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5 Reasons to Undertake Ebook Publishing

Are you making a mistake not planning to include ebook publishing in your publication schedule?

People interested in independent publication ask me if they should publish their manuscript as an ebook, a hard copy book or both.

The honest answer on my part is I don’t know. The decision is individual and unique to you. What might be right for one person is not necessarily right for another.

What I can do is give you some of the best reasons I can come up with why you need an ebook. There are many good ones, and I’m offering you some that I have either come up with or found. These are presented in no particular order.

1. Ebooks are inexpensive to bring to market.

Many writers, especially new writers, are eager to bring their stories and ideas to an audience. They want quick interaction to assess if there is an audience interested in their book.

A hard-copy book is more difficult and expensive to produce—and by extension slower. Even relatively inexpensive print–on-demand publication can cost you five or six dollars a book. An ebook on the other hand is published easily without any publication expense. Just as with hard copy, there are production costs which can (and usually should) include lay out, coding, design, editing.

If you want to see how people will respond to your book, creating an e-book is an avenue that will get you to market very quickly and will permit you to assess how people respond to it. You can get a book to a reader either through selling the book or by giving it away for reviews and getting people’s opinion about it.

2. Ebooks have a higher profit margin.

Since ebooks are so inexpensive to publish, your profit margin will be larger than for a print book even though you may sell more hard-copy books. (This is not to say you will earn more overall with an ebook.) But, your margin—the difference between cost and selling price will be more in your favor.)

There is also generally no cost to deliver an ebook to a buyer—an exception being photos which do incur a per-photo delivery cost in the range of $.03 per photo. On both Amazon and Smashwords, your profit margin is likely to be 70%. (30% going to the distribution company.) This is not a bad margin.

3. Your e-book can be revised easily.

Whether you have written memoir, nonfiction, or fiction, you will often find that you wish you had included something you had not—or not written something you have written. If you decide to revise the text or otherwise alter your ebook, you can tweak it easily. Unlike with hard copy, you will not have multiple copies that have to be sold before you can make a change—or else throw the books away.

While this easy tweaking can be true of a print-on-demand (pod) book, the pod hard-copy is likely to need formatting changes that will affect expenses. With an ebook, you can make a change today and sell the new book tomorrow with very little cost to you.

4. E-books are easy to store and transport. WomaneReader

I have been surprised by the number of people who tell me that they prefer to have an ecopy of one of my books rather than a hard-copy. Many people, especially those who live in apartments, may be reluctant to acquire books that need to be warehoused in their limited space.

Have you even gone on a trip and brought a book that did not really meet your need in the end and you wished you had another title? Space in your suitcase or briefcase is limited. Not so with an ebook. You can carry hundreds of etitles with you as you leave on your trip. Your appreciative reader can bring your book along with many others.

5. You can do ebook publishing quickly.

There may be times when you have an event coming up and you would like to be able to have a book ready to sell at that event. An event can be a physical occurrence—a conference or trade show—or it can be an electronic event—a tele-class you are presenting. When you have any e-book, you have something that you can sell.

You can provide a download address and code the book for only one download so the address cannot be shared. Of course, if someone chooses to copy your ebook, there is nothing you can do, but while this can happen, it is not going to be the rule.

If you would like to discuss how we can help you with ebook publishing, give us a ring at 207-353-5454 or send us an email: [email protected].

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