Has written three collections of short stories that take readers deeper into the “dark side” of the Harry Potter wizarding world, publishers confirmed Wednesday. Rowling reveals surprises and intricate details about several characters’ lives in the three new ebooks, which are available next month, Pottermore CEO Susan Jurevics said in a statement to TIME. The collections are presented by Pottermore, the interactive website Rowling created for Harry Potter fanatics, and cost about $3 each and will be released Sept. Each book is about 10,000 words long and is being sold on and other online book retailers. Gives readers a glimpse into the “ruthless roots” of Professor Dolores Umbridge and the relationship between Professor Horace Slughorn and Voldemort when the Dark Lord was a young student at Hogwarts. Harry Potter has 13,560 ratings and 773 reviews. Rose said: okay, now i'm crying.after finishing this way-too-short prequel, i'm sad because 1.] i want. THE PREQUEL he speeding motorcycle took the sharp corner so fast in the darkness that both policemen in the pursuing car shouted. “Whoa!” Sergeant Fisher slammed his large foot on the brake, thinking that the boy who was riding pillion was sure to be flung under his wheels; however, the motorbike made the turn. The book also provides the history behind the Azkaban prison. Profiles Minerva McGonagall and Remus Lupin, while focuses on secrets behind the walls of the wizarding school. The stories, which are available Wednesday for preorder, come after Rowling said the eighth installment in the beloved book series,, will be the about Potter in the saga. Rowling wrote Harry Potter, she came up with an immersive world and history, which is now playing out in the form of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and its. However, a group of fans are filming an origin story of their own: Voldemort: Origins of the Heir. After watching the teaser trailer for this fan film, we have a question: can we just get this one instead? The story follows a witch named Grisha Mac Laggen (heir to Gryffindor and original character to this film), who suspects trouble when, a descendant of the Hufflepuff family, was found murdered. The case goes cold, but Laggen suspects that there’s some sort of dark magic at play, and she believes that former Hogwarts student and future dark wizard Tom Marvolo Riddle is involved somehow. Visually, the teaser looks stunning, with visual effects and production design that feel like they fit alongside that of the official Harry Potter films. The story sounds intriguing as well, pulling references from the novels to tell the story of the rise of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Book fans might recognize the name Hepzibah Smith: she owned Helga Hufflepuff's cup and Salazar Slytherin's locket, which Voldemort later used to create two of his Horcruxes, and he killed her in the process. The film looks as though it’s closely tied to the Harry Potter novels, while the official Fantastic Beasts prequel feels a bit disconnected,, which was a. Voldemort: Origins of the Heir has been in the works since early 2016, when its filmmakers were inspired after re-reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, leading them to wonder about what drove Riddle to become Voldemort,. They launched a Kickstarter to fund the film, only to have Warner Bros. With the release of the teaser, the film appears to be continuing forward — the filmmakers note on their Facebook page,. This has some echoes of the Star Trek fan film Axanar, which brought from Paramount Pictures over its movie-quality production, along with. Fortunately, Warner Bros. Seems content to let the project proceed, and, the film will be released on YouTube in fall 2017.
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That’s according to. HarperCollins has said it is “not ruling out” implementing the e-book library lending model in the UK its US partner has initiated, which allows library users to borrow its e-books only 26 times. Publishers Association c.e.o. Richard Mollet said a “balance” had to be struck between the concerns of libraries and the profitability of publishers. He pointed out in the same way books “come to the end of their life” and have to be replaced, the HC model ensures the license can be renewed “in my understanding, at a lower rate”. Phil Bradley, vice-president of CILIP, said HC’s move was a “big concern”. NetGalley is a site where book reviewers and other professional readers can read books before they are published, in e-galley or digital galley form. Members register for free and can request review copies or be invited to review by the publisher. He objected to Mollet’s reasoning, saying it was “patently not the case” that a book would become unusable so quickly, stating a paperback can be “loaned at least 40 times, a hardback more than that”. By 2013-11-30 22:38:40 UTC As competitors in the e-book subscription market, and like to emphasize their differences. Yet the two share a common talking point: They both drop the name HarperCollins. The New York-based publishing house, whose roots date back to 1817, was the only one of the Big Five publishers to offer some of its backlist titles — and perhaps more importantly, some of its prestige — to these startups at launch, helping to kickstart the fledging Netflix-like e-book subscription market. 'They intuitively got what we were doing right from the first meeting,' Trip Adler, Scribd's CEO and cofounder, told Mashable in a recent interview about his interactions with HarperCollins. 'They operate the most like a technology company in terms of their willingness to try new things.' See also: For HarperCollins, working with Scribd and Oyster is part of a larger strategy to experiment and experiment often, with the goal of being early to new digital reading business models, whatever they may be. 'If you are early, you get more leverage,' Chantal Restivo-Alessi, HarperCollins' chief digital officer, told Mashable earlier this month. She argues that publishers like HarperCollins have more of an opportunity to 'guide the thinking' of startups in a new space like e-book subscriptions when it's just getting started rather than when it's already fully off the ground. 'If you are early, you can have a bit more say on the terms because you got a premium for being there early.' Restivo-Alessi, a former executive at music label EMI, joined HarperCollins in mid-2012. Some might say it was already late in the digital book game when she was hired. Amazon had pushed publishers to embrace the e-book market five years earlier with the launch of the first Kindle. In typical Amazon fashion, the e-commerce giant chose to exercise control over the pricing of digital books. In his book, author Brad Stone recounts that the big book publishers were blindsided when Amazon announced at the Kindle launch event that e-books would be priced at just $9.99. That moment, perhaps more than any other, highlighted the power shift in the publishing industry. Chantal Restivo-Alessi, HarperCollins' chief digital officer While Amazon may go down as the company that helped spark the digital reading era by corralling publishers to accept e-books as a legitimate format, HarperCollins had made moves towards digital in earlier years. In 2005, for example, the publisher set out to that would be easily searchable online through services like Google and Amazon. The person who championed that initiative, HarperCollins' group president Brian Murray, took over as CEO in 2008 and later brought on Restivo-Alessi to report directly to him with the goal of growing digital revenues. Restivo-Alessi's staff consists of a mix of book publishing veterans and people from other media categories, such as the music business and the video game industry, who pursue alternative business models and product innovations. In addition to working with Scribd and Oyster, HarperCollins has partnered with startups like Curriculet to test the concept of e-book rentals for schools, and a company called Inkling to try its enhanced digital publishing platform. The HarperCollins team is also working with Accenture to sell e-books directly to consumers — starting with the works of C.S. Lewis at and, with the possibility of more launches for other authors and genres — rather than going through intermediaries. Each of the publisher's imprints has someone overseeing digital product development. That person consults with editors to find ways to experiment beyond the e-book, which Restivo-Alessi refers to as 'an obvious element' of the publishing process. That might mean adding video content or creating a custom app to enhance the reading experience. To that end, HarperCollins recently released an app called that scans print books to pull up digital extras on your phone. 'Publishers have historically been the most innovative and creative of organizations,' Charlie Redmayne, head of HarperCollins UK, said in a recent interview with. 'But I think that when it came to the digital revolution, we came to a point where we stopped innovating and creating. We thought, we've done an ebook and that is what it is.' Restivo-Alessi won't go quite as far as her colleague, but she agrees that the publishing industry is 'very conservative' in experimenting with new business models in part because of the 'healthy growth' in e-book sales in recent years. 'I personally think that's short sighted,' she says. Every HarperCollins digital experiment is intended to contribute to the bottom line, according to Restivo-Alessi, whether through direct sales or indirectly by retaining and wooing more authors, but some of that might be wishful thinking. Allen Weiner, a technology analyst with Gartner, questions the wisdom of multimedia add-ons for books in particular, noting that consumers won't likely be willing to pay more for these features. As for whether it improves the reading experience, he believes it may be good for cooking and travel books, but for other genres like fiction, 'it's a tick below nice to have.' HarperCollins' e-book sales increased 30% in the September quarter from the same period a year earlier and now account for more than a fifth of the publisher's revenue. Those gains haven't been enough to offset declines on the print side, however, as HarperCollins' overall revenue for the quarter dropped 7% year-over-year. That matches the general trend in global book publishing of growing e-book sales, but overall declining revenues, as seen in the chart below from PricewaterhouseCoopers. The bigger incentive for publishers like HarperCollins, Weiner says, is to use apps, direct-to-consumer sales and other digital experiments to build a stronger connection with readers in the hopes of learning more about them. 'One of the biggest issues facing publishers today is knowing a lot about the people who are buying their books,' Weiner told Mashable. 'When you sell through a third party [like Amazon], you really don't have that.' Chantal says HarperCollins has no interest in replacing Amazon or being a retailer — even though Amazon has become more of a publisher with Kindle Singles — but she and the company don't want rely solely on Amazon or Apple for innovation on the digital front, either. In her opinion, the best word to describe the publisher's relationship with these two tech companies is 'frenemy.' 'At times we are enemies and at times we are friends. When it comes to commercial negotiations, everyone is back on their high horse but we are all there in partnerships to grow our businesses,' she says. 'I don't want to be only dependent on their innovation but I am always happy to talk and participate in their innovation, too.' HarperCollins certainly isn't the only major publishing house to invest in digital innovation. Random House has tried its hand at mobile gaming, Simon & Schuster has developed enhanced books and apps and MacMillan has taken the bold step of launching a to buy and develop 'innovative technologies' for educational products. But HarperCollins is trying to be more aggressive than others in testing new business models. 'What you learn from digital companies and startups is the willingness to experiment is half the journey,' Restivo-Alessi says. 'You put out something, you learn fast and you ditch stuff that doesn't work, and then you carry on experimenting.' 'Some things will stick and some things will hit big,' she added, 'but you don't know ahead of time.' Image: Flickr/. Oct 05, 2017 Learn how to use Pages to create digital books in the ePub format. (ebook) standard from the. Create ePub files in Pages. The Ultimate Guide to Publishing Your eBook on. This can be done using a couple of free software programs so that your Kindle ebook. Create a site and. October 20, 2013 How to create Kindle Collections on your Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle iOS App / Introduction I received an email this week asking me whether I had a post dedicated to creating collections on the Kindle. I was certain that I had but I search through my archives revealed that there was a gap in the how to content pertaining to the Kindle. I had a couple of different posts but no one central location. Kindle Collections are basically folders on your Kindle that help organize your content. There are three ways to create Kindle collections. One is on the device itself. One is using the desktop programs. And the third is using my favorite software organization program Calibre. 1) Creating Kindle Collections on the device. Step 1 First, create a collection. Go to the Home screen and select “Create New Collection” from the menu. Name your collection. Some people have very creative names. Mine are very basic. I have folders called TBR, Books to Read Now, Books to Avoid, etc. You can organize your collections by date, by genre, or by the person who recommended it to you. Perhaps you’ll organize by tropes. The selection is yours. To delete a collection, highlight the collection name, press and hold for the popup to appear and then you can choose “Delete Collection” from the choice of four options. This is where you can rename a collection as well. If you do delete a collection, you will not remove those books from your device, only removing the folder in which they resided. Once you have your collections created, you can sort your Home Screen content by collections. On the Home screen, select “Recent” and then selection “Collections.” You can place books in more than one collection. Step 2 Get your books into the collection. Press and hold the cover image of a book. A pop up screen will appear and the first option is “Add to Collection”. Check the box next to the collection where you want the book to appear and hit Done at the bottom of the screen. From within a collection, tap menu and then select Add/Remove Items. A list of your books will appear which you can sort by “recent”, “title” and “author.” Put a check by each book you want in that particular collection or uncheck books you don’t think are appropriate to be in that collection. 2) On your desktop Create Collection Step 1: Create a new collection or import collections from your existing device. Step 2: Drag and drop the collections. This process works better if your books are downloaded instead of just archived when you are moving them. The cloud symbol means that it is archived and not downloaded to your computer. Get Collection on Device Step 1: Go to your Kindle device. Step 2: Hit “Home” and then “Menu” and then “Sync and Check for Items” Your collections should sync across devices. But, Jane, you say, I have collections that are empty but on my computer, they exist. This is because you don’t have the books downloaded to your device. Note: Importing a collection from another device does not import the books or other items to your Kindle if they aren’t downloaded already. However, books already on your Kindle that are associated with a collection will automatically appear under that collection name on your Home screen. 3) Using Calibre If you are a Calibre user, and if you aren’t, you should look into it, a programmer named meme at MobileReads created a Kindle Collections plugin which you can. This post walks you through the install of the plugin and the basic usage of the plugin. The more books you have on your device, the slower your device works particularly when loading the menu and the collections. Install Plugin Gather your Kindle, a kindle cord, download Calibre, and the plugin. Hook up the Kindle to the computer, open Calibre, and install the plugin Once you have installed the plugin, you will need to restart Calibre. You must have your Kindle connected to your computer to operate the plugin. Customize Plugin After Calibre is restarted, go to Preferences -> Plugins. You will need to find the Kindle Collections plugin which is located under “User Interface Action plugins” or type “Kindle Collections” in the search bar. Highlight the plugin and then click “customize plugin” button. Suggested customizations include: • Creation of automatic tags: I do not advise using this feature if a) you have a ton of books on your device or b) unless your calibre metadata is very clean. If you download tags from Amazon or another source, it is likely that you are going to have thousands of tags with only one book in them. Plus, if creating collections based on authors is a nice idea if you only have five or six authors. More than that and again, you’ll have pages and pages of collections with only one book. Collections are to help you organize, not create more pages on the device to scroll through in order to find your books. • Preserve existing collections. Check this if you have collections on the Kindle device you don’t want deleted. These are collections that you have created on the device and not through Calibre. Uncheck if you want to control all the collections through Calibre. • Ignore uppercase/lowercase. This means if you have tags that are paranormal and Paranormal, Kindle Collections will treat these as one tag instead of two different tags. Read more about the plugin here Step 3 Creating collections You can create user categories in Calibre and this can be used as the basis for your Kindle Collections. Your user categories can be simple such as “Read, TBR, Unread”. Or perhaps they are genre specific: “Paranormal, Contemporary, Romantic Suspense, Historical”. Again, if you become too granular in your user categories, you may end up with dozens of collections. The Kindle Collections icon shows up in the bottom of your Calibre screen. I have the goodreads plugin installed and it shows up next to the Kindle Collections: Automatic Collections You can create collections based on: Author Sort, Authors, Publishes, Read, Series, Tags, Title, and User Categories. (See my advice in Step 1 re using these automatic collections). Manual Collections You can create manual collections. Create a collection by typing in the name of the collection and pressing the green plus sign. Then select your newly created collection in the dropdown box on the left, scroll your list of titles, sorted alphabetically, and click the green plus sign to add. If you have a large library, this can be tremendously time consuming. Once you hit “Save”, the collections will be sent to your Kindle. Custom Category *Recommended* Create a custom category for your Kindle Collections. Right click in the title/author/date menu bar area. Select “Add Your Own Columns” and then add a column for kindle collections. The bottom button is “Add custom column”. Click that or use the green plus sign on the right. Click “Tags” from the Quick Create selection. Then change the lookup name to “kindlecollections” or whatever you like and the Column Heading to “Kindle” (or again, whatever you like). The column type can be “Comma separated text, like tags / Text, column shown in the tag browser/ Long text, like comments / Yes/No”. Comma separated text, like tags is recommended. Save and restart Calibre. Your column should show up in the menu area. You can go through your books and tag which book belongs in which collection: Once you are done, go back to the icon and select “Customize collections to create from Calibre”. Look for your customized column (mine is named Kindle), and make sure the drop down box is “create”. Then go to “Create collections on the Kindle from Calibre”. Import Collections to Calibre from your Kindle *Recommended* This is a particularly nice way to create collections for those who have existing collections. If you have existing collections on your Kindle, you can use the Calibre interface to organize your collections. First, however, create a custom column as you did above. Go to the plugin icon and select “Import Collections to Calibre from your Kindle”. Select your newly created column from the dropdown menu: From there, you simply go through your Calibre library and select which collection you want the book to appear. Once you are done, go back to the icon and select “Customize collections to create from Calibre”. Look for your customized column (mine is named Kindle), and make sure the drop down box is “create”. Then go to “Create collections on the Kindle from Calibre”. Step 4: Restart your Kindle To load the new collections, you’ll need to restart your Kindle. Eject your Kindle. Unhook your Kindle from the computer. To restart, you can either hold down your power key until the device restarts or go to Home -> Menu -> Settings -> Menu -> Restart. Tips: • I prefer to use the User Categories section and create a special category for collections on the device. It’s far easier to scroll from the library view of Calbre and sort your books in this fashion. • This only works for titles that are you in Calibre and on your Kindle. It doesn’t work with titles that exist in the Amazon Cloud and you archive. • Kindle Collections will generate an error report and you can use that error report to help you clean up your metadata. It will tell you if there are duplicates or conflict errors in titles, authors, tags, etc. • If you eject your Kindle device and then re attach it to the computer via the USB, sometimes Calibre won’t recognize Kindle device. Simply quit Calibre and restart. If you have a lot of books on your Kindle, and I do, then making collections on the Kindle is clunky and time-consuming. Once you’ve created your collection, then it dumps you out into a list of all your books on Kindle, regardless of whether they’re in other collections already. They’re all individually listed. You then have to go through page after page after page to find your book(s) to add to your collection. Or, you can just say “Done” after creating the collection and go back out to the home screen, then go find your book(s) then press and hold on the title. It will bring up the choice to add to a collection, but half the time when I choose that the screen partially blanks and it doesn’t do anything, then I have to go out and tell it again to add to a collection, then it will take you back out to let you do that. One way is hugely clunky and irritating, the other slightly less so. I have my earlier books on the first Kindle, then more on the Kindle Fire, and now my latest purchases on the Paperwhite I bought last October. Nowhere, except on Amazon, are they all in one place. I wish Amazon would take some time to think about people like me (I can’t be their only obsessive book purchaser) and what we would need to be able to more easily manage our books – especially given that they won’t all fit on one Kindle now. However, given how long it took for them to come up with the ability to do collections in the first place, I doubt they’re spending much time or effort on it. I love my Kindle. It goes with me everywhere. Like pets, however, their lives are not long. I do have to follow Jane’s excellent post from earlier this week to download my books to my computer, and into Calibre. Then I need to go back and download the books from the first Kindle, then figure out what’s in the middle and download them directly from Amazon. When I think of the time this is going to take to sort it all out. Last Update October 5th, 2016 So you want to learn how to make an eBook? I can help you with that. The trusty eBook is still an extremely powerful online format that is only going to get stronger as more people switch to smartphones and reading devices like Kindles. Today I’m going to show you how I do everything when I make an eBook – from brainstorming ideas to defining concepts, designing the layout and cover to finally uploading it to your blog or website. This article will focus on how to create an eBook to give away on a blog, but it will also have most of the information that you’ll need if you want to create one to sell on online marketplaces. Let’s do this! Find out how to create great content whether you write it yourself or hire someone else to do it for you. How to sell your eBook on ALL the major eBook platforms such as. Quick steps for creating an eBook Let’s start by taking a look at the quick steps that are involved in creating an eBook and then we’ll go into some huge details below: • Research your target audience and topic • Ensure you have the right editing program • Write, edit and proofread your eBook • Add images, graphics and create cover art • Upload it to your blog or hosting platform for automatic delivery • Promote it everywhere Of course I am going to miss out on something so if you get stuck please and let me know what I’ve forgotten and I’ll do my best to help you out. For some (but not all!) of these tips it helps to have in order to get the best results and take advantage of certain programs and software. Disclosure –This post contains some affiliate links. I’ll let you know which ones they are below. If you purchase a product through one of those links I will earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend services I’ve used and love. Thank you for the support! Why make an eBook? If you are reading this post it is likely that you already know the benefits of making an eBook so I won’t go in to too much detail. Some of the reasons all internet marketers and bloggers should make an eBook are: • Get pre-loyal subscribers If you want to make money you need loyal subscribers. And one of the best ways to in order to introduce them to your material is to give them a free eBook as a “bribe”. • Increase your exposure Those little PDF files are super easy to share and you will often find that people send them on to their friends who then get introduced to your stuff. Also, they tend to sit on people’s desktop for longer than a post or a web article and as such you have multiple chances to get them to read it. • Add a new revenue stream Many people think that the big bloggers just make money on their blogs. A lot of their income often comes from a combination of having tied to a successful eBook. Oh, did I mention you can sell the darn things? All these things are possible if you know what you are doing. Remember, the eBook market is extremely saturated so you need to do something extremely good. The good news is that as the tablet and smart phone market grows, so does the demand for PDF file eBooks. Step 1: Research your target market The first step on the how to make an eBook journey is to take a careful look at who you are pitching it to. Knowing this information is like knowing which person in a crowd is Waldo. You have to know what he looks like, what he’s wearing and why he might be looking for you. Unless you know your target market well you are essentially shooting blind. NOTE: This is the first step if you have an existing blog. If you want to make an eBook first and then build up promotional material around it you would do step two first. A) Get Market Samurai One of the best things you will ever buy as an internet marketer or blogger is. It will cost you $90 or so but it will make you thousands and save you just as much in wasted time. However, if you don’t want to make a purchase some of the following research can be done with. B) Look for popular keywords in Google/Clicky Analytics, and competitors The next thing you want to do is log in to and look at the popular keywords and search phrases that people are using to find your blog. Which posts are most popular? You can then take some time to look at your competitors on Google and see what posts are most popular for them. This gives us a good idea about useful keywords. C) Use Market Samurai to analyze traffic levels The next thing you want to do is input those keywords in to Market Samurai and find out if any other related keywords could perform better. For example, when I was researching the title of this article I found out that “make an eBook” gets slightly more searches than “create an eBook” and so I decided to target that instead. Over time these little bits of information can make or cost you a lot of money. D) Find out who they are Now you want to take that information and think about who these people are. Research this information wherever you can. Think about their age, sex and location. Think about their income levels and career paths. Most importantly, think about how you can write an eBook that will help them. Step 2: Come up with a killer topic and title Once you have narrowed down your target market you want to come up with a topic and a title that will absolutely blow people away and solve their problems. To do this it needs to have an original edge on a very relevant topic. E) It’s about you as much as them One important thing to realize is that making a good eBook is as much about you as it is your target audience. Because you are the one that is writing it, promoting it, selling it and believing in it. Unless you have a passionate and knowledgeable interest in the thing you are going to fail before you start. Don’t make an eBook about puppy training unless you know enough to help people and then love it enough to push it for the next five years. F) Personalize it The best eBooks are the ones that share a personal experience about a very common topic. Because it adds authority. Authority is very important when it comes to books and articles because you need to show potential readers and customers that you are experienced enough to know what you are talking about. Let’s take the example of making money online. Let’s say you write an eBook called How to Make a Million Dollars Per Year. Now, if you make a million dollars per year and think you can teach others how to do the same then that is a very good book to write. If, however, you have never made that money yourself then you really have no authority on the topic. And people will smell it a mile off. So, whatever topic you choose to write on, make sure you have a personalized angle attached to it. This is very important. G) Make the title specific Specific titles work best. It doesn’t matter whether it is a book or a blog post. For example, I wrote a post called that hit the front of Delicious and went on to even get picked up by some newspapers. If I had called it How to Sell a Blog I don’t think it would have done nearly as well. Make your title specific. Step 3: Write the eBook and make it pretty So now you have to write your eBook and format it so that it is all pretty. This is where the magic happens and, unless you know what you are doing, the obstacles. H) Use Open Office to write it Now, this will probably be contested by a lot of you but I have found to be the best program to write eBooks. Because it is totally free and has an excellent selection of features. For example, it allows you to instantly convert your regular.doc file to a.pdf and it also has a massive range of really nice fonts to choose from. If you have a new version of Microsoft you can probably do all of this stuff but please do not go out and buy anything for the purpose of eBook writing. I) Start with an end result and work backwards People are downloading your eBook because they want to figure out how to do something. For this reason you should start with the end result that they are looking for and work your way backwards. Sometimes I will write the contents page first because it gives me a good plan. Other times I will just write like crazy and worry about the format later. It doesn’t matter as long as you are systematically getting people closer to achieving their goals. J) Use two types of headers and lots of paragraphs, lists and breaks Have a look at all of my posts here on Blog Tyrant. They have two types of headers (main and sub) and they have lots of lists and paragraphs. The reason for this is because people hate digesting large lumps of content. While is getting more popular, it needs to be formatted in a scan-able way. K) Get some really good images Over the years I have tried so many different and the two best solutions I have found are and taking/making my own. Remember, when using photos you need to make sure you purchase the correct license and get permission. You also want to avoid stock photography that has been used thousands of times before. If you are really specific about what you want photos of or if you need your own product in there somewhere then you are going to have to hire your own photographer. And this is expensive. You’re usually looking at between $500 and $3000 for a full day’s shoot. Taking the photos yourself on the family camera is never a good idea because they generally look really amateurish. L) Use a safe, well-proven font and simple colors Sometimes I download eBooks and wonder whether the author/designer was blind. You really only need to use a simple font like Arial, Verdana or Georgia at size 14 or 16 and then a simple color scheme like black with one other. Don’t go overboard when it comes to this stuff! Less is always more in the design field. You should also avoid bright reds for text as it looks spammy. M) Get it proofread, and not by your mom The next step is to get your eBook proofread by someone who is not afraid to give you harsh feedback. Think professional writers or other people in your industry. The point is not so much to find spelling mistakes (although that is important) but to figure out whether it is solving problems, coherent, etc. You really need someone to be able to give you the hard truths about your writing style and execution of ideas. N) Make an eBook cover to use on your site A really important part of the process here is to have to promote your PDF file. Here’s my latest updated one: These things are great because they increase the perceived value of the product by making it seem like something solid. Of course, its just a PDF file and not a real book, but by giving it a graphical representation people will feel like it is worth more. I highly recommend getting a designer on to make you something professional. Remember, this is going to represent your whole brand. Step 4: Convert to a PDF file and give it away This final step is the part where the eBook baby is born. Now, I am not going to talk about how to sell an eBook because I really believe it giving them away for free. But if you want to learn about landing pages and sales have a look. O) Convert to a PDF file All eBooks are in PDF format. Because they are universally recognized by Macs and PCs alike and work on all eBook readers. They also provide a consistent output. This is important. When you save a DOC file and send it to your friends chances are everyone will see something different. Not with a PDF. They all look the same. This means your design and formatting work won’t go to waste. If you are using Open Office you just need to go FILE > EXPORT AS PDF and then select your settings. P) Choosing the right settings Now, you want to make sure you select the right zoom levels because sometimes it will save blurry. I saved my Blog Tyrant eBook at 120% because this was smoothest. It will all depend on your graphics and logos and how well you have created and saved them in Illustrator or Photoshop. Sometimes it is a good idea to get advice on this issue. You also want to save it at a high quality level as long as this doesn’t mean the file size gets too big. Try to keep it below 1MB if you can. Q) Give it away in exchange for email subscriptions The next step is to set up a system where people get delivered the eBook for free when they enter their email address in to your subscription form. I have done an instruction video on so I won’t go through all the steps again other than to say that it’s easy to do with. R) Promote your eBook Promoting your eBook is actually the bulk of the work. I highly recommend you follow to help you understand the relationship between your website, mailing list and a successful eBook. Simply put, the idea is to create quality content on your site and other sites that drives relevant traffic back to your eBook’s landing page. It’s called a sales funnel and works extremely well. What have I missed? If you have made an eBook before and have some tips to share please leave a comment below and let me know. I would really like to make this post a nice little resource for people starting out on the eBook creation road. Similarly, if you have any questions for me drop a comment and I will do my best to answer them. Hi, First of all, well done. You’ve given people the main stuff they need to know as promised. One particularly good point is the one about editing. Not too long ago, many info-marketers seemed to have the idea that digital wasn’t expected to be the same as print as far as quality and there were some really poor products/ebooks out there. That simply isn’t the case. No matter what the format, print or digital, your work reflects you and your business, so unless you want to be perceived as sloppy, make sure it is edited well. As far as what could be added to your list, I may get some disagreement here, but I say do not to try to call something of 10-20 pages an ebook as has also been done repeatedly over the years in internet marketing. With the advent of Kindle etc. And the explosion of novels and other “traditional” books going digital, more and more people are familiar with the term ebook. With that come the general perceptions of document length. Generally, 35+ pages gets into short book territory (think kids’ books), something shorter than that is a report (think of offline biz documents). There’s a lot of confusion in the realm of books and publishing these days and in what a book’s value is. My belief is why add to all that noise if it’s possible to avoid it? Ebooks are definitely a great tool in the marketing toolbox, let’s all work to make sure they hold their value. I agree that results are key, however, identifying appropriately I think ties into the trust factor and that’s important too. Even if I love the results of a 10 page document, I’d still wonder why it was called a book if I envision a book to be something longer. Along the same line, if a book was promised and I didn’t get it (got what I feel is a report instead), I’d have questions as to why not. For example, if that promise wasn’t fulfilled, what else won’t be if I continue to do business with this person? If the request for an ebook is after an initial visit to a site/to entice for a sign up, I think we need to be very careful with that first impression. Something as simple as knowing what people expect and then delivering or over delivering, goes a long way in making it a good one. I kind of thought you dropped off the earth for a bit. Long time no update! I have to share my own experience. My ebook is VERY simple. It’s intentionally simple and bare bones because I want my readers to be able to print the document as a how to guide. So I made my ebook and just kind of let it sit there. It was working for me, but not making magic. Then when I was going through the process of my re-design, my designer mentioned that we needed to make my ebook pop more and make it more of a selling point. I don’t know, I guess it took HER believing in it for me to believe in it? So we created a little sidebar graphic and sign up form and OMGin less then a month I increased my subscribers by several thousand. Now I can’t credit that ALL to my ebook, because I have been running weekly subscription giveaways. But I do credit a lot of it to my ebook. Making it pretty and prominent made a huge difference. The feedback on the book itself (mine is just a PDF in Google Doc format that I made in Open Office) has been amazing. People email me almost daily telling me how much money I’ve saved them. So yeah, I am a HUGE fan of prettying up your ebooks and marketing them. Thanks for sharing this article BT! Parley Well, aside from my online dreams of money blogging, I’m also a CPA with a lot of QuickBooks experience. My thought for the blog was to scour the internet (google, bing, yahoo) for unanswered QuickBooks questions. Then, create a series of 5 min video tutorials with accompanying step by step text instructions. If I take your suggestion, then a micro-niche could be: Getting your QuickBooks Mobile for the book. I don’t have a lot of experience in that specific arena, but I can certainly handle the research. The money portion would probably be easiest as either remote QuickBooks support or leveraging the blog along with my QuickBooks affiliate account. I’m kind of thinking out loud here, so if it seems like I’m rambling, I really am. So here’s my only hesitation in giving away a free ebook or any other type of thing like that in exchange for an email subscriber. I really want an email list of people who are totally all about my topic (photography business tips). I worry that people will sign up for the free cookie and then not ever open anything ever again. While I’m sure you’ll retain some of them, especially since the blog topic will be related to the cookie (or that’s how I’d do it), I would think that’d you’d get a lot more less-loyal followers. I guess I’d rather have 200 followers who are loyal and LOVE everything we put out vs. 1000 followers who are marginally interested and might mark us as spam in the future (or something like that). At least one blog I’ve signed up for later sent me an inactivity notice when so long had gone by without my opening any of her posts. It gave me the option to let myself become unsubscribed or to click a link to keep my subscription active. Haven’t looked much into it yet, but my guess is that it’s an option through Aweber. You might try creating a series of autoresponders designed to engage new subscribers within the first few weeks/months of their subscription so they’re more likely to open content as it lands in their inbox. Maybe something to gently transition them from the subject of the ebook to the regular blog posts they receive. I see your logic and there are many ways of looking at it. Here’s my experience, though (and no not all my ebooks are free giveaways). The time when someone is most likely to really want to hear from you is immediately after they give you their email address. So look at it like this They might find your site through Google. Then perhaps a headline of yours catches their attention so they check out your blog. If your blog gets them to move from that “attention” point to “I want more” point (aka interest), then hopefully they will give you their email address in exchange for the extra juice offer you have on the side. This is the point where you have their MOST attention and can ask them to do something. They will be looking for that email coming to them. Now it’s your job as a blogger, internet marketer, web publisher, or whatever you call yourself, to blow their minds. You see, what you’re talking about here is that you’d rather have a small list of avid followers rather than a big list of so-so’s. You have to give yourself the chance to convert them from so-so’s to avid followers and the best time to do that is immediately after you did something to cause them to take action Like giving you their email address. And then if they drop off your list because it turns out they aren’t interested in you, then so be it, they probably wouldn’t have bought from you then anyway. But again, this doesn’t mean you have to give away every ebook, it’s just something some people do. There are other methods to get that optin as well. Thought I’d expand step 3: Create the ebook. Type up an outline: 1. Intro (your but about your background and the reason you wrote the ebook on the particular topic. Describe the problem you are solving (why it’s a problem, why it’s hard to solve, why solving it is possible). Break down the solution into several sections. (How to do A, how to do B, how to do C.) 4. Show how the sections A/B/C work together to solve problem. Summarize the problem and the solution and give links to added resources. This is a very brief outline. The idea is thisbreak down the ebook into sections that you’d expect to see if you were reading it. Then write those sections. Summarize and give added resources. In most digital mediums, color is tricky. Even if you proof a book digitally, the color on paper will often be slightly different. You basically need to know what device your reader will be using. If it’s PDF for example, I would think there will be variation in color from monitor to monitor. If you want to sell it for other devices, NookColor is one option, many others are B/W only. I know the discussion here is ebooks, but if you are showing a process, maybe a better option for you would be video. Creating video is no longer difficult and creating DVDs can be reasonable as well. I just had a thought. I’ve spent the last several months trying to think of what kind of ebook I could give away on my paranormal/conspiracy theory site and I think I might finally have it. One of my most popular posts is a list of 101 paranormal/metaphysical/conspiracy terms that I’ve defined in a sentence or two. What if I took those same 101 terms and instead wrote a couple of paragraphs about each – still enough to fill out an ebook, but not so complete that it would compete with a full-fledged book on the paranormal when I try to sell it later on. What do you think? Would it work? The idea of taking something you’ve already written, especially if it’s popular, and then building a product around it is solid. I had two posts on my blog which were SO popular I went ahead and designed an entire website around them. It was great because I highlighted those two articles on my site and set up a redirect so that people who found the articles in Google were redirected to that new site I built Can you say instant traffic! But here’s the problem it seems you’re having. It sounds like you have two niches going on and you’re writing to two similar but different groups. You might want to try a test and do something like I did. Then you can create products (or promote affiliate offers) to those highly targeted readers on each site. It does present some challenges though if you decide to take that route. For example, are you going to keep one or two twitter accounts? Facebook accounts? Always evaluate what you’ve got. Maybe you could do something like Tyrant said but put a spin on it for both your readers. “Warning: 10 Paranormal Conspiracy Theories That Will Change the Way You Travel”. Just some food for thought. I agree with John, if you have two distinct topics of interest, even if they are generally related, separating them is probably better. There are many marketers, experts etc. Who work in more than one niche. Yes, it requires multiple sites, but in order to attract a particular customer, you need to speak their language so they relate to you/the product. If you try to mix, you don’t really appeal to anyone enough to make them want to have a relationship with your site/purchase your product. I’ve seen people manage this kind of thing in two ways. If the topics are closely related, a central site like yourname.com is the hub and products etc. Live on separate landing pages. If the topics are unrelated, you can pick the most dominant one, use that identity on major social media, and then promote the other topic in more niche based ways. Then the goal is to make enough at it to hire a VA to keep everything straight:-). Thanks for the feedback y’all, but splitting out my topics to different sites isn’t an option I’m willing to explore. The two topics I mentioned – whether people are willing to admit it or not – are inextricably linked togetheras are the others I talk about on the site. There aren’t enough hours in the day for me to maintain a separate site on everything I talk about under the umbrella of dark/weird and I can’t say I have the interest to maintain that many sites even if there were. It’s not a primary website for me, just the one I’ve run the longest. I don’t think I ever expected to make a dime off it, but it doesn’t seem right to leave it there without a free giveaway. One of the best online ebook cover generators I’ve found is. Really easy to use. Also, as far as getting images into your ebook, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using images from Flickr, so long as you give photo credits. Simple and cheap. About marketing the ebook (okay a little off topic from creating one) I like the guest posting idea and it certainly works really well. For my last ebook launch I tried a different method. I flipped the funnel and instead of doing a ton of guest posting and article marketing to drive loads of traffic to my site (just speaking about the launch here), I gave away free copies of my ebook to key individuals who had a following already and asked them to sign up for the affiliate program and write up a quick post or email blast about it. The idea was that instead of “John Hoff” writing a guest post about what my ebook covered, why not have the person who’s blog I was targeting for traffic write up a quick review or note on my book. The reason was that this person has a list of followers who trust them already, not me. For example, I too did a and my optins spiked like crazy. But just imagine if I was able to get Brian to personally mention my book. I bet my optins would have been doubled. I’ve even asked people on my list, “What made you end up getting the ebook?” The most common response was, “Person X said I should check it out.” I guess what I’m saying is a good question to ask yourself before you do that guest post is to ask if it would be better to do the guest post so you can show everyone how you write and that you’re knowledgeable or ask the person instead to write up a post themselves about your product. Both ways have their advantages. Thanks for a great article. This is a great blogpost, and some great comments, there’s just one thing I want to add, as someone who writes these on a regular basis. Chris provided a good outline to use; it’s important to establish your credibility and say why people should listen to you and believe the information your’re giving, but the first section should really be a wiiftr – what’s in it for the reader. You can mix this with information about credentials, say what the information did for you – and then the important part is to say ‘therefore THIS is what the information in this ebook can do for YOU’. I’ve written e-books with and without this, and always found that putting the reason to read right up at the beginning makes a big difference. In this post I’m going to share a bunch of images, tools and tricks to help you design your own ebook without spending any money on a designer. We all want our websites, emails and ebooks to help us look professional, stand out from the crowd, get recognized and, ultimately, delight our audience. And hopefully we all know how offering a giveaway on your site can significantly increase the number of people who signup for your email list. Here’s how things changed at Fizzle when we started offering an ebook. Here’s stats from our email list for the past year +. Can you tell where we started promoting the Audience guide? (Click here to learn more about.) So in this post I want to share all sorts of ways you can put something into the hands of your readers, something they will love to read, something that will grow trust with them and make them more likely to choose us when they need our products or services. These are tricks I’ve picked up, ways to get us from here to there without getting too technical or artsy fartsy. But, before we do that we need to get clear about what your ebook is for, what it’s supposed to do. What’s in this post • • • • • • • • • • • • • What your ebook is supposed to do Here’s 3 things every ebook is supposed to do: • Your ebook is supposed to be interesting. Rule #1 of designing an ebook is make sure the topic is f*%^ing interesting to your audience! The fanciest design can’t outperform a killer topic and headline. • Your ebook is supposed to be readable. If your reader can’t read the words due to color choice or font choice or lack of contrast, etc., then you can’t get your ideas from the page and into their head/heart/life, you can’t help them, you can’t build trust. Whatever else your ebook is, it must be readable. • Your ebook has to be out in the world. We can’t be fiddling with this thing forever. The point of it is to be out in the world affecting hearts and minds, so let’s get this done now. It can always be better;. To illustrate this last point, let me tell you about how Darlene made (and leveraged) her ebook. Case Study: 10 Photo Challenges Ebook Below is a before and after of. The new version is definitely an improvement over the old one, wouldn’t you say? Here’s a few sample pages of Darlene’s Photo Challenge ebook after working with a designer (3.5 years after first publishing the ebook). Darlene actually made the “before” version herself using Open Office (an open source word processor). Did you hear that? She did it herself using free software. Then she used it and it worked. She’s used that version for 3 years and grew her blog to over 22,000 email subscribers. Yes, the second version looks nicer than the first — she says herself that she wanted to update the look and feel of the book — but her business grew because she used what she had. She didn’t fiddle and whine about making it look better, she used it. There will always be a possible better version of what you’re making. Successful people know when to stop fiddling and start shipping. “There will always be a possible better version of what you are making. Ship it.” Tools for making ebooks YOU DON’T NEED TO USE FANCY OR EXPENSIVE APPLICATIONS TO MAKE YOUR EBOOK. Did you get that? Sorry to yell. I just really want you to get it — you don’t need fancy tools to make a killer ebook. You could use presentation software like PowerPoint, or Keynote. Michael Hyatt used one of these when he made his super successful life plan ebook. (More on.) You could use word processing software like Microsoft Word, Open Office, Google Docs or Pages. As I mentioned above, Darlene used Open Office to make her ebook. You could use any of these tools and export a PDF of a great ebook. But my favorite tool for making ebooks is definitely Apple’s. It looks amazing, it’s really easy to use, and it’s free. Note: there was some worry when iBooks Author first came out that the app’s terms of service didn’t allow users to sell their books anywhere but the iBooks store. That’s not the case. If you use Apple’s.ibook format, you can only sell through the iBooks store. All other formats have no restrictions. Read more on Apple’s FAQ. We make all our in iBooks author and export as a PDF. If I were starting from scratch today, I’d use iBooks Author with one of the built in themes. If I were on a PC and couldn’t get iBooks Author, I’d use PowerPoint or Google Slides. If I planned on collaborating with anyone I’d definitely use Google Slides. The styles drawer in Apple’s iBooks Author Tip: Use formatting styles. In most of these apps there’s a way to save how an H1, H2, H3, body copy, link and blockquote should look. Then you can simply select some text and choose that style to format it the same as all the other similar elements in your book. Added bonus here is that you can change the style of all those elements throughout your ebook by changing the formatting of the master style. Another bonus here is that hopefully it’ll keep you from selecting this word and making it red and that one and making it green and that one and making it huge or small, etc. Play it cool, Sundance. Use landscape mode (or portrait) I like landscape mode for a PDF ebook much more than portrait. Its wide pages make it easier to include graphics and it has room for two columns of text (keeping your body text’s line length from being too wide, which makes for easier reading on computers). This is not a rule. If you feel your ebook should be in portrait mode, do it. If you feel it should be in landscape, do it. If you feel strongly it should be a parallelogram, you’re on your own. I don’t think any of the apps mentioned above do that. But they all do portrait or landscape. Go download some ebooks and see what the experience is like. Model yourself after the ones you like and you’ll learn fast. Portrait Mode: great if you’re focusing on mobile devices. But I’m missing Guy’s hand:( 2. Just use a damn theme There are hundreds of great themes out there that make it easy to dress your ebook up. The applications mentioned above all have built in themes you can apply in the click of a button. (Again, this is a place where iBooks Author really shines.) A theme makes so many difficult decisions for you, giving you a handful of page templates, colors, fonts, etc., enabling you to get into the real work of putting words, images, stories and ideas on the page to connect with the reader. And there’s a bunch more themes available for free or fee around the web, like these (unfortunately, you may have to signup for a few email lists to get them): • PowerPoint + InDesign: • PowerPoint + InDesign: • PowerPoint: • Apple Pages + iBooks Author: • Keynote: • Google Slides: The downside of using a theme is, of course, you may not look as unique. Someone else may use the same theme, the theme may not look exactly the way you want it, etc. However, themes make it easy to get your book out the door and into the world. Can you do like Darlene and just get your first ebook out the door and into the world and working for you? Using a theme gives you the advantage of speed and ease. If this is your first ebook, can you simply find a theme you feel good about, one that gets you 80% there, and force yourself to work with that this time around? Remember, as we say all the time on: your goal is to release your content, test it, get feedback on it and improve it over time. Using a theme helps you do that without all the fiddling. I want you to just use a theme for your first ebook because your ebook only wins if it’s a great topic + a good title + very useful + people are finding it and trusting you enough to download it + people are sharing it because they found it useful. The best custom design in the world can’t fix those if they’re broken. And a theme helps you get it out and get some feedback. Then, when you’ve proven the book works and filled in any gaps, you can invest $500-1,000 to hire a designer and really make it represent you and your brand. Ok, I’m done with my theme rant now. Hopefully you’ve stopped reading and you’re already writing your book in a theme of your choice. For the rest of you gluttons for punishment: let’s get into color. Steal great colors Many of the great designers I know start on a project’s color palette by stealing. “Stealing” sounds a bit harsh let’s call it “modeling.” We model our colors on other works, be they in the real world (houses, buildings, nature) or printed world (book covers, posters, etc.) or work online (websites, images, etc.). One of the harder things about colors is picking colors that feel right together. So, let some excellent designers put groups of colors together for you and find palettes. They’ve got thousands of color choices put together; it’s searchable, browsable and easy to find good stuff. (It’s also easy to spend a lot of time here. Use these great color picking tools: • Palettes: • Palettes: • Color Wheel Picker: • Color Wheel Picker: Color considerations: • The background of your book should be white or a light color if you want it to be printable. • Don’t choose more than 4 colors (unless you know what you’re doing). • Page background: again, keep it light • Body text: you can use a little color but keep it dark enough to read. • Link color: you’ll want to hyperlink text throughout the book to promote stuff. Make sure hyperlinked text is still readable. • Callout/header/footer color: something that plays nicely. You could use the link color as the background and make the text white on top of it. Or you could choose a totally different color. • Other accents and elements can use darker or lighter versions of the colors above. Tip: Model your color choices on what other designers are doing. Use to find a palette you like and go with it! Steal great font combinations Everybody want’s to know about what fonts to use. I’ve been hot and heavy passionate about fonts for a few years and here’s what I have to say: • Different fonts have different feels. • Go for something you feel good about. • Remember to keep it readable. Don’t get too fancy or too weird. • There are so many free fonts out there. Did you know you can download any of the fonts from? Let them do the work for you. No need to repeat why. • Use no more than 2 fonts unless you really know what you’re doing. I normally pick one font for headings (h1, h2, h3, etc.) and one font for body copy. Added bonus if the body copy font looks great in large sizes for those big quotes (we’ll get into them in a bit). I could talk about fonts until I’m blue in the face. I hear them, I feel them, I talk to them when no one’s around. Tip: Model your font choices on what other designers are doing. Here’s a google search for. Anticipate boredom: break up the flow Have you ever wanted to read something, been interested enough to click and get started reading, only to realize that it’s a big-ass wall of text all the way to the end? Text endlessly, incessantly lined up like like some old English king’s army, poking and prodding you with their swords and spears and ascenders. I just want to Braveheart it, scream “FREEDOOOOOOOOOOM!” and break the tyranny. You can call your ebook a “book” if you want, but you’re not Shakespeare or Malcolm Gladwell (yet). And you don’t have to be. So let’s use images and typography in your book to break up that daunting flow of text and keep me curious and interested in what’s on the next page. Besides, even Shakespeare and Malcolm Gladwell could use some excellent callouts, images and large quotes, right? Remember what your ebook is supposed to do. It’s not supposed to win you the Pulitzer prize. That’s a different project with a different set of design requirements. Really, fundamentally, your job is to keep the reader interested and engaged. Breaking up that flow of non-stop body text is an essential part of that, making your book fun, intriguing and delightful. Ways to break up the flow • Tell them what you’re going to tell them (in a big headline), tell them what you’re telling them (in a page or two of text), then tell them what you told them (in a box callout with a couple bullet points of “key takeaways” or something like that). Admit it, you skim through stuff until you see a list. • Use headings (h2, h3, etc.). As I scroll through your ebook, these headings help me know what section I’m in. I normally only use 3 levels of headings: the huge headline that starts the section (h1), the main breaks within that section (h2), and then the smaller section within sections heading (h3). On half the page or a quarter of the page or the whole page or whatever. Great images, images that help me understand your words better, will make your ebook feel like it’s designed really well. • Pro tip: add captions to your images. These are some of the most read pieces of text in any book or webpage. • Build in your CTAs (calls to action). (See below.) • Use any (or all) of the 10 page templates I list out below throughout your book. These boredom breakers can work really well even if they’re not designed all that wonderfully. I may not immediately be blown away by your design and think, “wow, this lady’s good,” but I may read enough to get sucked in and curious about what’s around the next page turn, and in that page turning come to know, like and trust you. Tip: Expand your line height. You can make those little lines of text easier to tumble through by expanding the line height. Line height is how short or tall the space is between lines of text in a paragraph. Let it breathe. I normally set that something close to the golden ratio: 1.62. (E.g., if I’m using an 18px font size, I’ll start with a line height of 1.62 times that 29px). Some fonts are quite tall and need more line height. Others are quite squat and need less. Move things around and see how they feel. Here’s a great resource for. Build in your calls to action (CTAs) You have business goals with this ebook. Not only that someone would download it, but also that they’d read it and take even more action from there. What are those actions you want them to take? • to hire you? • to subscribe to your podcast? • to buy your product? • to promote your book to their network? • to leave you an Amazon review? • to draw them into a next step in their learning journey? What are the things you want your reader to do? Have you identified them? Can you cull them down to just a couple and really focus your book to get them into one of those next actions? These calls to action need to be designed things, they need to be thoughtfully prepared — what sequence they come in, what form they take, etc. And they provide great ways to break up that flow of text and help the reader understand what you’re saying. Some specific ways to do this are called out in the page templates below, but these are a few more ways to add CTAs that will help make your ebook feel more interesting. • Add “key takeaways” to the end of each page where you include a link. E.g., “learn more about.” • Add a little “tweetable” block on a page that encourages someone to share a quote or statistic. • Create a dedicated call to action page. (More on this below.) • Use images or screenshots from videos to entice someone towards your youtube channel or blog post. (See the example of this below). Create full-page “advertisements” for pieces of content that further explain a concept. This one’s from our. There’s a bunch of ways to fold in well designed calls to action. But the best designed CTA is the one that makes sense, the one that’s thought through, that anticipates the reader’s needs and questions and delivers the solution at the right time. Again, download a handful of ebooks and see how others are doing these kinds of things. Get inspired and decide how you’ll do it your way. End sections with a full-page quote I hesitated to put this one in. It felt kind of too simplified, but the truth is it’s one of my favorite tricks. People love quotes. Quotes feel like statistics in some ways. They feel hard, sturdy, more like data points than opinions. Of course they often are just opinions, but when I say make an argument and then conclude it with a quote from some important person there’s something stronger than an opinion about it. I believe Winston S. Churchill said it best: ““It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.” ~ W. Churchill” See what I did there? I call this out as a page template below, but I thought I’d include it here for one special reason: if you want to make the writing of your book easier, identify a quote (or statistic) to close each section of your book off with. It’s a hack, and in time it’ll probably feel hacky, but I collect quotes for this very purpose because when I’m writing towards a conclusion already written down it focuses me. And, just for the sake of argument: ““I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.” ~ R. Emerson” 10 page templates to use in your ebook Ok, I’m going to share 10 page templates you can use in your ebook to break up the flow of text, draw your reader further into insights for them and a relationship with you and, ultimately, to make your book more interesting and engaging. I’ll just say a word about each. You should be able to get an idea or two of how you can do a similar thing just by looking at each. Cover page Cover pages are hard. They’re hard because they can be really important. The best way to design your own cover page is to to look at a ton of examples of cover pages and take notes on what you do/don’t like. This is a perfect time for you to find a few covers out there you really like, pick one and model your cover after that one. Make it your own, but put it together similarly. I’ll bet you can guess what I think the most important part of your cover page is. It’s your title. It’s the focus of your whole damn book. Don’t forget that as you look at the examples and think about colors and fonts and more. Here’s a bunch to check out. Misty Spears’ and Will Gibbons’ 2. Chapter/section page Each chapter (or section) of your book can feel like another enticing excursion if you have a great chapter page. Think about it like watching a TV series on Netflix. What can you show them that’s going to get them into that next episode? Note: design plays a role in arousing the reader’s interest, for sure, but it also has a great deal to do with what you call the chapter, what the topic is. Remember that and get in the headspace that each chapter is a new conversion experience. BTW, I had to share this as an awesome example of breaking up the flow of text with a list. And also notice that breadcrumb nav in the upper left. Really great idea to help a reader know where she is in the book. Data, graph, statistic or graphic page Graphs and statistics can bring a nice, “researchy” feel to your ebook. Show us you’re informed not just by your ideas but also by some real research out there. Added bonus: they break up that flow of text and, if done nice and understandable, can a reader understand your ideas better. Here’s worksheets from our audience guide (top 2), (bottom left) and (bottom right). How to write a quick ebook So there are 10 page types you can include in your ebook. If you made one of each of those page types, do you think you could add a page or two of text in between each to fill in the gaps and help a reader learn something badass? I think you can. And you’d be well ahead of those folks out there still fiddling with colors or wondering if they should hire a designer for their ebook. A guideless masterclass in ebook design I’ve been a designer for a long time. I come by it honestly; self taught, no lessons. Everything that I’ve shared here is just stuff that I’ve picked up over the past 8 years. And yet, that picking up of stuff has led me to be the designer of some of the biggest blogs on the web. I’m well known for it, people respect me for it, and I learned it all by simply paying attention to the experience I wanted to make. Here’s the #1 thing you could do to learn how to design a badass ebook: go download a bunch of ebooks, one at a time, and keep note of your experience with each. Actually try to read them. Find some on topics you’re actually interested in and pay attention to what it feels like to try to learn something. What did you feel when you saw a wall full of text? Did you read through any of them? Which was the easiest to read through? Which one was your favorite? Which one had the worst experience? Write down your notes about each. Go through maybe 10-20; you’ll probably know when you’re ready to stop. This will be your own personal masterclass in what you want your book to be like (and what you don’t want it to be like). Don’t go throw together an ebook and hope for the best. You’ll create a pointless one and done experience for your reader with you. Instead, experience what it’s like to download an ebook and open it up. Experience the hope that it’ll be great, easy to get through, informative, the answer to so many questions. Experience being let down terribly. And commit yourself to doing what you can to build an experience that will actually matter to your readers. If you want a guided masterclass in design, I have a course on it. I created the C.R.A.F.T. Process for making websites, and it translates nicely to ebooks. It’s free for 30 days, and it’s my hope you’ll enjoy our community of entrepreneurs so much that you’ll stick around for longer. A big list of design tips Before I go, here’s a big list of design tips for you that you can apply to your ebook. If you have a question about any of them ask about it in the comments below. • Put your logo on the cover of the book. Don’t make it big. Make it tasteful. • Don’t use more than 2 fonts. Limit yourself. Your work will be more understandable. • Callout quotes in big text if it’s a short enough quote. • Use images liberally in your ebook, but don’t choose cheezy images. • Can you divide your book into a few sections and use an icon to represent each section? • Start your book with exactly what the reader’s going to walk away with at the end. Then fulfill that promise. • Anticipate their boredom. I said it above. I’m saying it again. • Conclude your book with a next step for them. Don’t leave them hanging if they want more. Anticipate what they want next on their learning journey. • Why not let them email you directly? Add your email to the end of the book to clarify any questions. After all, they read your damn book! You can always take it out later. • You have a landing page for your book, right? Click on each of our to see how we do our landing pages. • Watch someone read your book. Stand behind them and watch them read your book. You’ll be amazed how much you learn. (You will owe this person cake.) • Highlight what’s on the next page when I get to the end of a section. I can always feel when a point is starting to wrap up, and I may just put your book down and never pick it back up. • I listed a lot of page templates above. They can all look similar, even though they do different things. Don’t get too crazy. You want each page to feel like it’s a part of the same book. • Use paragraph styles in the application you’re using to create your book. If you’re a pro, change those styles to be exactly how you want them. • Design supports your content — not the other way around. Everyone knows that. This is just another reminder. • Please notice your line length (that’s how wide your lines go across the page). Nobody likes reading a line for 22 inches across their whole monitor. • There’s a lot more font, typography and color training inside the. It’s free for 30 days if you’re not a member. • Use bold and italic a few times on each page. It helps the eye move down the page in chunks. But don’t overuse them. • Do you know what whitespace is? It’s emptiness. Room to breathe. How do you feel when you’re locked in a closet? How do you feel in an empty arena? How do you think your words feel all cramped into their little boxes with no space to breathe? ““End things with a quote. It makes you look smart.” ~ @chase_reeves”. Download the Updated Guide: Top 10 Mistakes in Starting an Online Business All 10 mistakes explained Resources and links to address each mistake Some of our favorite quotes from amazing entrepreneurs Over 35 page full color guide Free to download The Top 10 Mistakes in Online Business Every week we talk with entrepreneurs. We talk about what’s working and what isn’t. We talk about successes and failures. We spend time with complete newbies, seasoned veterans, and everything in between. One topic that comes up over and over again with both groups is mistakes made in starting businesses. Newbies love to learn about mistakes so they can avoid them. Veterans love to talk about what they wish they had known when starting out. These conversations have been fascinating, so we compiled a list of the 10 mistakes we hear most often into a nifty lil' guide. Whoa, this is awesome, Chase, thanks so much for brining the epic again especially with all the visuals and case studies. Super helpful to me and the timing is great as I’m cracking open iBooks Author today to start my first eBook product. (I have an opt-in, but this one will be my first one to go through Gumroad.) Friend of Fizzle, Nathan Barry, also writes in Authority that landscape is more open to adding visuals but cautions that it will take more design chops to pull off. And then adds the tip to make sure your cover mock-up is in the same orientation your book will be. I’ll admit, I haven’t opened a fizzle e-mail in a really long timeI kept seeing these 37 tips for this or that headlines and I thought Too much info #overwhelm. But this e-mail goes back to Chase’s roots with that ruthless focus of features theme. It’s just one thing. Writing an e-book And yes there are 37 plus tips and goodies on how to do so (really kick ass stuff) but I didnt get overwhelmed by it all at once, and not even click. That strategy of using a large number of odd numbered tips in e-mail headlines is trendy now, but there’s something magical about getting one good actionable tip. That’s how you fizzle and stay epic. Omg, wth just happened to me? It’s like I found treasure. Teresa Roche Ott (Fizzlechick) and I are creating an ebook together at this very moment–we chose iBooks Author, and we are now blessed with all these grab and go ideas. The worksheet for example. And I collect quotes, so yeah, that’s a fun tip. “I dwell in possibility.” –Emily Dickinson I have to start a progress log on Fizzle for our Make a Tiny Website guidebook now. Totally relieved and seeing how sweet it is going to be. A toast to Chase. Wait it’s not noon yet.;-) •. Some good tips here; I’ll be offering an ebook soon. But as someone who worked in publishing for 20+ years, I would also suggest folks have someone edit the ebook — or at least proofread it — so that embarrassing misspellings, punctuation errors, grammar issues, etc. Are eliminated. This affects writer’s credibility diminishes an author’s claim (whether bold or subtle) as an expert. For instance, I noticed a few bloopers in this post that jumped right out and turned me off; I almost stopped reading. My second comment is to be very careful about using quotations (and encouraging others to use them) due to copyright law. An ebook is a published work, as is all content online. Folks cannot just include others’ content (words, photos, artwork) in a publication. Read up on what requires permission from the rights holder, and be aware you may be in violation regarding any content that’s not your own. Due to the ease with which info can be spread in our digital world, there’s a whole lot of illegal distribution/infringement going on doesn’t make it right. Thank you for this article Chase. I was able to make an ebook with a great design. I have a big problem, though. I followed your advice from the use of powerpoint to landscape and PDF, etc. However, when i submitted it to Amazon’s KDP for publication, the converted copy was a mess. I had to to unpublish my ebook. It turns out powerpoint and PDF are not a good fit with Amazon’s system. They recommend only Word or HTML. Can you recommend a retailer or integrator or any proven ebook sales organization through which I can sell my powerpoint-based ebook? A Quick History of Self-Publishing For most of publishing’s history, if an author wanted to self-publish, they had to invest thousands of dollars with a so-called “vanity” press, or otherwise learn how to become an independent, small publisher. That all changed in the late 1990s, with the advent of print-on-demand (POD) technology, which allows books to be printed one at a time. As a result, many POD publishing services arose that provided authors with low-cost self-publishing packages. They could be low cost because—without print runs, inventory, and warehousing—the only expense left was in creating and designing the product itself: the book. Outfits like iUniverse, Xlibris, and AuthorHouse (which have merged and been consolidated under AuthorSolutions) offered a range of packages to help authors get their books in print, though most books never sat on a bookstore shelf and sold a few dozen copies at best. What’s Changed Since 2007 Just as traditional publishing has transformed due to the rise of ebooks, today’s self-publishing market has transformed as well. Most self-published authors earn the bulk of their money from ebook sales. Furthermore, 85% or more of all US ebook sales happen through a single online retailer, Amazon. Anyone can make their ebook and print book available for sale in the most important market—Amazon—without paying a cent upfront. That means the full-service POD publishers that used to make a killing are now largely irrelevant to most self-publishing success, even though you’ll find them advertising against Google search results for “self-publishing.” Don’t be immediately lured in; first understand your options, explained below. The Most Common Ways to Self-Publish Today There are several ways to self-publish in today’s market. • Self-publish completely on your own, hiring only the freelance assistance you need, and work directly with retailers and distributors to sell your book. • Self-publish by hiring a service company to basically act as your publisher. • Work with a. This post will expand on how to self-publish completely on your own. Before I explore that process in detail, here’s an explanation of the other choices you have. Self-publish by hiring a service company This is what I call the “write a check and make the headache go away” method of self-publishing. If you have more money than time, and have no interest in being a full-time career author, this may best serve your needs. Service packages and publishing arrangements tremendously vary, but the best services charge an upfront fee, take absolutely no rights to your work, and pass on 100% net sales to the author. They make money on charging authors for the services provided (editorial, design, marketing, and so on), not on copies sold. Such books will almost never be stocked in physical retail bookstores, although in some rare cases, it may happen. Most assisted publishing services have different packages or tiers of service, while others offer customized quotes based on the particular needs of your project. The benefit is that you get a published book without having to figure out the details of the publishing industry or finding freelance professionals you can trust. The best and most expensive services (which can easily exceed $20,000) offer a quality experience that is comparable to working with a traditional publisher. You should avoid companies that take advantage of author inexperience and use high-pressure sales tactics, such as AuthorSolutions imprints (AuthorHouse, iUniverse, WestBow, Archway). Examples of good assisted services include Matador, Mill City Press, DogEar, Radius Book Group, Book in a Box, and Girl Friday Productions. To check the reputation of a service, visit. Publish through a “hybrid” company Some self-publishing (or assisted publishing) services have started calling themselves “hybrid publishers” because it sounds more fashionable and savvy, but such companies may be nothing more than a fancy self-publishing service. Fees dramatically vary and quality dramatically varies. You have to do your research carefully. As with self-publishing service companies, you will fund book publication in exchange for expertise and assistance of the publisher; cost is often in the thousands of dollars. You may receive better royalties than a traditional publishing contract, but you’ll earn less than if self-publishing on your own. Each hybrid publisher has its own distinctive costs and business model; always secure a clear contract with all fees explained. Agents who offer self-publishing services Increasingly, agents are starting to help existing clients as well as new ones digitally publish their work. Help might consist of fee-based services, royalty-based services, and hybrid models. Such practices are controversial because agents’ traditional role is to serve as an advocate for their clients’ interests and negotiate the best possible deals. When agents start publishing their clients’ work and taking their 15% cut of sales, a conflict of interest develops. In their defense, agents are changing their roles in response to industry change, as well as client demand. Regardless of how you proceed, look for flexibility in any agreements you sign. Given the pace of change in the market, it’s not a good idea to enter into an exclusive, long-term contract that locks you into a low royalty rate or into a distribution deal that may fall behind in best practices. Self-Publishing: The DIY Approach I Recommend Today, anyone can get access to the same level of online retail distribution as a traditional publisher, for both print and ebook editions, through services such as,,, and. I will explain how and when to use these services throughout this post. You don’t “pay” these services until your books start to sell. Every time a copy of your book is sold, the retailer takes a cut, and if you use a distributor, they’ll take a cut, too. You, the author, manage the publishing process and hire the right people or services to edit, design, publish, and distribute your book. Every step of the way, you decide which distributors or retailers you prefer to deal with. You retain complete and total control of all artistic and business decisions; you keep all profits and rights. There are many mediums for ebook publishing today. But how does a publisher or author choose which one to use? Or does he or she even have to choose at all? Self-publishing on your own means making decisions about your book’s editorial, design, and production quality. What follows is an explanation of how to self-publish once you have a final, polished manuscript and/or printer-ready files. Some of the services I reference, particularly CreateSpace, offer fee-based services related to editing, design, and marketing. These package services may work OK for your needs, but I think it’s better to hire your own freelancers and always know who you’re working with. Also, you can take a look at, which offers a way for total beginners to prepare ebook and print book files that are ready to be distributed and sold. Setting Up a Formal Publishing Company You don’t have to set up a formal business (e.g., in the United States, you can use your Social Security number for tax purposes), but serious self-publishers will typically set up an LLC at minimum. For the basic information on how to establish your own imprint or publishing company, read Joel Friedlander’s post,. How Ebook Self-Publishing Services Work The first and most important thing to understand about ebook retailers and distributors is that they are not publishers. That means they take no responsibility for the quality of your work, but neither do they take any rights to your work. Here are the characteristics of major services: • Free to play. You rarely pay an upfront fee. When you do pay upfront, usually in the case of a distributor (such as ), you earn 100% net. If you don’t pay an upfront fee, then expect a percentage of your sales to be kept. • At-will and nonexclusive. You can upload your work at any time and make it available for sale; you can also take it down at any time. You can upload new versions; change the price, cover and description; and you can sell your work through multiple services or through your own site. • Little technical expertise required. Major services offer automated tools for converting your files, uploading files, and listing your work for sale, as well as free guides and tutorials to help ensure your files are formatted appropriately. Again, it’s important to emphasize: By using these services, you do not forfeit any of your rights to the work. If a traditional publisher or agent were to approach you after your ebook has gone on sale, you are free to sell rights without any obligation to the services you’ve used. Most e-publishing services fall into one of these categories: • Ebook retailers. Nearly all ebook retailers offer to distribute and sell self-published ebooks through their storefront or device, then take a cut of sales. The biggest and most important of these is Amazon’s. Ebook retailers do not offer any assistance in preparing your ebook files, although they may accept a wide range of file types for upload. • Ebook distributors. These services primarily act as middlemen and push your work out to multiple retailers and distributors. This helps reduce the amount of work an author must do; instead of dealing with many different single channel services, you deal with only one service. The most popular ebook distributors in the United States are and. • Book builders and distributors. These are tools that allow you to create and distribute your work all from one interface. These are most common for children’s books and highly illustrated books, such as One popular approach for independent authors is to sell and distribute directly through Amazon KDP, then use a distributor like Draft2Digital to reach everyone else. Because none of these services demand exclusivity, that’s possible. A note about ISBNs: While an ISBN is not required for basic ebook distribution through most retailers, some distributors and services require one. Therefore, to maximize distribution, you’ll need an ISBN for your ebook. Some self-publishing services will provide you with an ISBN, or you can obtain your own ISBN. (If you’re US-based, you can buy through.) What ebook retailers pay 5. Creating Ebook Files Nearly every service asks you to upload a final ebook file that is appropriately formatted. Services vary widely in the types of files they accept. Because standards are still developing in the ebook world, you may find yourself converting and formatting your book multiple times to satisfy the requirements of different services. Here are the most commonly used formats for ebooks: • EPUB. This is considered a global standard format for ebooks and works seamlessly on most devices. While you cannot export an EPUB file from a Word document, you can save your Word document as a text (.txt) file, then convert and format it using special software. This is the format that’s ideal for Amazon Kindle, although you can also upload an EPUB file. PDFs can be difficult to convert to standard ebook formats. It’s not a recommended starting point for ebook conversion. Most major ebook retailers and distributors accept a Word document and automatically convert it to the appropriate format, but you still must go through an “unformatting” process for best results. All major services offer step-by-step guidelines for formatting your Word documents before you upload them for conversion. Important to note: There is a difference between formatting and converting your book files. Conversion refers to an automated process of converting files from one format into another, without editing or styling. It’s often easy to convert files, but the resulting file may look unprofessional—or even appear unreadable—if not formatted appropriately. Useful tools for formatting and converting ebooks include: •: Free software that converts and helps you format ebook files from more than a dozen different file types. •: popular ebook formatting software for Mac users •. If you’re feeling overwhelmed at the idea of converting and formatting your own ebook files, then you may want to use a distributor or service that’s customer-service oriented in this regard, such as. If your ebook has special layout requirements, heavy illustration, or multimedia components, you should probably hire an independent company to help you ( is one option). But if your book is mostly straight text—such as novels and narrative works—then you might be able to handle the conversion and formatting process without much difficulty if you’re starting with a Word document or text file. Designing an Ebook Cover There are a number of special considerations for ebook cover design. People may see your cover in black and white, grayscale, color, high-resolution, low-resolution, thumbnail size, or full size. It needs to be readable at all sizes and look good on low-quality or mobile devices. For these reasons (and many more), it’s best to hire a professional to create an ebook cover for you. One designer I frequently recommend is. When Ebooks Can Be Problematic Even though ebooks are the best-selling format for self-publishing authors (especially fiction), ask these questions before you begin: • Is your book highly illustrated? Does it require color? If so, you may find there are significant challenges to creating and distributing your ebook across multiple platforms. • Is your book for children? Ebook adoption in the children’s market is in the single digits, unlike the adult market. Ebook-only work will struggle to gain traction. How to Self-Publish a Print Book There are two primary ways to publish and make a print edition available for sale: • Print on demand (POD) • Traditional offset printing Print-on-demand technology allows for books to be printed one at a time. This is by far the most popular way to produce print copies of your book because it reduces financial risk. Pros of print-on-demand • Little or no upfront cost, aside from producing printer-ready files • Your book can be available for sale as a print edition in all the usual online retail outlets (Amazon, BarnesandNoble.com, etc), as well as distributed through Ingram, the largest U.S. Book wholesaler. • Most people cannot tell the difference between a POD book and an offset printed book—at least for black-and-white books. Cons of print-on-demand • The unit cost is much higher, which may lead to a higher retail price. • You may have very few print copies on hand—or it will be expensive to keep ordering print copies to have around. Most books printed by U.S. Traditional publishers are produced through offset printing. To use a traditional printer, you usually need to commit to 1,000 copies minimum. Pros of offset printing • Lower unit cost • Higher quality production values, especially for full-color books • You’ll have plenty of print copies around Cons of offset printing • Considerable upfront investment; $2,000 is the likely minimum, which includes the printing and shipping costs. • Increased risk—what if the books don’t sell or you want to put out a new edition before the old one is sold out? • You’ll have plenty of print copies around—which means you have books to warehouse and fulfill unless you hire a third party to handle it for you, which then incurs additional costs. While it can be fairly straightforward and inexpensive to get a print book in your hands via print-on-demand services, virtually no one can get your book physically ordered or stocked in bookstores. Self-publishing services may claim to distribute your book to stores or make your book available to stores. But this is very different from actually selling your book into bookstores. Bookstores almost never accept or stock titles from any self-publishing service or POD company, although they can special order for customers when asked, assuming the book appears in their system. Also, think through the paradox: Print-on-demand services or technology should be used for books that are printed only when there’s demand. Your book is not going to be nationally distributed and sitting on store shelves unless or until a real order is placed. Investing in a Print Run: Yes or No? The 3 key factors are: • How and where you plan to sell the book. If you frequently speak and have opportunities to sell your books at events, then it makes sense to invest in a print run. Also consider if you’ll want significant quantities to distribute or sell to business partners or organizations, stock in local/regional retail outlets or businesses, give to clients, etc. I do not recommend investing in a print run because you think bookstores or retail outlets will stock your book. If such an opportunity should arise, then you can always invest in a print run after you have a sales order or firm commitment. • Where you’re driving sales. If you’re driving your customers/readers primarily to online retailers, you can fulfill print orders with less hassle and investment by using POD. Ultimately, you do have to use POD regardless if you want to be distributed by the largest U.S. Wholesaler, Ingram. (More info below.) • What your budget is like. Not everyone is comfortable investing in a print run. You also need to anticipate your appetite for handling the warehousing, fulfillment, and shipping of 1,000+ books, unless a third party is handling it for you, which will reduce your profit. When the truck pulls up to your house with several pallets piled high with 30-pound boxes, it will be a significant reality check if you haven’t thought through your decision. Print-on-Demand Recommendations If you choose print-on-demand for your print edition, then I recommend the following: • Use to produce a POD edition for all markets except Amazon. By doing so, your book will be listed and available for order through the largest and most preferred U.S. Wholesaler, Ingram. • Using (a division of Amazon) to produce a POD edition for Amazon sales. For many authors, the majority of sales will be through Amazon. I recommend using both Ingram Spark and CreateSpace to maximize your profits and ensure that no one is discouraged from ordering or stocking the print edition of your book. As you might imagine, independent bookstores aren’t crazy about ordering books provided by CreateSpace/Amazon, their key competitor. However, if you use Ingram Spark to fulfill orders through Amazon, you will reduce your profits because Amazon offers more favorable terms when selling books generated through CreateSpace. So it’s much more advantageous financially to use CreateSpace—but limit the scope of that agreement to just Amazon orders. As soon as your printer-ready files are uploaded, POD books are generally available for order at Amazon within 48 hours. With Ingram Spark, it generally takes 2 weeks for the book to be available through all their channels. Example of Print-on-Demand Earnings This is for a $14.99 standard 6×9 paperback, about 240 pages. Maximizing Your Book Sales With print books, your success is typically driven by the quality of your book, your visibility or reach to your readership, and your cover. With ebooks, the same factors are in play, plus the following: • If you check the ebook bestseller lists, you’ll see that independent novelists charge very little for their work, often somewhere between 99 cents and $2.99. Some argue this devalues the work, while others say that it’s appropriate for an ebook from an unknown author. Whatever your perspective, just understand that, if you’re an unknown author, your competition will probably be priced at $2.99 or less to encourage readers to take a chance. Typically, the more well known or trusted you are, the more you can charge. Note: Nonfiction authors should price according to the competition and what the market can bear. Sometimes prices are just as high for digital editions as print editions in nonfiction categories. • Your Amazon page may be the first and only page a reader looks at when deciding whether to purchase your book. Optimization of this page—the marketing description, the book cover, your author bio, the reviews, and more—is critical for driving sales. • Giveaways are an important part of ebook marketing and sales strategy for indie authors. This is but a scratch on the surface of the world of ebook marketing. More Resources You can read more about self-publishing at the following posts: • • • by David Gaughran • Mick Rooney’s offers in-depth reviews of just about every publishing service out there. Read his review before using any service. You can also hire him for a consultation if you need expert guidance. I Want to Pay Someone to Self-Publish My Book Here are high-quality, full-service publishing providers that I trust. Jane Friedman () has 20 years of experience in the publishing industry, with expertise in digital media strategy for authors and publishers. She is the co-founder and editor of, the essential newsletter on the publishing industry for authors. In addition to being a columnist for Publishers Weekly, Jane is a professor with The Great Courses, which released her 24-lecture series,. She also has a book forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press, (March 2018). Jane speaks regularly at conferences and industry events such as BookExpo America, Digital Book World, and the AWP Conference, and has served on panels with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Creative Work Fund. Post navigation. Jane, I have a question. For me the ISBN is a no-brainer, but what about a CIP? What are your thoughts? To add a few thought myself As far as resources, especially for those doing most of the work, get this: Chicago Manual of Style That is the style guide for publishers and not only talks about the parts of the book, it has all the answers for commas, capitalization, foreign name use, references, etc. If you are copy editing and working from those rules you learnt at school, you are making mistakes. Start looking at books and how they Read more ». Jane, You are so good to do this and so thorough, I hate to nitpick. But I would suggest you fix this first sentence of this piece, to wit: “For most of publishing’s history, if an author wanted to self-publish, they had to invest thousands of dollars with a so-called “vanity” press.” It’s simply not true. There was a vanity press industry. But there were always real options to being ripped off by it for those who truly wanted to publish: starting with contracting a book printer. Dan Poynter’s Self-Publishing Manual championed non-vanity press self-publishing from the mid-1970’s on, but Read more ». Thank you, Jane, for all this great info to get me oriented about ebooks. I have a large Microsoft Visio mind map chart that is 105″ x 325″ but it can be broken up into smaller pieces. Given your understanding of the current state of ebooks and the device technologies, do you think it will be practical for me to pursue publishing this content in ebook format? Or should I pursue the traditional techie’s approach of having customers pay and download the files as PDF docs from my own website? I expect your informed opinion may save me a lot Read more ». Publishing Your Own Electronic Book (Ebook) by Christopher Heng, You may have seen them around on the Internet. Some of them are available free of charge. Others have to be bought. A couple of Stephen King's latest stories are available only in that form. I'm talking about electronic books (or ebooks), of course. In the age of the Internet, newsletters and ezines are not the only things you can publish without recourse to a big name publisher. Now, anyone can publish their own book. Why Should You Publish Your Own Book? Besides wanting to immortalize your name, here are a couple of reasons why you might want to publish your own electronic book (eBook). • Publicity for your website or business Why do you think so many people on the Internet are giving away electronic books? Free ebooks, like other free things, spread fast. They become an easy way for you to publicize your website or business. Of course, for that to happen, your Ebook needs to be more than just an advertising brochure - it really has to have something worth reading for people to bother to read and pass it on. • For Sale Electronic books for sale are becoming increasingly common on the web. As mentioned earlier, even Stephen King has taken to publishing electronically. It's becoming an acceptable medium in this age of electronic communication. Advantages of Electronic Publishing Over Hardcopy Publishing The beauty of publishing your book electronically is that your costs are incredibly low (relative to hardcopy publishing). You only need to get the software to create the ebook, and nowadays, you can even get that free of charge. Whether you sell or distribute 1000 copies of your eBook or just one copy, your cost of producing the ebook remains at that same fixed cost it took to produce the first copy. In fact, once you've bought your software, you can produce any number of Ebooks without incurring any additional cost. Another advantage is that you do not need to try to find a publisher to accept your work. You can be your own publisher and distributor. What Should I Write? As in the case of publishing newsletters, you should of course write on things you're familiar with. If your intention is to publicize your website or your business, your topic should of course be related to what you're promoting. That way, people will come to see you as an expert in that field and go to your site for more information and help. Steps To Take • Get the software for you to create an electronic book (see below). • Write your ebook. • Use the software to convert your document to the electronic book format. • Make your ebook available from your website. Note that even if you wish to sell your Ebook, you should still have a sample of your eBook available freely to whet the appetites of your prospective customers. • Publicize your ebook. The Common Ebook Formats • Portable Document Format (PDF) The most common ebook format for self-publication nowadays is the Portable Document Format, or the PDF. In fact, it is so widely used that even though there are no official standards for ebooks, it is virtually the de facto standard on the Internet. The PDF format has the advantage that it can be read on any platform: there are for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Unix (various), handheld computers, etc. Although these viewers have to be downloaded separately for some systems, PDF files are so widely available and used nowadays that many people already have them on their systems. Many off-the-shelf computer systems are typically sold with the reader pre-installed. The fact that PDF files are multi-platform means not only that users of any type of computer can read your book, but also that they can read your book on their handheld devices (eg, PDAs, tablets, smartphones) when travelling, etc, giving you an additional selling point for your book. Ebooks in this format function almost like a real book — they are portable. Familiarity with the PDF is another advantage of this format. Visitors seeing that the book is a PDF file will not flinch (much) about downloading it and reading it. In fact, on a number of commercial business-to-business sites, many documents and white papers are only available in PDF. There are many available. In addition, the most modern, including Microsoft Word, also have the ability to save a file in the PDF format. Note: after you create your PDF ebook, if you need information on how to put it on your website and link to it, check out the article. • Electronic Publication (EPUB) Another format sometimes used for ebooks is the EPUB. It is supported by a number of e-book devices, including the iPhone, iPad, Nook, Sony Reader, and so on (although not the Kindle, at the date of this writing). Unfortunately, if your target audience primarily uses computer desktops, it may not be the ideal choice either, since they will have to install additional software just to read it. To create one, you will need an editor or wordprocessor that can save to the EPUB format. • Raw HTML Format The raw HTML format is self-explanatory. It can be read by anyone with a web browser. The major disadvantage of this method is that if you require more than one file for your book, some readers may become confused and not know which file to start with. To create files in such format, simply use whatever software that you currently use to create your website, be it like or, or commercial editors like. Of course, if there are multiple pages, you will probably need to distribute your ebook in some sort of archive format, like in a zip file, and give instructions to your readers how they can, and which file to click on to start reading. • Windows Executable File Another possible format to use is the Windows executable file (EXE file). To use this format, you will need an ebook 'compiler' that converts your document into a Windows program. When your reader runs the file, a built-in viewer will display the book for him/her to read. This format has a couple of major disadvantages. Firstly, with the proliferation of viruses and adware on the Internet, many visitors are suspicious of having to run an executable file just to read a document. Putting your book in this format may put off such people. Secondly, your audience is restricted to Windows users. In the past, this format had the advantage that you do not need to tell your visitors to download a specialized viewer to read the file. They can just double-click the file. Nowadays, I feel that this advantage is more than offset by its disadvantages and the fact that other formats like the PDF can also be read by most people simply by double-clicking the file, since they already have the viewer on their systems. Probably the only remaining advantage this format has is if you want to impose some sort of restrictions or protection for your ebooks, commonly called 'DRM'. For example if you are selling ebooks, and you don't trust your buyers not to distribute it to others, some ebook compilers provide features like including a serial number into every ebook and password-protecting pages. Note that although I mention this as 'advantage', it may actually come back to bite you since users typically don't like DRM protections, and they tend to cause their own share of system compatibility problems. I personally don't recommend this method, for the reasons mentioned above. • Proprietary Formats There are numerous other proprietary formats for ebooks, such as those you get if you publish through third party publishers like. However, since this article is about self-publication, I will not deal with those. How to Increase Sales of Your Ebook: Create a 3D Image of your Book After creating your book and putting it online, you may also want to consider creating a picture of your ebook (see picture below for an example). Although your publication is not a physical product like a printed book, having a 3D image of your ebook serves many purposes: • It gives you a relevant picture to display for your e-publication. Since yours is an electronic product, you don't really have a picture to show for it. A 3D book cover image is as good a pictorial representation as any. • It makes your product seem more tangible in people's minds. Although they know that they'll be getting an ebook, a photo of it somehow makes your book more like a worthwhile purchase. • It helps people to associate your product with things usually connected to a printed book: something that may contains useful content that they can learn from or be entertained. The picture can be created using any. Is It Worth The Effort? Publishing electronic books can provide you with an additional revenue stream (if you're selling them) and a means of promoting your website (there's nothing like a freebie to attract people to your site or business). In an era when millions of sites are competing for the same audience, every little bit helps. Copyright 2000-2017 by Christopher Heng. All rights reserved. Get more free tips and articles like, on web design, promotion, revenue and scripting, from. You are here: > > thesitewizard™ News Feed (RSS Site Feed) Do you find this article useful? You can learn of new articles and scripts that are published on by subscribing to the RSS feed. Simply point your RSS feed reader or a browser that supports RSS feeds. You can from my. Please Do Not Reprint This Article This article is copyrighted. Please do not reproduce or distribute this article in whole or part, in any form. Related Pages • • • • • • • • • New Articles • • • • • • • • • • Popular Articles • • • • • • • • How to Link to This Page To link to this page from your website, simply cut and paste the following code to your web page. Publishing Your Own Electronic Book (Ebook) It will appear on your page as. Harry Potter ha sco th h ul. HARRY POTTERAND THE SORCERER'S STONE. Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone / by J.K. Summary: Rescued from. Ley, however, had a perfectly normal, owl-free morning. Harry Potter has no idea how famous he is. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.; 0 Facebook. More Free Ebooks. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Harry, an orphan, lives with the Dursleys, his horrible aunt and uncle, and their abominable son, Dudley. One day just before his eleventh birthday, an owl tries to deliver a mysterious letter—the first of a sequence of events that end in Harry meeting a giant man named Hagrid. Hagrid explains Harry's history to him: When he was a baby, the Dark wizard, Lord Voldemort, attacked and killed his parents in an attempt to kill Harry; but the only mark on Harry was a mysterious lightning-bolt scar on his forehead. Now he has been invited to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where the headmaster is the great wizard Albus Dumbledore. Harry visits Diagon Alley to get his school supplies, especially his very own wand. To get to school, he takes the Hogwarts Express from platform nine and three-quarters at King's Cross Station. On the train, he meets two fellow students who will become his closest friends: Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. Harry is assigned to Gryffindor House at Hogwarts, and soon becomes the youngest-ever Seeker on the House Quidditch team. He also studies Potions with Professor Severus Snape, who displays a deep and abiding dislike for Harry, and Defense Against the Dark Arts with nervous Professor Quirrell; he and his friends defeat a mountain troll, help Hagrid raise a dragon, and explore the wonderful, fascinating world of Hogwarts. But all events lead irrevocably toward a second encounter with Lord Voldemort, who seeks an object of legend known as the Sorcerer's Stone. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Harry, an orphan, lives with the Dursleys, his horrible aunt and uncle, and their abominable son, Dudley. One day just before his eleventh birthday, an owl tries to deliver a mysterious letter—the first of a sequence of events that end in Harry meeting a giant man named Hagrid. Hagrid explains Harry's history to him: When he was a baby, the Dark wizard, Lord Voldemort, attacked and killed his parents in an attempt to kill Harry; but the only mark on Harry was a mysterious lightning-bolt scar on his forehead. Now he has been invited to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where the headmaster is the great wizard Albus Dumbledore. Harry visits Diagon Alley to get his school supplies, especially his very own wand. To get to school, he takes the Hogwarts Express from platform nine and three-quarters at King's Cross Station. On the train, he meets two fellow students who will become his closest friends: Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger. Harry is assigned to Gryffindor House at Hogwarts, and soon becomes the youngest-ever Seeker on the House Quidditch team. He also studies Potions with Professor Severus Snape, who displays a deep and abiding dislike for Harry, and Defense Against the Dark Arts with nervous Professor Quirrell; he and his friends defeat a mountain troll, help Hagrid raise a dragon, and explore the wonderful, fascinating world of Hogwarts. But all events lead irrevocably toward a second encounter with Lord Voldemort, who seeks an object of legend known as the Sorcerer's Stone. Reviews - • stonegoble - I read this series 4 years ago and I absolutley love it! I never thought I liked fiction ( only historical and realistic) but after reading this is changed how I viewed these kind of books. The book is about a boy named Harry Potter who has been brought up always knowing his parents passed away in a car crash. He has had to live for 11 years with his Uncle Vernon, Aunt Petunia and his plump cousin Dudley. During his stay he was never loved, never got to celebrate his birthday, and thats saying a lot compared to Dudley who whines that he only got 26 presents and not 27. In his mind what can be worse? Living in a cupboard under the stairs, never getting mail, Dudley stomping on his tiny called 'bedroom'. So the average day Harry picks up the mail to find a letter for no other that HIM HIMSELF, addressed Mr. H Potter 'the cupoard under the stairs' 4 privet drive little whining surrey. And thats when it all starts, I WOULD LOVE TO BE ABLE TO WIN THIS BOOK AS I COLLECT THE NEW EDITIONS OF EACH HARRY POTTER AND I AM A MASSIVE FAN! I DRESSED UP AS GINNY WEASLEY FOR HALLOWEEN, I HAVE 4 WANDS BEEN TO THE HARRY POTTER THINGY AT UNIVERSAL STUDIOS AND THE SET IN LONDON! I AM A BIG FAN AND I WOULD LOVE TO WIN THIS! | Sign In You will be prompted to sign into your library account on the next page. If this is your first time selecting “Send to NOOK,” you will then be taken to a Barnes & Noble page to sign into (or create) your NOOK account. You should only have to sign into your NOOK account once to link it to your library account. After this one-time step, periodicals will be automatically sent to your NOOK account when you select 'Send to NOOK.' The first time you select “Send to NOOK,” you will be taken to a Barnes & Noble page to sign into (or create) your NOOK account. You should only have to sign into your NOOK account once to link it to your library account. After this one-time step, periodicals will be automatically sent to your NOOK account when you select 'Send to NOOK.' You can read periodicals on any NOOK tablet or in the free NOOK reading app for,. I have little desire to rehash the politics, but the facts are plain: by the time I arrived in college as an undergraduate English major in the mid-90s, the idea of the “Western Canon” as a container of—in the words of —“all that’s good, and great, and true” was seriously on the wane, to put it mildly. And in many quarters of academia, mention of the name of Yale literary critic provoked, at the very least, a raised eyebrow and pointed silence. Editorial Reviews. Amazon.com Review. Discussed and debated, revered and reviled, Bloom's tome reinvigorates and re-examines Western Literature, arguing against the politicization of reading. His erudite passion will encourage you to hurry and finish his book so you can pick up Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens once. Mar 22, 2014 Twenty years after the publication of “The Western Canon,” Pankaj Mishra and Daniel Mendelsohn discuss how we would react to such a book in 2014. Bloom’s reputation perhaps unfairly fell victim to the so-called “,” likely at times because of a misidentification with political philosopher. That Bloom was himself no ideologue,; he was a close friend of Saul Bellow and “an eccentric interpreter of Enlightenment thought who led an Epicurean, quietly gay life.” Nonetheless, his fiery attack on changing academic values,, became a textbook of the neoconservative right. Though Harold Bloom wished to distance himself from culture war polemics, he has unapologetically practiced what Allan Bloom preached, teaching the Canonical 'great books' of literature and religion and opposing all manner of critics on the left, whom he lumps together in the phrase “the School of Resentment.” Bloom’s 1973 has itself exerted a major influence on literary studies, and best-selling popular works, like 1998’s, have kept Harold Bloom’s name in circulation even when scholarly citations of his work declined. In 1994, Bloom re-affirmed his commitment to the Canon with, a fierce sortie against his so-called “School of Resentment” adversaries and a work a “heroically brave, formidably learned and often unbearably sad response to the present state of the humanities.” ( in a 1995 CBC interview.) The Western Canon is tightly focused on only 26 authors, but in a series of four appendices, Bloom lists the hundreds of other names he considers canonical. For all of Bloom’s ornery defensiveness, his list is surprisingly inclusive, as well as—for Fruman—surprisingly idiosyncratic. (Bloom later disavowed the list, claiming that his editor insisted on it.) Like a classical philologist, Bloom divides his Canon into four “ages” or periods: The Theocratic Age (2000 BCE-1321 CE); The Aristocratic Age (1321-1832); The Democratic Age: 1832-1900); and The Chaotic Age (20th Century). Below, we’ve compiled a very partial, but still sizable, excerpt of texts from Bloom’s list that are available online through the University of Adelaide's ebook library. For all of the unpopular positions he has taken over the past few decades, Bloom’s immense erudition, expansive intellect, and sincere commitment to the humanities have never been in question. As a distinguished exemplar of a fading tradition, he is an invaluable resource for students and lovers of literature. A: “The Theocratic Age” The Ancient Greeks Iliad; Odyssey. Works and Days; Theogony. Oresteia; Seven Against Thebes; Prometheus Bound; Persians; Suppliant Women. Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone; Electra; Ajax; Women of Trachis; Philoctetes. Cyclops; Heracles; Alcestis; Hecuba; Bacchae; Orestes; Andromache; Medea; Ion; Hippolytus; Helen; Iphigenia at Aulis. The Birds; The Clouds; The Frogs; Lysistrata; The Knights; The Wasps; The Assemblywomen. The Histories. The Peloponnesian Wars. Poetics; Ethics. Hellenistic Greeks The Girl from Samos. Lives; Moralia. The Romans The Girl from Andros; The Eunuch; The Mother-in-Law. The Way Things Are. Odes; Epistles; Satires. Attis and Other Poems. Aeneid; Eclogues; Georgics. Metamorphoses; The Art of Love; Heroides. Tragedies, particularly Medea and Hercules Furens. The Golden Ass. The Middle Ages: Latin, Arabic, and the Vernacular Before Dante City of God; Confessions. Yvain: The Knight of the Lion. England and Scotland The Canterbury Tales; Troilus and Criseyde. Le Morte D'Arthur. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia; Astrophel and Stella; An Apology for Poetry. The Faerie Queene; The Minor Poems. Poems and Plays. The Unfortunate Traveller. Plays and Poems. Poems; Sermons. Poems, Plays, and Masques. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Religio Medici; Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Buriall; The Garden of Cyrus. 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. The White Devil; The Duchess of Malfi. The Compleat Angler. Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained; Lycidas, Comus, and the Minor Poems; Samson Agonistes; Areopagitica. Poetry and Plays; Critical Essays. A Tale of a Tub; Gulliver's Travels; Shorter Prose Works; Poems. The Beggar's Opera. Life of Johnson; Journals. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful; Reflections on the Revolution in France The Vicar of Wakefield; She Stoops to Conquer; The Traveller; The Deserted Village. The School of Scandal; The Rivals. Poetical Works. Moll Flanders; Robinson Crusoe; A Journal of the Plague Year. Clarissa; Pamela; Sir Charles Grandison. Joseph Andrews; The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker; The Adventures of Roderick Random. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. Great Britain Complete Poetry and Prose. Poems; The Prelude. Waverley; The Heart of Midlothian; Redgauntlet; Old Mortality. Pride and Prejudice; Emma; Mansfield Park; Persuasion. Poems and Prose. Essays and Criticism. Don Juan; P oems. Confessions of an English Opium Eater; Selected Prose. Castle Rackrent. Cranford; Mary Barton; North and South. Melmoth the Wanderer. Poems; A Defence of Poetry. Poems and Letters. Poems; The Ring and the Book. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club; David Copperfield; The Adventures of Oliver Twist; A Tale of Two Cities; Bleak House; Hard Times; Nicholas Nickleby; Dombey and Son; Great Expectations; Martin Chuzzlewit; Christmas Stories; Little Dorrit; Our Mutual Friend; The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Poems and Translations. Poems; Essays. Nightmare Abbey; Gryll Grange. Selected Prose; Sartor Resartus. Modern Painters; The Stones of Venice; Unto This Last; The Queen of the Air. On Liberty; Autobiography. The Barsetshire Novels; The Palliser Novels; Orley Farm; The Way We Live Now. Complete Works. New Grub Street. Jane Eyre; Villette. Poems; Wuthering Heights. Vanity Fair; The History of Henry Esmond. Poems; The Egoist. Collected Poems; The Man Who Was Thursday. Erewhon; The Way of All Flesh. The Moonstone; The Woman in White; No Name. The City of the Dreadful Night. Plays; The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Artist as Critic; Letters. Adam Bede; Silas Marner; The Mill on the Floss; Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda. Essays; Kidnapped; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Treasure Island; The New Arabian Nights; The Master of Ballantrae; Weir of Hermiston. Early Romances; Poems; The Earthly Paradise; The Well at the World's End; News from Nowhere. Lilith; At the Back of the North Wind. Russia Complete Prose Tales; Complete Poetry; Eugene Onegin; Narrative Poems; Boris Godunov. The Complete Tales; Dead Souls; The Government Inspector. Narrative Poems; A Hero of Our Time. A Sportsman's Notebook; A Month in the Country; Fathers and Sons; On the Eve; First Love. Notes from the Underground; Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed (The Devils); The Brothers Karamazov; Short Novels. The Cossacks; War and Peace; Anna Karenina; A Confession; The Power of Darkness; Short Novels. The Tales; The Major Plays. The United States The Sketch Book. The Deerslayers. Nature; Essays; Representative Men; The Conduct of Life; Journals; Poems. Complete Poems. The Scarlet Letter; Tales and Sketches; The Marble Faun; Notebooks. Moby-Dick; The Piazza Tales; Billy Budd; Collected Poems; Clarel. Poetry and Tales; Essays and Reviews; The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; Eureka. Walden; Poems; Essays. Selected Poems. Collected Writings. Little Women. The Awakening. The Rise of Silas Lapham; A Modern Instance. The Portrait of a Lady; The Bostonians; The Princess Casamassima; The Awkward Age; Short Novels and Tales; The Ambassadors; The Wings of the Dove; The Golden Bowl Complete Short Stories; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Devil's Racetrack; Number Forty-Four: The Mysterious Stranger; Pudd'nhead Wilson; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism. Great Britain and Ireland. The Collected Poems; Collected Plays; A Vision; Mythologies. Major Critical Essays; Heartbreak House; Pygmalion; Saint Joan; Major Barbara; Back to Methuselah. Collected Plays. The House with the Green Shutters. The Well-Beloved; The Woodlanders; The Return of the Native; The Mayor of Casterbridge; Far From the Madding Crowd; Tess of the D'Urbervilles; Jude the Obscure; Collected Poems. Kim; Collected Stories; Puck of Pook's Hill; Complete Verse. Collected Poems. Lord Jim; The Secret Agent; Nostromo; Under Western Eyes; Victory. Parade's End; The Good Soldier. The Short Stories. The Science Fiction Novels. A Voyage to Arcturus. The Old Wives' Tale. The Forsyth Saga. Complete Poems; Studies in Classic American Literature; Complete Short Stories; Sons and Lovers; The Rainbow; Women in Love. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse; Orlando: A Biography; The Waves; Between the Acts. Dubliners; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses; Finnegans Wake. Collected Essays; 1984. The United States. Collected Short Stories; The Age of Innocence; Ethan Frome; The House of Mirth; The Custom of the Country. My Antonia; The Professor's House; A Lost Lady. Three Lives; The Geographical History of America; The Making of Americans; Tender Buttons. Sister Carrie; An American Tragedy. Babbitt; It Can't Happen Here. Lazarus Laughed; The Iceman Cometh; Long Day's Journey into Night. Babylon Revisited and Other Stories; The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night. Miss Lonelyhearts; A Cool Million; The Day of the Locust. Of this last Appendix--which ends with Tony Kushner's Angels in America and includes a great degree of diversity--Bloom writes: “I am not as confident about this list as the first three. Cultural prophecy is always a mug's game. Not all of the works here can prove to be canonical... Literary overpopulation is a hazard to many among them. But I have neither excluded nor included on the basis of cultural politics of any kind.” Again, the selections above are very limited. Before you ask, 'what about x, y, or z!' And if you still do not find authors you believe deserve inclusion in any version of the Western Canon, pick up to learn more about his critical criteria. A decent number of the texts above can also be found in our and collections. Related Content: is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. An interview with Harold Bloom Harold Bloom offers an in-depth interview discussing his inspiration to writing How To Read and Why?, what he believes most threatens the future of reading (and its not just TV!), and why technological means of obtaining information threaten our human growth in self-knowledge, introspection, compassion and spiritual discernment. He also discusses his favorite book to teach and the three people who inspired him most. What inspired you to write How To Read and Why? With both The Western Canon published back in 1994 and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human published in 1998, I had toured extensively and found an astonishing response from the audiences I addressed and from people who talked to me and people for whom I was signing books. To this day, I am deluged with mail from people who say how desperately pleased they are to find that someone is indeed writing about literature for the common reader, that someone does not try, as it were, to do the French thing, in regard to literary study or the many ideological modes which I will not mention, which are now practiced in the Anglo-American Universities and college world. The more I thought about the response to these two books I had written, the more I realized that neither of them had really addressed a need which I felt highly qualified and highly driven to meet. And that is, a self-help book, indeed, an inspiration book, which would not only encourage solitary readers of all kinds all over the world to go on reading for themselves, but also support them in their voyages of self-discovery through reading. [ How To Read and Why is meant to] give readers a human aid to their own reading, not to tell them what to read, because to some extent I had done that in The Western Canon, but to tell them indeed how to read, and even more than how, to remind them why we have to go on reading, why indeed it's a kind of death in life if we yield completely to what William Wordsworth called the 'tyranny of the bodily eye,' that is to say, the tyranny of the visual at a time when we are so bombarded by information of a visual kind. What do you think is the single greatest threat to the future of reading? I used to believe, until fairly recently, that the greatest threat was both visual over-stimulation--television, films, computers, virtual reality, and so on--and also auditory over-stimulation, you know, what I call rock religion, MTV, rap, all of these mindless burstings of the eardrums. And, of course, I think what has happened to education on every level, from grade school through graduate school throughout the English speaking world, is an increasing menace to disinterested and passionate reading, reading not governed by ideological and other social considerations. But more recently, I have reached the very sad conclusion that what most threatens the future of reading is the, I will not say probability--I would become very wretched indeed--but the real possibility of the disappearance of the book. I begin to fear that what it means to be alone with a book--the various ways in which you can hold a book in your own hands and turn the pages and write in the margins when you are moved to do so, underline or emphasize when you are moved to do so--might almost vanish, that the technological overkill of the latest developments we are moving towards, the e-book sort of thing which Mr. Gates and others are proclaiming might perhaps put the book in jeopardy. And I really don't think that without the book we are going to survive. You can have a technological elite without the book, but you cannot finally have a humanely educated portion of the public that is able to teach to others. As a matter of fact, I think what you will really have is the death of humane teaching, as such. What can people get from reading that they can't from movies or television? I would say not less than everything. You can get a great deal of information, as such, from screens of one sort or another. You can dazzle yourself with images, if that is your desire. But how you are to grow in self-knowledge, become more introspective, discover the authentic treasures of insight and of compassion and of spiritual discernment and of a deep bond to other solitary individuals, how in fact can like call out to like without reading, I do not know. I suppose if I were to put it in almost a common denominator sort of way, I would say that you cannot even begin to heal the worst aspects of solitude, which are loneliness and potential madness, by visual experience of any kind, particularly the sort of mediated visual experience that you get off a screen of whatever sort. If you are to really encounter a human otherness which finds an answering chorus in yourself, which can become an answering chorus to your own sense of inward isolation, there truly is no authentic place to turn except to a book. You talk in the book about contemporary readers having difficulty comprehending irony in literature of earlier times. Why do you think this is a problem? Irony by definition is the saying of one thing while meaning another, sometimes indeed quite the opposite of what overtly you are saying. It's very difficult to have the highest kind of imaginative literature from Homer through Don DeLillo, as it were, and entirely avoid irony. There is the tragic irony, which one confronts everywhere in Shakespeare, that the audience, the auditor, and the reader are aware of--something in the character or predicament or inward affects, emotions of the protagonist or protagonists, that the heroes and heroines are totally unaware of themselves. It's very difficult to convey this quality of irony by purely visual means. Visual ironies tend to fall flat or they vulgarize very quickly or they become grotesque. Really subtle irony of any sort demands literary language. The way in which meaning tends to wander in any really interesting literary text, so that the reader is challenged to go into exile with it, catch up with it, learn how to construe it, make it her very own, is essentially a function of irony. If we totally lose our ability to recognize and to understand irony, then we will be doomed to a kind of univocal discourse, which is alright I suppose for politicians' speeches and perhaps for certain representatives of popular religion, but will leave us badly defrauded. What books or poems have you returned to most often over the course of your life? The primary answer has to be Shakespeare. Even if I did not teach Shakespeare all the time, I would always be re-reading Shakespeare, reciting Shakespeare to myself, brooding about the great plays. I tend personally to re-read the major lyric poets of the English language from Shakespeare's sonnets through Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane. That's what most vivifies and pleases me. I re-read Jonathan Swift's A Tale of the Tub twice a year, but that's to punish myself. It is, I think, the most powerful, nonfictive prose in the English language, but it's a kind of vehement satire upon visionary projectors as it were, like myself, and so I figure it is a good tonic and corrective for me. I re-read Proust every year because In Search of Lost Time is just about my favorite novel, except maybe for Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, which I also tend to re-read every year or so. I re-read Dickens all the time, especially my peculiar favorite which I've loved since I was a child, The Pickwick Papers. I re-read Oscar Wilde nearly every day of my life, or I recite Oscar to myself, but that's a personal enthusiasm which perhaps surpasses his literary worth, very large as that indeed is. Samuel Johnson all the time because he is my great hero as a literary critic and I have tried to model myself upon him all my life. But this answer would be endless, since I do very little besides teach and read and write. What is your favorite book to teach? Oh, most certainly, Shakespeare. Teaching either the high tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, or the greatest of the comedies, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, or what may be, I think, the finest, most representative instance of what Shakespeare can do, the two parts of King Henry IV, taken together, considered as one play, in which, of course, the central figure is my particular literary hero, Sir John Falstaff. And the so-called late romances, which are really tragi-comedies, particularly The Tempest and The Winter's Tale. Did you have a teacher who was a particular inspiration to you? I was deeply inspired and helped greatly, humanly, by three of my teachers in particular. When I was at Cornell undergraduate, I came very much under the influence and the kind guidance of M. Abrams, Meyer Howard Abrams, who I'm delighted to say is still alive. He's 88 years old now, one of the leading, perhaps the leading scholar of English Romantic poetry in the 20th century. Then when I became a graduate student at Yale, I was much under the influence of Frederick A. Pottle, who was a Johnson and Boswell scholar and a Romantic scholar, and is remembered best now for writing a large two-volume definitive biography of James Boswell and for his work on the Boswell papers. He was a tremendous steadying influence upon me. I was a sort of wild young man with fierce opinions of every sort and congenitally unable to see anybody else's point of view. Pottle was sufficiently strenuous in urging a proper care upon me for the really civilized and well thought-through and valid opinions of others, not just any opinions. But I think he did me a vast amount of good. The third person would be the late dean of Yale College, William Clyde Devane, a great Browning scholar. I was his student also, but mostly he was too busy during those 25 years, first when I was a graduate student and then when I was a younger and beginning-to-be-middle-aged person on the faculty. He was too busy running Yale College to give me much direct instruction, but he took a great interest in me, defended me against my Yale enemies, as Professor Pottle did, and I had plenty of enemies, some of whom I no doubt deserved and some of whom I didn't deserve. But he was a fountain of wisdom. He was a man of enormous worldly insight, but of still an idealistic kind, and he took the long view. Even if I never quite learned from him to take as long a view as William Clyde Devane could take, he had a strong effect upon me. I suppose also, you know, I would say that Meyer Howard Abrams and Frederick Albert Pottle and William Clyde Devane were, in their very different way, very wise men. I say at the beginning of How to Read and Why, 'information is readily available to us; where shall wisdom be found,' which is an ancient Biblical question. I found wisdom in those three teachers in particular. While I'm not trying to be a guru or anything of that sort, any more than they tried to be or actually were gurus, any hard-won wisdom of my own comes primarily from what they started in me and from the deep reading of what by now must be literally hundreds of thousands of books-ingesting them, memorizing them, voluntarily and involuntarily, pondering them, always turning them over in my mind. How did you choose which works to discuss in the book? As I made very clear in one of the earlier sentences of the book, there is nothing prescriptive about the book. It isn't trying to tell you what to read; it is really trying to tell you how to read and why to read. It is a self-help and inspirational kind of manual, as it were. And as I say very clearly at the beginning, whether I'm dealing with any of my five categories, European novels, American novels, short stories, poetry, or plays, I can only give samples. I tried to take samples that were really in some deep way central to the experience of the reader, but that were also to some degree, varied, and above all else accessible. I wanted them to be accessible stories, accessible novels, very familiar works if possible, or familiar to many readers, if not to most or all readers. (I would have to admit that Shelley's The Triumph of Life may be a little too difficult for the purposes of the book, but I felt that by then one could try a really difficult poem on the reader.) But it's very, very difficult to try to write such a book and keep it to about whatever this is, 285-or-so pages, and not seem to be purely arbitrary or purely personal in the books that you choose. Thus some of my friends who are poets and novelists and playwrights, though they like the book, have questioned why one writer is there rather than another, and I'm not always sure that I can give an answer that will altogether satisfy or appease them. To some extent, the choices had to be, in part, arbitrary. But I think they are all of them representative. I think they are almost all of them accessible to a reader with good will who is willing to work a little. I think that all of them are beautiful, to use a term that we should not let go of. They are all of them aesthetically rewarding to the highest degree. And I think that all of them have either a great wisdom or, quite manifestly, a great unwisdom, which teaches you a good deal also. When I re-read the book in proof the other day, I realized that without meaning to do so, I had at one time or another, whether I was dealing with novelists, storywriters, poets, or dramatists, found myself reflecting upon and trying to say something useful about the quite palpable influence of Shakespeare upon all of these writers. And he has been, of course, in all European languages, probably with the exception of French, the inescapable influence, the inescapable presence for the last four centuries, since he is, after all, the largest and most powerful writer that we know. In the prologue you write, 'Ultimately we read in order to strengthen the self.' As you have noticed, self-help books top bestseller lists. How can reading great literature provide an alternative to these manuals? In the self-help and inspirational category, to be perfectly fair, most things that are published, or that sell widely, are really intellectually and spiritually rather thin. They don't challenge a reader in any way, and I'm afraid frequently tend to flatter a reader in preconceptions and misconceptions and easy adjustments to one's own self. So the question is, how can one possibly hope to vie with, to compete with, self-help books of that sort in presenting a book on how to read and why. I suppose pragmatically is the only answer I can give. I have tried to be as simple and clear as I either can be or can be induced to be. It is a very direct book, I think. It addresses the reader--whether he or she be young or old, whatever their background--quite intimately. The purpose of the book, and I hope the achievement of the book, is to get in very close to a reader and try to speak directly to what it is that they either might want out of the book or might be persuaded to see: that truly, though they may not have been aware of it, this is what they want and only really first-rate imaginative literature can bring it to them. For example, they want Chekhov's short stories, because they are not only so poignant but have the uncanny faculty, rather like Shakespeare in that regard, to persuade the reader or the auditor that certain truths about himself or herself, which are totally authentic, totally real, are being demonstrated to the reader for the very first time. It's not as though Shakespeare or Chekhov has created those truths. It's just that without the assistance of Shakespeare and Chekhov, we might never be able to see what is really there. Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder. From Matrubharti is an eBook Reading Library for Indian Regional Language readers. Matrubharti has recently achieved 1, 000, 000 ebook downloads in first year itself. 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