The internet is one of the self-publisher’s richest assets. Not only does it allow you to research printers, designers and literally hundreds of other useful things from your desk, it allows you to establish a potentially international sales outlet online – your own website – or link up with one of the established companies that sell and/or publish online. I for one can’t imagine how self-publishers (or authors for that matter) managed before the internet came into our lives.

CREATING YOUR OWN WEBSITE

Regardless of whether you have access to the internet or are scared witless by your computer, you should create a website for your book. If you aren’t technically minded in this department, pay someone to do it for you. You don’t need a Rolls Royce of a website; a couple of pages will do. Ask your friends and family if anyone can recommend a website designer, or your designer or printer might recommend somebody. If not, look in the Yellow Pages and request (and follow up) references.

Before you speak to a website designer, you need to consider what you want your website to do.

Obviously, the more you want your website to do, the more it will cost you to create. Your website designer will also advise on the type of web-host you require. You will pay an annual charge for the hosting of your website. The price will depend on factors such as the size of your site and how many emails you want attached to it.

Once you have your website you can use it to extend your marketing. Highlight your website on the book’s back cover. Link your site to Amazon and ask your website designer about pay-per-click advertising (see below). Research other websites which might benefit from a link to your own and ask if they will do so -this is especially relevant if you’re publishing a specialist non-fiction book.

UTILISING SEARCH ENGINES

You should automatically submit your new website to all the leading search engines. Registering for Yahoo! and Google is free, others charge. You can have a look at what is required by visiting the websites of the main search engines:

• www.google.co.uk
• http://docs.yahoo.com/info.

There are many other search engines, and I’m not in a position to recommend which are the best. However, by spending some time familiarising yourself with the process, you will hopefully feel confident to make your own decision – or your website designer might make the decision for you.

PAY-PER-CLICK ADVERTISING

This is probably more suited to non-fiction books with an identifiable subject area. Pay-per-click advertising allows you to buy an onscreen advertising space, in which your advert or website link will appear every time somebody searches for the topic you have signed up for. You pay each time somebody clicks on the link and follows it to your site.

For example, if your book is about the history of your village, Booktownleigh, through pay-per-click advertising your website could appear whenever somebody enters ‘Booktownleigh’ in the search engine. Be careful not to sign up to very general terms (such as ‘English history’ in this example), as this could generate lots of clicks through to your site (which you pay for) but not much business. You can set a maximum number of clicks per day that you’re willing and able to pay for.

All the major search engines offer pay-for-click advertising. Other pay-per-click advertising companies, and companies offering analysis of all companies, can be found – ironically – by entering pay-per-click in your search engine.

AMAZON

Amazon remains the most established online retailer. Fortunately for us, Amazon provides self-publishers with an easy means of tapping into their global brand. Although they take a substantial cut of your earnings (normally 60 per cent of retail price), it is worth putting your book on Amazon. It will mean, quite simply, that if somebody searches for your name, your book’s title, or even your book’s broad subject matter, they will have the opportunity of finding your book’s listing. More importantly, they will then have the ability to buy it online.

To have your book listed on Amazon you need to contact them via their website. Consider joining their Advantage Scheme. This costs £23.50 (inc. VAT), and means your books will be listed with 24-hour availability. You can also access sales and inventory reports for your book/s online.

Don’t forget to create a link between your own website and Amazon. (You will earn 10 per cent commission on any sales made via this link.) Amazon graphics can be downloaded to create this link.

www.amazon.co.uk

www.amazon.co.uk/advantage

Tel: 020 8626 9451

ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING

Electronic publishing is another fast growing area of publishing. The progressive development of computer software, internet search engines and improved internet access speeds have expanded the user base into the realms of the ‘general public’ -as opposed to electronic publishing’s initial, more limited user base of academics and hobbyists.

The most commonly referred-to product of electronic publishing is the ‘e-book’ – a book made available on the internet, in the form of an electronic file (usually PDF, although there are some specialist e-book readers available), either for reading only, or reading and downloading (i.e. printing).

Although e-books are a growing market area, several significant obstacles make electronic publishing more complex and difficult than many self-publishers might assume.

Disadvantages of electronic publishing

• Rights management and control. Despite advances in software, it remains difficult to prevent the unwanted copying of electronic publications by people who have the motivation to do so.
• Training, hardware and software. To participate in electronic publishing you need to invest in the necessary training, hardware and software, or pay somebody else to do it for you.
• A lack of industry standardisation means there are competing formats and delivery systems for electronic publications.
• There is no clear industry pricing structure for downloads payment.
• The market place remains vague. Whereas specific institutions such as universities have shown that e-publications are tremendously valuable for a specialised audience, the average author publishing the average book online is entering a market that remains undefined.

Advantages of electronic publishing

• Mass market place. Once available online, your book is accessible to a potential market place far greater than that any printed book could achieve.
• Portability. In electronic form, your e-book can be redirected anywhere.
• Qualities. Your e-book can include qualities not possible in a printed book. For example animation, hyperlinks, word searches, and options for online reader feedback.
• Added value. If you already have an online presence (website), electronic publishing provides an additional opportunity for you to raise your profile and extend your readership.

You will need to think carefully about what you want to achieve from electronic publishing. This will influence whether or not you allow people to download your work, and whether or not you charge them money to do so. The type of electronic publishing you engage in will clearly be restricted by the size and design of your website (and your budget for website design and hosting support).

Using an online e-publishing company

The number of companies available online to help authors venture into electronic publishing continues to grow. These companies vary in the services they offer. Their websites are effectively book-hosting portals from which your book can be purchased online in electronic form.

They exploit different downloading options. Some will use PDF files, others will use the other formats available: Microsoft Reader, or Mobipocket Reader for example. The format used by the website for downloading will dictate which technical platforms will be capable of receiving the download, e.g. mobile phones, PCs, personal digital organiser.

Some online e-publishing companies offer additional services. Many offer a self-publishing print-on-demand option, whereby you can upload your manuscript online. The company will then produce a book in a traditional printed format, which they will sell online for you.

With the pace of technological change the boundaries have blurred between what is an online bookshop(offering books in an electronic format) and what is an online publisher. Some online epublishing sites request a substantial upfront fee: are they the old-fashioned vanity publisher in a new guise?

Before you invest considerable time and money on creating an electronic version of your book, consider this:

• Who will read it?
• Who will buy it?
• Will these people (your perceived customer base) really be bothered to:
  • a)find a website with the electronic version of your book on it;
  • b)sit and read it on screen;
  • c)print it off on their possible old and/or slow printer;
  • d)pay money to print it off?
• Would you be bothered to do any of these things, and how badly would you want to read a specific book before you would be bothered?

Electronic rights

Be aware that some companies will request the electronic publishing rights for your book. Others do not. If you decide (after careful consideration) that you’re happy to relinquish the electronic rights for your book, give over only the English electronic rights and retain all other rights.

Research the different royalties offered by those companies that request electronic publishing rights. How often are royalties paid, and on what terms? If you’re granting the right for a third party to make your book available online or downloadable, in full, to purchasers, you may be asked to grant an exclusive licence. Request a time limit to this licence, of two or three years.

General advice appears to be that authors should enter the electronic publishing arena via their own website, if they can, and retain their electronic rights.

Other points to note about using a third party:

• Ask for a list of their titles and authors. Is it a miscellaneous list, or does the site specialise in any way?
• What market research do they have about visitors to their site?
• How do they make their money? (Author commission? Website advertising?)
• In what format do you have to submit your work? Do you have the appropriate software to do this?
• How long have they been in business? (And if you’re interested, ask them to email you their long-term business plan.)
• Do they have a quality-vetting policy? Can anybody place ‘any old novel’ on the website, regardless of editorial style or content matter? What is their policy regarding written pornographic content?
• Do they provide editing and design services?
• What safeguards to they take against hacking/plagiarism?
• Do they provide an online contract, and terms and conditions of entering such a contract?

Website references

The following sites are a variety of online self-publishers, writers’ co-operatives, and other useful sites. Their inclusion should not be read, where relevant, as a recommendation that they provide the best service in their field. They have been selected because they represent a cross-section of the many hundreds of websites available. Just use your search engine and you will be presented with an endless list that you can visit and research at your leisure.

www.writersworld.co.uk

www.books-4u-online.com

www.lulu.com

www.authorsonline.co.uk

www.author.co.uk

www.unlimitedpublishing.com

www.onlineoriginals.co.uk

www.netlibrary.com

LULU – A TRIAL OF AN ONLINE PUBLISHER

As I knew no one who had used any online publishers, and hence had no opinions to offer, I decided to give one a try for the purposes of researching this book. I chose Lulu (www.lulu.com).

Lulu, an American company, is said to be positioning itself to be ‘the eBay of publishing’. It offers authors the opportunity to upload their manuscripts, edit them on screen, and have them printed either electronically or as a conventional book. Authors are offered 80 per cent of the profit made from website sales of their book.

Although Lulu remains a relatively unknown brand, revenues are growing 10 per cent per month. They have published over 23,000 books to date, and are looking to establish a UK based print centre.

The only completed manuscript on my bookshelf was a woman’s novel I’ve referred to earlier – The Bored Wife’s Manual. As I was still deciding whether to self-publish it or not, I figured that creating one copy on Lulu wouldn’t hinder my decision either way. I ended up ordering nine copies of my novel on Lulu (I bought all nine of them myself). It cost me US$90.90 and took about a day of my time. Because my order was between $25-$100, I qualified for their free shipping. My books were dispatched via standard international post.

Note that if you print 30 copies you receive a 4 per cent discount on the unit price. There is a sliding scale of discounts thereafter. For example, for 100 copies the discount is 18 per cent.

I invested a couple of days proofreading my own manuscript and preparing a Microsoft file, using a template I downloaded from the Lulu website. I then uploaded my Microsoft document, Lulu converted it to a PDF, and, once I had checked it online, off it went to printing!

I uploaded my own cover (because I had the ‘work in progress’ I included in the examples of front cover designs in Chapter 5), but you can also personalise one of the template covers Lulu offers in its cover design gallery. I had a few technical hiccups (of my making), but managed to sort them out (which says much of their online help systems because I am never very savvy about any form of computer related ‘glitch’).

I would certainly use Lulu again for small projects. (I’m thinking already of doing a book for my children for Christmas!) I would also use Lulu if I wanted to offer a book to the American market free of risk.

THE INTERNET AND THE FUTURE

There will continue to be grumblings about the impact the internet will have on the publishing industry in the long term. Will e-publishing ever catch on to the extent that it threatens traditional book sales? Will Amazon continue to grow and threaten traditional bookshops? (Not for a while. At the moment, despite its fantastic service and convenience, it has only a 6-10 per cent share of book sales in the UK.)

New advancements will continually present new challenges to decision makers in the industry. In 2005, for example, Google announced plans to include the digitised texts of books (millions of them!) on its searchable databases. It is too soon to tell whether the big publishing houses will join the scheme – for fear of being left out – or refuse to participate through fear of what such a facility will do to traditional book sales.

In the short term however I believe the small self-publisher has little to be afraid of. Embrace the internet and utilise the many opportunities it offers you.