Saturday, May 24, 2014

Publishing an ebook: a steep learning curve (Part 1)

A couple of years ago Francis Pryor wrote an ebook, FlagFen: a Concise Archæoguide, but recently the publisher decided his company was moving on to new projects and so the book became unavailable. As Francis is my brother-in-law I offered to see whether it would be possible for me to make it available again, in my innocence thinking it might be a reasonably straightforward process. I had the original files available, but unfortunately the original copy was a Pages document, and I am Macless.
After pondering on how to convert this into a Word document I realised that Francis should have one. After a short hunt he emailed me his original, but unproof-read copy; I then had the task of bringing this text into line with the previously published ebook. Proof-reading is a thankless task: I had to go through the document twice, and then a third time using the function in Word’s Review menu which will compare two versions of a document, before I was happy with it.
Next I had to find out what format the text had to be: there are specific ways to show chapter breaks and titles, sizes of images and how to insert them and their captions, even how paragraph breaks are handled are important to how the book will display.
Once I had all this under my belt, and as I already have an Amazon seller account I decided to start there. The first thing I found was that it’s necessary to set up a separate KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) account. The second thing I discovered was that to set up a KDP account it’s mandatory to complete an online tax interview with the American Internal Revenue Service.
With a little wider research it transpired that I needed a number called an EIN; this involves filling in Form SS4, which isn’t at all difficult, but for some bizarre reason, if you’re outside the US, it is only possible to do this over the phone to the IRS in Philadelphia.
I duly filled in a copy of the form and rang the number. After an initial little speech I was told I was in a queue of between 30 minutes and an hour, so I hung up. On reflection, I decided that ringing at 0905 EST wasn’t sensible, so the following day I tried again at just after 6am EST (mid-morning here) and the call was answered almost immediately. The call took 18 minutes, longer than one might expect to read off the answers on quite a short form, but having to spell out every word to the operator slowed things down a bit - and then at the end she had to read the whole form back to me, spelling out everything (yes, even U-N-I-T-E-D K-I-N-G-D-O-M). Once I had agreed that this was all correct I was issued with my EIN, the magic number that allows withholding of tax to the IRS under the relevant international treaties. I am still waiting for the letter which will include details of when and what sort of returns I will have to make, but I will worry about that (possibly quite a lot) when it arrives.
So, back to the KDP website to complete form W-8BEN, having looked up the bank account’s IBAN and BIC codes, and submit the form. I think it was once this was complete I was able to upload the Word document to be converted into a Mobi file.
Once that had uploaded and been accepted by Amazon (there was a short wait for that) the next stage was to decide on pricing and royalty levels. We’d decided to keep it the same price as previously. Amazon offer the choice of two royalty levels – 35% or 70%. Why, I thought, would someone choose to only get 35%? I read the ‘Pricing Page’, or as much as I could before my brain glazed over, and set the royalty rate at 70%. I still didn’t understand what benefit there could be in asking Amazon to give you only half as much money as you might get.
The next step was to set pricing for Amazon.com, .co.uk, .in, .fr, .de, .es, .it, .co.jp, .com.br, .ca, .com.mx, and .com.au, to be told when that was done that the American, Indian, Japanese, Brazilian and Mexican royalties are only 35% unless the book is enrolled in KDP Select. So on to look at the page explaining what that is, and where the main benefits of KDP Select became apparent. They seem to be threefold – to be able to offer your book for free, to enable people to borrow the book (for free), and to give KDP exclusive right to publish your book.
Deciding not to do enrol in KDP Select was the last step, I think. It took a little while (about twelve hours, or so) for the book to appear online. So that’s that, and now you can buy a mobi copy of Flag Fen: aConcise Archæoguide for your Kindle. If you want to find it in your own country’s Amazon site you can search for B00K6JD1Z6. It’s available on all of them except  for China.
Next was to investigate which platforms to sell the epub version on, and how. But that’s for Part 2.
This post was originally published on Bagotbooks's blog. You can follow the publisher of the ebook on Twitter.
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