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BB eBooks Newsletter – March 06, 2014

Dear Friend,

In this newsletter, we continue the publishing tips series by covering Draft2Digital and Nook Press to provide you with the step-by-step guidelines to set up an account, distribute, and sell your eBooks. BB eBooks would like to announce our fixed-layout eBook service for our clients who need advanced design that contains illustrations and complex text and image layout. From a technical standpoint, this will allow us to cater to our clients’ growing demand of advanced eBook design. Another technical revelation is the specification of the book cover that requires your attention to make your professional designed cover stand out for both eBooks and print books. Last but not least, how did you enjoy Read an eBook Week?


Tips for Publishing on Draft2Digital

While keeping the interface easy-to-follow, user-friendly, and visually appealing, Draft2Digital is good alternative to Smashwords to distribute eBooks to certain retailers. Although their choice of retailers is not as diverse as Smashwords’, their latest distribution to CreateSpace should incentivize self-publishers to ease their publishing process. Known for its distribution speed, payment system, and the sales report with up-to-date information, the distributor offers a unique experience for authors to deal with book publication more conveniently than ever.

Even if you have never published on any online retailer before, following our step-by-step guideline from start to finish should save you time to distribute your eBook to three retailers: Nook, iBooks, and Kobo. Last time we checked, D2D is still experiencing distribution issues with Kindle; however, we recommend publishing directly through Amazon at KDP. For paperback production, we do not recommend you experiment with the automatic conversion at this stage. We suggest you visit CreateSpace directly and follow their instructions using Word or InDesign or hire a contractor (like BB eBooks!) to make the best possible PDFs for your print edition.

Once you have published via D2D, you can request the sales report to check the most up-to-date sales and royalty payment data. You can also view the chart by specifying different values based on your interest (e.g. unit sales, book title, or sales month). Unlike Smashwords, you can preview the finished eBook/book before it becomes published. For BB eBooks’ clients, you can bypass the automatic conversion and directly upload the EPUB file we provide you to fast-track the process and sell your book right away.


BB eBooks Now Offering Fixed Layout Formats

FXL

BB eBooks would like to announce our latest service on fixed-layout eBook for children’s books and comic books. We proudly present the specially-formatted 131 pages of The Real Mother Goose to you which contains hundreds of images and rhymes. The apps that support the fixed-layout eBook are iBooks for iPad/iPhone, the Kindle Fires, and the Readium plugin for Chrome. To see the real beauty of the classic nursery rhymes, please visit our Samples page and download the file in EPUB3 and/or MOBI/KF8 and see for yourself.

For your distribution, you cannot distribute fixed layout eBooks via Smashwords or Draft2Digital to get onto iBooks as it is required that you upload directly through Apple’s dreaded iTunes Producer. However, you can publish the fixed-layout MOBI through KDP like a reflowable eBook. Due to the labor-intensive requirement in production, our prices start at $120 to make sure your fixed-layout will be of optimum display.


Smashwords Preorder Helps Indie Authors Big Time

Mark Coker is pretty vocal these days about Smashwords’ expanding services. Its Preorder is no exception for self-publishers to try the “new merchandizing tool” as it was officially announced in late 2013. Based on his presentation uploaded on SlideShare, authors are encouraged to submit links to him in order for their blog about preorder. Ostensibly, this will create a higher volume for their site traffic and spread the news to reach those who have not tried the feature and climbed “the ladder of success.”

Preorders are exclusive to Smashwords’ three leading partners: Apple iBooks, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo. Over 70,000 Smashwords users can use the feature anytime now through their Publish setting. Although its benefits are pretty obvious to spice up interests among readers to discover your book prior to its official release date, Mark Coker summarizes several critical points how to use it to your highest advantage. For example, by enabling the preorder to work for your book, it stands a chance to hit the best-seller lists with the help of accumulated sales during the limited time before the release date, not to mention that you can use book promotion websites to maximize the result. For those who have already published other titles, you can tweak your back matter to add excerpts and buy links for all of your books. This will not only add credibility to your profile, but it can also generate sales for your backlist titles without paying extra.

Apart from evangelizing how the Preorder can increase your book sales, Mark attaches the press clippings of how two of Smashwords authors were being featured on iBooks’ Breakout Books. In his presentation, he also stresses the importance of how authors can use Preorder along with other features such as Coupon Manager, Series Manager, and Interviews.


Technical Considerations for Covers: eBooks and Print

Although it may sound cliché that a book should be judged by its book cover, several bloggers and designers have discussed why a good cover will appeal to your target audience effectively. While you can seek help to have your book edited by your neighbor or upload your eBook to retailers by yourself, it is highly recommended that you invest in a professionally-designed cover, especially when your book is in one of the highly competitive genres: Erotica, Contemporary Romance, and Crime/Thriller. Although BB eBooks does not provide cover design, there are several experts in the field that can turn your idea into a work of art with the right price starting at $125. You can contact the following creative individuals and see their mind-blowing portfolios that have graced the covers of several bestselling titles: 1) Kellie Denison – Novel Graphic Designs, 2) Kari Ayasha – Cover to Cover Designs, 3) Syd Gill – Syd Gill Designs, and 4) Amber Shah – Book Beautiful.

To say the blog is purely dedicated to advertising book designer’s services is an understatement of what the retailers’ requirements are. One of the most frequently asked question is why our clients need to send us the covers when their eBook has been formatted. From a technical standpoint, submitting a separate file for a cover is compulsory since the EPUB2/EPUB3 standard requires that the covers be embedded on the first page and there should be a link to them in the Table of Contents. Due to the guidelines on different retailers, please make sure you study each store’s requirements carefully so that you will upload the right one to the target store for the marketing cover that appears on the product page.

Apart from the requirement for your cover in the eBook, the specification for print edition, both CreateSpace and Lightning Source, is entirely different. Fortunately, you should be able to produce a top-quality PDF based on the trim size, page count, and paper type of the print interior with the help of their automated templates. To make sure your cover will be displayed at its optimum result, CMYK color space is recommended instead of RGB since it is intended to be used for print rather than digital.


Tips for Publishing on Nook Press

For those who used PubIt! on Barnes and Noble way back in 2013, the rebranded Nook Press’ interface might be familiar to a certain extent. If you are about to publish your eBook on Barnes and Noble by yourself without going through Smashwords or Draft2Digital, we provide step-by-step guidelines for your self-publishing project. Additionally, we also cover the backstory how Barnes and Noble has attempted build its reputation against its archrival, Amazon (hint: Barnes & Noble ain’t winning!).

The reemergence of Barnes and Noble as Nook Press in April 2013 seems to build on where PubIt! left off. B&N boasts of having 25% indie-published titles that represented Nook Book sales in its press release. With the introduction to the new features and the support from successful indie authors, Nook found its path to grow second time around. While the road to take the lion’s share from Amazon is not as not forthcoming due to the glowing errors generated in their manuscript editor tool, Hugh Howey’s Author Earnings report has indicated exciting news that 25% of the Nook market was made of self-published works.

Nook keeps things simple with its self-publishing interface as it facilitates authors to submit their EPUB file and preview the sample immediately before publishing it. One of the outstanding features about Nook Press is that you can invite collaborators to comment on your project the same way as they can review your manuscript in MS-Word file.

Regardless of the bad decisions B&N may have made, with constant price drops and heavy promotion to slash their eReading devices’ prices, more readers might expose themselves to the reading experience. Based on the comparison with Kindle Paperwhite, reading on Nook Glowlight is not such a bad experience and the device seems to live up to readers’ expectation.


Smashwords’ Read an eBook Week and Its Official Page on Scribd

Smashwords’ Read an eBook Week is ending in two days, March 8th. As a Smashwords author, if you are not aware of the term, you can check your Dashboard and experiment with the “site-wide promotions” and generate a discount coupon. Several authors, including some of our clients, announce steep discounts to entice readers: for example a book about a loveable Ridgeback gets a special 50% off its regular price. Another Smashwords milestone is its launch of official page on Scribd. So far, the number of published titles, page views, followers, and likes has risen from what we reported in the blog. By providing a huge selection of eBooks for Scribd users, it is a strong indicator how many more Smashwords authors have opted into extended distribution to supply their eBooks to Scribd. Nonetheless, Scribd still faces problems with mass piracy, and Smashwords earned the wrath of some respectable authors (including many of our clients) for distributing to Scribd without plans to address ebook piracy. Andrew Weinstein, Scribd VP of content acquisition, promises to address the issue. While it remains to be seen how Scribd will tackle piracy with its four-point program, some indie authors are willing to take their chance upon eBook subscription service more seriously than ever.

Please note: we received a helpful tip from author of the bestselling Heaven Hill series, Laramie Briscoe, that authors can use a service called MUSO to track down where your eBooks are being pirated. We promise to look more into this service at a later time as many of our clients have expressed frustration about the piracy of their eBooks on torrent sites.

Yours sincerely,

The BB eBooks Team


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