
E-books Are Not That Easy - DanielBMarkham
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2012/01/e-book-publishi.php
======
spatten
Sounds like a lot of the pain points that Peter Armstrong and I ran into when
writing our books, and that we're trying to solve on Leanpub
(<http://leanpub.com>).

It's free to sign up, you write your book in Markdown and we convert it into
PDF, epub and mobi for you. We pay you 90% - $0.50 for sales on our site.

You can put it on the iBookstore and Kindle store yourself (or be patient for
a few weeks and we'll do that and provide an ISBN for you as well...).

If you've already written your book in HTML, we can convert it to Markdown for
you automatically -- throw your HTML files into a Dropbox folder and click a
button on Leanpub.

As for technical editors, our approach is to publish early (before you're done
the book, preferably before you've written 100 pages) and have your readers
function as development editors.

It's not a complete solution (yet), but I think we would have saved you tons
of pain.

Drop me a line (scott@leanpub.com) if you have any questions.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
You're confusing books with manuscripts. Please don't call these things you
sell 'books'.

 _"A manuscript is not a book. The author's job is to write the manuscript.
The publisher's job is to turn a series of manuscripts originating from
different suppliers into consistently produced books, mass-produce them, and
sell them into distribution channels.

[...]

While it's true that the author is the one with the creative input, they only
do about half the work. And the other half of the job is not optional. The
reason publishers exist is to provide for division of labour; if I did the
other 50% to bring my rough manuscripts up to published-book-quality, I'd only
be able to write half as many novels."_

As per Charlie Stross, accomplished fiction writer:
[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2010/02/cmap-2-h...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2010/02/cmap-2-how-books-are-made.html)

~~~
peterarmstrong
"A rose by any other name..."

I'm the author of 2 traditionally-published books. ISBNs, dead trees, the
works.

The first one (Flexible Rails) was something I self-published on Lulu as I
wrote it. It started at about 200 pages and ended up over 500 pages before I
did a deal with a traditional publisher.

At what point was it a book? My publisher approached me about publishing my
book, not my manuscript (or rose). People all over the world bought my book
when it was just a PDF. It made my mortgage payments for a while. In fact
about 70% of my profit over my book's lifetime was from PDF sales.

As its author, I considered it a book when I first published it. My readers
did too. Publishers like O'Reilly, the Prags and Manning probably consider
their beta / early access books to be books.

Finally (since I'm typing on a phone), ebooks are to physical books like web
apps are to shrinkwrapped software: you can do way more releases. At what
point is a release real? Our answer is it is when you have paying customers.
That is a commitment to your readers, and it helps you write and keeps you
motivated.

So, to sum up the ramble: in 5 years almost all books will be ebooks, most
will have multiple releases (including before being "finished"), and this
author's opinion will be quaint.

~~~
jstclair
What you're saying makes perfect sense when applied to technical/non-fiction,
but as Stross is writing sci-fi/horror, I'm -- to be honest -- a bit irritated
by your use of "quaint." What does multiple releases have to do with a mystery
novel? "The killer was Dr. Melville in v1, but I fixed that in v2"? And in
anticipation, multiple releases != releasing a chapter at a time. That's a
serial, and goes back at least to Dickens. I'm pretty sure that Stephen King
tried out a "pay-per-chapter" novel once, but believe it wasn't finished. And
_even_ in the case of serials, for _most_ authors, that's just the path to
complete mediocrity; unless you know exactly where the story is going and how
you're going to get there, an editor is still essential. Are you going to pull
the previous three chapter releases because you've decided to put them in the
middle of the book? Or refund people for the second chapter because you've
decided to drop the character that it introduced?

Will there be a lot of self-published ebooks in 5 years? Yeah, maybe; but the
idea that publishing houses is going the way of the dodo, that they deliver no
value to the consumer, is best confined to a specific set of genres.

~~~
DanBC
Stross will agree that some of his dead tree books (Jennifer Morgue in UK) are
_full_ of typos / errors.

I'm baffled why the Kindle doesn't allow crowd-sourcing to mark these errors
for fixing in later versions, and then allow people to download the new
version over their old version.

~~~
jstclair
Completely agreed on the crowd-sourcing of typos, that would be very useful. I
just got an updated version of Programming Clojure, and the experience was
wonderful.

------
bennesvig
Anyone who says it's easy either hasn't written a book or they're referring to
getting the finished product into the Kindle store.

Everything else (writing/editing/marketing) takes serious effort that most
people aren't willing to do.

It's almost like learning an instrument. Anyone can do it and everyone wants
to, but it's only a small percentage of people who will actually commit to it.

~~~
Avshalom
More specifically self publishing basically means that instead of writing
you're running a small business. Which means you're engaged in a massive time
suck that is distracting you from doing what you're actually passionate about.

------
nicw
There is definitely a misnomer that ebook creation is easy, especially as so
many creation tools seem to output to .EPUB. The key isn't creating an EPUB,
it's creating a _good-looking_ EPUB.

This stuff is hard and I totally understand your pain - I'm the digital
product manager over at Blurb.com (ebook!). We're primarily focused on fixed-
layout epubs which ensures that the picture you laid next to the text will
always stay in the same place. Reflowable epubs are technologically easier to
create but the output can vary so much that it makes the author look sloppy at
times. Not cool.

You can create a Blurb book and then convert it to an ebook for $1.99. We
create them to Apple's strict epub standards so you can even submit it to
their iBookstore. No DRM. :) (<http://blurb.com>)

Looking forward, I think we are going to see a larger focus on fixed-layout
ebooks in the future as more tablets are created (Kindle Fire, iPad) and
authors see the limitations of reflowable ebooks. I'm not knocking reflowable
ebooks, but just writing a book in itself is a huge undertaking
(congratulations!); trying to maintain formatting and a clean layout
afterwards feels like you're being punished.

As to anyone else who has gone through ebook creation/conversion with Blurb
(or elsewhere), feel free to send me a note or comment with your questions.
It's rare that a HN thread directly relates to my work :)

\- Nic.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I can totally understand why this would be hard once, I'm trying to understand
how this would be hard in repetition.

Lets say you do the work of creating an EPUB formatter that works to your
satisfaction, then is it like a pipeline where you can feed new material in
and get books out repeatedly, or do you have to tweak it for each book?

~~~
nicw
It's a little bit of both. What really happens is that you're looking at a
moving target in terms of both inputs and outputs. Think of this like the
early browser wars, where even a standard chunk of HTML could look different.

You can create an EPUB formatter that works to your satisfaction, but you've
only coded it to work with that set of books. The next set of books may have
different layout requirements, like padding between the text and the images.

Secondly, the epub world is evolving, and the readers that display the epubs
all have their own interpretation. EPUB is simply HTML/CSS inside a .zip.
e-readers are essentially browsers wrapped in their own chrome.

So, the real trick is to automate as much of the formatting as possible, but
then have easy tools for the Author to make the final tweaks.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Ok, lets follow along further.

 _"It's a little bit of both. What really happens is that you're looking at a
moving target in terms of both inputs and outputs."_

Can you say more about this, it seems like we have two, perhaps three,
targets; Kindle, iPad, and Nook. Together they probably make up over 95% of
the e-book 'market' in terms of readers. Also they have a vested interest in
making sure that books that look good today, still look good in the future so
that publishers won't get stung by having to re-generate books.

Now the original discussion here was about authors who are trying to publish
their own e-books. So when you said this:

 _"Secondly, the epub world is evolving, and the readers that display the
epubs all have their own interpretation. EPUB is simply HTML/CSS inside a
.zip. e-readers are essentially browsers wrapped in their own chrome."_

I sort of tuned it out, while I can certainly see the top three book readers
having their own interpretive quirks for EPUB, if, as an author, I get my tool
chain which converts my manuscript into an acceptable EPUB on these three
platforms, I would expect to be able to re-use that tool chain over and over
again. So if I'm writing suspense novels, and my friend Bud gives me the
occasional pen and ink illustration, I should be able to create a tool chain
which can take my prose, scans of his drawings, and poop out an epub file.
Then I sit back and go all Agatha Christy and write 150 detective novels.

Once the pain of getting the tool chain to work, with the caveat that book
reader vendors are committed to backwards compatibility, I'm wondering why it
would be 'hard' to publish after the first one was done.

Now granted if I went from pulp fiction to coffee table photography books I
could see my tool chain being unfit for the task. And I could also see how,
_as a publisher of many authors_ it would be a pain in the arse to account for
all of their different styles and topics and books and features etc. But if
the rules really have changed, and its really 'better' for me to just publish
my own books and distribute them through a channel like iTunes or Amazon, once
the mechanics of publishing my style of book are over come, why wouldn't they
stay over come, at least for me to get several books out using them?

------
shanmoorthy
I think of an eBook in the same vein as a web app. While anyone can cobble
together a basic website using a WYSIWYG editor, making a good eBook that
gives the reader a great experience is like building a fully featured, cross
browser compatible, elegantly deprecating website (and all the rest of the
best practices and QA that goes with it).

There's a massive disparity in people's minds about the difficulty involved in
crafting a great website, and crafting a great eBook... when they're
essentially similar in composition and complexity.

------
davidw
Nope, they're not. Now think about how hard a lot of this stuff is for someone
who's not even that great with Word.

<http://www.liberwriter.com/testimonials>

These are real quotes, and are just a selection of many. Making something hard
easy for 'regular people' is a good business. I don't think it's actually that
big a niche, and probably doesn't scale up hugely, because there is a human
component involved, but so far I'm enjoying myself a lot.

------
waterside81
Might be different in the US, but in Canada, ISBN numbers are free. We have a
different ISBN for each of our products (hard cover, soft cover, ebook
version, plus english, spanish & french versions) and they were all free.

However the rest of the list really paints an accurate picture of what selling
an ebook and trying to get some market penetration is all about.

~~~
rst
U.S. based pricing is here: <https://www.myidentifiers.com/isbn/main>

And it's truly ridiculous. A single ISBN is $125. In lots of 1,000, they're a
dollar apiece. I can't think of any principled way to justify this, other than
as a way of sticking it to would-be self publishers and very small presses
just because they can.

~~~
JoshTriplett
I can think of quite a few straightforward ways to justify pricing like that,
if you set pricing based on the involvement of a human in the processing of
applications. Under such circumstances, it requires about as much work for the
human whether you order 1 or 1000.

Imagine ordering a paperclip: how much do you expect it to cost to order one
paperclip, versus 1000 paperclips?

Similarly, it requires about as much work for a business to issue a check for
$10 as for $10,000, hence why many businesses say it costs them much more in
accounting costs to issue a small check than the actual value of the check.

The pricing for ISBNs makes zero sense given modern technology, where no human
should ever need to get involved in the process. However, that assumes some
degree of sense involved in the process...

------
asdf333
There are companies like Hyperink www.hyperink.com who will partner with
experts and help them publish (and write) the book in return for a revenue
split. I think its a great place for people who have some expertise to
contribute, but don't necessarily want to deal w/ all the hassles of self-
publishing and promoting.

~~~
cstross
That is a weirdly accurate description of how Traditional Publishing works.

Believe it or not, a typical trad publisher's profit after handling production
and distribution overheads for a typical midlist book is roughly the same as
the author's. Because publishing books is not, in fact, terribly profitable,
because with vanishingly few exceptions most books have on the order of a few
thousands to tens of thousands of consumers. (Traditionally the way publishers
got large was to publish _lots_ of stuff, and be prepared to follow through on
the one in a hundred or one in a thousand titles that broke big.)

------
levifig
So, "writing and publishing a book isn't easy so I'm charging you $50 for an
e-book so I don't have to give up the work and percentage to a publisher that
would make it available to you for $20".

I don't stand by publishers but this seems to be the other extreme. The
consumer loses in both, IMO…

------
happywolf
Usually market research is done before a product is being made to decide what
the target market is and product features needed. Not sure why the author is
doing it the other way round.

------
callmeed
I have an open source Rails app for selling ebook a with Stripe
<https://github.com/2tablespoons/thylacine>

------
jeremymcanally
If you spend "a couple thousand" on your eBook, you got screwed somewhere.
Hosting isn't expensive, domain registrations aren't expensive, format
conversion can be handled by you, editing can be crowdsourced (usually), the
cover design can be had for cheap-ish (or learn to use Gimp yourself), and so
on.

Having written 3 of my own eBooks now and been involved with a few others, I
can't fathom what you'd spend that much money on.

~~~
bloggergirl
I agree that it shouldn't be expensive.

My hubby and I did the first 4 CopyHackers ebooks for under $1000, and I'm
totally sure anyone could do it for less. We paid:

$700 for book cover designs on 99designs.com. $10 for the domain. $89 for a
bunch of WordPress themes that ended up not meeting our needs. $29 for the
WooTheme that did meet our needs.

I had a PDF-converter already, so I just launched with PDF. And I didn't do a
mobi version until well after the concept proved itself and I could pay for it
with the income from the ebooks.

As for marketing, hey, HN is free! So's Twitter. And MailChimp has a free
option, too.

Hope it works out for you!!!

~~~
peterarmstrong
What program did you write the books in, and would Markdown have worked for
you as a writing option?

I'm asking since I'm doing customer development for my startup Leanpub, and
we're trying to solve this exact problem. As an author, you shouldn't need to
pay for PDF, MOBI or EPUB conversion, a storefront, blog theme, etc. You
should only need to write the words -- and do your promotion on Twitter, of
course.

My cofounder Scott posted above in this thread. Please feel free to email
either of us if you have any questions; I'm peter@leanpub.com.

~~~
bloggergirl
I saw Scott's post and instantly thought, "Damn, I wish I'd have known about
these guys back in October." Looks very cool.

I love the idea of not having to worry about the various formats. That was the
worst part for me... and still is, actually, as I haven't done the epub thing
yet (just PDF and mobi). WooThemes was great, but, to be honest, my hub set up
most of that, so perhaps if I'd been left to do it on my own it might not have
been so easy for me. I'll def check Leanpub out.

~~~
davidw
I'm not so sure you don't have to worry about the formats. PDF can give you a
much richer visual experience than, say, .mobi can. If you go for a lowest
common denominator, ok, sure, you can generate both from the same sources, but
likely you'll get a fairly plain looking PDF.

~~~
peterarmstrong
There's nothing wrong with a simple, clean PDF. A book is great because of the
words, not any fancy formatting. These are books, not magazines. If your book
is worth reading, it's worth reading with any decent layout.

Of course, there are exceptions to this. For example, books for very young
children are very much about layout, art, etc. Also, books that are really
multimedia projects, with heavy images, embedded video, etc are exceptions.

However, these exceptions are the minority. The vast majority of books are
just words and figures. An author can create this themselves, writing in
Markdown and creating their own figures. Will it be as polished as what a
publisher would produce? No, of course not! Will it be all the reader really
needs and wants? Definitely!

This is 90% of the value, and it's something that the author needs to produce.
This is true even when working with a traditional publisher.

For technical books, business books (like startup books) and fiction books,
all a reader really wants is the words and (if applicable) figures. In
bookstores, things like nice glossy covers, layout, etc are important because
people flip through books and make purchasing decisions. For example, this is
why technical books have large indexes: people look at the index when making
purchasing decisions.

On the internet, people make purchasing decisions based on Twitter, reviews,
the book landing page, sample book content, price, etc. So that's what we
focus on at Leanpub.

------
wiradikusuma
Very new in this book publishing thing. What software do you use? Word/Pages?
Do you do the layout in that program too along while writing?

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Most manuscripts are written in a word processor like Word or Pages, without
any formatting. 12 pt Courier at 1,5 line height. I like it when writers send
in their work in Adobe InCopy format, but few of them do.

<http://www.adobe.com/products/incopy.html>

------
JohnsonB
Amazon only pays $17 out of $50, since when? I thought the common knowledge
was Amazon pays 70% the full retail price to the authors of e-books.

~~~
bennesvig
I think royalties drop back down once the price hits above a ceiling price.
The floor for 70% is $2.99. Not sure at what point it drops back down to 35%.

~~~
skottk
It drops back down to 35% at $9.99. Here's the pricing table from the Kindle
Direct site: [https://kdp.amazon.com/self-
publishing/help?topicId=A301WJ6X...](https://kdp.amazon.com/self-
publishing/help?topicId=A301WJ6XCJ8KW0)

------
johnohara
It's a lot of work to do it well.

Strong cross-currents between e-books, online course content and the
programming paradigm also seem to be e/merging.

------
pace
Who said that e-books would be easy?

------
mharrison
I originally wrote my ebook as preparation for a 3 hour long conference
tutorial. I had given the tutorial previously and thought that I would prepare
by writing a book. Well, the book was published in November, the conference
was in July. Yes it is hard work. Especially when you have a full time job and
family.

Amazon really wants ebooks to be priced under $10. Hence the 70% margins from
$3-$9.99. The Hockings, Lockes and Konraths who spit out a novel a month can
go down in the $.99 - $2.99 35% margin and make it back by selling 50K copies
a week. I don't know that any technical book sells that much in a month. Hmmm,
maybe technical books aren't exciting enough and could be spiced up a bit.

WRT formatting, I ended up writing my own restructuredText to epub
converter[0]. I format my html specifically so it will go through KindleGen
and make acceptable mobi's. (I'm convinced that the author(s) of KindleGen
outsourced every other line of that program, then blindly merged them
together. I'm not sure how else it could generate such horrible markup... A
first year intern should be able to do much better in a month of a summer).
Then I also created a mobi/epub friendly css project that has had some
contributions from professional ebook creators. [1]

It took a lot longer to write than I would have thought, I had an in-law that
writes grants for a living give it an overview, and then got a professional
Python editor to give it a wonderful overhaul.

I did cover design myself with Inkscape. It's OK, better than a lot of covers,
but not stellar.

As for distribution, e-junkie has a horrible interface (for admins) but does
the job for self-distribution. Amazon has about 60+% of the US market, so even
though mobi sucks, I put all my focus on making it look great on the Kindle.
(In fact I'm in the middle of another book on mobi-friendly epubs) Getting
published on KDP is easy, no ISBN required. BN has another 20% of the US
market, pubit also easy, no ISBN required. Apple is a pain, and from my
research most ipad users buy content from Amazon... Smashwords is fine for
novel writers but requires writing in Word (at least until mid 2012), so I
just can't justify spend time tweaking Word documents, for a book on Python
where it is imperative that spacing and whitespace are correct, for a small
slice of the pie. If Smashwords accepted by epub or mobi, I'd put it up there
yesterday.

I'm horrible at marketing. Getting reviews and feedback is longtail behavior.
Send out 40 copies to people who say they'll give feedback and maybe one or
two will respond. (Maybe my peer group is bad) I need to spend more time
prettying up the website and on marketing, but I feel good about my book and
the reception it has gotten.

Yep it is hard work, but for some reason I'm in the middle of writing two more
books.

0 - <https://github.com/mattharrison/rst2epub2> 1 -
<https://github.com/mattharrison/epub-css-starter-kit>

~~~
emeraldd
Have you looked at sphinx? I've used it to generate epub format files with
some success.

~~~
mharrison
Yeah, being a docutils contributer and a creator of another rst2X tool, I just
wanted my own bikeshed. There are some compelling features of Sphinx. I'd love
to see how their epubs fare against kindlegen....

------
newandimproved
Zero to Superhero: <http://zerotosuperhero.com> took me four and a half years
to research, write then format and self-publish, so I know how much work it
can be.

Then again, my second book Economtricks:
<http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/economtricks/6123536> took only a year
and a half, and every aspect of it went smoothly.

So maybe there's something to be said about having gone through the process
once, it gets easier.

