Amazon and Apple Make Self-Publishing Incredibly Easy
If you enjoy writing, there is no excuse not to publish!
Had I known that the Pages app on my Mac had a publish option that directly publishes whatever I write to the Apple Books app, I would have done this a LONG time ago.
I’ve been sitting on material that could have turned into books for years.
A few months ago I began writing a book on Crypto Trading Bots. Each chapter began as a story drafted in my blog.
I kept the draft form available in my blog, then published the final revision.
It’s got all the same core information, but the finalized book is a little neater, tidier, and cleaned up.
I managed to increase my readership by creating linked-story series and jumped up in earnings at the same time. These linked story series compelling readers on a journey with me! (And thank you for coming along!)
That journey was finally released into the wild and I am very surprised at how super-easy it was to publish.
First the Kindle Edition and Apple Books editions.
Then the softcover.
And the hardcover was just approved and listed today.
It was a little too easy.
I honestly expected Amazon to force perfection onto all pages, but they really only did that for the covers.
Apple Books, Amazon Kindle, and my softcover — all of them let a few errors slide that made it into sales before I caught them — nothing major, a formatting issue or two, the title page said “Beginners Guide” (I forgot the word “Ultimate”), there were a few missing apostrophes, and a few un-needed commas in places where they shouldn’t have been (I do that a lot, in my writing, like this), and my page headers were missing.
All of that made it into print. Eeeekk!
I guess that is why people hire publishing companies and editors.
I have since corrected the errors so any copies purchased now and going forward are the corrected edition.
In my former life I worked for Adobe and specifically supported Digital Publishing Suite, so I already had some idea of what to expect in the publishing process.
I know that I just published a Kindle book without owning a single Kindle device to test it on, and the desktop previewer is never totally accurate.
Kindle was a little tricky.
I corrected all the correctable errors, now I just hope that the formatting doesn’t upset anyone on Kindle.
I’ve read other books on Kindle whose formatting was a little …. bizarre…..and just assumed it was related to device sizes and reflow.
I did what I could do, so far no complaints, but I am still working on perfecting the format.
The formatting is NEVER going to be perfect on every size screen and rotation.
Amazon wont distribute your ebook on all devices unless it is a reflowing text book — which is a huge challenge with images. Especially when not all devices are very good at scaling those images.
Selecting a non-reflowing configuration leads to only being distributed on two classes of device, and the majority of readers are left out.
My book needed the example images, so it was either re-flow, or have distribution be limited.
Apple publishing to Apple Books was not tricky at all.
I was able to distribute without reflowing, just as a static PDF, which is better for the purposes of a book that has software screenshots. They do not limit distribution.
But ….I also haven’t had ANY sales through Apple Books yet.
Not sure what it takes to push sales on Apple but i’ll have to do some reading on it.
On Amazon, I am already kind of stoked.
I have sold 30 copies so far, about 3/4 ebook and 1/4 softcover, and I already have made three 5 star ratings!
Check out my book on Amazon :
>>>https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D8JK3DPL<<<
And thank you very much to my reader Stephane who ordered a copy and left my first review!
That helps so much! I am very glad you liked it!
Excited!
I have read that 10 positive reviews with no negative reviews = instant Amazon bump into their own promotions without me having to pay for ads.
I can’t find any confirmation of that anywhere so that maybe just forum speculation…..
This has been a pretty positive week for a first time author with no audience to pre-sell to.
Thank you to my readers for helping making it rock!
Thank you for reading!
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Until next time….
Onward and Upward Everybody!
-Chris
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