Publish Your Own Kindle eBook

Thriller writer Barry Eisler landed himself a $500,000 publishing deal. He knew right away what he should do: he talked it over with his family, then turned it down.

Eisler isn't alone in turning his back on traditional publishing. A New York Times bestselling author, he set himself up as a self-publisher, convinced by a growing body of evidence that he can earn more that way than any established imprint could pay him.

Eisler, like fellow author Joe Konrath, sees publishers' relevance diminishing in a rapidly changing industry. "We're the writers. We provide the content that is printed and distributed," Konrath wrote. "For hundreds of years, writers couldn't reach reader*; without publishers. We needed them. Now, suddenly, we don't. But publishers don't seem to be taking this very important fact into account."

The rise of eBooks, the US sales of which overtook paperbacks in February, is putting old-school publishers out of their jobs, and eBook readers such as the Kindle and iPad are helping even novice authors find an audience and make real money from writing.

Bypassing the print publishing cycle not only leads to lower prices, but also to greater choice for readers. For most people, their bestselling novel remains unwritten not because of the effort involved in getting the words onto the page, but through lack of faith that those pages will ever be printed. Imagine what might happen if publication wasn't a remote possibility, but a dead cert.

Signing a publishing contract is no guarantee of success. Publishers make mistakes, just like the rest of us, pulping the "next big thing" when it fails to find an audience and passing up a blockbuster without seeing its brilliance. Success comes through selling, not through having a Penguin 01 your cover. The more you sell, the greater your success - but how do you sell without a publisher? It isn't easy in print. The biggest sellers in a bookshop are stacked on the tables inside the door. Without a spot on the table, your chance of success is greatly diminished, but landing one is expensive.

Authors of eBooks have no such concerns and, better still, their royalties are far in excess of what's possible with traditional publishing houses. Most mainstream authors receive considerably less than 15% of the cover price for each book sold, but on Kindle you can earn up to 70% without any ongoing costs.

You'll also receive your payments sooner. It can easily take a year or more for a printed book to find an agent, several months for the agent to sell it, and up to 18 months for your publisher to edit, print and market it in line with their leisurely schedules. Your chances of earning anything within three years of typing "The End" are slim.

Save yourself the frustration and sidestep the traditional publishing route, as we show you how you can be selling your book by next weekend. And you'll have a three-year head start on your print-based rivals in which to start writing a sequel.

Formatting Your Book for Kindle

(Click image to enlarge)

We're using Sigil to format our book. Free to download from http://code.google.com/p/sigil, it's a cross-platform eBook editor that uses ePub as its native format.

If your book is a plain-text file you can open it directly inside Sigil, but if you've written it in Microsoft Word, you'll need to convert it first. From Word, click File | Save As… and choose Web Page, Filtered as the format. Open the result in Sigil.

ePub files are highly structured, with their contents described in underlying code and arranged in a particular order. Our first job is to add the book cover. You'll need to design two covers for your book - a color version to display on Amazon's website, and a higher contrast 960 x 1,280 monochrome version to embed in the eBook.

Position your cursor at the very start of the text and press Ctrl-Shift-I to open the image browser. Choose the picture you want to use for the book cover and it will be added to the Images folder in the Sigil sidebar. To identify this as the cover, right-click on it in the sidebar and choose Add Semantics | Cover Image.

Images you want to embed within the text are imported in exactly the same way, but without being marked for use as the cover. In the book we're publishing. The Sketchbook of John, Constable, we're using a graphic timeline at the start of each chapter that would be impossible to render accurately in text.

At this early stage, your book is a fairly unmanageable tract that needs to be split into chapters. Position your cursor at the start of chapter one, immediately after the cover image, and press Ctrl-Enter to insert a chapter break. Do the same at the start of chapter two. You will now have three files in the sidebar's Text folder with consecutive numbers: sectionOOO1.xhtml is your cover, section0002.xhtml is chapter one and section0003.xhtml is the rest of your book. Continue working through the text, inserting a break before each chapter to create new files in the sidebar.

If you want to include a table of contents in your book, use the Style menu on the left of the toolbar as you create your chapters to mark each title as a Heading. There are six heading styles to choose from, with Heading 1 uppermost in the hierarchy. Press F7 to open the Table of Contents Editor and untick any headings you don't want to include in the table when you compile your book.

Press F8 to open the Metadata Editor and enter (at the very least) the title of your book and the author's name, so it can be accurately catalogued by online stores. To add further details such as the imprint, ISRN, rights and so on, click More and use the Add Basic and Add Adv buttons to add both common and more esoteric metadata. The more information you add, the more accurately your book will be catalogued.

When you've finished formatting your book, save it in Sigil's native ePub format. This is the format used by most eBook readers, including the iPad and iPhone, but not the Kindle or Kindle apps, which use a modified version of Mobipocket. While the Kindle Direct Publishing process will handle the conversion, for the best and most predictable results you should perform the conversion yourself and test the book locally on your own Kindle.

We'll do this using Calibre (http:// calibre-ebook.com) - a free, open-source eBook library tool. When you first install Calibre you'll have to tell it where to file your library, but beyond that all management tasks, including conversions between different book formats, are conducted through the Ul.

You can add whole books or references to them in a number of ways, from simply entering an ISBN for which it will retrieve the cover art and metadata, to importing a complete book file for reading and manipulation. We need to latter, so click Add Books and navigate to your formatted ePub.

Calibre copies the book to its library and uses the metadata you entered in Sigil to catalogue it. Double-click the book in the library to preview the contents. You should be able to click to the start of each chapter in the table of contents, and forward and back through the pages using the purple arrows. If it works as you expect, you're ready to convert it to the Kindle's native format.

Click Convert Books, and select Mobi as the output format from the drop-down menu at the top right of the conversion panel. The input format should already be set to ePub.

Click Page Setup to check that Generic E Ink is selected as the output profile, then click OK to perform the conversion. The progress spinner at the bottom of the library window will show you it's working, but when it stops it won't be immediately obvious where it has put the completed document. To find it, select the book in the library and click the link beside Path in the Book Details pane.

Connect your Kindle to a USB port and either drag the Mobipocket-formatted book to its Documents folder, or use the Send To Device button on the Calibre toolbar to upload it, then eject your Kindle in the usual way.

Your new book will appear at the top of the Kindle homescreen. Open it to check that it looks as you expected. Check in particular that the table of contents is intact (press Menu | Go to... | Table of Contents) and that clicking the links there takes you to the relevant points in the book. Check also that your chapter markers are in place. These are the notches cut into the progress bar at the foot of the reading display. Using the left- and right-hand edges of the four-way controller skips you backwards and forwards a chapter at a time.

If it all works as you expected, you're ready to take the final step and publish your book on Amazon.

Publish and be damned

Now it's time to get your book listed in the Amazon store. Log into the Kindle Direct Publishing dashboard at http:// kdp.amazon.com using your regular Amazon account details. Agree to Amazon's terms and conditions and you'll see a warning in the top corner about your account information being incomplete. Enter your address and how you'd like to be paid. You'll have to wait until you hit 7000 INR of sales if you want to be paid by cheque, but if you're happy to accept an electronic funds transfer (EFD straight into your bank account, Amazon will make a payment for every 70 INR earned. You'll need to choose cheque or FFT for both IJK and US site sales, but bear in mind that US payments are made in dollars, for which your bank may charge a handling fee.

Return to your bookshelf and click Add a New Title to publish your book. Work your way through the publishing form, at the very least giving a title, language and author name, and a description of up to 4,000 characters. Select the two most relevant categories under which Amazon should file your work, and you can optionally tag it to improve its search performance.

Amazon sells both public domain books and those for which copyright still applies, and requires all publishers to specify into which camp their book falls. Public domain books can still be charged for, even if you haven't contributed to them yourself, but they only ever attract royalties of 35%.

It's up to you whether or not you upload a cover image, but we'd strongly recommend doing so. if you don't, Amazon will use a flat placeholder that will do little to sell your work. Ensure your cover image is RGB, rather than CMYK, at least 500 pixels wide and no more than 1,280 pixels tall. If your background is white, add a three-pixel grey border to help it stand out on the Amazon listing pages. This cover image isn't the same as the one that forms part of your book: that's embedded within the Kindle file itself, so can be optimized for the Kindle screen.

Finally, decide whether you want to enable DRM copy protection and upload your book. You can't change your mind on the DRM issue once you've published your book, so think carefully whether you're happy for people to share your work.

Amazon will check your uploaded file, and assuming it passes will let you complete the publishing process, which involves choosing the territories in which the book should be sold and what royalties you'd like to earn. The standard share is 35% of the cover price, but if you price your book between 100 INR and 500 INR and enable lending, you can hike it to a relatively generous 70% in the UK and US.

Naming your price

Follow the traditional publishing route and you'll be lucky to earn royalties of 15% on net receipts, after discounts of 50% or mere are given to retailers as an inducement to take your book. On a 1000 INR book. then, even if you negotiate royalties of 15%, you might earn 59p. From this, your agent would also take a cut of 10% to 15%.

Sell your book for 100 INR on Kindle, on the other hand, and you can opt for 70% royalties, which will earn you 90 INR per copy while still significantly undercutting the mainstream publishers and increasing your chance of a sale. Reduce your price to 95 INR - the lowest level at which you'd qualify for 70% royalties - and you'd earn 70 INR for each copy sold.

Novelist joe Konrath was selling his book, The List, for $2.99. Through the first two weeks of February it sold an average of 43 copies a day, each of which earned him royalties of 70%, pulling in $87 daily. On the 15 February, he dropped the price to only 99¢ - a level that's eligible for royalties of only 35% - and sales increased massively. It went from being the 1,078th best-selling charged-for book in the Kindle Store to 78th. Daily sales increased to 533 copies, and although the amount 0" money earned by each copy fell from $2.03 to 35¢, his daily earnings rose to $187. Dropping the price - and the royalties - more than paid for itself.

Bear in mind when setting your price that Customs and Excise counts eBooks as "services" (the service being the act of serving the download), and services attract VAT. Amazon adds this to your asking price using the rate charged in Luxembourg at the time of purchase. This currently stands at 15%.

It will "deliver" your book for free if you opt for 35% royalties, but if you choose 70% it will charge you 10p (UK) or 15¢ (US and Canada) per megabyte to send it to your readers. The size of the book is calculated when you upload it, and the charge worked out pro-rata to the nearest kilobyte. A 200KB book would cost 2p to deliver, which would be deducted from your royalties. It's therefore worth thinking carefully before including decorative images in your book. You should also use your image editor's Save for Web function to compress those you use.

It takes two working days for Amazon to publish an English language book, after which the Dashboard's Reports section will show your earnings week by week.