How I Wrote and Self-Published a Book: Step by Step | Hacker News Reader

How I Wrote and Self-Published a Book: Step by Step

bennesvig.com

196 pointsbennesvig43 comments

Here's the tutorial I wrote after publishing xkcd: volume 0. Best of luck to all of you self-publishers!

http://breadpig.com/2010/02/17/53000-profit-in-3-months-from...

http://breadpig.com/2010/02/19/step-by-step-guide-on-how-to-...

if this type of thing interests you, i also wrote in detail how i did mine here: http://www.startupsopensourced.com/2011/05/01/startups-open-...

You misspelled Calibre.

Ten minutes later: I can't believe I just spent that much time reading your article. You got yourself another sale.

After months of seeing this as the #1 recommended book by Amazon based on my previous purchases, I finally gave in and got Startups Open Sourced. It was the best book I read in 2011. I give you a lot of credit for putting together one of the best startup resources out there to date. Thanks for the hard work, Jared!

i really loved talking to the founders and working on this project, but hearing comments like this really makes me glad i did it. thanks for your support!

Ben, I see you started with Google Docs and switched to Scrivener. Did you ever consider writing in Markdown? (That's what we use for Leanpub manuscripts, and we produce PDF, EPUB and MOBI.) Obviously your book is done; I'm just interested in your feedback on writing tools. (Basically, I'm doing customer development, trying to figure out if you could go back in time and use Leanpub, would you still use Scrivener, etc?)

Hadn't heard of Markdown until now. I can always be convinced to try something new, but Scrivener was incredibly simple. I can edit and submit an updated version to the Kindle store in 5 minutes (video of that here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puv9zCwrex4 ).

My formatting isn't anything incredible, so if Leanpub could put together a quality conversion I'd consider checking them out.

If you email your manuscript to peter@leanpub.com I'll have this done for you so that you can compare. Ideally if you can save it as HTML we can convert it to Markdown automatically. However, if this is a hassle, then send me whatever format you have.

The nice thing is that since you're publishing an in-progress book your approach lines up exactly with what we encourage authors to do. When you publish new versions your readers get free updates automatically, etc. We produce files that can be put in the Kindle store, iBookstore, etc and we also sell the PDF, EPUB and MOBI on Leanpub, paying a 90% - 50 cent royalty.

Email me if you want any more info...

Thanks for turning me on to Leanpub; it looks great for my need. I just wrote a book, and I was going to mess around with my own markdown convert to (something else).

"Everyone has a book in them, and in most cases that is where it should stay."

Christopher Hitchens on self-publishing

Sturgeon's law probably applies to any book published, whether by traditional or self-published means.

After publishing a book through a publisher ("Design for Hackers"), I've had some other smaller ideas rattling around that I've considered self-publishing. Scrivener looks like a useful tool.

I'm pretty sure I would hire an editor, though. Unless you're a trained writer, it can be difficult to keep grammar and sentence structure correct.

Agreed. No matter what happens in the publishing industry, editors will always have a place.

I'm halfway through Design for Hackers. The Kindle version is really impressive on the iPad. Whoever did the formatting did a great job.

Hey, thanks for picking up Design for Hackers! I was pleasantly surprised by the Kindle version myself.

Last week I self-published my first book.

My visit to North Korea last year amazed me at how much we base our impressions of North Korea on pre-conceived notions. I already blogged daily (http://joshuaspodek.com), but the experience affected me so much I started posting twice daily, one post on North Korea (http://joshuaspodek.com/category/northkorea).

Then Kim Jong Il died and tons of articles came out on North Korea, many or most had the same pre-conceived notions or assigned credit to the leaders that I thought were properties of the system, making understanding or achieving change difficult.

Reading all those articles, I felt compelled to put my perspective out there. My posts on HN got high karma. I assembled a number of my posts, polished them (they needed more polish than I thought), and posted them on Amazon and Smashwords for download to electronic devices (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006PMDXTM?ie=UTF8&tag=...).

The first time was laborious and time-consuming. Now that I've done it, I know how to do it easier and I plan to do it many times.

I'm going to start marketing soon. The big news days when Kim Jong Il died motivated me so I missed them as days to sell books, but I hope the book changes some people's views of North Korea and helps motivate people toward effective change.

$89 for some guy on oDesk? Wow, I knew we needed to raise prices at LiberWriter, but... ouch. For someone technical - you know HTML and grok various XML formats - learning how to do it yourself isn't that big a deal. I have always likened it to changing a tire on a car - it's not that hard, but if you're short on time and patience, you'll probably be happier to pay someone to do it if possible.

The $89 was for CreateSpace conversion as well. But I agree completely. Deciding to outsource was lazy thinking in this instance. Formatting the ebook was a lot easier than I thought it would be.

You're advertising an ability to make an ebook beautiful through formatting and styling, yet this is your Website: http://liberwriter.com/

I'd work on that if I were you.

It looks good to me - simple, direct and easy to navigate.

Our customers are looking for quality formatting at good prices, not lots of rounded corners and other gewgaws. By and large, they have zero overlap with the HN crowd and could care less about the latest trendy design fads.

Also, remember that Kindle formatting is very very plain.

It probably would make sense to get something from http://themeforest.net/ or similar and jazz it up a bit. I don't disagree with what you are saying but you will most likely do more sales that way. If you end up doing this make sure to write about it.

Here's an example (not saying to use this one):

http://themeforest.net/theme_previews/286942-cheerapp-premiu...

While your suggestions are good, the idea that a visually better designed site will convert better is a universal one. I've seen more than my fair share of tests where the cruder site wins.

I've looked through themeforest in the past - the prices are great if I found something that would be an improvement, but I never found anything I liked. A lot of our customers are older and not great with computers, so clarity and simplicity are things that I place a high emphasis on - and something people have commented on as well - they appreciate that it's all right there in front of them in fonts that are easy to read.

Not to say it couldn't be a lot better, but it's something that I feel more like iterating on at the moment, rather than throwing it away and starting from something someone else did that I may have trouble changing.

I do appreciate the constructive comment though; a lot of 'design' threads seem to be a bit on the sniffy side, which is unhelpful: I know I'm not a professional designer, and don't try and play one on the internet. I'm doing the best I can given the circumstances, and am not unhappy with the results so far, in terms of what our customers are telling us.

"A lot of our customers are older and not great with computers"

Understand. The hand holding crowd. We have those as well so I know what you mean.

I think you need to incorporate this statement that you make elsewhere:

"Word manuscript, we make it look good on the Kindle"

in a prominent place under your banner on the homepage such as:

"We make your word manuscript look good on the Kindle!"

"Liberwriter makes your word manuscript look good on the Kindle!"

It needs to be right on your home page since it's the easiest way to understand at a glance and reinforce what you are doing. (See logo design below).

Also, the stuff on this page:

http://www.liberwriter.com/kindle_book_cover_images

Needs to be more prominent visual and mentioned on the home page. I think it's the key to what you are selling and it represents what every writer really wants (and is the key to vanity publishing in general like what a diamond ring means to a woman the physical representation of something).

Lastly, I would work some of the quotes from "testimonials" into the home page as well. For example this:

"contacting Kindle Support and they finally recommended Liber Writer"

can become this:

"Recommended by Amazon Kindle Support!" (in proximity to your logo at the top).

In fact, browsing your testimonials I see plenty of things that belong on your home page (which is good so take advantage of anything you can put there.)

You can use http://99designs.com or http://www.logotournament to create a new banner at the top. With the resulting photoshop files you can change and tweak the tag line when needed. At the very least a new banner incorporating a tagline would be a very easy change to make.

If you make any of these changes let me know so I can take a look. Good luck.

Trust me, it's not good. It's not a matter of adding "rounding corners and other gewgaws" (which you already have on your site, I might add). It's about knowing what you're doing or hiring someone who does.

Seriously. Have you done any A/B testing. Do you have any stats from his traffic and conversion rates. Did you read his clients minds? A good website is not a "nice" one. A good website is a one that does the best conversion and satisfy the customer.

P.S: I used to think that way until I saw my dad browse the Internet. He was looking for solar panels and hit a Chinese website. The website was 95 like, and my dad said "This guys look great". He only cared about the pictures, prices and specification. He copy/paste their email and contacted them.

Also, the Call To Action is a bit small.

You think? It should definitely mention pricing more prominently, I suppose, because I get people who write to ask about pricing... It'd be harder to make that button much larger, brighter, or more central though.

It was an attempt at humor. The CTA button is humongous.

Yesterday I was trying to make an ebook out of a comic I made, where there is one image per page. The designers of epub and mobi apparently didn't think it useful to be able to put an image in the center of a page, it has to be glued to the top. That seems so idiotic that I'm still hoping I didn't look well enough.

I'm also trying to find an easy way to make a book into an android and iphone app. O'reilly packages some of its books as apps using the aldiko reader, but I haven't found any explanation about how to do this.

Would you mind explaining why you decided to go with the Kindle Store instead of just hosting it yourself? Does the Kindle Store restrict you from doing that? Would you mind sharing some of your stats?

Thanks for sharing your insight!

The Kindle store is where I made 99% of my book purchases last year, so I based the decision off my own buying preferences. Also, it's much easier to publish a book through Amazon than Apple (at least from what I've read).

If you sign up for KDP Select, where people with Amazon Prime and a Kindle can rent your book for free, then the digital version has to exclusively be on Kindle for 90 days.

As for stats, the book has only been out a week and a half so the data isn't that interesting. Plus, I've yet to really make a big marketing push behind it. In a few months I'll have another post sharing some stats and what I've learned.

Are you selling on any other ebook platforms yet; like OverDrive for libraries, or in B&N's store? Do you sell physical copies through Lulu or their competitors? What do you use to track analytics if you use multiple platforms? Did you ever think about formatting with Markdown ever during the process? Can you expand upon why you chose $3 as the selling price for your ebook?

I realize these are quite a few questions, but I value your input given your experience. It's a very interesting world in self-publishing today.

Thanks.

Selling on other platforms: Not yet. KDP Select prohibits me from selling the digital version anywhere else. Unsure of whether this was a good decision or not, but I'm stuck for the next 90 days.

I did consider using Book Baby for distribution. I still might come march.

Physical copies: I'll be submitting the book to CreateSpace once the designer I'm working with finishes the cover.

Pricing: Pricing is a known unknown for me. $3 is as cheap as I can go while retaining the 70%. Below $2.99 and it goes down to 35%. Should I price it at $5? $7? $9.99? I'm not sure. Seth Godin has interesting thoughts on this: http://www.thedominoproject.com/2011/12/how-much-should-an-e...

Also, can someone residing outside US publish in Kindle Store? I see they send payments via checks, but it was not clear whether it's global.

You can. They opened it up for international authors in January 2010.

Just to mention another option for prospective authors to publish an e-book sans the sucky parts: HyperInk.com (YC startup)

How is this "self-publishing"? Isn't Amazon your publisher?

Publisher and distributor aren't the same thing.

Any tips on how to best market a self-published book?

I can't give advice from experience for at least another month or two, but I'll post a conversation I've been having with a successful author on book marketing next week.

I have a work in progress marketing guide here:

http://www.liberwriter.com/documents/120

Some of it is LiberWriter specific, but not that much and all the ideas are useful elsewhere.

I found this digital book to be an excellent resource http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005DC68NI

you can get a free pdf version at the authors blog http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/lets-get-digital/

Read this blog:

"A Newbie's Guide to Publishing" http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/

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