Dreaming of becoming a published writer? Trying to ensure your book reaches the largest audience possible? Then you've come to the right place. At the Inventing Reality Editing Service blog, I'll offer tips and advice about improving your writing and marketing your book, all based on what I've seen as editing and writing dozens of published works.
My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past five years, I’ve helped more than 175 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I'm also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day... writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.
“Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
“A book is simply the container of an idea – like a bottle; what is inside the book is what matters.” - Angela Carter
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” - Jorge Luis Borges
“I spent my life folded between the pages of books.” - Tahereh Mafi
“Books are the carriers of civilization...” - Barbara Tuchman
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
I originally had titled this entry “Ebooks: The Future of Publishing” but after editing changed it to “Ebooks: The Now of Publishing.” My original title might have been accurate in 2010, but since then digital books have come to be a major portion of the book market. They are now the primary way a sizable number of people read books, whether it be a classroom text or the latest airport novel.
More than 1 out of 4 Americans in 2016 read an ebook, according to a Pew Research Center report. And while use of ereaders has declined during the past five years, the reading of ebooks on tablets and smartphones have tripled and doubled respectively during that time. Further, more than third of Americans aged 18-29 read an ebook in 2016; the age group is the largest demographic to do so. Arguably, the habit will remain ingrained as they read books during the next six or seven decades of their lives. Indeed, during 2015, Americans purchased at least 204 million ebooks, according to Nielsen Bookscan and PubTrack Digital. While this has been flat for about three years, it’s still a remarkable number; just obtaining a 0.00005 percent share of those sales would push a title to more than 10,200 ebooks sold and to the top of most Amazon.com bestsellers lists for several weeks. Simply put, ebooks are not just a passing fad.
In addition, while ebooks and paper books largely are interchangeable, that is shifting. The same interchangeability was true of television and radio programming when people began buying TV sets in the early 1950s. But ebooks aren’t paper books any more than television was radio; they’re two different mediums for relaying information and entertainment. Today, ebooks can play videos and audio while linking to vast amounts of additional information, a limitation of paper books. And, just as television altered radio (How many dramatic programs are broadcast on your favorite AM or FM station anymore?), so ebooks are altering and shaping the purpose and function of paper books. The latter increasingly is the realm of celebrities and authors who are big names in their genres. Paper won’t die for many years to come, but like radio vis-à-vis television, its days as the primary way people read stories and nonfiction will wane.
Authors – whether novelists or nonfiction writers – who want to sell their titles in the years ahead will need to do so on digital platforms. And though precisely how ebooks will evolve storytelling or the presentation of information remains to be fully seen, authors need to learn the basics of ebook formatting now to both cash in on this market and to be prepared to take advantage of it during the next decade.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
A number of self-publishing companies exist, and most are rip-offs. Yes, they may turn out a quality-looking product, but they don’t get you an Amazon.com landing page for your title or you’re unable to sell your title across several platforms such as Kindle or Nook. Worse, they are extremely expensive.
Without a doubt, CreateSpace and KindleDP – both divisions of Amazon.com – offer the best deal, as they’re free and get you a landing page with high SEO and your book’s various platforms all linked, but they don’t get you on an ebook for Nook, iBook or Kobo. The simple solution is to also load your ebook to another self-publishing site that offers this option and that also is free, namely Smashwords.
Based in California, Smashwords was founded in 2008 as an ebook publisher and distributor. As of early 2017, the company had published about 440,000 books.
There are a couple of major benefits to using Smashwords. First and foremost is it offers one-stop shopping for all of the major ebooks formats (Kindle, iBook, Nook, Kobo) including ways readers can download them to their PC, laptop or tablet. That’s a lot easier than formatting a book for each of those vendors and uploading it at their website. Secondly, Smashwords gives you a nice landing page for your book that gets fairly good play on search engines. Even better, you really don’t have to do anything to promote that page to get a high ranking.
Of course, Smashwords, like anything, carries some downsides. One issue is its very finicky formatting rules. What is acceptable when uploading at Kindle Direct probably won’t cut it at Smashwords. That’s because Smashwords needs a format that works across-the-board for Nook, Kobo and iBook as well as Kindle. Getting your book formatted correctly can be frustrating the first time around. Another issue is that you’ll still need to upload your book separately at Kindle Direct if you want an Amazon.com page for your ebook. Though Smashwords can create a format that Kindle ebooks can read and shows up high on search engines, when most people want an ebook for their Kindle, they go to Amazon.com, which on search engines almost always shows up in a spot ahead of your Smashwords landing page.
Verdict: Use Smashwords to get your ebook on iBook, Nook and Kobo. If you format your Kindle ebook to Smashwords’ specs, all you’ll need to do is add a paragraph on your title page about Smashwords, and you’ll be good to go across several platforms.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
Writers new to self-publishing often run into the abbreviation ASIN and find themselves confused. Is it the same as an International Standard Book Number (ISBN)? Does one need an ISBN if you have an ASIN?
ASIN stands for Amazon Standard Identification Number, a 10-character alphanumeric identifier used by Amazon.com and some of its partners. Amazon.com assigns every book (actually, every product sold at its website) a unique ASIN.
For the most part, the ASIN is not the same as the ISBN. Paperbacks published in the Untied States, for example, need an ISBN to be published and afterward are assigned an ASIN. Ebooks do not require an ISBN but if sold on Amazon.com via KindleDP will receive an ASIN. The 10-digit ISBN for international paperbacks, however, does match the ASIN.
A single product need not have the same ASIN. Sometimes a book will have a different ASIN when sold on a different country’s Amazon.com sites. In addition, the ebook version and a paperback of the same title and content have different ASINs; a digital book is considered a different product than a trade hard copy.
You never need to pay for an ASIN, so be aware of scams trying to convince you to that you need to do so.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
From the 1920s through the 1940s, radio served as Americans’ primary way to receive news and entertainment. A radio sat at the center of their living rooms, where families would gather each evening to laugh together, enjoy the latest jazz tune, root for their favorite sports team, and catch the latest news of the world. Beginning in the late 1940s and through the early 1950s, however, a new medium for delivering comedy, drama, sports, news and music increasingly grew in popularity. Television soon overtook the radio set in American living rooms, and the radio industry found itself shrinking and seeking niches where it might maintain some edge against this new media powerhouse.
A similar revolution is underway today in book publishing. Paper bound into volumes long has been the primary means of sharing written information, from novels and poetry to schoolbooks and nonfiction tomes. During the 2000s, authors began to publish books in digital formats collectively and commonly known as ebooks. The ebook really took off once Amazon.com released its first Kindle and as self-publishing increasingly gained acceptance from authors and readers alike. Today, the ebook is poised to become the main way readers access the written word.
As someone who wants to publish a book, you’re no doubt wondering if the ebook is for you. Perhaps you prefer reading paper books over digital books. Maybe your don’t consider yourself tech-savvy enough to construct an ebook. And paper books continue to sell at a good clip, you point out.
If you’re having these thoughts, set your nostalgia and fear aside. There are several practical reasons why you simply must publish an ebook:
There’s money to be made The ebook is a multi-billion-dollar industry that’s growing and is not just a fad. Many readers prefer to read on electronic devices, and with an increasingly tech-savvy youth, that number only will grow. Paper books (and I love them, btw) are increasingly seen as quaint. Indeed, in mid-January 2016, Amazon’s U.S. ebook sales averaged 1,064,000 paid downloads a day.
Increase visibility If you write genre books, offer services, or sell products, penning a book about that topic can increase your sales in those areas. Readers looking up books about your topic probably are interested in your genre books, services or products, and they can discover them by coming across your ebook in multiple ways, such as a search engine, on Amazon.com’s internal search, or various social media outlets (such as Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Goodreads, Facebook) where users are more likely to purchase digital than paper books.
Build credibility Visibility is a plus in selling your books, products or services, but credibility also is must, for it sets you in a class apart from all of the other authors, services and sellers. Simply being published delivers that by making you an “expert” on the topic. To borrow jargon from the corporate world, publishing makes you a “thought leader.” An ebook, because it is modern and a growing industry, makes you a cutting edge thought leader.
You can do what can’t be done in a paper book Of course, simply publishing a paper book will give you visibility and credibility. With an ebook, however, you can provide a superior reading experience that further boosts your authority in a profession. That’s because an ebook allows you to embed video, audio, links to pages or websites that with a simple touch of the screen can provide additional information – something a paperback can’t do. You also can include ads that take readers to landing pages where they can purchase your other books, products or services.
Writers who stick to only to publishing paper books certainly can be successful, but they are limiting themselves. Indeed, just as radio exists today despite not being the dominant form for acquiring information or entertainment, so paper books will survive into the decades ahead as a secondary rather than the chief medium that people use for reading. The future of books rests in the digital realm.
Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an economic climate where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.
