Now that it is easier than ever to create your own non-fiction ebook and sell it online, there is also more competition than ever. Even if you write a book about a niche topic like training Labradors, as opposed to a book about training dogs in general (idea found here), you still might find a good amount of competition out there. Do a search on Google and you'll see what I mean.
So how can you compete?
One way is to tap markets that are not being pursued. Using the Labrador training book as an example, you could join forums like Just Labradors. I haven't investigated their particular posting rules since this is just an example, but most forums and blogs allow links in participants' signature lines. So after leaving a thoughtful post regarding how to train labradors, you would sign it with something like this:
John (or Jane) Doe, Author of "Training Labradors the Easy Way" (with a link to your Amazon page or another site where you are selling your book).
Of course the key is that your comment must be one that adds value to the site you are visiting. If you just try to advertise your book, that's not going to work and it might even get you banned from using the site.
This method does not generate oodles of traffic, granted, but at least it is targeted traffic. Those who click on your link are practically guaranteed to be labrador-owners who are interested in training their dogs.
Print it!
Another way is to turn your ebook into a print book. Yes, I know that sounds like something you don't want to get your hands into, but there are POD (print on demand) printers out there who only charge for each book that you print. Take a small box of those printed books and go to veterinary offices and ask if you can leave them a complimentary copy for their waiting room. Include sheets of paper with your website on it where readers can order their own copy for home.
Next, try attending a meetup like the Long Island Golden Retriever and Labrador Meetup, or a simliar group nearby you. Don't just go to sell your book, though. That's tacky! Instead, bring your own Lab (I expect you have one otherwise it would be strange that you wrote a book about how to train them), associate with other Labrador owners, get to know the people and the dogs. When should you bring up your book? You'll know. Some dog-owners with rather desobedient dogs will express their frustation, at which point you could say "You know..." :-)
Now all of that might seem like a lot of work, and it is. But it also gives you more writing material for your blog. Try a post like "My Experience at the Long Island Golden Retriever and Labrador Meetup". (Please tell me you do have a blog. If not, start one!) And it helps you to learn about other concerns and needs labrador owners have. It also expands your network of Lab-owners which could lead to book sales further down the line as you continue networking.
It's not just about the book
Your first tendency might be to concentrate just on how many dollars of profit you make off each book. But there are other ways to create income off of your book besides the sales of the book itself. For example, if you are so into Labs that you wrote a book about how to train them, I bet you could give some classes on the topic, too. Or maybe you have the space and yard layout to board labradors while people are away. Why would a Lab-owner chose a generic dog-sitter when you have expertise handling the specific type of dog that they own? The idea is to find numerous alternative ways to create income off of your non-fiction book.
Obviously, these aren't things that the big publishing houses are going to do. And they're not things that most authors will do, either. So get out there! Meet people on the Web and in person who share your interests! And have fun selling your book and related services!
Photo credit: David Sifry
If you're an author, I'm sure you've considered self-publishing your book as an eBook. You've probably read some pretty inspiring success stories about authors who have sold a substantial number of books on the Web. And even those who haven't sold very many at least were able to get them online and out in front of the public. That might not have happened if they were still trying to get their books accepted by acquisitions editors at traditional publishing houses.
But deciding to self-publish an eBook seems to lead to a lot of questions, many of which we hope to answer in future posts on this blog. One of the first things you'll have to decide is which format you want to use to publish your eBook. The most-common formats are ePub, MOBI (used on Kindle) and PDF.
Pros and Cons of PDF
The format you're probably most familiar with is PDF (Portable Document Format) since that's the file format used with Adobe Reader, which is installed on most computers. So it might seem that it would be your best bet, being that almost anyone with a computer can open a PDF file. But think again...
Try opening a PDF eBook on a phone and you'll see the problem. PDF files contain t static text, so if there are 400 words on a page when you create it, there will be 400 words on a small iPhone screen. Obviously the text will be too small to read, so you'll have to enlarge the page. And then you'll have to move it around with your finger in order to read everything on the page. If you own an iPhone, try downloading our Tips for Authors Creating an Index which is available as a PDF. Or borrow a friend's iPhone and try it out. You'll quickly see what I mean.
Benefits of ePub
On the other hand, text in ePub books is not static. Instead, it flows. ePub eBooks display as much text as will fit on the screen, depending on the text size the user has chosen. So all the user has to do is read and flip pages. Very nice. MOBI does the same for eBooks on the Kindle.
And MOBI?
As far as the differences between ePub and MOBI, they are very different, technically-speaking, but not so different for the reader. ePub tends to format books in a way that looks closer to what the author initially sets up than MOBI does, especially with spacing. And MOBI files of same books tend to be quite a bit fatter, sometimes double in size. However, if you want to sell your book on Amazon, then it needs to be in MOBI format.
Deciding on a format
Still unsure about which format you should use? If you want to reach readers who will read your eBook on their computer, then your best bet is PDF. If you want to reach those who will read on their iPhone or Android phone then you're better off going with ePub. And if you want to sell to Kindle users, then MOBI is the format to use.
But wouldn't you rather reach them all? So why not make your eBook available in each of the three most poplar formats? Considering how cheap it is to produce eBooks, it makes sense to publish your eBook in a way that makes it accessible to anyone who wishes to read it.
How do you go about publishing in these formats? We'll answer that in an upcoming post...
There are some publishers or authors that would immediately say "Yes!" to this question. They feel that any person, place, thing or idea that is mentioned in a book belongs in the index.
If you are an author, editor or publisher, here are a few examples of paragraphs from a few books that will help you see that including each and every noun in a book's index is a mistake that will compromise the usability of the book’s index.
Example #1, from Steven Pressfield's The War of Art, page 74:
"The writer is an infantryman. He knows that progress is measured in yards of dirt extracted from the enemy one day, one hour, one minute at a time and paid for in blood. The artist wears combat boots. He looks in the mirror and sees G.I. Joe."
Here are the nouns in that paragraph: writer, infantryman, progress, yards, dirt, enemy, day, hour, minute, time, blood, artist, combat boots, mirror, G.I. Joe.
Do you see the problem with including every noun and noun phrase in the book’s index? Not only would it bloat the index (in fact you would actually have a concordance, which is not quite the same as an index), but if you were reading the book and looked up the term "yards" in the index and were led to this paragraph, would it contain what you expected? In fact in a book about being an artist, you would probably not look up that term at all. So why put it in the index? How about "dirt", "day", "hour", "enemy"? Get the point? Unless the index directs the reader to truly relevant information about a subject, it will just disappoint the reader. A few entries like that and the reader will lose trust in the index and not bother using it at all. (By the way, The War of Art doesn't contain an index, so we wrote one and posted it online here.)
But how about technical books? Wouldn't every noun in such books be concrete, important items that need indexing? Well, take a look at the following example.
Example #2, from William Horton's *Designing Web-Based Training*, page 311:
"...notice that the first and forth questions can be answered by looking at the picture. The second compares the mineral to the one other mineral whose hardness most people are familiar with. Most people could answer the third question by recalling that June is the month when many people get married and diamonds are used for engagement rings."
Since the book is about how to design online training, the words "mineral", "June", "month", "diamonds" and "engagement rings" are not pertinent to the theme of the book. They are just here as examples.
So next time you get ready to index a book, or to evaluate an index prepared by a professional indexer, remember that indexing every noun is not the way to create a quality index. Instead, evaluate whether each noun and noun phrase relates to the theme of the book and whether there is pertinent information about the topic on the page that you are referencing.
You want to get the index to the book that you are working on done super-fast, as in a few days. You also want to be able to reuse the index if you later publish another edition of the book. And since you plan on producing both a print and an eBook version of the book, you want the index to work in both.
If you are trying to achieve any or all of these objectives, than by now you have probably already heard about embedding indexing. Here's the skinny on what it is and a few words on the advantages and disadvantages that you'll want to consider.
What is embedded indexing?
Embedded indexing is the process of inserting hidden tags, which contain index entries, into the text of a book. This can be done in most publishing software such as InDesign, Quark Xpress, FrameMaker and even in Microsoft Word. The tags can be viewed by clicking on an option within the application, but obviously would not be viewable in the final output files, such as PDFs.
Advantages to embedded indexing
There are several advantages of embedding index entries into the text.
One benefit is it allows indexing to start before the book is even finished being written. You can send the chapters to the indexer one at a time and she can embed the index entries and send the chapters back to you. Even if you edit the chapter, deleting some sentences and moving some paragraphs around, the index tags get deleted with the text that you deleted and move with the text that you moved. Also, since the index entries are embedded in the text, it doesn't matter that you haven't formatted the book yet, or inserted all of the images, etc. When the book has been copyedited, proofread and is ready to go, you generate the index and the page numbers after each index entry will reference whichever page where the corresponding hidden tag is located. The indexer will need to do an edit of the index, but that should only take a few days in comparison to the few weeks she would need to start indexing toward the end of the production cycle.
The other benefit is the point we mentioned at the beginning of this- you can reuse the index if you wish to also produce the book as an eBook or in some other format. Since ePUB books don't have page numbers per se, the index would also not have page numbers, but it would link directly to the text, taking the reader to the exact paragraph referenced by the index entry.
Disadvantages of embedding indexing
Despite the benefits, there is a downside to embedding indexes in publishing software. One of them is that it is harder for the indexer to create a good-quality index. Since she is receiving the chapters one (or a few) at a time (and turning them in that way too), she's sort of indexing with tunnel vision. She can view the index for each chapter that she is working on by generating it for that specific file, but she cannot see the index entries to chapters that she has already indexed to see how each entry should be adjusted to blend with the others. If she were working off of final PDFs, she could compare an index entry that she is writing to one that she created for a previous chapter, evaluate whether they relate to the same thing and then edit the old or the new entry so that they don't conflict.
As a simple example, perhaps chapter 1 discusses "cooks" while chapter 7 uses the term "chefs". Are they the same? Perhaps they are used to refer to the same profession in this book or maybe there is a distinction. If they are the same, the reader should not find two separate entries (one for "cooks" and the other for "chefs") with completely different indented subentries under each of them. Instead, the most commonly used term (we'll say its "chefs") should have all of the corresponding subentries and the other term ("cooks") should have a cross-reference reading "See chefs." If they are different, than both entries should have their own, distinct subentries. However, each entry should have a "See also" reference pointing to the other entry, since they are so closely related.
You can see how hard it would be to determine how to treat related entries in an embedded index. Obviously, there are much more complicated relationships and many synonymous or seemingly-synonymous terms throughout the text of most books, especially in highly technical works.
Editing the index, which needs to be done when the book is almost finished, is also much more difficult when the index has been embedded. Instead being able to index as she goes along, comparing one entry with another, the indexer must clean up what by now has surely gotten rather messy. The best quality indexes are usually produced when the indexer can make many small adjustments during the indexing process, not by doing major edits all at once.
That being said, there are methods of saving index entries from previous chapters and then comparing them with new index entries upon creating them. Such an indexing system can help the indexer to avoid scattering information within the index and thus create a neater, more-organized index that needs less editing. But not all indexers know how to do this. (More on that in another post).
Making the decision
So what did you decide? To embed or not to embed? If you are still undecided or have more questions, click on the button below and I'll gladly answer your questions (at no charge) about embedded indexing.
