is discussed regularly among publishers of both print books and e-books as well as by those who publish only e-books. I think it depends (don’t you hate that kind of answer?). There is also a lot of disagreement about what format an e-book should take.

  Novels can sell reasonably well as e-books, depending somewhat on the genre and target audience. Marketing an e-book is not much different than marketing a print book, except that (of course) you can't market to brick-and-mortar bookstores or libraries (although some libraries are beginning to loan e-book readers with books on them). Joan Stewart (aka The Publicity Hound) wrote an interesting article on promoting an e-book

  At Slipdown Mountain Publications, we have decided to use one ISBN to cover an e-book in multiple formats. (Yes, there are a lot of different possible formats for an e-book.) Currently, we are offering only PDF and Amazon Kindle e-books but will soon be offering EPUB and Mobi formats (compatible with the Sony Reader and Mobipocket readers, respectively), as we believe the customer should be able to choose the format they prefer. (Actually, I just uploaded our first title to Mobipocket today – my historical novel Devil in the North Woods.)

  Note 1 about Amazon Kindle: We do not assign a new ISBN to an e-book we upload to Amazon for sale in Kindle format -- there's no reason to since Amazon assigns its own unique ASIN to each Kindle book and using the print version's ISBN helps to make sure the Kindle book is listed as an alternate format on the print book's Amazon page.

  Note 2 about Amazon Kindle: If you upload your book as a Mobipocket e-book via Mobipocket’s ebookbase system, you don’t need to upload it also via Amazon’s DTP site for Kindle books – Mobipocket will provide it directly to Amazon’s Kindle Store (Amazon, after all, owns Mobipocket now), as well as to dozens of other online e-book retailers..

  Should an e-book be little more than an electronic version of the print book? For a PDF, it certainly can be just a more compact version of the PDF sent to the printer (more compact to allow faster download) with lower-resolution images of the front and back covers added to the file. Many people think the e-book should be reformatted to a landscape (horizontal) format since that is closer to the format of a typical computer screen. For a novel, I see nothing really to be gained. You also have to decide whether to change the file's security settings to prevent printing the book or copying/pasting the text from the book.

  For a Kindle e-book, just uploading a PDF is highly problematical as the Amazon conversion usually does weird things to a PDF. We prefer to create a Kindle-specific HTML file and convert that to both Mobi and Kindle. For books with an Adobe InDesign layout available, it is fairly easy to create an EPUB format compatible with the Sony Reader.

  For selling off your own website, you need to be able accept payment and provide an immediate download. For that, we have been using PayLoadz.com, which requires you to have a PayPal account. It works very smoothly and is fully automatic once you've uploaded the files to PayLoadz. They process the order, collect the money, and manage the download -- and deposit the money immediately in your PayPal account.

  Having said all of that, I would like to note that our Five Rainbows Services subsidiary offers conversion services to Kindle via our website and can also provide conversion to both Mobipocket and download-friendly PDF (even though that's not mentioned on the site yet) and will soon offer EPUB conversions for InDesign files (and possibly for files available only in MS Word, too -- I'm still working out the specifics of that). And, by the way, EPUB is fully compatible with the Apple iPhone using the very popular Stanza application (the last time I checked, more than 400,000 people had downloaded Stanza for the iPhone).

  Bottom Line: You need to decide how many e-book formats you want to create for your book and how you want to sell it. I recommend that you sample some e-books in your genre before making final decisions. There are a variety of free desktop e-book readers that allow you to read the various formats in approximately the same form they will take on the various e-book reader devices.

  P.S. I checked, Mara, but could not find you on Twitter yet! If you do join, be sure to start following me (I’ll be happy to return the favor). You can start following me from my profile page.

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  Do you have a question or comment on the above or something else related to publishing, writing or book design and marketing? Email me at Walt@FiveRainbows.com and I may include it, with my answer, in an upcoming newsletter.

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  You can buy many of our books in downloadable e-book format from our Slipdown Mountain Publications website and read them right away!

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  Creating a Book's Print-Ready PDF
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  Read more. . .

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  Looking for solutions to your publishing dilemma? You can get a no-obligation quote for any of our many publishing solutions on our Five Rainbows Services website. You can find a wide range of solutions for editing, book design and typesetting, cover design, indexing, mentoring, PCIP data, news releases, ghostwriting, and Kindle formatting with easy online forms to request a price quote. If you don't see exactly what you need, just use any of the contact options at the top of every page.

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  If you’ve missed some newsletters or only recently signed up, you can read the back issues of the Publishing Tips newsletter in the online archives.

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  Be sure to visit our Slipdown Mountain Publications website to see our wide range of fiction and nonfiction books. You can also find our books at Amazon.com with many available in the new Kindle e-book format. And don’t forget our downloadable PDF e-books.

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  January 4th, 2009 at 4:58 pm

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