E-books Are Not That Easy
whattofix.com
whattofix.com
It's free to sign up, you write your book in Markdown and we convert it into PDF, epub and mobi for you. We pay you 90% - $0.50 for sales on our site.
You can put it on the iBookstore and Kindle store yourself (or be patient for a few weeks and we'll do that and provide an ISBN for you as well...).
If you've already written your book in HTML, we can convert it to Markdown for you automatically -- throw your HTML files into a Dropbox folder and click a button on Leanpub.
As for technical editors, our approach is to publish early (before you're done the book, preferably before you've written 100 pages) and have your readers function as development editors.
It's not a complete solution (yet), but I think we would have saved you tons of pain.
Drop me a line (scott@leanpub.com) if you have any questions.
"A manuscript is not a book. The author's job is to write the manuscript. The publisher's job is to turn a series of manuscripts originating from different suppliers into consistently produced books, mass-produce them, and sell them into distribution channels.
[...]
While it's true that the author is the one with the creative input, they only do about half the work. And the other half of the job is not optional. The reason publishers exist is to provide for division of labour; if I did the other 50% to bring my rough manuscripts up to published-book-quality, I'd only be able to write half as many novels."
As per Charlie Stross, accomplished fiction writer: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/02/cmap-2-h...
It shows. I notice when a manuscript hasn't been taken care of by a good editor before going to print. I can't think of a single genre in which editing is not necessary.
NB: I'm a publisher of non-fiction books, primarily lifestyle and comp sci. My dad's a publisher, my mom's an author, my brother is a photographer for print. I'm familiar with the amount of work it takes to turn a manuscript into a book.
I'm the author of 2 traditionally-published books. ISBNs, dead trees, the works.
The first one (Flexible Rails) was something I self-published on Lulu as I wrote it. It started at about 200 pages and ended up over 500 pages before I did a deal with a traditional publisher.
At what point was it a book? My publisher approached me about publishing my book, not my manuscript (or rose). People all over the world bought my book when it was just a PDF. It made my mortgage payments for a while. In fact about 70% of my profit over my book's lifetime was from PDF sales.
As its author, I considered it a book when I first published it. My readers did too. Publishers like O'Reilly, the Prags and Manning probably consider their beta / early access books to be books.
Finally (since I'm typing on a phone), ebooks are to physical books like web apps are to shrinkwrapped software: you can do way more releases. At what point is a release real? Our answer is it is when you have paying customers. That is a commitment to your readers, and it helps you write and keeps you motivated.
So, to sum up the ramble: in 5 years almost all books will be ebooks, most will have multiple releases (including before being "finished"), and this author's opinion will be quaint.
Will there be a lot of self-published ebooks in 5 years? Yeah, maybe; but the idea that publishing houses is going the way of the dodo, that they deliver no value to the consumer, is best confined to a specific set of genres.
In my experience of writing occasional short stories online, Sci-Fi/Fantasy readers love updates.
I mean; quite often as a fantasy reader myself I think "hmm, I wonder how that character got there" or "what is her backstory". The ability for the writer to insert those things, fix plot/canon errors (as well as spelling/grammar) and other things pointed out by the reader is really cool
(Don't get me wrong; whilst I enjoy those prospects I'm not suggesting traditional publishing and "hardware" books (:P) will die - I hope not!)
I'm baffled why the Kindle doesn't allow crowd-sourcing to mark these errors for fixing in later versions, and then allow people to download the new version over their old version.
- "ebooks aren't 'real' books"
- "in-progress books aren't 'real' books"
I did not mean to imply the following:
- "any book that's is published on paper is quaint"
- "any book that is finished before being published is quaint"
You brought up Dickens and serials. I totally agree with you! I've been bringing up Dickens when I've been talking about Leanpub to authors (and a room full of publishing industry people) for years.
I am absolutely not claiming that Leanpub invented serials, self-publishing or beta books.
Serials in fiction go back to Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Arabian Nights, etc.
What we are calling "Lean Publishing" is the act of self-publishing an in-progress book. Specifically, here's my full definition:
"Lean Publishing is the act of self-publishing a book while you are writing it, evolving the book with feedback from your readers and finishing a first draft before optionally using the traditional publishing workflow."
The notion of self publishing is not new, and the Pragmatic Programmers, O'Reilly and Manning have all published and sold in-progress technical books for years. I think the Pragmatic Programmers were the ones who did it well first.
I wrote a manifesto about Lean Publishing, which is where the above definition is from. It's freely available here: http://leanpub.com/manifesto
I'm also selling an in-progress book of it, of course. My intention is not to promote that book, so I won't link to it, but to bring it up to ask questions about whether you would consider it a book. It's short: it's currently 50 pages, about the length of On Bullshit (a real book). Almost all the content is in the free manifesto, which is an essay on a web page. So is Lean Publishing a real book? People have bought the ebook and read it on computers, Kindles and iPads. If it's not real yet, when will it be real? When it's printed? When it has an editor?
Finally, you focus a lot on mediocrity and the role of publishers. I've thought a lot about this too; my ideas are here: http://leanpub.com/manifesto#what-does-lean-publising-mean-f...
Love On Bullshit! But that takes me back to my original point; I love my Kindle, have read all of cstross's articles on the challenge of ebooks, and don't have any problem calling an ebook a "real" book. And from both a technical and philosophical perspective, I understand and sympathize with leanpub (and thanks for the links; this is the first I've heard of your company, and it's great to see you've put so much thought into it).
My original point was simply that I can appreciate the interative nature of writing a manuscript, and getting feedback is essential. But I think there are large swaths of literature which are simply not suitable for the average consumer to provide that kind of feedback, because the very process of reading the draft ruins your ability to enjoy the end result. And since many of my colleagues in the software business don't tend to read those sorts of books (or ebooks), I probably should have made more of an effort making my point, rather than being snarky.
However, for a fiction author, publishing in-progress has its merits too. First, given the number of writers in the world, it's a mathematical certainty that there's a really good story that exists only on some author's laptop right now, and all that s/he has to show for it is rejection letters. (Or the author could be so shy that they haven't even submitted it to anyone yet.) Lean publishing on Leanpub could help this author get their work out there and overcome the fear of publishing. (It would be really cool if one day Leanpub enables some great work of literature to be discovered...)
But publishing is special. Even if you've been creating lots of previews and have no interested readers, the first time you click the publish button and make your book available for purchase it is a scary thing to do. (This is a lot more so than tweeting or blogging.) I was even nervous clicking publish on my in-progress manifesto book, and I'm the cofounder of Leanpub! I think this is because most authors (myself included) have a deep respect for books and publishing. Saying that your words are worth reading is one thing, saying that they constitute a book worth reading is a big deal.
That said, we believe that the Lean Startup principles do apply to books, and that releasing more often can create a better work. Publishing in-progress can give authors some of the feedback that really good editors can provide. With my first book, I actually got really good feedback both from readers when I self-published and from my technical editor once I signed with a publisher after the first book version was done. But frankly, the reader feedback was more important: a reader found a security bug in my code, I got to ask my readers how important they thought REST would be to them (this was many years ago), etc, etc. Now, most readers gave me no feedback. This is expected. But the level of feedback I got from the most engaged readers was superior to what I would have gotten from even a good development editor. (The technical depth of these readers was equal to that of the technical reviewers, who are only typically engaged near the end of a technical book's development.)
Finally, publishing in-progress has another advantage: it helps avoid writer's block. This is because once you get in the habit of publishing, it removes the fear from it and just leaves the endorphin rush. This is similar to how continuous deployment in lean startups works, or how regular exercise at the gym works. Lean publishing makes releasing new versions a habit, and habits are powerful things...
The same is true for books. Anyone can write some texts amounting to 300 pages of characters on pages. That doesn't make it a book, IMHO.
To think that an intermediary is necessary to create a long-form work is demonstrably false cargo cult thinking. Books were printed for centuries before publishing companies came along.
We're using Ulysses (similar to Scrivener) and exporting to Word and importing to Pages (because the epub export was somewhat disappointing compared to the Pages epub export, and Pages layout tools are more powerful than Word's) because we need both epub and 6"x9" (US trade) print-ready PDF. She's got a cover and a back cover. She wants to have both ebook and hardcopy, and you guys don't offer hardcopy.
I don't have the time to write the software I would need to prepare this stuff myself—and I don't know that I want to learn all the standards that I'd need for it, either. If your PDFs are print-ready or I can somehow specify the size so that it can be print-ready, I'd happily pay to convert her novel—because this is just one of four books that we're going to have to do in the next few months.
(Shameless promotion for my wife: If anyone is interested in a late 70s rock and roll novel set in Canada and the UK, let me know—an email is in my profile. I'll send a note out when it's available, regardless of the process we use to produce it.)
The slightly longer answer is that we are working on some features for a more print-ready PDF. Right now our PDFs are optimized for on-screen reading. Sone small changes such as gutters and page numbers that alternate sides will make a nicer looking print book.
So, right now, who or what handles kerning, tracking, and such to ensure that you don't get distracting "rivers" of white space, odd page/paragraph breaks, and the like when printed?
I notice lots of rivers on Kindle.
If you're seeing rivers on a Kindle I'm guessing there'd be the same problem on paper.
For example, one of our books (leanpub.com/battingat10) was written by Chick Dubber, a retired typesetter. He noticed some bad hyphenation and we tweaked a few settings to make it look good. Other than that, he had no complaints.
There are lots of book samples that you can get for free from Leanpub. Many are linked to here: http://leanpub.com/bestsellers. Take a look and see what you think.
edit: Took a look at Raganwald's combinator book sample.
It has this bit of code:
address = Person.find(...).tap { |p| logger.log "person #{p} found" }.addre\
ss
Was this an editing choice by Reg, or is this something the software does?
For preformatted code blocks, there has to be an absolute line length -- otherwise the code just flows off the right side of the page, as <pre> blocks only do line-breaks when they are actually there.
So, what we do is take all pre-formatted code blocks, wrap them if they go over a certain line length and send a warning to the author letting them know that we did this. This is a case where human intervention is required -- we need to show all of the text, but most of the time you'll want to edit where the line breaks manually.
Most of the time automation is good enough, but we try to inform authors when there's something that needs their attention.
OK, so an author would know that there were things that should be manually inspected and changed if needed.
Here's Peter's/our take on DRM: http://www.peterarmstrong.com/?p=257 (this is slightly out of date, since Peter only talks about PDFs in the post).
When we get the feature completed on Leanpub, it will involve you filling out a form (we need to know a few things like the description and what categories you would like your book listed under) and clicking on a button on Leanpub. We'll do the rest.
We'll charge a one-time fee for the service, and you'll get an ISBN as part of the deal, but you will get 100% of the money from Amazon or Apple -- we won't take a cut of the sales.
Everything else (writing/editing/marketing) takes serious effort that most people aren't willing to do.
It's almost like learning an instrument. Anyone can do it and everyone wants to, but it's only a small percentage of people who will actually commit to it.
This stuff is hard and I totally understand your pain - I'm the digital product manager over at Blurb.com (ebook!). We're primarily focused on fixed-layout epubs which ensures that the picture you laid next to the text will always stay in the same place. Reflowable epubs are technologically easier to create but the output can vary so much that it makes the author look sloppy at times. Not cool.
You can create a Blurb book and then convert it to an ebook for $1.99. We create them to Apple's strict epub standards so you can even submit it to their iBookstore. No DRM. :) (http://blurb.com)
Looking forward, I think we are going to see a larger focus on fixed-layout ebooks in the future as more tablets are created (Kindle Fire, iPad) and authors see the limitations of reflowable ebooks. I'm not knocking reflowable ebooks, but just writing a book in itself is a huge undertaking (congratulations!); trying to maintain formatting and a clean layout afterwards feels like you're being punished.
As to anyone else who has gone through ebook creation/conversion with Blurb (or elsewhere), feel free to send me a note or comment with your questions. It's rare that a HN thread directly relates to my work :)
- Nic.
Lets say you do the work of creating an EPUB formatter that works to your satisfaction, then is it like a pipeline where you can feed new material in and get books out repeatedly, or do you have to tweak it for each book?
You can create an EPUB formatter that works to your satisfaction, but you've only coded it to work with that set of books. The next set of books may have different layout requirements, like padding between the text and the images.
Secondly, the epub world is evolving, and the readers that display the epubs all have their own interpretation. EPUB is simply HTML/CSS inside a .zip. e-readers are essentially browsers wrapped in their own chrome.
So, the real trick is to automate as much of the formatting as possible, but then have easy tools for the Author to make the final tweaks.
"It's a little bit of both. What really happens is that you're looking at a moving target in terms of both inputs and outputs."
Can you say more about this, it seems like we have two, perhaps three, targets; Kindle, iPad, and Nook. Together they probably make up over 95% of the e-book 'market' in terms of readers. Also they have a vested interest in making sure that books that look good today, still look good in the future so that publishers won't get stung by having to re-generate books.
Now the original discussion here was about authors who are trying to publish their own e-books. So when you said this:
"Secondly, the epub world is evolving, and the readers that display the epubs all have their own interpretation. EPUB is simply HTML/CSS inside a .zip. e-readers are essentially browsers wrapped in their own chrome."
I sort of tuned it out, while I can certainly see the top three book readers having their own interpretive quirks for EPUB, if, as an author, I get my tool chain which converts my manuscript into an acceptable EPUB on these three platforms, I would expect to be able to re-use that tool chain over and over again. So if I'm writing suspense novels, and my friend Bud gives me the occasional pen and ink illustration, I should be able to create a tool chain which can take my prose, scans of his drawings, and poop out an epub file. Then I sit back and go all Agatha Christy and write 150 detective novels.
Once the pain of getting the tool chain to work, with the caveat that book reader vendors are committed to backwards compatibility, I'm wondering why it would be 'hard' to publish after the first one was done.
Now granted if I went from pulp fiction to coffee table photography books I could see my tool chain being unfit for the task. And I could also see how, as a publisher of many authors it would be a pain in the arse to account for all of their different styles and topics and books and features etc. But if the rules really have changed, and its really 'better' for me to just publish my own books and distribute them through a channel like iTunes or Amazon, once the mechanics of publishing my style of book are over come, why wouldn't they stay over come, at least for me to get several books out using them?
I thought the entire point of using ePub over PDF was so that it would be more adaptable to each reading device and/or reader (e.g. larger font sizes).
but the tl;dr is: Different needs for different book types. Think of a reflowable epub as a .TXT file and a fixed-layout epub as an HTML file w/CSS. Yes, a .TXT file is indeed reflowable and adaptable for a screen size.
But what if you're writing an instructional book? Or you've made an awesome photo book of your travels? This is where presentation is more important over reflowable. It's important that the images you are referring to in the text are on the same page. Fixed-layout doesn't have to mean exact pixel representations just as most modern-day web pages adapt to user screen size. You can still "reflow" your text into a fixed-layout epub, the creation tool helps make this easy.
At the end of the day, the screen ratio of tablets is fairly similar, and epubs are just HTML + CSS. A fixed-layout epub gives the author the choice of control - they don't have to specify rigid container widths just as much as they don't have to specify a font.
There's a massive disparity in people's minds about the difficulty involved in crafting a great website, and crafting a great eBook... when they're essentially similar in composition and complexity.
http://www.liberwriter.com/testimonials
These are real quotes, and are just a selection of many. Making something hard easy for 'regular people' is a good business. I don't think it's actually that big a niche, and probably doesn't scale up hugely, because there is a human component involved, but so far I'm enjoying myself a lot.
However the rest of the list really paints an accurate picture of what selling an ebook and trying to get some market penetration is all about.
And it's truly ridiculous. A single ISBN is $125. In lots of 1,000, they're a dollar apiece. I can't think of any principled way to justify this, other than as a way of sticking it to would-be self publishers and very small presses just because they can.
Imagine ordering a paperclip: how much do you expect it to cost to order one paperclip, versus 1000 paperclips?
Similarly, it requires about as much work for a business to issue a check for $10 as for $10,000, hence why many businesses say it costs them much more in accounting costs to issue a small check than the actual value of the check.
The pricing for ISBNs makes zero sense given modern technology, where no human should ever need to get involved in the process. However, that assumes some degree of sense involved in the process...
If you plan to publish a version in hard cover, soft cover, ePub, PDF, with or without illustrations, you will need more than one ISBN for each book title.
Believe it or not, a typical trad publisher's profit after handling production and distribution overheads for a typical midlist book is roughly the same as the author's. Because publishing books is not, in fact, terribly profitable, because with vanishingly few exceptions most books have on the order of a few thousands to tens of thousands of consumers. (Traditionally the way publishers got large was to publish lots of stuff, and be prepared to follow through on the one in a hundred or one in a thousand titles that broke big.)
I don't stand by publishers but this seems to be the other extreme. The consumer loses in both, IMO…
Having written 3 of my own eBooks now and been involved with a few others, I can't fathom what you'd spend that much money on.
My hubby and I did the first 4 CopyHackers ebooks for under $1000, and I'm totally sure anyone could do it for less. We paid:
$700 for book cover designs on 99designs.com. $10 for the domain. $89 for a bunch of WordPress themes that ended up not meeting our needs. $29 for the WooTheme that did meet our needs.
I had a PDF-converter already, so I just launched with PDF. And I didn't do a mobi version until well after the concept proved itself and I could pay for it with the income from the ebooks.
As for marketing, hey, HN is free! So's Twitter. And MailChimp has a free option, too.
Hope it works out for you!!!
I'm asking since I'm doing customer development for my startup Leanpub, and we're trying to solve this exact problem. As an author, you shouldn't need to pay for PDF, MOBI or EPUB conversion, a storefront, blog theme, etc. You should only need to write the words -- and do your promotion on Twitter, of course.
My cofounder Scott posted above in this thread. Please feel free to email either of us if you have any questions; I'm peter@leanpub.com.
I love the idea of not having to worry about the various formats. That was the worst part for me... and still is, actually, as I haven't done the epub thing yet (just PDF and mobi). WooThemes was great, but, to be honest, my hub set up most of that, so perhaps if I'd been left to do it on my own it might not have been so easy for me. I'll def check Leanpub out.
Of course, there are exceptions to this. For example, books for very young children are very much about layout, art, etc. Also, books that are really multimedia projects, with heavy images, embedded video, etc are exceptions.
However, these exceptions are the minority. The vast majority of books are just words and figures. An author can create this themselves, writing in Markdown and creating their own figures. Will it be as polished as what a publisher would produce? No, of course not! Will it be all the reader really needs and wants? Definitely!
This is 90% of the value, and it's something that the author needs to produce. This is true even when working with a traditional publisher.
For technical books, business books (like startup books) and fiction books, all a reader really wants is the words and (if applicable) figures. In bookstores, things like nice glossy covers, layout, etc are important because people flip through books and make purchasing decisions. For example, this is why technical books have large indexes: people look at the index when making purchasing decisions.
On the internet, people make purchasing decisions based on Twitter, reviews, the book landing page, sample book content, price, etc. So that's what we focus on at Leanpub.
The AppSumo promo blew my mind. But nothing will ever compare to what happened on HN... probably because I feel so much gratitude toward this particular community. :)
Please - it's acceptable to do so. It is polite to do so.
A couple grand isn't any where near the "screwed" mark.
[1] https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26O...
[2] https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A30F3VI2...
Strong cross-currents between e-books, online course content and the programming paradigm also seem to be e/merging.
Amazon really wants ebooks to be priced under $10. Hence the 70% margins from $3-$9.99. The Hockings, Lockes and Konraths who spit out a novel a month can go down in the $.99 - $2.99 35% margin and make it back by selling 50K copies a week. I don't know that any technical book sells that much in a month. Hmmm, maybe technical books aren't exciting enough and could be spiced up a bit.
WRT formatting, I ended up writing my own restructuredText to epub converter[0]. I format my html specifically so it will go through KindleGen and make acceptable mobi's. (I'm convinced that the author(s) of KindleGen outsourced every other line of that program, then blindly merged them together. I'm not sure how else it could generate such horrible markup... A first year intern should be able to do much better in a month of a summer). Then I also created a mobi/epub friendly css project that has had some contributions from professional ebook creators. [1]
It took a lot longer to write than I would have thought, I had an in-law that writes grants for a living give it an overview, and then got a professional Python editor to give it a wonderful overhaul.
I did cover design myself with Inkscape. It's OK, better than a lot of covers, but not stellar.
As for distribution, e-junkie has a horrible interface (for admins) but does the job for self-distribution. Amazon has about 60+% of the US market, so even though mobi sucks, I put all my focus on making it look great on the Kindle. (In fact I'm in the middle of another book on mobi-friendly epubs) Getting published on KDP is easy, no ISBN required. BN has another 20% of the US market, pubit also easy, no ISBN required. Apple is a pain, and from my research most ipad users buy content from Amazon... Smashwords is fine for novel writers but requires writing in Word (at least until mid 2012), so I just can't justify spend time tweaking Word documents, for a book on Python where it is imperative that spacing and whitespace are correct, for a small slice of the pie. If Smashwords accepted by epub or mobi, I'd put it up there yesterday.
I'm horrible at marketing. Getting reviews and feedback is longtail behavior. Send out 40 copies to people who say they'll give feedback and maybe one or two will respond. (Maybe my peer group is bad) I need to spend more time prettying up the website and on marketing, but I feel good about my book and the reception it has gotten.
Yep it is hard work, but for some reason I'm in the middle of writing two more books.
0 - https://github.com/mattharrison/rst2epub2 1 - https://github.com/mattharrison/epub-css-starter-kit
Then again, my second book Economtricks: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/economtricks/6123536 took only a year and a half, and every aspect of it went smoothly.
So maybe there's something to be said about having gone through the process once, it gets easier.