Self-published ebooks are an ideal format for niche ideas and a good way to make money online. Secrets of mind reading and make-up techniques of the stars are ideal topics. Arcane expertise could net you a profit, too.
Perhaps you rebuilt an old car from scratch. There are probably a few hundred other people who'd tackle the same project with your guidance.
Self-publishing with ebooks is easier than ever – especially with iTunes and Kindle publication now real options. You don't even have to create a special format for Kindle books.
The Kindle Direct Publishing program accepts digital manuscripts in plain text, HTML or Microsoft Word DOC formats. That's the older Word format, by the way, not DOCX.
You can use PDF, but Amazon book publishers have reported problems with formatting.
There's a form to fill in, enabling you to categorise the book, add an ISBN and add Digital Rights Management.
Authors report that making changes to the submission after the fact is laborious, so make sure every detail is correct and your text has been proofread. Next you set a price and keep 70 per cent of the mark-up from every sale.
Formatting books for Apple iBooks – the free book store app for the iPad – is more involved. You need to output to the ePub protocol, supported in Apple's Pages application, Adobe InDesign.
Alternatively, you can convert to ePub using the open source tool Calibre. From there, the submission system is similar to KDP.
One final service that is more than worth a mention is Smashwords. It makes the process of publishing to multiple formats and outlets easier – and it accepts digital manuscripts in DOC format.
With one submission to Smashwords, you can have that all-important ISBN number sorted out and publish your book to the Nook and Sony's eReader store, as well as the Smashwords site. It even publishes to Apple iBooks.
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