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Love the journey, not the destination …
Linda Aksomitis in Budapest, Hungary.
Tips for Making Money With Your E-Books
Well, the easy answer to how can you make money with your e-books is to write and self-publish a best seller! Okay, so maybe that won’t work for all of us. Smashwords, the #1 distributor for indie e-book authors, recently published the results of their own study of what’s selling and making money from books listed with them. It yielded, as research usually does, some useful information for independent e-authors. Some of the things they identified I’d already landed at just by my own knowledge and experience in the book...
read moreEverything Independent Publishers Need to Know About ISBNs for E-Books
I get many questions about ISBNs in my course, Publish and Sell Your E-Books, so I thought I’d do a blog post to answer some of them. Let’s start with the question: What is an ISBN? ISBN is the acronym for International Standard Book Number. These numbers are assigned by different issuing agencies around the world. So, if you’re in Canada, you need to get your number from the Canadian ISBN Service System or CISS. If you’re in the United States, you get your ISBNs from the Bowker U.S. ISBN Agency. Another important...
read moreE-Book Publishing Copyright Questions
E-Publishing opens the doors for writers from all around the world to get their stories into the hands of readers–I love helping them do this with my online course, Publish and Sell Your E-Books, which is taught at 3000+ community colleges around the world. A number of students have asked additional questions about copyright, so I thought I’d share them here in my blog. 1) Do I need to reapply for copyright if I modify the text, even slightly? The beauty of self-publishing is that I can tweak the manuscript if need be, right?...
read moreWhat happened to spring anyway?
This is it…the day after the first day of spring. Good news is we’re not having another winter snowstorm. Bad news is now we’re having a spring snowstorm. Nobody has really explained what the difference is besides the fact that it’s March 21 not 19. On the plus side of things, we’ve had an amazing winter of snowmobiling with five full months on the sleds and no sign of it letting up yet. Of course, when it snows for five months without a thaw, we also set a snowfall record here. It took until the end of March to...
read moreHow Much Should You Charge For Your E-Book?
One of the most common questions students ask in my virtual classroom for Publish and Sell Your E-Books is how much they should charge for their ebooks. There isn’t, however, one answer (or price) that fits all books. Traditional publishers may have it easier to set prices, because they know their input costs and have a reasonable idea of expected sales. Independent, or Indie, self-publishers may not have any input costs if they’re doing everything themselves from the editing to creating the cover. Instead, they have to formulate...
read moreThe End of Pages
The fourth session of my new course, Publish and Sell Your E-Books, started last week. I love teaching it and have had the most interesting questions in my discussion areas–in fact, one of my students commented that she learned as much in the discussions as in the lessons. I was pleased! Indeed, the ability to ask questions and get answers is the key advantage to learning in an online classroom. Otherwise, you could research everything you needed to know from a book or the Internet. A number of students have asked how to format pages...
read moreKeep Your Track On the Snow
It’s January 2013–despite years of build-up with the Mayan prophecy that many indicated would mean the end of the world on December 21, we’re still here. For those trying to predict the end, perhaps it will come from climate change after all. As a writer, I find it intriguing to study the science and consider the possibilities–and there are many–now for the time to write the book! I’m a planner. By the time January ends I should have my major commitments inked in for 2013. And I’ve looked at what I...
read moreNot a Gold Rush – The Taleist Self-Publishing Survey: Book Review
If there’s one thing everyone always wants to know, it’s what will I make if I write a book? I know most people think I must be rich, since I have so many out–and they’re quite surprised to find that just because you’ve got books with traditional publishers doesn’t mean you’re making millions. It’s not any different in the self-publishing world. The only difference is in who’s making the money. Instead of giving the lion’s share of income to a publisher (admittedly they also get the...
read moreLearning in the Online Virtual World
I love being a teacher in the virtual world–of course, I also really appreciated being able to take some of my university courses by distance education, so it’s no surprise that I wanted to be a leader in this area. The great thing about online learning is that the learner has so many options. For example, at Credenda Virtual High School & College students have a learning program that very closely resembles a traditional classroom. My library technician students “come to class” every week where they not only...
read moreWhat’s new in e-book publishing as December, 2012 approaches?
Gosh, where has the fall disappeared to! The e-book world seems to have been as busy as the face-to-face one I live in. The latest in e-books just came in with my Smashwords newsletter. Apple iBooks has expanded to 50 countries around the world! That’s good news for my novel, Snowmobile Challenge, as it has that many more potential readers out there. http://blog.smashwords.com/2012/10/apple-ibookstore-expands-global-reach.html Mind you, I’m not sure how many South American readers will actually be interested in the sport of...
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