authors

Comments and feedback on my post on bookshelf plugins for WordPress taught me that many authors still build a critical part of their website, the pages for each of their books, by hand. I like using said plugins because they make it easy, but I have built a few book pages by hand for a site hosted on Squarespace.

Building a book page freehand takes more work, but it also gives you more opportunity to tweak a design so it fits with a particular author’s style or with the book.

Here’s the checklist I put together to make sure I don’t miss important details. Do let me know in the comments if I left something off.

1. Cover Image – Do you have a large cover image ( > 1500 pixels tall)? You will probably end up using a smaller cover image (300 to 500 px tall), but you will need the larger image so that you can set it as the featured image (if the option is available). And you’ll want to keep a copy of the larger image just to give yourself options.
2. Description – Usually around 200 to 400 words, this is what tempts readers into reading reviews, checking the price, and maybe adding a book to their TBR pile. It would be best to use original content, but in a pinch you could reuse the description from the book’s listing on Amazon and other retail sites.
3. Metadata – This is one area where using a bookshelf plugin helps a lot. Most plugins will give you a form to fill out, making it easy to remember all the details, but if you’re building a book listing by hand then you’ll need to remember to list all of the relevant metadata, including the title, author name, genre publication date, page count, etc.
   These details might not seem important, but the page count, for example, tells readers whether to expect a short story of fantasy epic, and details like the title are important to anyone using a screen reader.
4. Excerpt – This is the 1,000 to 3,000 snippet of the book that will give readers a taste of the writing style without giving away too much of the story. It can be hard to embed such a large body of text on the same page as the rest of the book listing, which is why the excerpt is either on a separate page or at the foot of a page. One might also choose to use Amazon’s preview feature for the snippet. This works as an embeddable widget that can expand to cover the entire screen, and includes links to the Kindle Store.
5. Audiobook excerpt – If you have an audiobook, you can upload a snippet to SoundCloud and embed that snippet on the book listing.
6. Reviews – If the description and excerpt haven’t sold a potential reader on your book, reviews might. Carefully read your reviews – even the negative reviews – and copy the best parts as quotes. List those quotes on your book’s page, and link back to the reviews – and yes, this includes the negative reviews (maybe). One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and the reasons I hate a book might be inspire someone else to buy it.
7. GoodReads – It is always a good idea to link to GoodReads, as it is the single largest source of reviews.
8. Buy Buttons – The whole purpose of this page is to get someone to buy the book, so of course you need to include link to sites where the ebook, audiobook, and print book can be bought.

image by Ole Husby

Author websites come in many shapes and forms, and can be found on just about every platform from Squarespace to WordPress, but the vast majority share at least one common feature.

Generally speaking, they all need to display the books an author has written, or is working on.

Authors with a site on Squarespace, WordPress.com, etc, will have to build a book listing page by hand, but this is one area where self-hosted WordPress websites excel.

Edit: If you’re building a book page by hand, here’s a checklist of what you should include.

Authors with a self-hosted WordPress site have any number of options for listing their books on their sites. They can either use a theme like Preface, and use its built-in features to create book pages and book shelves, or they can use one of the following plugins.

(If you would like to use a theme with a built-in bookshelf, you can find several on ThemeForest.)

I recently undertook a survey of bookshelf plugins so I could recommend one to a client. There aren’t a lot of options, but I did find a couple great plugins.

Tl;DR

My top two choices are Novelist, because it’s free and I really like it, and MyBookTable, because its users can’t stop themselves from recommending it.

When I look at bookshelf plugins I try to keep three requirements in mind:

• The plugin has to look good on my site, and include both bookshelf pages and book pages
• It has to be easy to use.
• It needs to have widgets that I can use on to automatically display book covers and blurbs the front page of my site, and other pages.

The last feature might not sound important, but I have found that I want to build front pages that promote the latest book, or perhaps a series. I think it’s an attractive design element, and a lot of authors like – with good reason. It helps them promote their work.

Here are 7 WordPress plugins that authors can use to list their books on their sites, and some comments on my experiences with the plugins.

WordPress Book List

• Free version demo
• Pro version demos
• Developer website

No one is using this plugin, which is shocking because it is my first choice. This is one of the two plugins you should install first and test before trying anything else. The free version looks good, and the paid version gives you extra layout options and several useful features, all for $22.

It does not have the widgets, but I like the rest of the plugin enough that I sometimes build the widget manually.

Edit: I just built a bookshelf with a half-dozen books and suddenly I like this plugin a whole lot less. I was going to st up a demo but it was honestly so frustrating that I don’t want to spend more time getting it right.

Novelist

• Demo
• Developer website

This is the second of my preferred plugins. The free version is great; it lets you reorganize the book listing layout to your own design, and it even includes many of the features other plugins would ask you to pay for.

As you can see in the demo, a book listing takes up a lot of space on the page. This plugin begs for a theme with a lot of whitespace, so it’s not going to work for everyone.

MyBookTable

• Store demo
• Developer website

This is one of the less commonly used plugins, but I know of several authors who use it, and I must admit that it looks great on their sites. I have not used it much, though, because I found that the free version is missing too many features. For example, the Amazon and B&N buy buttons are only available with the $49 Pro version.

I’m sure the Pro version is great, but I have yet to see a reason to invest in it. The thing is, competing free plugins have the features I want so I use them instead.

Genesis Author Pro

• Developer website

StudioPress is one of the more well-known premium WordPress theme developers. I think their themes are over-engineered Rube Goldberg machines, but I won’t dispute that they are very popular and also reliable.

They make an author theme called Author Pro., and they also make a matching free plugin called Genesis Author Pro. This plugin can be used with StudioPress’s other WP themes to add book listings and bookshelf pages.

If you have a StudioPress theme then you should try this plugin first – it works, and looks professional. If your theme was made elsewhere then don’t bother; this plugin was made to only work with StudioPress themes.

MooBerry Book Manager

• Demo
• Developer website

This is a highly rated but not a widely used plugin. I liked it. I thought it was easy to figure out, and that its book pages looked good. It included both custom bookshelves/collections and let you display book covers with a widget (the widget wasn’t really worth using, though).

Alas, I had to stop using it once I realized that it was causing conflicts on a couple different sites I was building.

GS Books Showcase Lite

• Pro version demo
• Developer website

This is another one of those plugins where the pro version looks great but the free version is so limited that I didn’t use it long enough to decide if I wanted to invest in a license.

I did check, and apparently the developer is no longer selling the pro license. (The developer’s own website is broken, which is a good argument against paying them for a license.)

Book Showcase

This plugin doesn’t do anything useful and has limited features. Don’t even bother trying it. (Reviews should ideally be longer than this, but let’s not waste any time.)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an author in possession of a book must be in want of a website. They need a home on the web to call their own, one safe from the fickle whims of Facebook’s algorithms.

That home will need a name – but what to call it?

Like the Chinese word for crisis which is erroneously described as consisting of the words “danger” and “opportunity”, choosing the domain for an author website comes with both great risks and high potential rewards. It is a way for authors to brand themselves online.

So what are your options?

Some authors choose to go with the perfunctory choice, but others choose a domain of a more personal nature, or a whimsical one.

The Mundane

Well, you could go for the obvious and staid choice such as the author’s name, book series, character name, or book title. Those options usually work well – the author name is a great default that brings all (most) of an author’s work together on a single site (but it might exclude pen names), while naming the site after the book series or main character might add a small boost to SEO.

Edit: Some will insist this is the only way to go because if the author’s name isn’t in the domain then it won’t be found in search results. This is simply not true; the right SEO will make sure that a search on an author’s name will lead to their site.

I named my blog The Digital Reader because it referenced the topic I wanted to cover: digital reading, in its many forms. It is a decent choice, but it is not without its problems. For a number of years people kept confusing me with a competitor who has a similar first name and blog name. (If I had realized that would be an issue, I’d have chosen a different name.) Also, I never did get the domain I wanted – I had to go with the-digital-reader.com because domain squatters were demanding exorbitant fees for the domains DigitalReader.com and TheDigitalReader.com.

One of the domains would have cost me eight grand, and the other is listed at $39,000. (In fact, I just got an email asking me if I were interested in the domain, hence this post).

I feel paying $39,000 for the domain would be a huge waste of money, which is why I have never gotten those domains. A lot of web people agree with me, but if your favorite domain has already been registered, and you can get it for a fair price, you might want to spend the money.

The Topical

If you don’t want an obvious title, you could go for a more topical title. Rather than use a domain that explicitly references an author’s work, the author might choose a domain that is in some oblique way connected to the work.

For example, when I considered launching a site that reviewed the Chinese takeout places in my area, a friend recommended that I use the name TheOysterPail.com. This domain references a little known fact that the little white boxes that Chinese food comes in were originally created to hold shucked oysters, and were called Oyster Pails.

I ended up using the domain for my humor blog after I was told that NO, I could not buy and review that much Chinese food.

Speaking of that humor blog, did you hear about McDonald’s buying the domain EIE.io?

Another way to come up with a topical title is to use the “And Method”. This is a trick for coming up with unique names where you combine two otherwise unrelated words, and in this situation an author might choose two words that hint at their work.

Swords & Sorcery, to name one obvious example, suggests a D&D-style fantasy, while Coffee and Corpses hints at police procedural, or detective stories. And then there is Death and Texas, which is both clever word play and possibly a topical reference to for author whose mystery novels are set in Texas.

The Whimsical

But you don’t have to go for the topical or staid choice; you might instead go for the whimsical or the personal.

When it comes to the personal, you might use your online handle as your domain name – a suggestion I have made to a number of Twitter users. The benefit here is that you get to build your author identity on top of your established online identity, giving readers a feel for the person behind the name.

Edit: Chris Meadows mentioned in the comments that Googlewhacking might be useful here. This was a game where you try to find a pair of words that gets only one a single Google hit. if you can find that pair of words, it would make for a unique domain name.

Edit: Over at The Passive Voice, PG writes that he has found a site called Nameboy helpful for locating good domain names.

On Nameboy, you type in a primary word and, optionally, a secondary word. Thereafter Nameboy generates all sorts of possible domain names based on those words. It lists them in a table that shows you which of its generated site titles are available as domain names and which are not.

Or, you might choose a name that references the work of your favorite author – for example, borogroves hints at Lewis Carroll – or you could come up with a whimsical name by combining random elements. For example, 3 Pugs and an Octopus is both unique and funny enough that it begs for people to ask about the story behind the name.

Any name that inspires questions is a great name because it is a conversation starter, and I can confirm that from personal experience.

I can’t tell you how many times I have been asked about the name Valiant Chicken, my WordPress business. As I explained in a blog post last year, I thought up the name while inventing new variations on the porn star name game.

I tell people that their first tech company should be named after their middle school name and their last meal, and that their Batman villain name is their profession plus the color of their socks, and use that spiel to establish a memorable first impression as a creative professional.

Edit: It took me three years to figure it out, but that was actually terrible advice. I should have listened to the people who told me to change the name.

I have been told that I should get rid of the Valiant Chicken name because it has no connection to WordPress services. Authors will receive similar advice that they should choose a domain that brands them as an author, and that advice is just as bad for authors as it was for me.

The sky is literally the limit.

No two author websites look the same, but they all share a few common characteristics. Generally, author websites have to fill four needs. An author site needs to tell visitors:

• what an author has written,
• who the author is,
• how to contact the author, and
• what the author is writing next.

Before you launch your author site, here’s a quick checklist to make sure you have all the parts you need.

1. Author bio – Have you posted a bio on your site, and does it include a photo? Readers want to know more about you, which is why you should post a bio on your site. You should include a photo as well as details about how you got into writing, what you do for fun, and other personal info.
2. Books – People can’t become your fans if they don’t know about your books, and if you don’t list your books on your site they will never find out That’s why you should create a listing page for each of your books, and while you’re at it  a directory page and series summary.
3. Mailing list – Your fans will want to hear from you when your next book is out, so you should give them the chance to sign up for your mailing list. Don’t forget to offer a freebie to anyone who signs up.
4. Contact page – People need to be able to reach you so organizers can invite you to events, fans tell you they love your books,  and bloggers can ask about ARCs. That’s why you should have a contact page with a contact form and your email address.
5. Social media – Have you added links to all your social media accounts? (It’s okay if you don’t have any, but you should link to the ones you do have.)
6. Events – Have you added a calendar or some other way for fans to know when and where they can meet you?
7. Home page – Your home page is the first thing new visitors will see, and you never get a second chance to make a first impression. That’s why your home page should tell visitors who you are, and include either a call to action or the cover of your most recent book (or both).

You don’t need to check off all the items on this list, although it would be a good idea to include all the details you think will be useful or important to your site’s visitors.

image by Amy Guth

Content curation (or as I prefer to call it, "link posts") is a great way for authors to help both their readers and other writers by one, pointing readers articles worth reading, and two, giving other writers public kudos by including their work in a post.

But if you’ve never created a link post before, it can be difficult to tell where to begin. I can help with that.

This post boils down my experience with curating link posts and lays out a practical step-by-step guide that you can use to both develop your link post and to set up the procedures you will need to consistently publish your link post on a regular schedule.

Link Posts on My Blog

I have been curating a daily link post on and off since since 2010, and in that time I have also published other bloggers' weekly and monthly link posts. Currently I am publishing my own Morning Coffee link post as well as Paul Biba’s weekly link roundup (from his Twitter feed). Both are posted on The Digital Reader. I also curate the weekly ebook link post for MediaShift, and am in the process of developing a link post for the EPUBSecrets blog.

I’ve been doing this so long that I have developed hard and fast rules on what should and should not be included. Here are my guidelines for curating a link post.

1. Read everything you include in the link post. You don’t want to link to a piece which is nothing more than a snippet with link, or is itself a link post. You should also avoid posts where the blogger got their facts wrong, or where the blogger wandered off-topic (unless the diversion is entertaining).
2. Do not include your own work – unless you are directly responding or rebutting to one of the other links. Remember, the value of content curation is in helping readers find new content, not your own.
3. Set a schedule, and keep to it. If you can only commit to once a month or every other week, that’s fine.
4. Keep it short. No one wants to read a link post with 30 links; readers' eyes will glaze over by the tenth link, or they will be interrupted, or they’ll simply be overwhelmed. Try to aim for links to six to ten stories.

I will be honest with you – I break these rules all the time. But I do try to follow them (especially the first two) because I have found, as a reader, link posts that consistently ignore the first two rules have little value to me as a reader.

Keep these rules in mind as you develop your link post and readers will appreciate your curation efforts more.

Readers will also appreciate your work more if you put time into developing your own procedures before publishing the first link post, and I can help you with that. Over the past 8 years I have developed a number of guidelines or best practices and I have refined my techniques to the point that I can get a link post done in under half an hour (longer if I stop to read everything before rather than after completing the link post).

I have boiled down setting up a link post (or newsletter) to five key components.

• Sources
• Topic
• Timing
• Format
• Graphics

Sources

The first thing we have to do is shoot all the lawyers – er, find stories to link to. Here are some of the tools I use to find stories.They are all free, too.

• Twitter – Facebook is where people go to hang out, but Twitter is where you will find the news junkies. We not only tweet links that you can find through twitter search, but we also collate lists of sources. I myself have created four lists of Twitter users who share a lot of links, and I follow a half-dozen lists made by others.
• Google News , Bing News – Just put in your favorite keywords, and these two niche search engines will give you an endless, constantly updated stream of news stories. Based on different algorithms, Google News and Bing News will give you different results, but they do share one deficiency – they’re biased towards a strict definition of "news", which means they will miss a lot of the more interesting blog posts and other commentary.
• Feedly – Here’s an old-school solution for you. Way back in the time before people shared lots of links on Twitter (about six years ago) news junkies used to have to subscribe to news sites and blogs, and then periodically check to see if those sites had published new articles. We used services like Feedly to stay on top of all those subscriptions.
• Google Alerts – do you know what’s even better than looking for news? Having it come to you automatically. Google Alerts lets you follow search results for just about any search term. Whenever a new result is found by Google’s bots, you’ll get an email with the news.

Topic

It’s hard to say how you should pick a topic, but I do have a few ideas.

An author might find that their readers are interested in topics related to the author’s work. Fantasy readers might like links to articles about armor and archaic weapons, or historical trivia. SF readers might want to read about the latest theories in faster than light travel, or other new technologies.

What catches your attention? What do you think your readers will be interested in?

And is anyone else focusing on that topic for their newsletter or link post? (You don’t want to copy someone else’s idea and come out looking second rate – or worse, a plagiarist.)

Timing

Do you want to publish your link post once a week, everyday, or once a month?

The answer to that question really depends on how much time you can devote to this project, and how many linkworthy stories you can find. But what matters more than how frequently you publish is that you set a schedule, and pick the optimum time. MailChimp and other newsletter services will tell you that timing matters. Publish a post when everyone is busy and readers are more likely to simply skip it and get back to what they are doing.

They are correct, but alas, I can’t answer this one for you; the optimal time will depend on your readers. (Although, if you do decide to publish the link post a newsletter, MailChimp can recommend a publication time.)

Format

Before you publish your first set of links you will need to make three decisions about the formatting. Obviously you will need a title, and you will also need to write a one- or two-sentence intro for your link post.

But the big question here is how you want to organize the links.

Do you simply want to share a list of links, or do you want to include an excerpt from each story? Or do you want to instead write a one- or two-sentence description for each piece you link to?

There’s no single best option. I like to use article titles, but Joel Friedlander and many other bloggers use excerpts. Both work, but speaking as a reader I have also found that I am most likely to click a link in a link post if the curator wrote that one-sentence summary.

As the curator, the decision is up to you.

Graphics

It is always a good idea to include an image related to your topic or to one or more of the linked articles. It’s not just that it makes your link post look better but also that the right image will help your post get more attention when people share your post on Twitter or Facebook.

I make a point of using a photo of a coffee cup with my Morning Coffee posts because of how it ties into the title, but I also sometimes find an image that I want to share as one of the links (this drawing of owls on coffee, for example).

Another option would be to use the same image for every link post. I got this idea from MediaShift, where they have specific images for each of their daily link posts and for their once-a-week link posts.

Their images include the title of the link post on a background that conveys the topic. Here’s one example:

You can find an image on Flickr or a free image site (just make sure you comply with the license), and then you can go to Fiverr to find an artist to add text to the image.

I paid ten dollars to get text added to this photo:

In the interest of self-flagellation, I think the font choice could be better, but all in all that image works.

O O O

So there you have it; a practical step-by-step guide you can use to take your link post from idea to reality.

Link posts have been one of the more popular features on my blog over the years, and when done right they can generate a lot of traffic, help other bloggers gain recognition, and help readers stay up to date with the most important stories.

If you add them to your blogging routine I am sure your readers will like them as much as mine do.

image by ThoroughlyReviewed via Flickr

Gmail is possibly the most widely used email service, but are you getting the most out of it?

The following 12 Gmail hacks will help you take control of your inbox and go from being a Gmail user to a Gmail expert.  Read on to save time, avoid mistakes, and add a dash of style to your inbox.

Unread Message Icon

Do you check your inbox every five minutes just because someone might have sent you an urgent email that requires your immediate attention?

Well, now you can relax and let Gmail do the work by enabling the Unread Message Icon feature in Gmail Labs.

Look in the Labs tab of the Settings menu and you will find an option called "Unread message icon". When enabled, this feature adds a number in Gmail’s browser tab which tells you how many emails you need to read.

This trick doesn’t work so well for those of us with thousands of unread emails, but if you regularly achieve inbox zero then this could be just what you need.

Use smarter searches

Everyone knows that you can use the Gmail search bar to look for emails to and from specific names (To: and From:) or under specific labels (label:) but did you know you can also exclude labels, senders, and recipients?

It’s true!

If you want to exclude a sender from a search in Gmail simple add a dash "-" before the From tag. For example, "-from:authorearnings@gmail.com " will exclude any search results.

The same trick works for the To tag and the label tag.

Don’t fall for phishing emails

Scammers are getting pretty good at sending emails which you can’t tell from the real thing. This is why everyone warns you to not click a link in an email but instead visit a company' website.

Luckily, Gmail has an experimental feature which can help you separate phish from fowl. Look in the Labs tab of the Settings menu and you will find an option called "Authentication icon for verified senders".

When enabled, this feature checks the sender’s email address and adds a key symbol whenever it can confirm that the email is legit.

Use Gmail offline

The Gmail website is a great way to get work done while you’re online, but did you know that you can also use it offline (just like you do the apps)?

Google has released a Chrome extension which lets you keep on writing drafts, deleting emails, and so on, even though you have no connection to the internet. You can find the extension in the Chrome Web Store.

Themes

The Gmail website can get awfully boring to look at if you use it day after day for years on end. Google doesn’t change the interface very often, but you can.

One of the options under the Gear menu in the upper right corner is the Themes menu. You can change the background to any one of dozens of images or colors.

This feature is particularly useful if you maintain multiple Gmail accounts. You can give each one a different theme and save yourself from sending a personal email from the work account.

Use Tasks to add emails to your to-do lists

When you get an email that requires action on your part, and you can’t get to it right away, look at the menu bar above your emails. If you’re in the reading view, you’ll see a button marked “More”. Click that button and select the Add to Tasks option. This adds the email to a little to-do list.

Dropbox for Gmail

Do you like using Gmail and want to pair it with Dropbox rather than Google Drive?

Dropbox for Gmail is a Chrome extension that adds a Dropbox button to Gmail’s Compose window. This button makes it easy to share Dropbox links in an email, and it allows you to bypass the process of attempting to email large files — and saves valuable space in your inbox.

Yes, Gmail solves this problem by uploading large attachments to Google Drive, but if you already have all your docs in Dropbox then why not simply share a link?

Dropbox has more info.

Mute Conversations

Have you ever found yourself subscribed to a mailing list, and the current topic has nothing to do with you?

If you don’t want to unsubscribe and you don’t want to have to keep deleting the unwanted emails, you can easily stop the friendly spam with the Gmail mute function. Simply select the conversation, open the More dropdown menu, and select the mute option.

The conversation will stay muted until you un-mute it; it will also un-mute itself if your address appears in the To or CC box in the message header.

Use smarter filters

Filters are one of the easiest ways to automatically triage your inbox so you can focus on the important emails and let the cat photos wait. But did you know that you can add keywords to your email address and then use filters to sort the matching emails?

One of the cooler tricks with Gmail is that you can add a plus sign to your existing email address and Gmail will ignore anything after it. For example, my Gmail account is natehoffelder@gmail.com, but if you send an email to natehoffelder+amazon@gmail.com it will arrive in my inbox just as quickly.

I use this trick to sort emails from services like Paypal and Amazon. I have to first sign up with the modified email, but after that any emails they send me will be caught by the appropriate folder and labeled for my review.

Save space by deleting  only the largest emails

If you use Gmail long enough and are in the habit of saving everything (even the emails with large attachments) then chances are you might be running out of space.

You could solve this problem by deleting old emails, but there is a better solution. FindBigMail is a web app that will scan your gmail account and identify the email conversations that take up the most space.

It will tell you the twenty largest emails and which email are over 10MB or 5MB in size, and send you a simple report.

Stop senders from tracking you

It’s a fact of life that mailing lists and many other senders of emails will track whether recipients open the emails they get. (This is even an automated feature in Mailchimp and other email blast services.)

I don’t know about you, but I want to keep at least a small fragment of privacy. That’s why I use a couple browser extensions to block senders from tracking my activity.

• Ugly Email
• Pixel Block

image by stephenrwalli

Amazon may be quietly locking out its competition with ebook creation apps like the newly released Kindle Creator, but not all ebook creation apps tie you down to a single distribution channel.

Even iBooks Author can make and export Epub3 files now, and that’s not the only app authors can use to make ebooks.

Here’s a double handful of apps and online services which can make ebooks (let me know if I missed one you like).

First, here’s the free app I use:

Sigil

Sigil is not the best app on this list but when it comes to free alternatives there is simply no comparison.

I found it easy to learn with an intuitive interface that did everything I wanted, and I am still waiting for a good reason to switch to another app like:

Jutoh

Jutoh is an ebook creation tool for all platforms (including the Raspberry Pi). It can make ebooks in all the popular formats and, aloing with Scrivener, comes highly recommended (although there is a vim/emacs divide in the author community over which is better).

WordToEpub

This is a Windows app from The Daisy Consortium. If you have MS Word you can use it to make an Epub3 ebook. (I do not have word, so I can’t tell you how well it works.)

Vellum

Vellum is a macOS-only app which costs so much that I can’t come up with a good reason to buy it.

It is a rather expensive app and costs either $200 for an unlimited license or $10 to $30 for each title. That is rather pricey when compared to the free apps much less the paid alternatives like:

Scrivener

Scrivener is the one paid app everyone recommends – including those who don’t use it.

It is a complex and feature-rich app which is designed to cover all the steps in the process of creating a book rather than just the act of making an ebook. It has always been way more than what I required, but many authors swear by it.

Calibre

Calibre is known as the best ebook library tool, free or paid, but it can also make ebooks in just about any format you can name. You can even use it to edit ebooks, although you shouldn’t distribute them to other professionals.

While I use calibre to convert ebooks and manage my library, I also know that it is widely hated by many in the digital publishing industry. Calibre makes ebooks which look okay, but the code is absolutely atrocious (Calibre-made ebooks have even been banned by Amazon once or twice).

Caveat Emptor.

Calligra

Calligra is the office suite which used to be known as KOffice way back when. It was originally developed for Linux systems and has since been ported to Windows, macOS, freeBSD.

Calligra has included an ebook export option since 2012, although I am not sure very many people are using it.

eBookBurn

eBookBurn is a paid web service I have been meaning to try. It costs $19 to export an ebook in Epub and Kindle formats, but you can set up as many ebooks – or parts of an ebook – as you like.

Pressbooks

Do you know how they say that a third of the web runs on WordPress?

That includes Pressbooks. This paid service lets you upload (or type) parts of a book, edit them, and then export an ebook in Epub, PDF, or Kindle format.

Everything except for the last step is free, and you can even set your preferred formatting as CSS. what’s more, WP is designed to publish to the web, and Pressbooks takes advantage of this. You like you can upload a book and then show it off and get feedback.

O O O

When I published a list of eight apps and services you could use to make an ebook about a week back, a bunch of readers responded with suggestions for other apps they either liked to use or had developed.

I think more info is usually better, so here are six more apps and services you can use to make an ebook.

Atlantis

In this day and age almost everyone has to use MS Office, Google Docs, or Libri Office in order to stay compatible with their colleagues, so you would think that the lesser known word processing apps would simply wither away and die.

Atlantis would suggest that is a faulty conclusion. This app doesn’t get much attention but it is still popular with some authors.

Draft2Digital

This company is known for being one of the best ebook distributors, but you can also use their service to produce an Epub from your source Word file. This is strictly intended as a proof copy, but there’s nothing stopping you from using it like any other ebook.

PublishDrive

eBook distributor PublishDrive launched their ebook conversion tool in early 2019.

Papyrus

This online editor can help you make an ebook from scratch, or you can use it to assemble an ebook from blog posts and web pages.

I found Papyrus really useful when I tried it two years ago, but it won’t work for me today. For some unknown reason it is kicking me out of the ebook project I started two years ago.

Oh, well, maybe I will try this next service instead.

Bookbinder

Edit: This service no longer makes ebooks.

This online service costs $19 per title and is entirely new to me.

It offers both a simple conversion as well as an online editor you can use to format an ebook.

Libre Office

This open source office suite gained the ability to export Epubs with its 6.0 release. It could already make PDFs.

Viewporter

Viewporter is a relatively new app that makes Epub3 ebooks. I don’t know anyone who has used it, so all first-hand user reports would be appreciated.

Kotobee Author

Kotobee Author is an ebook creator and Epub editor, allowing you to add interactive content that can be opened  in any compliant Epub 3 reader. Convert your PDF to EPUB, customize the look and feel of your ebook apps, and emulate the result on different platforms and devices. It can also make web apps, and is available for Windows and macOS.

WordPerfect

In just a few clicks, save WordPerfect documents in the popular Epub ebook format for easy publishing to popular devices. Improved file format compatibility enables users to save WordPerfect files in OpenDocument Text (ODT) format, while updates to PDF functionality give control over the resolution of linked and embedded content.

If you’ve been reading the ebook news lately then I’m sure you know all about the reaction by Kobo, Amazon, and B&N when "news" broke that they were selling adult content. They removed hundreds of questionable titles as well as ebooks that did not violate any rules or laws, with Kobo even going so far as to temporarily gut their self-pub section.

No matter whether you think their response was justified or not, the events of the past few days remind us that authors can’t rely on the major ebookstores to be there forever. It’s past time that they set up a fallback position with an independent ebookstore.

They have quite a few to choose from, including Indiro, reKiosk, Gumroad, and so many others that I can’t name them all.

Rather than list all the possible options I thought it better to list a few of the things I think authors should look for. I am not an author but I have bought stuff online and I have sold stuff online. I know what I look for, and I know what features I wish the major ebookstores would offer.

Reputation

I feel that a ebookstore’s reputation is more important than payment processing, website integration, or almost any other feature. If an author uses a service with a bad reputation then they could lose customers.

For example, if there were an ebookstore with the reputation of Ebay then I would avoid it. I despise Ebay, and I only use it because it doesn’t really have any competition. Authors aren’t so lucky and they can’t afford to drive away readers.

Author Website Integration

An indie author isn’t going to be able to rely on their author page on Amazon.com to drive sales, and that means that they will need to make it easy to for a visitor to their website to buy the ebooks. Ideally this would mean that the ebookstore would offer a widget of some kind that could be integrated into an author’s website, but that is just one option.

Payment Options

Obviously an author needs to make it easy for customers to buy, and that means making sure that the payment options match up with whatever the customer is used to using.

Authors also need to make sure that they will be paid in a timely fashion and in a way that doesn’t raise their costs too much. Remember, it wasn’t too long ago that Amazon paid international KDP authors via a paper check which was snail-mailed from the US. That incredibly inconvenient delay is a marked contrast to Smashwords, which pays via Paypal.

Royalties

Most ebookstores will tell you up front the percentage of each sale which they pay, and it varies between the various services. Smashwords is one of the higher paying ebookstores/distributors, and Gumroad pays even more. Of course this last service does nothing more than payment processing and delivering the file, so it’s not for everyone.

DRM

This is a hot-button topic with strong feelings on both sides. I have long been in the DRM-free camp, but I’m not going to use this post to convince you to agree with me. Instead I will point out a couple useful details.

• If an author chooses to require DRM then they’ll have to make sure that readers can use the DRMed ebook. This will generally restrict the author to ebookstores that offer Adobe DE DRM (there are exceptions).
• Also, choosing to use DRM will cost the author money in terms of fees paid to Adobe. The author will probably earn less on average from each sale.

Website Design

Before an author sells ebooks on a site they should first try to buy an ebook. Does the search work correctly? Do the pages load quickly and is it easy to figure out your way around? Does the cover and description lok good? And finally, can the author easily change the price for a sale?

If the ebookstore’s website doesn’t function well then it could discourage customers. And since there are a lot of competing services there is little reason to choose one which is subpar.

On the other hand this particular point is also something of a trick question. For example, Gumroad doesn’t offer any sales site at all. It just offers payment processing, content delivery, and a higher royalty rate than some of their competition.

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There are probably a dozen or more different issues which affect this topic. I don’t think i will be able to think of them all, so I am going to throw open the comments and let authors fill in what I missed.

What do you look for in an indie ebookstore?

image by brewbooks