Crafting Captivating E-Books for Fiction, Guides, and Non-Fiction
In today’s digital age, e-books have emerged as a popular and convenient way to consume and produce content.
Whether you’re an aspiring novelist, a guide author, or a non-fiction writer, creating an e-book can be a rewarding and effective way to share your ideas and reach a wider audience.
Choosing the Right E-book Software
There are numerous e-book creation software options available, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Here are a few popular choices to consider:
Apple Pages
Inside Apple Pages you’ll find templates for creating e-books, plus other documents like newsletters.
Scrivener
A powerful and versatile tool for writing and organising long-form content, including fiction, non-fiction, and scripts.
Calibre
A free and open-source e-book editor that can convert documents into various formats and supports most file types.
Adobe Acrobat
This is a professional-grade tool for creating and editing PDF documents, which can be converted into e-books.
Amazon Kindle Create
Amazon specifically designed and structured Kindle Create for creating and publishing e-books for their Kindle platform.
Selecting the Right E-book Platform
Once you’ve created your e-book, you’ll need to choose a platform to distribute it. You can publish it with multiple platforms and get as much exposure and readership opportunities as possible, and get more search engine results. Here are some popular options:
Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)
The largest e-book marketplace, with over 200 million active users. You can publish with KDP select exclusively, or use it alongside other platforms.
Barnes & Noble Press
A popular platform for publishing e-books for the Nook e-reader, or for their customers to download and use on other e-reading devices. You can also run promotions like BOGOF offers.
Apple Books & Pages
Allows you to publish e-books for Apple devices, including iPhones, iPads, and Macs. If you write using the Pages app, you can use it to publish directly with Apple, without doing any file conversions.
Google Play Book Partner Programme
A platform for publishing e-books that can be read on Android devices and through the Google Play Books app.
Kobo
Another popular book publisher, Kobo’s Writing Life offers authors to self-publish on their platform, and provides various promotional options, like giving away free copies.
Distribute it everywhere using Draft2Digital
Historically, these guys are more of a distribution service, providing the ability to publish with all of the publishers mentioned, but from one dashboard. This makes it easier to change prices and run promotions all in one place.
They have also bought indie publishing favourites Smashwords, so you can publish your book with them, too.
Formatting Your E-book for Different Platforms
From 2023, most if not all major publishing platforms use ePub (2/3) files. Amazon was the exception but is also now using ePub. If there are any issues with your files, they will be flagged during publishing, present the error codes, and either ask you to fix them if critical, or proceed with non-critical errors. Most will flag typos, too.
It’s vital to read it through before it goes live; check for things like unwanted gaps, spare pages, plus the obvious – typos. If you spot something when it’s live, don’t worry, you can either pull it and fix the errors, or fix them and then submit the updated version.
Avoiding setbacks during the publishing stage
Most issues arise due to the table of contents (ToC) and formatting errors caused during conversions from whatever file type is used by the word processor or writing app. Be sure to use proper headings and paragraph styles, and double-check everything before you publish – it’s as important as the writing and editing.
Consider Embedding Multimedia
While text is the core of e-books, you can also enhance your content by embedding multimedia elements such as images, videos, and audio clips. This can make your e-book more engaging and visually appealing.
Marketing Your E-book
Once your e-book is published, it’s time to start marketing it to your target audience. Many believe you should start this before it’s been launched, to help build the hype. And if you want pre-sales, then you should definitely. Here are a few tips:
Create a compelling cover and description
Your cover and description are the first things potential readers will see, so make sure it’s eye-catching and accurately represents your content, or has some significance. For example, you may really want to use a certain piece of artwork you think will catch the reader’s eye, but it’s of a house on a hill and the book is about sheepdogs.
Promote your e-book on social media
Share your e-book cover, description, and links to buy or download your e-book on your social media channels. To learn more about using social media as a marketing tool, check out this article.
Engage with other authors and bloggers in your genre
Comment on their blog posts, share their articles, and offer to guest post on their sites.
Submit your e-book to online review sites
This can generate valuable feedback and help attract new readers. Please note, some review sites don’t review just any or all books, and there are fewer of them. Others may be a paid-for service.
Give away copies
Offering your book as a free promotion could be a way around this, be sure to see what each publisher has to offer. For example, Amazon won’t allow you to zero the price unless you enroll in KDP Select, but if you do this, it’s exclusive to them and you can’t sell it anywhere else for about three months.
Final word
As mentioned, each publishing platform offers something different. Don’t feel resigned to any particular one (unless they offer you a traditional publishing deal!). Give your book the best shot you can, and if you mess anything up, you can always fix it and try again.
By following these tips, you can create compelling e-books that appeal to your target audience and increase your chances of success. Good luck, friend.
If you need help writing your book, or with anything else, feel free to get in touch. We’ve written and published e-books using many of the methods and platforms mentioned, and provide a ghostwriting service.