Why publish you eBook? Consider time to market, cost of publication, enhance-ability, and financial reward, to name a few.  Year to date statistics show $560.5M in eBook sales in 2011, a 150% increase over 2010. Growth is exponential. Media Bistro If you have a manuscript that is ready for publication, an eBook should be included in your plan.

If you don’t own an eReader, we recommend making the investment (or download the Kindle or Nook ap to your desktop.)  Experiencing e-reading will show you (rather than tell you) that a new paradigm is available to your readers.  The e-reading public can change the font; maybe he/she likes to read historical nonfiction in Times New Roman but prefers Arial for novels–now it’s the reader’s choice. The reader can also pick the font color, and size. Readers can make the margins bigger or smaller, and change the background color.  Hyperlinks leading to additional information, animation, and book trailers can be imbedded.

At the moment, Amazon pays 70% and B & N pays 65%.  Do the math; if the retail price of your paperback is $18.95, Amazon will sell it for around $14.00, by the time you pay your distributor, wholesaler, and the post office, you get less than $3.00 and the next thing you know, that same book is available used on Amazon and you get nothing. When you sell an eBook, 70% of $9.99 ($6.99) is all yours. Most ebooks retail in the $9.99 price range but there is no reason why you couldn’t publish a novelette or short story for $2.99 or an elaborate enhanced eBook for $20 or more.

Additional advantages to eBook publication

• No returns
• No shipping costs
• No reselling used books
• Limited book sharing
• Instant availability
• Enhance-ability when published for Nook Color or Kindle Fire (for example Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, hard copy with CDs retails at $60, while the enhanced eBook with everything goes for $19.99. As an author,  think about the difference in production costs. The Atlantic

Disadvantages

• Sorry, can’t think of any

At this writing, the two major formats for e-books are MOBI (Kindle) and EPUB (Sony Reader, Nook, iPad, etc, every eReader except for Kindle). If you compare eBooks to digital music, we’re way beyond 8 track, but not yet to MP3.  Someday soon, there will be standards, but we’re not there yet. That doesn’t mean you should wait to ePublish. Think of your eBook like a web site that looks different on a Mac, PC, smart phone or tablet. Your book will look slightly different on each eReader.

All you need  is a  manuscript in MSWord or InDesign. We convert it to MOBI and EPUB and set up accounts with Kindle, Nook and the others.

Your e-book will have

• a cover (you provide the jpg artwork, or a hard copy we can scan)
• a table of contents – if applicable
• linked endnotes
• links to your website or e-mail address
• other elements specific to your book
• unique ISBN (not the same ISBN you used for the print edition)

For more information contact marcia@marciabreece.com

The popularity of blogs has soared in the last few years. There are now over one hundred million blogs tracked by Technorati, a popular blog search engine.  According to demographics collected by the Pew Internet Study, blogs have become mainstream and represent virtually every audience and topic area.

You can use blogs to:

• Develop an audience for your work

• Promote your book

A blog bears many resemblances to a book. Both have a title and subtitle that reflect the content of a book. Blog posts can be organized into categories, which serve as a kind of table of contents to classify and group related material. Blog posts, typically three hundred to five hundred words in length, represent the raw content of a book. Links within posts or on the blog roll serve as a bibliography, showing references to source material.

How do you attract people to your blog?   Initially, through searches individuals make on popular search engine sites like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. By using popular keywords in your blog title, subtitle, categories, and posts, your blog will begin to turn up in these searches. You can discover these keywords using keyword discovery tools or simply checking out popular blogs in your topic area.  The more you blog and the more others discover and link to your blog content, the higher will be the ranking of your blog site in search results and the greater the traffic you will receive.

Blog software usually provides a basic set of statistics that allow you to track important information, such as number of visitors, page views, referring sites, and average time spent by each visitor. Page views and comments left by visitors for specific blog posts provide an indicator of popular content. This makes blogs an excellent way for you to field test and select material to be included in your book.

Once you have cultivated an audience, you can transform your blog into a great marketing platform. For example, you can promote your book on a special page, featuring your bio, a book description, excerpts, press releases and testimonials. Thus your blog can double as a book website.  You can also promote your book to a wider audience by arranging a blog tour.  A blog tour is a series of scheduled guest appearances on related blogs, where you have the opportunity to talk about your book. This is a low cost, high impact method to discover new readers for your work.

Whether you are publishing independently or trying to sign on with a traditional publisher, blogging can be key to your success. More publishers are now starting to view the blogosphere as a fertile ground to find promising writers. Why? As an author who blogs, you can quantify your audience and this is attractive to risk averse publishers.

Blogging is a low risk, low cost way to build your audience while you are developing your work and then promote your finished book to that same audience. Give it a try!

(lnformation from Tom Masters, author of Blogging Quick and Easy)

“But words are things, and a small drop of ink
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces 
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.”

Lord Byron, English poet, Don Juan, 1819

History cites the first written language about 3100 BCE in Sumer (located in present day Iraq). We have words to live by, words to capture your attention, to break your heart, to make your day.  As a writer, I live with words and am conscious of the impact of words.  Thoughts are nebulous until the words are realized on paper, then the thought becomes viable, something that can be as sharp as a razor or as comforting as a blanket.

The human heart, fist-shaped, weighs between nine to eleven ounces, yet can feel like a two-ton rock sinking to the bottom of the soul. The human brain, our complex, neurological computer, weighs on the average about three pounds, yet can be as empty as a blank screen.  It is words that give the human organs weight that cannot be quantified, but always qualified. Words have the power to transform lives, heal, destroy, and shape civilizations. Philosophers, poets, and scribes use words to instruct their students. All writers throughout history, have left us words to live by, to teach children the ways of the tribe, even the how-to manuals of our daily lives.

The power of word is greater than any machine, for a machine may move a mountain only if the operator knows how to use it. If the scale records a loss of ten pounds, I am ecstatic, light-hearted; but if I have gained, I feel heavy-hearted.  Love can make me light-headed, but a lover’s rejection can lay heavy on my mind.  The written words of Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Christ, Buddha, Marx, Sarte, Lord Byron, Sappho, Coleridge, Neruda, Emily Dickenson, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Ellison, Dickens, to name just a very few great minds, have had immeasurable influence on our personal and political lives.

The Bible, Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Machiavelli’s The Prince, The Constitution of the United States have changed the course of history and molded civilizations. Climbing down that epic ladder onto my own lawn, I am painfully aware of how my words affect others. A careless, critical remark can sever a tenuous link between mother and daughter; a sharp rebuke has shattered a friendship; and perhaps most damaging of all is silence, the lack of words, the shunning of another, when wordlessness becomes a brick wall. On the opposite side of that is that joyful silence, stunned by beauty, or an act so full of love that it leaves one speechless.

My heart can sing, my brain can rhapsodize eloquently, or my heart can whisper listen, listen. I save and re-read cards I get all year, savoring the kind words of friends and family. I understand why people have always kept letters stashed away because one cannot just throw out those precious jewels that are words written from one special person to another. Everyday I hope that it is my best I give, my words kinder than I may have thought yesterday, just in case someone takes it to heart and carries that careless remark like a stone weight.

And perhaps, one drop of ink can make me think.

by Jacquie Ream — author of KISS, Forcing the Hand of God, and Bully Dogs