Publishing Ebook How to: "I did it all by myself"

Now for the second instalment of creating your very own ebook. Last post I described what places you should plan on posting you book(s) on. Now I'm going to go into further details on how to do it.

If you have decided to go the route that is harder but makes you more money than doing it by yourself is the way to go.  Though you must keep in mind that some sites only allow aggregators to publish their books (ex Smashwords), like the Sony store.  If you’re American you’re in luck, you can publish (if you have the patience and requirements) at the iBookstore, Amazon.com is A LOT easier, and you can use PubIt! to publish on Barnes and Nobel. 

There is only one way to not take a loss and that is to have customers purchase your ebook off your webpage.  Quite a few people don’t have their own website and even less know how to throw a shopping cart on it.  I have my own webpage, but I don’t see the sense in making a shopping cart.  You might be asking yourself, why wouldn’t you want to make a 100% profit? My answer: Nobody knows who I am. why would they go to my site and buy me ebook? 

I think having your own site and own checkout is a great idea, but if you’re not established I don’t see it generating much income. If you’ve released a few ebooks and they are doing well then I would definitely consider this option and promote your website to your readers. Ex, put your website at the end of your ebooks, develop a fan page on facebook and tell your readers where to find your ebooks.

Now you have to decide where you want to release your ebook, the best thing to do is to release it on as many sites as possible. Please see my previous post for all the sites you can release it on.

Some tips:

Release your ebook for .99 cents (I know who wants all their hard work to get them less than a dollar, I sure don’t!) BUT people are much more likely to give an author they never heard of a chance for .99 cents.  Don’t fret though, you could set a goal for yourself like, if I sell 2,500 books I’m going to start selling my ebook at $1.99, and if your sales don’t drop after the price change you might say to yourself, if I sell 10,000 I’m going to change it to $2.99, etc, etc.  I wouldn’t go any higher than $3/4.99.

An Important thing to remember is once you start selling your ebooks don’t hike it up right away, you could deter people and then get less reviews than you want.  I am a strong believer in reviews if I see a book released with 300 reviews compared to one with 3 I am more likely to look at the 300 reviewed one, aren’t you?  SOMEONE out of those 300 is going to have a well detailed opinion, and we humans are drawn by popularity. We would trust a 4 star book with 300 reviews than a 5 star book with 3 reviews?

The more popular your book is the more popular it will become, period.  So don’t cut your books growth short too soon by hiking up the price to make a few extra dollars.

Option two (if you didn’t like the last option you’ll like this one even less) release your ebook for free and when it gets popular (set a goal for this two like maybe 10 reviews or 1,000 downloads or maybe just free for the first 2-4 weeks) start selling your ebook.  If you peeps have learned anything from my site, if it’s free I give it a go!

Next Wednesday: I'll be talking about converting you .doc to other files. 

How to Publish an Ebook (Children's Picture Book)

This is still applicable to those who do not want to publish just picture books, but this is the main focus of these posts. Over the next several weeks I will be posting about my experiences and what I have learned about publishing an ebook. I hope anyone looking for knowledge on the subject will find this very helpful, and I'm trying to cram as much information as possible so you don't have to jump for site to site to try and find about different publishers.

That being said, let's begin, :)

For any people (like me) that want to get their Ebook off of their desktop and into the hands of readers, here’s a how to.  The Ebook I released Waffles the Goldendoodle Teaches the Doggy Alphabet (based on our dog) may be a picture book but I’m sure anyone releasing a novel could find this helpful.

You have everything typed, drawn, proofread, and whatever else. So the question you ask now is: do I want publish this myself or have another website do it for me?

If you’re wanting to release an ebook, and by now you should have done some research, you should have noticed, Holy Crap there are quite a few formats! Don’t believe me? Wiki will tell you here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebook#Formats  if you scroll down to the bottom it will also tell the most popular locations for Americans and Canadians to sell their ebooks.

The most popular formats are epub, pdf, and quite a few will take TXT.

So now that we know what formats we need where do we publish our ebooks? Good question.  More places than you probably thought there were.

Where to publish:

-          Amazon.com (Kindle)

-          Kobo  (pretty self-explanatory)

-          Barnes and Nobel (Nook) (Use PubIt!)

-          Google Books

-          Sony Store

-          Android Market

-          iBookstore (Use iTunes Connect?)

-          On your own webpage

-          Countless other small sites sell books

o   Blurb

-          Ebay

-          Ebookservices.com (sells to libraries?)

-          Epubbud

-          Lulu

Now what you probably want to know is, how you get it on these sites.

Stay Tuned!

How to load a new template into the new blogger layout

Go to your blog, hit the design tab in the right corner

Go to Template on the left side

Click Back-up/Restore

****You need to back up your old template or else everything will be lost****

(Copy and paste HTML code in a txt or doc file, but I suggest look into this further so you don’t lose anything)

Click Load template

Find the XML file for you new template

Note : if your new template is in a zip you must extract the files to a different folder

-          Shift select all the files then hit the extract button and choose the destination

How to change your favicon (little picture next to the URL)

It's really simple but silly me, I missed this the first time around. So anyone else that missed it, here's how to change your favicon in the new blogger dashboard:

Go to you blog, hit the design tab in the right corner

Click the Layout Tab on the left side, here you can edit your favicon

Your favicon needs to be saved as a .jpg .ico (maybe a .gif?)

That’s it!

How to Align Text to Pictures

You ever wonder how people get the cool effect of text next to pictures in their blog? And call you can do is that boring old text underneath.  Well you're in luck if you want to remedy this situation!

I’m sure there’s a bunch on junk code in here, but if you want to line up text next to your photo here is the code.  (it also lined up my other body text, so I’m sure this much code is NOT needed) Just copy and paste this to where you want a picture in your blog in the HTML editor. Play around with it, :).

Note: You can edit what your text says either in HTML or Compose editor

<img src="https://encrypted-tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSve8fLjG95uZd31Rrdk13OxRZ7dfisXvSnxEv1GS3r2A217xa0" style="float: left;" />  This is of course the link to the image, the easiest way to get this is to just paste it in, find the image, right click and copy url NOT image

<br />

<div style="float: left; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-top: 10px; text-align: left; width: 300px;"> This will determined how wide and such your text is

<div style="font-weight: bold; line-height: 20px;">

5/5 Stars</div>

<div style="font-weight: bold; line-height: 20px;">

Hollowland</div>

<div style="font-weight: bold; line-height: 20px;">

Amanda Hockings</div>

<div style="font-weight: bold; line-height: 20px;">

First in The Hollows series</div>

<span style="line-height: 20px;"><b>Genre: Horror/Apocalypse</b></span></div>

<br /> 

<br /> <=--- this essentially means 'enter' make a space beneath

<div style="text-align: justify;">

</div>

<div style="text-align: justify;">

<br /></div>

<div style="text-align: justify;">

<br /> Not sure if you need this

How to add blogs to multiple pages

Let me explain, this is a tab, that’s not really actually a tab, so why do I want this? Because it gives the illusion of blog categories, so it’s like you have multiple blog pages.  You will notice I have one called ‘Tutorials’ and it will link to all my tutorial blog posts. I find this handy!

How to set this up:

1.       Go to your design tab in the top right corner

2.       Click the ‘Layout’ tab in the left side column

3.       Click ‘Add a Gadget’ and select the Labels one

4.       Create a label (you can create multiple labels by separating them with comma’s IE Example1, Example 2, Example 3)

5.       Unclick the ‘Show number of posts’ (something like that) box to get rid of the little numbers

6.       Grab and drag your new gadget so that it’s under your ‘Page’ box

7.       You will notice the labels haven’t shown up yet, they will once you create a Label for you Post

8.       To create a label for your posts, make a new one or edit and old one, and you will notice on the right side there’s a bar that says ‘Labels’, click it

9.       It will open and write your label name in here

10.   Save and then test it out on your main blog page!

How to make a static tab with New blogger layout

This is helpful for pages you don't want to change often, ie an 'about' page.


1. First go to your design tab in the top right corner of your screen

2. Click the ‘Pages’ tab on the left side column

3. Click on ‘New Page’

4. Name new page and if you want add a short description

5. Return to ‘Pages ‘page click the ‘Show pages as’ pulled down and select ‘Top Tabs’

6. Style will vary by template, mine is pretty ugly

7. You can change the order of the tabs by returning to you main blog page and hitting the edit (wrench crossed with screw) button at the end of your new Tabs line. To edit, it’s on the right side of the screen, just drag the tabs up and down to change the order.


I am on the search right now on how to make multiple 'blogging' pages, so I can categorize them  better.