- Kindle Direct Publishing - best option in my opinion, most readers. There is a GREAT how-to guide here.
- Barnes and Noble PubIt - We might actually have to have a "dumbed down format" like a Word, HTML, RTF, or TXT file, because this site's intention is to put it into ePub for you, but that would be easy with Calibre. Also I am not totally positive we can do it here because they take a 35% royalty so I'm not sure they'll take free ebooks
- iTunes connect - this requires an application process and may take a long time so doesn't really work too well for our class.
- and Lulu which would get us into the iBookstore and Lulu's store which claims to have a large community of readers; I don't know how many of those readers will be our intended audience though.
Other options:
Ashley Lewis also suggested we publish to Goodreads. I don't know what format Goodreads takes since they told her to contact them again "once the ebook is ready" before we could proceed, but it doesn't seem like it'd be too difficult a process.
Ben had suggested we publish to Gutenberg but I don't think they'll take our book as it doesn't fit within their qualifications:
"Confirm the eBook has already been published by a bona-fide publisher (i.e., not self-published or unpublished). Project Gutenberg generally is not suitable for unpublished work. In cases where a work was published by a very small publisher or not widely distributed, Project Gutenberg might request copies of published literary reviews or similar documentation to demonstrate recognition of the work's literary value." - Project Gutenberg publishingPublishing to Google books might also be a fairly easy option, but they will require both an ePub and a PDF version of the book. We would only have to follow steps 14 and 15 here after creating our book in both formats. This writer says it's a fairly simple process.
My suggestions:
I think we should publish with Amazon Kindle, Goodreads, and Googlebooks. I believe this will reach the widest audience as a free ebook. Kindle will of course reach the most people, but those who don't use Amazon very frequently and want to read on their computers without an ereader will probably be able to just read it at googlebooks or if they're a big social reader, goodreads. Goodreads might take a little longer so we should have our book ready as soon as possible to complete the process.
Another place we can go:
ReplyDeleteSmashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/about/how_to_publish_on_smashwords
It appears that this service will distribute our eBook to Barnes and Noble, Apple, and several other venues.
The issues with some of these is that we'd need to get an ISBN for our book. I don't think that it is very difficult but someone on the distribution or marketing team should find that out. Amazon might assign a ISBN to a book but I don't know about other places
ReplyDeleteAmazon doesn't assign an ISBN to a book and i think it might cost money to get one. But Amazon says you can enter your ISBN if you have one. I don't know that it's a requirement though.
ReplyDelete