LiberWriter – Friendly, Easy Kindle Publishing

“You should raise your prices – after you’re done with my book, of course!” is not the kind of thing you hear every day running a business, but we’ve had a couple of our customers tell us this.  High quality work and low prices continue to stand out as the two things that make our customers the happiest.  I view the second, in particular, as a challenge: for a programmer with many years of experience, the technical details of getting an eBook right are manageable.  The trick is how to do so, including providing good customer support, at a price that’s reasonable.

Amazon’s KDP is opening up self-publishing to many who might not have considered it.  Rather than spend a lot of money and time with a “vanity” publisher, people can just go directly to Amazon with their work, and if it sells, great!  But since “there’s no such thing as a sure thing”, if it doesn’t go well, it’s better to keep your costs contained.  You can always learn from what went wrong, and try again – edit the book some, improve your marketing skills, and, very importantly, write more.  That said, putting a minimum of effort into your books is likely to pay off: make sure the formatting is ok, make sure that the most glaring of errors are edited out, and make sure you have a nice cover image.  We come into the picture with formatting and cover images: we take your Word file, and produce a high quality .mobi file.   Indeed, I think we meet or exceed the standards of many big publishers’ ebooks, but as the saying goes, we don’t want to “forget to dance with the one that brung you”, and in that case, it’s all of you who are just getting into this self-publishing thing.  For those of you who are making money writing, our low prices are just an added benefit.

But how do we do it?  Mostly by means of programming to automate the process as much as possible, so that the people doing the conversion for each book can concentrate on what people are good at, and leave the boring stuff to the computer.  We have a process for managing your book from start to finish, so that we are efficient in our use of time.  There are tools to clean up all the garbage that MS Word leaves in many files, there are tools to help correct common formatting mistakes, and tools to help create a hyperlinked table of contents.  On the customer support side, we have a “progress tracker” for every book where our customers and conversion experts can leave comments and ask questions.

Does our automated process leave any room to customize your book? Of course!  We don’t add too much in the way of “frills”, since there aren’t that many things that can be done to a book destined for a wide range of reading devices in any event, but we can certainly work with you to personalize your book.

Interested in giving us a try?  Our prices and “get started” page is here:
http://www.liberwriter.com/pricing

Your book’s “cover” is the first thing that jumps out at people when it’s displayed on a web page with a bunch of other books.  It is absolutely critical that it do a good job of grabbing people’s attention.

Yes, of course, we offer cover design services, but to be radically honest, while we think we offer great cover design at good prices, there are a lot of talented designers out there, so pretty much everything below is going to apply to them as well.  I’m just writing it to help educate people about what goes into the production of a cover.

First of all, a “cover” for a Kindle book really isn’t a cover at all.  It’s a flat image that will be displayed on various web pages – most likely as a thumbnail, but also in a larger format if the user wants to have a look.  This means it’s important for the image to work as a thumbnail in order to attract attention.  Another thing that follows from the cover not being an actual physical cover is that there is no spine, and no back cover.

In a bookstore, when a book interests you enough to pick it up, you might glance at the cover, then at the back, then start looking inside.  Therefore, for print books, not only does the front of the cover have to be good, but the back must be designed correctly too, with a catchy quote or blurb that captures the reader’s attention and makes them want to spend more time with the book.  On the web, none of this happens: readers who want to know more click on your book, and an Amazon page pops up with all kinds of information about the book: blurbs, author bio, reviews, and so on.  This information takes the place of the back cover.  In many ways, this is a positive development: you have fewer expenses in terms of what you need to design, and your books’ page likely has a lot more space on it than the back cover of a book ever would.  Including a ‘back cover’ image in an eBook is a bit tricky.  Stash it at the very back of the book, and virtually no one will ever see it!  You could always put it somewhere after the title page, but most likely it’s going to be a bit awkward there.  We recommend simply not including it in an eBook.

Besides not needing a spine and back cover, another thing working in your favor in terms of costs is that for an eBook cover, you can get by with lower resolution, which translates (especially in terms of things like stock photography) to lower costs.  However, do keep in mind that if you ever want to do a print version of your book, you should discuss this with your cover designer so that they can keep that in mind when creating your cover.

What dimensions should you use?  It used to be that anything over 600×800 pixels was ok, but with screen resolution improving all the time, that’s not big enough any more.  These days, Amazon are recommending:

For best quality, your image would be 1563 pixels on the shortest side and 2500 pixels on the longest side

https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A2J0TRG6OPX0VM

Of course, you don’t want too large an image, as that may cause your book to be larger to download, which may end up costing you a portion of your earnings.

The cover image should be in color, but should also look ok in grayscale, for those viewing it on their eInk Kindles.

As to what imagery and typography makes for a good cover… that’s a long and involved discussion for another post.  Suffice it to say that a good designer will be able to help you create something that’s appropriate for your book.  The important thing, from my point of view is to stand out from the competition, and to make people curious to learn more about your book.  Naturally, you want to also come across as professional.

In conclusion, here are some questions we ask potential customers in order to help them think about what kind of cover they’d like:

• What is your book about, and who is your intended audience?
• Do you have any images (photos, logos, illustrations) that you would like to include on the cover? If you do not have an image yet, you can describe what you have in mind and we will locate several for you to choose from. Istockphoto.com is a source we work with often.
• What text would you like to include on the cover? Any particular font or font style that you have in mind?
• What are you envisioning as the overall look/feel/mood of the cover? The more detailed you are in your description, the more easier it will be to turn your ideas into reality. If there are examples of other cover designs that you especially like or dislike, that can also be very helpful.
• Do you intend to use the cover for a print book as well, or is it going to be exclusively an eBook?
• And, finally, what deadlines and timeframe do you have for this project, so we can be sure to get everything done in time?

Good customers are extremely important to getting a new business off the ground.  When I was pushing LiberWriter along the runway as fast as I could, I was fortunate to happen on David Wogahn as one of our early customers.  Patient, and full of great feedback, he’s exactly the kind of person you want as a beta tester.

Now that LiberWriter is more firmly established, having produced hundreds of books, we’re in a position to do David a good turn by giving his latest book some attention.  Of course, his book, being about the eBook publishing process, has an interview with me, which never hurts in terms of getting our attention!

There are a lot of people selling “snake oil” to all those yearning to see their book succeed as an eBook, but David’s book is the real deal, emphasizing the work you will need to put in to create and market your book.  He goes through all the steps to properly put together a professional looking eBook, and how to get out and start marketing it.

The book is available for purchase here:

For the next day or so, the book is actually free through Amazon’s Kindle Select program, so you can give it a try without even taking a risk.

Formatting books for the Kindle ranges from easy novels to more difficult assignments like textbooks, which still don’t work terribly well on such a small screen with limited formatting capabilities.

Cookbooks are somewhere in the middle, but still something that does work fairly well on the Kindle.  Here are some of our tips and tricks for how to format them.  This advice is for the LiberWriter system, but should be applicable to anyone working with HTML to format their book.

Like everything else on the Kindle, you want to keep things “linear”, so that the text flows.  If you try and lay things out with tables, you’ll get frustrated, and it probably won’t come out looking very good.  Paragraphs separated by spaces, or a bullet list are good for ingredient lists.

So, for recipes, just lay things out one bit after another:

1. Start off with the name of the recipe.  This is something that will be linked in the table of contents, so make it interesting so people will stop to look at it.  In LiberWriter, use a chapter or subsection, and if you use the latter, be sure to put a page break before it.  The chapter and subsection buttons format the heading in a certain way, and also ensure that it will appear in the table of contetns.
2. List the ingredients.  Rather than using “fancy” characters like ½, you can simply write 1/2.  While the former will probably work on most readers, the latter is guaranteed to.
3. Add the directions.  In order to ensure that each line ends where you want, you can push control and return together to make a line break, rather than a new paragraph.

Fairly easy.  Let’s go through an example from The Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe :

Continue reading →

In this clip from City Slickers, Jack Palance, as Curly, talks about the “one thing” in life (with a bit of swearing, if that’s of any concern).  With Kindle formatting, there are many tips, tricks, pitfalls and things to learn, but there’s something of a “one thing” as well.

The “one thing” is that content should be linear.  Each thing follows the next vertically, and not horizontally.  Two columns?  Forget about it.  Wrap an image in text?  No.  You need to place the image between blocks of text, vertically.  Tables?  Only the simplest will work; anything more complex and you should look at ways of making the content work in a more linear fashion.

For instance, if you had a table like so:

You could transform it to work like so:

Lance Armstrong
Weight: 67 kg
Height: 177cm

Alberto Contador
Weight: 62kg
Height: 176cm

… and so on.  Granted, a table is easier to use to quickly compare and contrast data with, and if you’re really desperate, you can always make an image of your table, but where possible, transforming it into one-thing-after-the-other is your best bet for easy formatting that will work everywhere with no hassles.

Bullet points, on the other hand, work fine, if you know what you’re doing, because they’re a linear element – one comes after the other.

Like Curly, at some point in the future this advice will probably shuffle off this mortal coil due to advances in ereader technology that allows fancier formatting, but for the time being, it’s a good rule of thumb.  And even in the future, we’ll still be faced with the problem of disparate reading devices from cell phones to PC monitors, so content that “flows” is always going to be superior to content that needs very rigid formatting.

I have been reading Peter Meyers’ Breaking The Page and find it fascinating to see some of the ideas of how books may be “improved” in the future.  I have my own ideas about what could and should happen with eBooks, but he has clearly put a great deal of thought into it, and his free preview book is well worth reading.

Something that I find interesting though, is the economics of the particular moment we are in right now.  Once upon a time, publishing looked like this:

– a very time consuming and expensive process, to say the least. Self publishing back then was out of reach of anyone not independently wealthy.

In the future described by Meyers’ book, things will never be that expensive again, however, especially for certain kinds of books (reference books for instance), it may be possible to throw in all kinds of “extras” to make the books more useful and valuable for people.  That’s mostly a good thing, but it will likely cost more to produce those books. Even novels, which are currently the books that work the best on the Kindle and other dedicated eBook readers because of their nearly exclusive reliance on text, and linear structure, may have extras like timelines and character notes, even if they don’t go all in with videos, graphics, interactive charts and the like.

Compare that with Kindle formatting as it currently stands: at LiberWriter, we can format your book for just $50, and it will look as good as most books from the major publishers.  The open secret of eBook publishing right now is that there just isn’t that much leeway in what can be done with books, so the emphasis is mostly on making sure the important elements like a table of contents are in place, and not making any major mistakes.

That’s a pretty amazing state of affairs if you think about it.  Between formatting, a cover image, and some editing, it’s quite possible to put together a very professional looking book and publish it for several hundred dollars.  Put another way: given good writing, just several hundred dollars are the only thing between you and being pretty much indistinguishable from an eBook from a major publisher!  That’s very, very little, in the grand scheme of things.

The question is: will it last?  If it becomes possible to do more and more “fancy”  things with eBooks, production costs for the high end will go up, putting more distance between what the “pros” can afford, and what self-publishers can do without spending a lot of money.

What do you think?  Are we in a golden moment for self-publishers?

My Kindle Fire finally made its way over here to Italy.

First impression: it’s alright, as far as these things go, but not something I’d “fall in love with” like the regular old Kindle.

The Kindle is a single-purpose reading device.  Sure, you can view web pages with it in a pinch, but it’s not the most pleasant experience.  The advantages it gains by doing one thing really well, though, are impressive: very slim, lightweight, and an amazing battery life.  For whatever reason, I tend to get anxious over whether my devices are running out of battery life if they’ve been running at all (I don’t like the gas tank in the car to be below half full, either, for that matter), and the Kindle is really nice because it doesn’t stress me out that way!  Also, the eInk screen is vastly superior for reading compared to any LCD screen.

In contrast, the Fire has about 8 hours of battery life, which isn’t bad, it’s just not amazing, like the Kindle.  For an LCD screen device, I like the screen, resolution, and so on.  But it’s not eInk.  And it’s certainly a heftier package than the Kindle in terms of its weight.  So for reading, the Fire can’t really hold a candle to the Kindle, with one exception: color images.  For most of what I read, this isn’t that big a deal, but one area where I think the Fire is clearly superior to the Kindle is for children’s books.  Nice, color images, and a touch screen are a killer combo to make the device much more accessible for children’s stories, many of which simply would not work very well on a regular Kindle.

Naturally, all the extra weight, lower battery life and LCD screen are made up for by the fact that in many ways, the Fire is a much more capable device: web browsing is pleasant with it, you can watch videos, and listen to music.  Sure, you could listen to music on the regular Kindle too, but the interface is pretty raw.  So for “media consumption”, which is probably what Amazon wants you to do, the Fire is a pretty good device.  What with two small children, and a business to run, though, I don’t have much time for “media consumption” of the TV show or movie variety, and I can listen to music on my laptop or phone.

As someone who wants a device to use actively, rather than passively, though, my initial feeling is that the Fire is in something of a no-man’s land between my Android phone, and my laptop.  With the former, I can take pictures, quickly write emails in English and Italian, read email and web pages wherever I am via a data plan, and access any application in Google’s Android market.

Which is where another problem with the Fire puts in its appearance.  Amazon, rather than collaborate with Google, took the open source Android system and made their own modifications to it, and do not include any of the super-useful Google mobile applications on the device.  No gmail, no reader, no maps.  I knew that when I bought it, but the presence of those applications is sorely missed on the Fire.  Also, the app store that Amazon provides is fairly limited compared to the regular one available for my phone.  Ultimately, this leaves my mobile phone as a more useful “on the road” device.

With no camera, or even a microphone, I can’t take pictures, or, something that I personally would have loved to be able to do, use the Fire as a ‘skype device’ for video chats.  The device’s shape and size would have made it perfect for that.

Of course, I knew most of these things before I purchased one, and went ahead anyway, because I want to make sure our customers’ books look good on the Kindle Fire, especially when Kindle Format 8 finally rolls out.

However, I think otherwise I would have waited for version 2 to come out next year, which will doubtlessly be a big improvement.  For reading, I would continue to highly recommend a regular Kindle, with my preference being for either the basic one, or the one with a keyboard.  The Kindle Touch, with visions of grimy fingers swiped across the screen, sounds like something that would bother me.  For the price, the Kindle Fire is a nice bit of hardware, but the problem is that it just doesn’t fill a need I have.  It’s not as convenient as my mobile phone, and not nearly as efficient for doing anything useful as my laptop.