.FLYINGHEAD DIGITAL PUBLISHING
.TITLE How I turned my novel into an ebook
.AUTHOR Heather Wardell
.SUMMARY Use Heather’s experience as a guide if you want to make an ebook of your own. Late last year, Heather Wardell decided to make her first novel available for free download from her Web site. She expected to spend an hour or so getting it ready to go, but instead it took weeks and brought up questions she hadn’t considered.
.OTHER
Late last year, I decided to make my first novel, "Life, Love, and a Polar Bear Tattoo", available for free download from [[http://www.heatherwardell.com|my Web site]]. I expected to spend an hour or so getting it ready to go, but instead it took weeks and brought up questions I hadn’t considered. Use my experience as a guide if you want to make an ebook of your own.
.H1 Which format?
There are a lot of options for ebook formats, but I wanted one that offered free document conversion and reasonably wide-spread use. I didn’t see much point in converting the book into a format that hardly anyone would be able to read.
HTML format would seem to fit my requirements, but I didn’t consider it. While some people do sit in front of their computer and read, they are in the minority, and I also didn’t like how easy it would be for people to change and redistribute the book. Ditto with Microsoft Word.
Since I do the majority of my reading on my Palm, I wanted a format that I could read myself. The [[http://www.ereader.com/ereader/software/ebookstudio.htm|eReader eBook Studio]] converter costs $29.99, and while that’s not a bad price, I didn’t want to pay to make my book available for free.
In the end, I went with PDF, because pretty much every computer and a lot of ebook readers can handle it, and [[http://www.mobipocket.com/|Mobipocket]], because the Amazon Kindle can read Mobipocket files. So far, nobody has asked for an additional format.
.TEASER Tap here and learn how Heather did it.
.H1 Digital rights management?
I am not a fan of being forced to unlock my ebooks with my credit card number or some other code, so making other people do it seemed unreasonable. In addition, my goal is getting as many people as possible to read my book, and I know from my own download experiences that the more hoops you make people jump through, the more likely they are to simply not bother.
What clinched it for me, though, was the Kindle situation. Although Amazon’s Kindle format is based on the Mobipocket platform, it cannot read Mobipocket files with DRM. Since I wanted Kindle readers to be able to read my book, I went with no DRM.
.H1 Creative Commons licensing?
A difficult issue for me. I think creators should have the right to decide how their work is distributed and to what uses it can be put, so at first glance the [[http://creativecommons.org/|Creative Commons]] (CC) licensing seemed perfect for me.
CC is a non-profit group that provides pre-written licenses to make it easier for creators to share their work and for other people to build upon that work. It provides a great way to keep some control over your work while still allowing others to put their own spin on it.
However, the one thing all CC licenses have in common is allowing people to share and redistribute the original work, and that made me uncomfortable. I want to know where my book has been posted, and be able to remove or change it if I see fit, and if I allowed people to post it themselves, I wouldn’t be able to do this.
I decided to write my own license for the book, which I think covers everything I wanted. I’m not a lawyer, but if you are releasing your own ebook I do give you permission to re-use and/or modify my license statement if you’d like to.
Here’s the license agreement I put at the start of the ebook:
You do have the right to:
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET Read this book on your computer;
.BULLET Read this book on any handheld device you can get to read it (if you use a Palm-based handheld or a Kindle, there is a Mobipocket version of the book available at my Web site);
.BULLET Print this book out for your own use;
.BULLET Photocopy this book as you see fit;
.BULLET Pass the electronic and/or printed version along to anyone else who might want to read it (also, feel free to send people to my Web site to get their own copy);
.END_LIST
You do not have the right to:
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET Do anything with the book that in any way makes you money (with the exception that you may recoup your costs if you, for example, had a copy printed for a friend);
.BULLET Claim this book is yours;
.BULLET Repost the book on your own Web site or blog or anywhere else (posting links from your site to my site is absolutely fine and there’s no need to ask permission);
.BULLET Print this book through lulu.com or any other self-publishing company (essentially, you may not print it in a way that makes it look like a "real" book);
.BULLET Post any part of the content of the book on your own Web site or blog (with the exception that you may post up to 100 words as an excerpt if you choose);
.END_LIST
While parts of it seem repetitive, I was trying to cover all possible permutations. In essence, I wanted people to be able to read the book in whatever way made them comfortable but not to be able to make it look like a commercially-printed novel. And of course, if anyone is going to make money from the book, it should be me.
.H1 File conversion
Once I’d made my licensing and DRM decisions, it was time to convert the book to Mobipocket and PDF.
Before I began, I made sure that the original Word file was consistently formatted. I wanted the book’s title and my name to appear on alternate pages in the PDF, and I definitely wanted each chapter’s headings to look the same. Using Word’s styles makes this considerably easier, but I still looked at every page to make sure they were correct.
It should go without saying, but it doesn’t given some of the free books I’ve downloaded, that I did also make sure the book had minimal spelling and grammar errors. On re-reading, I’ve spotted a word I left out, but the book’s quality is easily comparable to books I’ve bought.
Once my original file was complete, I installed Mobipocket’s free [[http://www.mobipocket.com/en/DownloadSoft/ProductDetailsCreator.asp|eBook Creator]] and opened my Word file within the program. Figure A shows one of the result screens, in which I can set my book’s metadata (title, author, genre, etc.), which will go with the book when it’s converted.
.FIGPAIR A Mobipocket’s eBook Creator, showing the book’s metadata
I was surprised to see "Day 1" as the book’s title, since that phrase doesn’t appear in the book. After some research, I realized that the book’s very first version, written in 2005, did begin with those words, and Microsoft Word had retained them as the file’s title even though the file name had long changed. It’s easy to change those details in Mobipocket, but changing them in Microsoft Word first would have been a good idea.
Once I set all the metadata, I added the book’s cover picture (which I created using a picture purchased from [[http://www.istockphoto.com|iStockphoto]] after hours of browsing) and had Mobipocket generate the book. One HotSync later, it was on my Palm.
Figure B shows its details page in the Mobipocket reader, as set in the ebook creator. My title’s a bit long for the screen, but I like it too much to consider changing it.
.FIGPAIR B The finished book on the Mobipocket reader
I expected the PDF conversion to be simple, since I had a PDF converter installed on my computer, but to my surprise the file with the cover picture included came out to be well over one megabyte in size, far bigger than I wanted. I tried reducing the resolution of the cover, but I couldn’t get the size down to anything reasonable.
I ended up using an [[http://www.pdfonline.com|online PDF converter]] which gave me a PDF of 586 KB, reasonably close to the Mobipocket file size of 477 KB, and still had great resolution. I’m not sure why my original converter couldn’t do this, but the smaller file size is worth the extra effort I spent finding the online converter.
.H1 You can post it, but how do they find it?
While I could have done much more in this area, I did do several promotional things that I think helped me.
First, I found several ebook- and Kindle-related bloggers and sent them an email telling them the book was available and asking if they would mention it on their blog. This was not a mass email; I sent only after reading the blog and being reasonably sure they’d be interested. They all did mention the book, and I saw spikes in its downloads as a result.
Second, I posted about the book on my social networking site profile pages and included it in my email signature.
Third, I was careful to let discussions grow naturally. I have a Google Alert set up for the book’s title, and so I’m informed whenever it’s mentioned on the Internet. I saw people discussing the book, and while I read the discussions I did not jump in and tell them I’d written it (or, worse, criticize their reviews). Some people emailed me directly with their comments, and I answered those, but I stayed out of more private discussions. I have seen authors attempt to interfere with how readers discuss their books and it never ends well.
What didn’t I do? I didn’t email everyone I’d ever met, I didn’t spam every message board and group I could find, and I didn’t obsess (too much) about the download numbers.
.H1 Speaking of the numbers…
I posted the book, both versions, on December 30, 2008. As of May 21, 2009, the PDF has been downloaded 515 times and the Mobipocket 456, for a total of 971 downloads. I also made it available on [[http://www.scribd.com/|Scribd]] on March 5, 2009, and it’s been accessed there about another four hundred times.
While there’s almost no chance all of those 971 downloaded files have been read, I am still thrilled with the results so far. People have emailed to say they like the book, someone added it to [[http://www.librarything.com/|LibraryThing]] and to the new [[http://www.librarything.it/|Italian LibraryThing]], and nearly every day I get another Google alert with another comment on the book.
They’ve been nearly all positive, and I haven’t yet had anything negative that was particularly hurtful.
.H1 Will I do it again?
My true goal is to be published by a "traditional" publisher. I am not yet ready to go full-scale into self-publishing. But I would seriously consider releasing other books for free. If I do, I will put more effort into promoting the book; this time around, I really just wanted to see if it was worthwhile.
It was more work than I expected, but the book has also gone further than I ever expected it to (I have at least one reader in Italy!). I’m pleased with how the experiment has gone and happy with the electronic versions I was able to create. Feel free to download the book yourself at [[http://www.heatherwardell.com|http://www.heatherwardell.com]] if you’d like to see how it came out.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
[[http://www.heatherwardell.com|my Web site]]
[[http://www.ereader.com/ereader/software/ebookstudio.htm|eReader eBook Studio]]
[[http://www.mobipocket.com/|Mobipocket]]
[[http://creativecommons.org/|Creative Commons]]
Mobipocket’s free [[http://www.mobipocket.com/en/DownloadSoft/ProductDetailsCreator.asp|eBook Creator]]
[[http://www.istockphoto.com|iStockphoto]]
[[http://www.pdfonline.com|online PDF converter]]
[[http://www.scribd.com/|Scribd]]
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
