Preparing your ebook for publication

There are a number of very specific elements that you need to consider when you are preparing your ebook for publication. It’s not just about writing a good book, editing it and formatting it. At each stage of publishing your ebook, you will be asked for information and it certainly helps to have it all ready before you start. It will dramatically save time – particularly if you keep everything in one place on your computer.

Here’s what I would suggest.

To come …

There are some sections of this blog that are still empty. I created the cateogories to cover the subjects that I thought would be of interest, and some have taken over – in particular Twitter and Reviews. But it will all be here – some time soon!

When I started to write this blog, I actually thought that the process of preparing an ebook for publishing and then doing a bit of online marketing would be very straightforward, so expected it to be just a few posts, followed by updates on progress. But I was so wrong!

So I apologise for the empty slots. I thought of taking them down until I had time to start to fill them up – then realised that it was better to show what will be coming, rather than look like a range of unconnected thoughts. There is method in my madness, but time constraints – as always – mean that things don’t happen as fast as I would like.

Temporary post

This blog is just beginning – and it’s in its early stages.

Please bear with me – there will be posts in all the sections very shortly.

Creating your first ebook – preparing the ground

Just to reiterate some of the information from the last post, there are several stages to getting your book ready to publish. It’s not just a matter of writing it, and then uploading it. At least, not if you want to be successful (and I have yet to discover how successful I will be!). The main phases are :

• writing a good book (obviously);
• proof reading until you are blind – some notes on this below;
• preparing your social networking sites, at least in a rough format so that you can add links within your book – you don’t want to be doing this later. This is covered briefly in the previous post, but there will be more on getting the most of your social networking sites later;
• preparing all the other stuff you are going to need – photos, blurbs, book cover images – more below;
• formatting your book so that it can be easily uploaded;
• choosing your channels to market – Amazon, Smashwords, etc;
• uploading your book, and correct any problems – then publish!
• writing a marketing plan, and then implementing it.

So there is more to it than meets the eye!

Publishing your first ebook – preparation

The earlier posts reflected what I was doing, how I was doing, and how frustrated I was getting with the whole process. But now my ebook is published and is available from Amazon.co.uk here and Amazon.com here. However, the journey was not quite as easy as I thought it would be, so I am going to concentrate the contents of the following few blogs on the process I followed, and the issues that I experienced along the way.

The process will be covered in several posts, and as I continue to market my book, I will share the process to the best of my ability.

Wrestling with html editors

Well, this isn’t the complete blog post that I was hoping for by the end of the week. After spending too long trying to sort out the best way to tweet, have people “like” me, and join various LinkedIn groups, I thought I should get down to the real business of sorting out my book. I had been working under the misapprehension that actually this last bit was going to be easy.

Social sharing

I was hoping that today I was going to be able to say that I had done a great job, and now all my social sharing stuff was up and working. This is not the case.

As I mentioned yesterday, I do want to make sure that people can share my content, and when the book is launched (presuming I ever get time to finish editing it) I want to be ready so that those people I know well will share information about me and about my book. So it all has to be ready!

Too much to do !

When I decided to publish my novel as an e-book, I thought it was going to be SO easy! I checked it out on Amazon, and thought that I just needed to make a few edits to my WORD document, and then just upload it. All done in a couple of days, I thought. But then I started to take it a bit more seriously, and all of a sudden I am drowning.

Getting Started – again

This is the new blog of Rachel Abbott – a writer, and I’m just about to publish my first book using various e-book formats.

I previously had a blog, but first of all the design just simply disappeared, and then to my horror the blog was hacked and filled with porn. It was quarantined by Google, and the best outcome seemed to be to delete and start all over again.

The next blog will be about the start of the e-book process, and I hope to update the blog constantly to record the ease or otherwise of getting the perfect e-book.