www.SelfPubBootCamp.com! Carla King SELF-PUB BOOT CAMP TRUSTED VENDORS An excerpt from the Self-Publishing Boot Camp Guide for Authors, 3rd Edition. For DigitalEd at MediaShift. In the previous two chapters I described the author’s toolset and possible publishing paths available to you through the entire lifecycle of your book. As you’ve seen, you can do everything yourself, essentially for free—if you don’t count your labor costs—or you can hire out services for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. Today, in 2015, my list of trusted vendors is fairly stable, but new ones are always popping up, and the old favorites continually improve their services with new features and sales channels. (Though in one case a service removed features to concentrate on doing just one thing better.) Please join my email newsletter to stay up to date with what’s going on. Please note that I am an affiliate of a few of these products or programs, which means I earn a small percentage of sales if you visit and buy using my link. I only seek out connections with people, products, and companies I have used, love and recommend. (Don’t know what an affiliate is? Check out Wikipedia’s page on affiliate marketing.) Thanks for clicking! Aerbook and Aer.io Amazon CreateSpace Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Amazon Kindle Kids Books Creator Blurb Book Design Templates BookBaby Bowker GoDaddy Gumroad IngramSpark Leanpub Lightning Source MailChimp PressBooks Scribd Scrivener Slicebooks Page 1 www.SelfPubBootCamp.com! Carla King Smashwords WordPress Vook Your trusted tools? Aerbook and Aer.io Aerbook founder Ron Martinez is a digital publishing futurist who is always dreaming up cool new tools for authors. His first product was Aerbook Maker, an easy to use, full-color multimedia ebook creator in the cloud. But Aerbook’s greatest value is in marketing and selling your book. Aerbook’s tiered products (Retail, Plus, and Flyer) were designed to help you share and even sell your books on the social web (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest). Upload your book and share a preview with your friends, launching it into your social stream where your friends will, ideally, share it with their friends, and so on, in a non-salesy or spammy way. What’s truly wonderful about this is that readers can preview your book directly without leaving the social media site, and then buy via the Aerbook online sales channel or an online retailer, whichever you choose. Martinez says the idea is to reach readers where they already are, instead of making them leave their comfort zone to navigate to a URL. Martinez’s new brainstorm for 2015 is Aer.io (now in beta), a tool that gives you the ability to easily and profitably sell books, video, audio and related merchandise on any website, and directly within social streams and apps. You can curate books as an indie publisher with an online bookstore. So, imagine that your site curates historical fiction based in 18th century France, or the Enneagram personality type indicator, or computer books related to Ruby on Rails. These are incredibly niche topics but, when you curate as well as sell your own—well, I think it’s a great marketing strategy, not to mention the benefits of an additional income stream. It also might inspire you to gather a group of authors together to create a shared online retail space. I can dream up profitable uses for both fiction and nonfiction authors with Aer.io. Amazon CreateSpace Use Amazon CreateSpace to create, proof, and distribute your book directly to the Amazon.com bookstore. Even if you’re not going to use CreateSpace for distribution, it’s a great tool for simply proofreading and testing out various book designs. They offer quick turnaround, great customer service by real people in the USA that you can reach by phone, the lowest-cost POD service I’ve found, and there’s no setup fee. CreateSpace offers book design templates, but I don’t recommend them as Joel Friedlander’s book design templates and PressBooks themes are so much more beautiful and professional looking. To print proofs, or advance reader copies (ARCs)—more on ARCs in the chapter on marketing and promotion—create and upload PDFs of your book interior and cover according to their instructions. Keep the book private, and order copies sent to you. If you don’t like it, experiment! Edit the cover, change the fonts, make revisions and corrections. Upload the book again, order another copy, and proof it once more. This is the magic of POD. You can repeat this process as many times as you like until you are happy with your book. Page 2 www.SelfPubBootCamp.com! Carla King Your book sells in the CreateSpace store for 80% royalty, but it won’t get lots of visibility there, so make sure to sell it in the Amazon store where the book buyers shop. If you have not already created your Kindle version, you can pay Amazon about $70 to create a KDP-formatted ebook file for sale in the Kindle store. Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Like CreateSpace, Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP’s) sole purpose is to distribute your ebook to a single channel: Amazon. You’ll need a KDP account and a specially-formatted MS Word doc file, which is almost identical to the Smashwords format. So if you already have a Smashwords edition, just make a copy, give it a new ISBN, and make adjustments as spelled out in the KDP formatting guidelines. (Or vice-versa, KDP to Smashwords. But be sure to check instructions in the free Smashwords Style Guide or hire someone from Mark’s List, see below.) If you’re starting from scratch, the KDP book formatting guidelines are fairly easy to follow. If your book is already for sale in the Amazon CreateSpace store, the Amazon Kindle Conversion Service team will create your file for $79. Of course, if you use a template or service to create your files, you won’t have to worry about this step. If you’re a publishing geek, you probably already know that in 2014 Amazon started to replace MOBI with Kindle Format 8 (KF8). If you use KindleGen or the Kindle Previewer program to create your Kindle ebook, it will now create a KF8 book. KF8 was developed for the new Kindle Fire tablets, and it also works with 4th-generation devices by Kindle for PC and Kindle Reader for the Mac. You might have heard of KDP Select, Amazon’s exclusive program that many authors use to give their book a boost during launch, hoping for bestseller status in a particular category. In exchange for exclusivity Amazon will give you marketing perks. Some people love this program, others believe that any exclusivity is detrimental to book sales. I’m in the latter camp. But, as always, it’s up to you to develop your marketing strategy. Amazon Kindle Kids’ Book Creator Amazon Kindle Kids’ Book Creator launched in 2014 as a tool for indie authors to easily create and sell children’s books to owners of Kindle Fire tablets. The authors I know who have used it say that it’s still pretty basic, but I expect improvements and enhancements through 2015. This is the only way to create a children’s book for the Kindle Fire, other than doing it yourself or hiring a professional KF8 designer. Blurb Blurb is a full color book print and ebook creation service that will print your POD or offset print book to sell in their store and to distribute when you’re ready. Their BookWright tool creates fixed- layout EPUB files at the same time you’re building your print book, which is pretty awesome. In exchange for using these awesome tools they do lock you into their distribution service which is a fair price in my opinion for making it really simple for you. A getaround is buying your own PDF and EPUB files for a reasonable price, if you want to print and distribute elsewhere, but you may not want to. I’ve often recommended that authors with complex, full-color books create books with Blurb as a test run for designers, advance review copies, or for sale to a niche audience. (Weddings! Family Page 3 www.SelfPubBootCamp.com! Carla King reunions! Puppies!) As with CreateSpace, you can order one copy at a time until you’re happy with it. Then decide if you want Blurb to handle fulfillment and distribution to Amazon and the Ingram distribution network. Many do. {I am a Blurb affiliate.} Book Design Templates As you may have already noticed, I can’t say enough good things about Joel Friedlander’s book design templates for book creation in Word and InDesign, not to mention his media kit for your website, press release template, book proposal template, and other products. These tools offload a lot of the hard work of design and rote work by providing do-it-for-you products and services for very reasonable prices. All the major book distribution companies accept these templates, including CreateSpace, IngramSpark, BookBaby, Smashwords, and Vook. I wrote more about the templates in the previous chapter on essential tools for indie authors. Find out more and buy the templates by visiting the SelfPubBootCamp.com Resources page. {I am an affiliate of Joel Friedlander’s book design templates and other products.} BookBaby BookBaby can format and distribute just about any kind of book you want to throw at them in both ebook and print formats.