Ask HN: Tips for publishing an Ebook | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Tips for publishing an Ebook

3 pointsErrantX6 comments

Short Version: I've nearly finished my first book and would love to hear first time tips for publishing/layout/marketing :)

Long Version: I'm about 2/3rds of the way through completing my first book (synopsis below) and am now reading through as much material as I can regarding publishing it. The plan is to go with an Ebook for now and publish a hard copy later if there is demand.

I know a few people here have published their own books so is there any advice you can give to help out?

Specific things I am still undecided on:

- Where to publish (i.e. self publish or try for an online publishing house)

- Tips on format and layout? I have a very basic layout in PDF at the moment but the design isn't stellar - any cheap services to improve that?

- Advertising, any tips? I have a target market in mind (computer forensics) but also it should be a good general reading book for anyone.

- Pricing. It's going to top out at about 150 pages - so my thinking currently is about $9.99

- Are lite versions a good idea? I've considered paring down a lot of the technical info and producing around 70 pages for "joe public" type readers. But I'm unconvinced there is a market there.

And for context here is the book details:

Tentative Title: What does your computer know about you?

Synopsis: Your computer knows a surprising amount of detail about you. Find out all the different ways a computer stores information about your activities, ways to find it and ways to stop it. (aka the book I wish existed when I came into computer forensics)

The written-in-10-minutes-for-this-post introduction gives a little more detail: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6026865/Book-Introduction.txt

I have read a load of information so far but first hand accounts are always useful :)

Short version: never published but built two PhD PDFs directly and helped friends do so. Use LaTeX.

Long answer: I've researched this for my own publishing dreams a while back. When you have a PDF you're happy with (again, LaTeX is your friend), you can use any one of several digital sales routes. If you're planning (hoping) to publish in print, use a service that also generates the ISBN for you. From memory, Amazon does this automatically and LuLu provides it as an extra for-pay function.

Also consider self-hosting the download. Briefly: set up a secure area on a website that people are granted access to after they pay. The download is protected that way, plus you can use this to provide errata and build a private community around the book (e.g. using a forum).

One thing that will annoy you and may become a serious cost: people pay, download the PDF, and then reverse the charge under your money back policy (and yes you're likely to need one). From reports I read, this is a bigger problem for expensive ebooks (like $100) not your price point. Still...

Build a blog dedicated to the book. Post interesting relevant articles so you get links and establish yourself as an authority. It's also one heck of a lead gen channel.

Good luck!

Thanks. I've been looking into LaTeX - so far everything is in .txt format (in a mercurial repository :)) so conversion should be fairly easy though I've avoided it so far.

Im very tempted to self host. The technical side of things is easy enough for me to put together and, on reflection, I much prefer to control that side of things. The only downside I can think of is that you don't have an "instant market" compared to publishing on Lulu, Amazon etc.

> people pay, download the PDF, and then reverse the charge under your money back policy

I've decided not to let it worry me much because the book is hardly going to be a massive revenue stream (it's as much about getting my name out there as a serious author! :D)

(thanks for the tips)

+1 for text files. The number of people I know that have had horrible experiences with using just text in Word is frightening.

For LaTeX, I preached about it in a recent thread that has tons of suggestions: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1173438 .

With Amazon publishing, you also get automatic listing in their catalogue IIRC. Perhaps you can use them and self-host?

Have you thought about DRM? I'm not saying do it (on the contrary), but prodding you to see if you've made a concious decision.

> Have you thought about DRM?

Yeh off hand; and I decided against it. Partly for "moral" reasons but also because there doesn't seem much point/use to me.

Thanks for the link; trawling through all that info now :D

The reason listing on Amazon etc. is that you can built a review rating that most people will trust. When I see something self-hosted and trumpeting its own positive reviews, unless they are by somebody I know of, I will wonder what the negative aspects are.

If you want to build a community etc. through self-hosting, why don't you do both? (Unless the Amazon TOS forbid it, which I can't imagine).

I'm going to echo the "use LaTeX" advice, but add to it the following: use memoir (http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/memoir/). Not only is the manual for that package a great (but basic) tutorial on layout and page design for the total beginner, there are lots of example layouts included that you can more or less copy and paste into your .tex source and it will look good with minimal effort.

As for hosting, I'd consider self-hosting in combination with one of the PDF -> POD sites. I don't have any specific experience with any of them, so I can't really recommend a particular one, but if I were publishing a book, I'd like the idea that people could get a physical copy of my book that actually looks and feels like a book.

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