I originally wrote my ebook as preparation for a 3 hour long conference tutorial. I had given the tutorial previously and thought that I would prepare by writing a book. Well, the book was published in November, the conference was in July. Yes it is hard work. Especially when you have a full time job and family.

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