There are many factors that go into pricing an ebook, as I stated above. Some authors will want to go for sales, some for a fan base. There are sweet spots in the pricing game that will help you a little in choosing a price, but it’s really a personal choice. You also take things into account like royalties and programs that certain price ranges qualify for in the digital marketplaces where you host your book. If you want to see some hard numbers, check out these graphs and factoids from TechCrunch: Ten Things You May Not Know About Ebook Prices.

Publisher’s Weekly posted a great article called DIY: How to Price a Self-Published Ebook on the steps to take and thoughts behind pricing your ebook. They talk a little about an author’s goals, and go deeper into the long-term success of your book. Sometimes more than one road leads to the same place, and there’s more than one way to go about selling your work.

Finally, there’s another perspective on selling your work: that your work is valuable, and you should price it accordingly. The Launch Coach talks a little bit about selling yourself short in his article called How to Price an Ebook So People Will Buy It. It’s a great reminder that a lot of hard work and long nights went into the creation that you’re about to sell, and you should keep that in mind. With the right marketing, your audience will believe the same, and you can sell your book competitively.

We hope that the pricing question is a little simpler to answer after these informative posts, and wish you all the best of luck in your journey to successfully publishing your book!

The publishing process, on the other hand, is complicated.

I’ve recently published my book, Hylsbrith Falls, using the Simply Written service. During this process I documented the experience and am writing a “how-to” for authors that want to self-publish through Amazon and the iBookstore. You can look forward to reading about the experience on this blog soon.

In the meantime I wanted talk a bit about the other options for a self-publishing author. There are a number of sites out there that will do some of the legwork for you, allowing you to submit a file to them for distribution to these two main sellers and a host of minor ones.

Smashwords

Smashwords is an ebook distributor founded in 2008 that focuses on making publishing relatively easy. They have a store online for their readers, as well as distribution lines to Apple, Nook, Kobo, OverDrive, Flipkart, Oyster, Scribd, Baker & Taylor’s, Blio, and Axis360, among others.

Authors can submit a word document to the service, and they convert the files for you. They also have started accepting epub files. When your book sells through a site that Smashwords sent it to, they take a small commission from the sale before you get your royalty payment. You get a much higher cut when it sells directly from the Smashwords site itself.

BookBaby

BookBaby is a site by the makers of CDBaby. They are a good fit for an author that wants a little more help through the process, but the author does pay a fee for that help. Their distribution is pretty solid, including Apple, Nook, Kobo, Amazon, Scribd, Gardners Books, Baker & Taylor’s, and more.

There are different levels of fees, and different services that are available. File conversion, cover creation, editing, and more can be purchased there. Their commission varies depending on the package you go with, and they have a yearly fee for the books held in their system, but overall it’s a worthwhile service to look into. They also have some options for print-on-demand runs.

Barnes & Noble PubIt

Barnes & Noble PubIt is very similar to Amazon’s Direct Publishing. The product is only offered on the Nook from this distributor, so you don’t get the breadth of coverage you would with the others. They do offer a free file conversion, or you can upload your own epub file. Their royalties are a tad less than Amazon offers, but still pretty competitive.

Lulu

Lulu is primarily a print-on-demand publisher, but you have the option of publishing an ebook there. They only distribute to the three big ebook sellers (Apple, Amazon, and Nook) so your retailer coverage is not as great, and they do take a commission on your earnings from these. They offer services for a fee, such as cover creation, editing, and marketing.

And more…

There are many smaller distributors out there as well. Booktango, Scribd, and CreateSpace to name a few. Many print-on-demand companies will offer an ebook creation service of some sort, though their reach may be limited. Be wary of any site that wants you to pay them to distribute your book.

The pitfalls with some of these avenues of distribution is that the files they create can be poor quality and full of formatting errors. If you decide to go with one of these distributors, it’s a good idea to upload your own epub files so they’re exactly how you’d like them to look. Simply Written makes ebook files to printed book standards. If there’s ever any complaint about our files, please pass them along and we can look into the problem.

Remember, whether you decide to publish and distribute your work on your own to retailers, or go with a distribution service, there are plenty of options out there. Do your research and make sure you’re getting what you want out of a service.

Why the sudden increase in self-publishing? In past years an author would write their masterpiece, then search out an agent; or cold contact a publishing house, praying to get someone to notice their work and want to buy it from them. A very small percentage of authors ever made it past the submission stage. Rejection letters would pile up over the years while waiting on a publisher to take notice.

What changed?

Then along came companies that offered print on demand (PoD) publishing. For no cost to the author, they would accept manuscripts and print them as their customers ordered them. They accepted anything that fit within their standards of “good taste”. If it didn’t sell, it was no problem to them. Sure the books cost a little bit extra so these companies could skim off the top, but you could publish it yourself at no cost to you.

Then, to make things even easier, along came the e-reader, and digital libraries hungry for content to offer their customers. Amazon and the iBookstore, and even Barnes and Noble, all opened their digital warehouse to independent publishers. Ebooks were even cheaper to produce on demand, and with a typical 30% cut taken off the top, they were even more profitable for authors as well.

Now anyone can be an author with very little cost to themselves.

What does this mean for publishing?

Setting aside the extensive debate about whether ebooks are going to make printed books obsolete, and the belief that self-publishing is driving up the price of books coming out of traditional publishing houses, there are two huge consequences. One of them is primarily positive, and one is very potentially negative.

First, the bright side. Because self-publishing is now viable, there are thousands of new authors who can get their voices heard. There are thousands of stories that can be told. Genres have expanded and are bursting at the seams. There is something out there for everyone’s taste, no matter how obscure. No longer is the reader subject to popular marketing and what the publishing house thinks they want. Opportunity is spread out wide before every writer, waiting for them to grab hold of their dreams.

But with every bright side, there’s a shadow. It used to be that for every successful author there were a thousand that were rejected. Some of these may have been brilliant works, but many were just not good enough. With self-publishing, anyone can be an author. There is no quality assurance process for ebook creation. There is no editor sitting behind a desk dropping manuscripts in the trash. It’s up to the reader to sort out what is quality and what is crap. It’s given rise to the review system, bringing an entirely new barrier into publishing that doesn’t happen during printing… but during marketing.

So what does this mean for you, as a potential author or independent publisher?

It means that instead of worrying about getting your book created, you have to worry about selling it. You can print (or digitize) anything, but your success depends on being able to get people to read and like it.

Self-publishing is putting responsibility for an author’s success directly in the hands of the author. There are opportunities popping up like never before, and they are more slippery than ever before. Make sure, when you make the choice to self-publish, that you go in with your eyes open.

For more info on self-publishing and what it entails, you can visit www.selfpublishedauthor.com, a site created by Bowker to help the independent author. There is great information there and a list of other useful links so you can do your own research into the world of publishing.

Happy publishing!