A Cheap and Easy Guide to Self-Publishing E-Books [Paperback]

Wayne F. Perkins (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Even if you elect to have someone else do the publishing of your book, this plan alone is worth the price." -- Cassell Network of Writers

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 3:Chapter Update on December 14,2000

5 Steps in Publishing and Selling Your first E-book

This chapter is the newest update to the CD-ROM and the paperback versions of "A Cheap And Easy Guide to Self-publishing E-books"

By reading this chapter and executing the plan below, you will have your first e-book published on the Internet. This will happen even if you do not have a website and do not have a credit card merchant account!

What is an e-book?

An e-book is simply a digital file that contains content that entertains, enlightens or inspires your reader.

It can be 5 pages long or 2500 pages long. It can be a complete book that uses all of the old fashioned elements of book publishing or an E-book can be a truly creative piece of work.

An e-book could be a speech, a series of speeches, a poem, a series of poems, recipes or series of recipes and "how to instructions. E-books can also be short stories like Stephen King's "Riding the Bullet."

E-books can contain sound, video and animation or they can resemble a typical paperback book.

Look up on Amazon.com and check out the top 100 books and see if you can tie in your e-book to a topic area of one of the bestsellers.

Write it just like you would write a letter. You do not need any special formatting.

2. Save your e-book as in Microsoft word as a doc. File...text file...and html file

3. Set up an account with Infopost.com. They will host your file and give you a free website page to include your description, reviews, pricing and any other information. Infopost.com is located at: infopost.com

4. Follow the directions on listing your e-book, including the description, sample chapter and then up-load your e-book to Infopost.com. You can set the price of your information to be anything you desire. I recommend a price of at least $9.95 for an e-book.

You will be able to add and edit your e-book at any time.

5. Copy and paste the URL of your e-book to your e-mail signature and register the URL with all of the major search engines and directories.
searchenginewatch.com
jimtools.com
urlsubmitter.com

Resources:

E-book sellers to sign up with if you have no website.
booklocker.com
ebookshoppe.com AKA Scribblers
infopost.com

Summary

Now you have the tools and the method to create your first e-book. In Chapter Four you will learn how to market your e-book effectively over the Internet. You will not have to spend any money in using these very effective marketing tools.

Product Details

• Paperback: 116 pages
• Publisher: Authorhouse (October 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1588200833
• ISBN-13: 978-1588200839
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,673,590 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Caveat emptor, January 31, 2002

By 

Mr. Kenneth G. Davies "rolleicanonikon" (Manhattan, New York, USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Cheap and Easy Guide to Self-Publishing E-Books (Paperback)

This book may be an easy read, but at over (...)for just over 100 pages it isn't cheap. As an example of an e-book it drives home the lesson that books need to be edited by real editors: "Cheap and Easy" contains numerous simple errors that would have been corrected by a copy editor. For someone who doesn't know anything about the subject, though, this is a reasonably good introduction, with rather less of the inevitable repetitive empty hype than some of the other how-to books in this field. (But that doesn't mean it doesn't have any meaningless hype. For example: "Right now there is an engineer from Bangalore, India, an architect from Malta, a nurse from Hong Kong, a construction worker from Sweden, an automobile worker from Germany, a homemaker from Salt Lake City, and a school teacher from Italy, who want to read your e-book! Act now and feed the world with your creativity and mark the world with your brilliance!") The general lessons about such things as selling from your own web site are useful. Readers should, though, be prepared for information in the book to become obsolescent; this is a rapidly-changing subject. For example, anyone following the advice in Chapter Three, "How to Publish Your E-book in One Day", will find difficulty registering with the one recommended publishing site, (...), which closed on January 12th 2002. On the next page you might notice that mightywords.com is mentioned as belonging to the parent company Fatbrain.com, but if you go to (...)you will find that it now belongs to (...) and has this discouraging little note at the bottom of its Publisher Information Center page: "We no longer post self-published digital content on our web site." It would have been helpful if the author's commitment to the World Wide Web as a publishing medium had led him to post amendments to the book on a web site, but if you follow the link on the back of the book listed under "Contact Information", (...), you reach (end-January 2002) a temporary page with no information, just a link to another address where you find an advertisement for a two-hour (...)teleseminar.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars quick and dirty, August 18, 2001

By 

Linda M - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Cheap and Easy Guide to Self-Publishing E-Books (Paperback)

Cheap and Easy is packed with quick and dirty tips and pointers. It provides a good starting point for those of us who have written a book, but are clueless how to begin self-publishing. It's a small book, but worth the money. I wish Wayne Perkins would write a more in-depth sequel. Those who buy this book might want to make their next purchase: "How to Publish and Promote Online" by M J Rose and Angela Adair-Hoy, which goes into more depth and contains articles by many successful self-publishers.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book will inspire you to act on your desire to write, December 4, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: A Cheap and Easy Guide to Self-Publishing E-Books (Paperback)

The organization of this book makes it very easy to read and understand. The author knows his subject and shares all with an enthusiasm that is contageous. With a sprinkle of humor Wayne guides and encourages you to do what might have been considered - just too hard.