In part two of this terrific series by Guido Henkel, author of the Jason Dark gothic horror dime novel series, we look at the reasons why you should avoid using a word processor for formatting your ebooks…

Why you shouldn’t use a word processor

When I visit message boards for authors on the the Internet I keep coming across the same question over and over again, followed by what is effectively the same advice over and again. Sadly, in my opinion, the recommendations are all too often ill-advised and tend to create more problems than they solve.

What I am referring to, of course, is the question that aspiring independent authors frequently ask once they get to the stage where they want to self-publish their books, “How do I create an eBook?” Aside from the noise that such a question generates, the tenor of responses usually goes something like “You can export an ePub file from your word processor” or “Take your word processor file and upload it to insert-your-favorite-conversion-service-here for conversion.”

To me, these responses are usually not real advice. They are opinions. Someone suggests the procedure because it worked for them, completely ignoring the fact that their own eBooks resulting from said procedure are oftentimes riddled with problems and/or that the way to get there was resembling running a gauntlet of cumbersome obstacles and tests of patience.

Advice, on the other hand gives you the opportunity to make an educated decision based on the evaluation of information. So, let me give you a piece of advice.

Do not use a word processor file as the source of an eBook.

As you will see in a moment, word processors are not very good at what eBooks do and are therefore the wrong tool for the job. It’s like trying to hand someone a spoon to dig out a swimming pool. It is certainly possible, but at what price?

Read the rest at Guido’s blog

Ebooks, ebook, ebooks. That’s all writers are talking about these days. How to best take advantage of the opportunity available to them, perhaps for the first time, to release their works the way they want to release them, thanks to the growing popularity of ereading devices like the Kindle and Nook.

But with that opportunity comes responsibility to do it correctly and so writers everywhere are trying to learn everything they can about the best ways to produce, release, and market their ebooks. Formatting, of course, is one of the most popular subjects. After all, if your book looks like &%$#, then no one is going to buy it, right?

Guido Henkel (author of the Jason Dark supernatural pulp series) has taken pity on the rest of us poor struggling technophobes and has been putting out a terrific series of posts explaining the how and why behind proper ebook formatting. I’ve found the series very helpful and urge anyone with an interest in the ebook process to check it out. I liked it so much, in fact, that I asked Guido for permission to repost each installment of the series here at Rockyourwritingcareer.com. Today’s post, part one of the series he’s calling Take Pride in Your Ebook Formatting, kicks the series off in fine style.

Take Pride in Your Ebook Formatting (Part One)

To me, one of the key elements that sets apart a professional eBook release from that of an amateur has always been the technical presentation of the book. Sure, anyone can write a document in a word processor, run it through some export tool, use a fully automated conversion utility or peruse the services of an online service, but the sad fact of the matter is that none of these approaches typically results in, what I call, production-level digital books.

So, why are people using them? I have spent a lot of time thinking about this and observing how other authors approach their eBook publishing, and the more I examined it, the more I have noticed that there are generally two reasons for it.

The first reason is that many authors simply don’t know any better. They write their book, complete it and look for the fastest, cheapest and easiest way to deploy it. Don’t be one of those authors! It is a sad testimony in my opinion, and certainly not a valid excuse. You have labored over your book for months, maybe even years, you have read and re-read it countless times, cleaned out typos and grammatical errors, massaged the style and worked on the structure, grinding away in the wee hours of the night alongside holding a daytime job and maybe having a family. You did not get here just to break the first cardinal rule of book publishing:

Don’t get sloppy on the home stretch! It will reflect poorly on your work.

Read the rest at Guido’s blog

Yesterday, fellow writer Joe Konrath announced that the next book in his Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels mystery series, Shaken, would be published through the Amazon Encore program.

What makes this interesting, for those of you who might not be familiar with Joe’s career, is that the last six books in the Jack Daniels series had been published in hardcover to a fair degree of success by Hyperion. Joe is also an author who has taken advantage of the ability to make his backlist available to readers via the Amazon Kindle and has been having great financial success with that strategy, earning royalties of more than $4000 per month as a result.

Having already had success taking matters into his own hands with regard to his backlist, Joe apparently decided to pursue the same course when New York passed on the eight book in his popular series. As he says on his blog, “Traditional publishers had a chance to buy Shaken last year. They passed on it. Their loss. Their big loss. Their big, huge, monumental, epic fail.”

As far as I know, this is the first time that the Amazon Encore program has been used to publish original fiction, Previously, it has republished works that had been previously self published by the authors themselves.

Joe has been vocal in his stance that publishers need to change in order to keep up with the changing face of publishing, given the rise of ebooks, ereaders, and the many ways authors now have to bring their works to the readers who enjoy them. While he won’t discuss the specifics of the deal itself, Joe does say “that my terrific agents have been involved from the very beginning of negotiations, and have been essential in getting me a very favorable contract. I couldn’t be happier.” Given what he publicly admits to making with his self-published Kindle books, I imagine Amazon must have cut a nice deal with him for him to say he “couldn’t be happier.”

I admit I’m intrigued by this development. I’d certainly love it if my Kindle books would sell as well as Joe’s are selling currently and I suspect that this move will really boost his sales, both for his current titles and for Shaken itself. Being on the front end of a big new wave is always a good thing. Is it sustainable? I don’t know. Will Joe do this for the rest of his books? I don’t know.

I do know it will be interesting to watch and see.

Tell me, what kind of implications do you see resulting from something like this?

With the rise of less expensive ebook readers and the growing interest in using mobile devices such as handhelds and cell phones to read digital content, the question of how an author should best handle their digital rights is becoming more complex.  Recent changes in how publishers are compensating us for this content has also made it more important for us to understand just what is being offered and by whom.

Back in October 2008, Random House sent out a letter to industry agents informing them of a change in policy regarding ebook royalty rates on all future contracts.  Previously, RH had paid 25% of the suggested retail price of the title.  The new policy was that they would be paying 25% of the amount received for all titles.

What, exactly, did this mean for writers?  Under the old policy, if a book retailed for $10.00, the author earned a royalty of $2.50 on every book sold, regardless of any discounting the publisher might do on the title.  Under the new policy, the writer would only receive 25% of what the publisher took in instead.  So if the book retailed for $10.00, but the publisher had to discount that 50% for the distributor, the author would only receive 25% of the 50% the publisher made, or somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.25.

That was a significant drop, any way you look at it.

Shortly thereafter, Simon & Schuster followed suit, adopting the same policy as Random House.  Thankfully, the vast majority of other publishers continued to offer what was at the time the standard 25% of list price royalty rate.

Now we have another bump in the road.  MacMillan, parent of such companies as St. Martin’s, Farrar Straus and Giroux, Henry Holt, Picador, and Tor among others, announced this week that they would be making changes in their ebook royalty rates as well.

Here’s a direct quote from CEO John Sargent’s cover letter:

“It won’t surprise you that we have looked at the growth of development of digital delivery of the content from our books.  A number of the new contract’s provisions, specifically in the grant of rights and royalty sections of the contract, reflect our response to those developments.  Our starting premise is that digital rights in the content we publish in print book formats must be included in the basic grant of rights that we receive from authors.  In addition, as the methods for dissemination of content rapidly change and the distinctions between sales and licenses blur, we have determined that a single royalty rate, based on the amount received by the Publisher, should apply to all exploitation of the content of the book in digital form.”

That standard royalty rate Sargent is talking about?  Turns out it’s 20% of monies received.

Back to our example.  If that $10.00 book is published by one of MacMillan’s companies, that $2.50 royalty is now reduced to $1.00.

As both a Tor author and one who is highly interested in digital rights, let me give you my honest opinion.

That sucks.

To show you what I mean, let’s compare that to my recent deal with Blackbetty Mobilemedia.  Under that contract, I get a royalty rate that is 20% of the catalog retail price of the book.  Each episode of The Cerberus Protocol (the first book in the HELLstalkers series) will sell for $2.99.  There will be six episodes – one will be free to bring people into the story and the other five will be at the above rate.  The cost to buy the complete book is therefore $14.95, or roughly the price of a trade paperback.  Of that $14.95, I walk away with $2.99.

$1.00 versus $2.99.  Which would you take?

But there is another issue here that needs to be examined and that is MacMillan’s insistence that digital rights be included in the initial sale.  That clause means I can’t sell the print rights to the HELLstalkers series to any MacMillan subsidiary, since I’ve already licensed the rights elsewhere.

Question is, should I be upset by that?

Let’s say Tor bought the rights and decided to bring the book out in paperback. Standard royalty rates on a paperback run 6% on the first 25K copies, 7% on the next 25K and 8% thereafter.  To make things easier, let’s just use that higher royalty rate.

Paperbacks typically sell for $7.99 now.  8% of $7.99 is 63 cents.

What becomes the determining factor now is not the royalty rate but the distribution model.  If I can get the book in front of as many people in digital form as I can in print form, I am far better off doing it the non-traditional way.

Something like 450% better off, in fact.

Part of my reasoning in accepting the recent offer from Blackbetty was to test if that distribution model is in place yet.  By partnering with a major telecommunications giant like Vodafone (who, incidentally, also own Verizon here in the States) I’m betting that we can put this book in front of as many pairs of eyes as I could if I sold it to a traditional publisher.  If I take into account the fact that it will be published in seven different territories simultaneously, I believe that I can even beat that pre-existing model.

Time will tell.

(Note – MacMillan did include a higher royalty rate on direct-to-consumer sales in the new contract – 10% of net receipts on the first 10K copies, rather than the old 5% industry standard, but I’m not giving them any credit for that because they don’t make any kind of commitment to changing how they market direct to consumers.  The higher royalty ate does little good as a result.)

Next month a press conference will be held at the Frankfurt Book Fair announcing the pending launch of HELLstalkers, which is that super secret project I’ve eluded to several times both here and on my personal webpage.  More information on the project itself – what it is, who’s publishing it, how people can get it – has been posted on the official series website, http://www.hellstalkers.com.

I’m not going to repeat all of that here, but instead take RockYourWritingCareer.com members behind the scenes and into the birth and production of the series itself.  How did it come about?  What hurdles did we have to go through to get it approved?  How are we incorporating mobile and web technology to expand and build upon the text of the novels themselves?  We’ll be examining these and other issues over the next few months as decisions are made and the project is launched.

So let’s begin with the most obvious question – how did all this come about?

In order to answer that, we have to go back a few years.  My second novel, HERETIC, was released in 2005 by Pocket Books.  Just a month before it hit the streets, my editor left S&S and moved to Random House to handle non-fiction, leaving me effectively “orphaned.”  (Orphaned means you have no in-house champion to fight for you or your work.)  My lack of internal support left me hanging high and dry and as a result, Pocket passed on picking up books two and three in the series.

My career might have ended then and there if it wasn’t for the fact that I’d already been cultivating overseas contacts.  An editor from Droemer-Knaur made an offer for all three book in the Templar Chronicles and I’ve been writing for them ever since.  (December will see the launch of my fourth novel for them, with at least two more still under contract.)

Why am I telling you all this?  Because it is the fact that I was writing for a German publisher, and enjoying some decent success while doing so, that made the HELLstalker series possible.

You see, a few months before the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair, I was doing some research on publishers who planned on being in attendance so that I could suggest editors for my agent to meet with at the Fair.  I stumbled upon an article about a multimedia company in Vienna called Blackbetty MobileMedia GmbH that was going to be launching a new mobile books platform for the German market.  The same article also noted that the company intended to expand into the US six to twelve months later.

Given that I had a bestselling series currently on the shelves in Germany at the time, I tracked down the company’s website and, unable to find an email address, used their contact form to send the following message:

I’m an American author published in Germany through Droemer-Knaur.  I’m interested in speaking to someone about having my German works available through your company.  Could you let me know who I should have my agent contact?

To my surprise, the company CEO wrote back that very evening, stating that he was familiar with my series and asking that my agent get in touch so that they could talk about licensing it for the mobile phone platform.

Several months went by, with discussions taking place between Blackbetty and my publisher, Droemer-Knaur, but nothing solidified during the process.  While all that was going on, I began corresponding with Blackbetty’s VP of Development, talking about the mobile books industry in general and Blackbetty in particular.  I knew that I wanted to find a way to do business with them and while chatting one day I asked if they might be interested in having me write something original for them instead of licensing my already existing work.  To my delight, they jumped at the opportunity.

What, they asked, did I have in mind?

Stay tuned for Part Two, where I pull a story out of my, uh…hat right there on the spot.

Video Tutorial

One way of expanding your writing career is to make your content available on multiple platforms. In this video tutorial I take you through all of the steps necessary to make your content available for purchase on the Amazon Kindle – from properly uploading the electronic files to the Amazon Digital Text Platform site to classifying and displaying them in the Amazon store.