Last week we discussed the importance of having a website to successfully market your eBook. One of the reasons a website is important is because you can further enhance your marketing efforts through social media, driving interested readers back to your website for more information.

Social Media Marketing your eBook in a Nutshell

You don’t necessarily need to be on every social media platform, but each platform does offer unique advantages for eBook marketing.

• Pinterest is an ideal platform for authors, since it is so image-centric. You can create boards for each of your books, plus one about the author. The boards can be in any order you choose, and every image can link, either back to your website or to a purchase link.

• Twitter is a great platform for authors, because you can share snippets and quotes from the book with a link back to your site. You can also engage with fans or host chats.

• Facebook allows for more extended conversations as well as larger images.

• Google+ helps to ensure that you rank well when people are searching for you.

YouTube, Instagram and other platforms all offer additional ways to market yourself as an author and market your eBook to increase sales. All of these platforms offer an excellent way for you to share your blog, which we will discuss next week.

There are a number of things you can do to successfully market your eBook , but to really get the most exposure, you need to take a multi-pronged approach that includes the use of a website, social media marketing, blogging and speaking engagements. In the next few posts, we’ll go over each of these in turn, beginning this week with how to use a website to market your eBook.

Marketing your eBook Begins with a Website

The decision you need to make before you launch your website is about how you want to market yourself. Are you marketing you, the author, or just the book? Simplicity suggests that you should market yourself as an author so that you can simply add new publications to the same site as you write and publish them.

Things to Consider when Creating a Website:

• Be sure to choose an easy-to-remember domain name, such as your name or the name of your book.
• Keep the design clean and make it easy to navigate.
• Include information about how to purchase your eBook.
• Include a tab for readers who might be interested in writing a review about your book.

Your eBook or author website does not have to be expensive or difficult; you can purchase a domain for $8-12 from GoDaddy.com and use WordPress to design the site. Be sure your website includes links to your social media accounts, as we’ll discuss social media marketing next week.

Creating an ebook presents a number of unique challenges. Your ebook will inevitably look different depending on the device your reader is using, and the number of devices available is growing exponentially. In addition to Nook and Kindle, there is now iBook, Kobo and a variety of online readers. You may not be able to make your ebook formatting work perfectly on every platform, but when creating an ebook, you should test your book to see how it will look once converted to .epub.

Testing EPUB Readers

1. EPUBReader
   This Firefox add-on lets you quickly and easily test your EPUB to make sure your ebook formatting will read well on most devices.
2. Adobe Digital Editions Adobe Digital Editions, Adobe’s desktop EPUB reader, can show you how your ebook formatting will convert for use on Kobo, Sony and Nook.
3. Kindle Previewer
   Kindle Previewer converts your EPUB to Amazon’s format, and since there are now six different Kindle formats (Kindle Fire, Kindle Touch, Kindle DX, Kindle iPad, Kindle iPhone, Kindle), this can be an important step.
4. iBooks (for iPad/iPod/iPhone)
   To check your EPUB file for iOS, you will need to email it to yourself on an iOS device and open it with the viewer.

Even if you are using EditionGuard to sell your ebook on your own website to avoid costly fees from third-party sellers, you’ll want to make sure your ebook looks good on the devices your readers use.

In our next post, we’ll switch gears and talk about successfully marketing your ebooks.

When creating an ebook, often one of the well-deserved assumptions about indie ebooks is that they author has skipped the much-needed editing process in order to go straight to publication. While indie authors do like to skip the steps of hiring agents and choosing publishing houses in order to bring readers material that costs less and says what the author intended, one of the most important steps in creating an ebook is proofreading and editing. In fact, it may be one of the most important steps you can when creating an ebook to be considered a serious author.

A New Step in Proofing eBooks

In addition to carefully reviewing your book for grammar, punctuation and consistency in style, there is a new step you must take as an indie ebook author to ensure that your ebook will be well received by the reader: testing the ebook on a variety of devices to make sure your ebook formatting is compatible with them.

No matter how cleanly you create your ebook, it will likely look different from one device to another because of the way each device converts your ebook formatting. You can work out quirks ahead of time and keep readers happy by making sure that you’ve addressed any ebook formatting issues prior to publishing.

In our next post, we’ll discuss the different testing formats.

When you are creating an ebook, it is important to consider your reader and focus on providing easy-to-read text in a common font that is translatable to any device.

Font Tips for Creating an eBook

• Page numbers no longer exist. Because your book will be viewed on so many different devices, page numbers and pagination are of no concern. In fact, page breaks between chapters can create too much white space on the device, so a simple indication of transition works better than encoded page breaks.
• Keep your ebook formatting simple. Use a left-aligned, standard paragraph style in a standard font type and size, such as Times New Roman 12 or Arial 10, since these fonts convert easily.
• Less white space is better. Because some people will be reading ebooks on cell phones and other small devices, it’s almost always best to use single spacing when formatting your ebook.

In the end, your reader will have control over what font type and size they read in, but by creating an ebook using a standard font and maintaining consistency throughout your entire ebook, it will convert more easily regardless of the device and reading choices your reader makes.

In our next post, we’ll discuss the importance of editing and proofreading.

When you are writing a book that will be print published, you control everything about how the book will appear for the reader, including the size of the font and the size of the page. When you are an ebook author creating an ebook, you have no control over what device your reader will use to read your book, making ebook formatting is quite different. In fact, in the digital publishing world, what you write will be seen on a variety of different devices with different screen sizes and different capabilities. Users can increase the font size or change the rotation of their device from landscape to portrait.

In a series of posts, we will discuss how to format your ebook readable on any device; images is the subject of this first post of the series.

Because images can enhance the quality of the message you are sharing, they are often a valuable addition to your ebook. If you’re writing a memoir, you may want to include images from your childhood. If you’re writing a how-to book, images are critical to getting the message across. Unlike print books, however, you must make sure your images are properly aligned and include the necessary meta information.

In our next post, we’ll discuss the importance of writing so that your words can be read on any device.

Many authors who publish their own ebooks often contemplate about what the effects of piracy would be for their earning potential, and the possible scenarios aren’t all that attractive. To combat piracy, the ebook industry has taken to the use of DRM (digital rights management) technology as a method of protecting the rights of the author. Unfortunately, many eBook owners tend to view most DRM technologies as a violation of their rights as an eBook owner. Quite a lot of people on both sides, however, find Adobe Content Server as an acceptable compromise. Read more →

If you have written an ebook and you want to market it online, one of the most efficient ways of doing so is by writing online articles and allowing search engines to lead your potential readers to them. This activity alone is the center piece of eBook marketing. It’s been said that search engines like Google have become the modern equivalent of the ancient oracles. In the old days, hordes of people flocked to oracles such as those at Delphi, and they had to wait an eternity for their questions to be answered—if they do get answered, that is. And even if and when they receive an answer, it may be couched in words so vague that the answer doesn’t seem all that helpful anyway. Read more →

Once upon a time, the TV was the most popular platform to sell just about anything, and the price of advertising minutes increased exponentially to reflect the great demand for airtime. Although in some ways this is still true (this is why a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl costs millions of dollars), for many people Youtube is the most popular website to go to for videos. Close to a billion people visit Youtube regularly and that kind of potential exposure shouldn’t be ignored for increasing your eBook sales. Read more →