Turn your manuscript into an e-book and make money doing it. This course will take you step-by-step through publishing your own e-books and building your writer's platform or brand, to be successful selling them.
If you can use a word processor, have a book written (or have an idea for one), and want to see your name in print, you just might have what it takes to succeed in self-publishing.
This course introduces you to everything you need to know to do a professional job of turning your manuscript into a book that will help you make money on the Internet, whether you want to self-publish a novel, a nonfiction book, or a picture book. You will learn how to format your e-book and get it ready to sell through bookstores like Amazon and Apple. By the end of the course, you could have your e-book published in over 100 countries worldwide and available to libraries and book clubs.
This course and its follow-up Introduction to Writing Markets, take you step-by-step through publishing your own e-books and building your writer's platform or brand, to be successful selling them. Take the first step to publishing success, and sign up today.
What you will learn
Learn to format your e-book and get it ready to sell
Learn about the publishing industry and tricks of the trade used by publishers
Discover marketing strategies and create a plan to sell your e-books
Learn ways to convert your e-book into different formats
Learn to use Calibre which is a e-book management tool
Discover ways to get your books into the hands of readers.
How you will benefit
Understand how to self-publish and e-book
Prepare and format your manuscript for e-book publication
Make final preparations and informed decisions required for publication
Know your options for making your e-book available to readers worldwide
How the course is taught
Instructor-led online course
6 Weeks access
24 course hours
Outline
You've probably heard that e-books get a bigger share of the book market every day. In fact, e-book sales have put millions of dollars in the hands of previously unpublished authors, midlist authors who've had modest print sales, and established authors who've decided to strike out on their own. Did you know that when you publish your own e-book, you can earn up to 10 times higher royalties? In this lesson, you'll meet some successful trailblazers in the e-book industry, find out which e-book genres sell best, discover how much money you can make publishing your own e-books, and explore the difference between fixed, reflowable, and responsive format e-books. This lesson will help you plan your exciting future as an independent e-book publisher.
In this lesson, you're going to start getting your e-book ready for publication, much like you would prepare a great manuscript for an editor at a publishing house. You want to make sure you have a great story that hangs together or a nonfiction book that's error-free. One of the best starts you can give your e-book when you send it off into the world is to make sure it's up to today's standards—with proper grammar, spelling, and style. In this lesson, you'll find out how to use tools to make this task simple and fast!
In this lesson, you'll start the first steps of the publishing process. You'll learn how to create a reader profile describing your ideal reader and apply what you've learned to your marketing plan. The lesson will share two book profiles with you and you'll see how they can be used to help you write the book descriptions, select the titles, and create the covers. This lesson is filled with lots of tips that will help you find readers for your book when it's launched.
For this lesson, you'll look at a few things you should do before publishing your book. First, you'll learn about copyright registration. This may help ensure that you're compensated if someone uses part of your book once it's in the bookstores! To make your book available in bookstores, you may also want to get an ISBN, which stands for International Standard Book Number. This identifies your book worldwide. You'll learn how that works and what your options are. Finally, you'll examine CIP, or Cataloging in Publication, data, along with PCIP. This is the information librarians add to their catalog so that they can circulate your book to their patrons.
This lesson takes you "under the covers" of your book to your title page and all the front and back matter you want to add. You'll need to consider the author name you want to use, or whether you want to use your own name at all. This is a big decision, so you'll look at a number of things you should consider. Once that's done and you've typed all the information into your book and formatted it, you'll learn how to add a table of contents and hyperlinks so that your reader can move around easily. This lesson will give you lots to think about and lots to do—and when you're done, you'll have included everything you'll find in any traditionally published book.
In this lesson, you'll learn how to find free images and add them to your e-book. One of most important things you'll learn about is how to manage images differently for fixed format, reflowable format, and responsive format e-books. Once you understand the differences, you'll have no problem creating professional looking e-books! You'll also learn how to check the file size of your book and ensure that it meets bookseller and distributor requirements. Once you've got everything just the way you want it, you'll learn how to convert your book file to a PDF, the most popular document file format on the web. Since POD books are printed from PDFs, you'll have a head start on how to release your book as a paperback, too. If you're working on a picture book, this is the lesson you've been waiting for!
In this lesson, you're going to learn some of the secrets traditional publishers use to market their e-books. You'll be able to give your e-book an inside advantage by adding data you can't see—but computers can—to your book. Plus, you'll explore options for converting your manuscript into an e-book to sell. Your choices range from hiring a service that does it all to doing it all yourself. In this lesson, you'll look at the pros and cons of paid services and free services and even check out some open source software if you'd like to do some of your own conversions. By the end of this lesson, you'll have finished up your initial marketing, and your book file will be ready to convert to formats for e-readers!
In this lesson, you'll learn how to use an e-book management tool to do a number of different things, from organizing your own e-book library to converting your e-book to a multitude of formats. The name of the tool is Calibre. Calibre lets you add stars and comments to the books you've downloaded, as well as convert unprotected e-book files from one format to another, so you can read books you've purchased on your smartphone, tablet, or e-reader. By the end of this lesson, you'll know how to use Calibre to convert your book to a number of different formats and fine-tune your metadata. You'll be amazed at how easy Calibre is to use!
Publishing your own e-books is a business, and in this lesson you'll look at the business end of things. There's always some paperwork required to start up a business, particularly on the Internet where you're dealing with online bookstores that could be anywhere in the world. Amazon is the world's biggest bookstore, so you'll look at their requirements first. You'll also go through the business decisions that you'll have to make, including adding DRM, pricing your book, and whether you want to make your title exclusive to one store. The last part of the lesson will walk you step-by-step through the questions you'll answer as you upload and publish your book!
This lesson opens up many virtual bookshelves for your new book as you learn how to select and work with an e-book distributor or aggregator. Even if you're an international author, aggregators can get you into any bookstore you want! It's an exciting time to be self-publishing, as there are many different options and tailor-made solutions. Even if you're starting out with a publishing budget of $0, your book can reach millions of readers. If you're concerned about your technical skills, don't be! You'll also learn how a distributor can take care of everything for you.
When you decided to self-publish your book, you eliminated the publisher—who would have taken the biggest share of income from your hard work. This lesson will show you how you can eliminate the bookstore too. That leaves all the money from sales in your hands! There are other advantages to selling your books directly, and you'll take a look at those, as well as some of the disadvantages. The lesson will outline the three main considerations for direct sales and give you a quick overview of the many options you'll have for collecting money online and delivering books to your buyers.
This may be the last lesson of the course, but it's also one of the most exciting. You'll look at additional ways to get your book into readers' hands. One of the first, of course, is libraries. How would you like to see your name and book come up when you search your library's online catalog? The lesson will talk about getting your book into school classrooms and the Google Books Library Project, which aims to digitize all the books in the world. Interested in multimedia options? The lesson will cover those as well and discuss your options for printing your book so that traditional print readers can also have access to it. Be prepared to come away with new ways to have your books reach readers!
Instructors & Support
Linda Aksomitis
Linda Aksomitis has a master's degree in adult vocational/technical education, with a minor in English. She has published 25 books for readers of all ages (fiction and nonfiction), including numerous e-books, and she has a few thousand publications in newspapers, magazines, and on the Internet. She's been an acquisitions editor for an e-publisher, webmaster of half a dozen websites, managing editor and webmaster for an Internet magazine, and she maintains two active blogs. Linda traces all of her publishing success to the Internet and the contacts she's made in cyberspace.
Instructor Interaction: The instructor looks forward to interacting with learners in the online moderated discussion area to share their expertise and answer any questions you may have on the course content.
Requirements
Prerequisites:
There are no prerequisites to take this course.
Requirements:
Hardware Requirements:
This course can be taken on either a PC or Mac.
Software Requirements:
PC: Windows 8 or later.
Mac: macOS 10.6 or later.
Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox are preferred. Microsoft Edge and Safari are also compatible.
Any type of word processor can be used in the initial manuscript set-up. However, Microsoft Word for Windows is used as the example (not included in enrollment).
Two additional types of software, Sigil and Calibre, available free online, are used in the actual conversion to e-book formats.
Software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins.
Other:
Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.
Instructional Material Requirements:
The instructional materials required for this course are included in enrollment and will be available online.
FAQ
A new session of each course begins each month. Please refer to the session start dates for scheduling.
Once a course session starts, two lessons will be released each week for the 6 week duration of your course. You will have access to all previously released lessons until the course ends. You will interact with the instructor through the online discussion area. There are no live sessions or online meetings with the instructor.
The interactive discussion area for each lesson automatically closes two weeks after each lesson is released, so you're encouraged to complete each lesson within two weeks of its release. However, you will have access to all lessons from the time they are released until the course ends.
Students enrolled in a six-week online class benefit from a one-time, 10-day extension for each course. No further extensions can be provided beyond these 10 days.
Reviews
The course clarified what I needed to know about getting a book on the market in one way or another, and that was my chief objective. The instructor was everything she should be and more and I learned far more than I anticipated. I had no idea the area was so complex.
Although I blindly stepped into writing my own book this course has further strengthened my interest in self publishing. It reviewed the knowledge I had gleaned from experience, answered many perplexing fears, and enhanced my ability to self publish 150%. Great information!
Linda is the most helpful, knowledgeable instructor I've encountered in my Ed2Go classes. She takes extra time to truly connect with her students and answers every question with such in-depth information that her discussion areas are equally as valuable as the actual lessons. I'd highly recommend any class she teaches!
I'm a CPA and required to take 40 hours of continuing education each year. I wish my CPA classes were this good. The instructor was excellent! The material was just the right amount for each lesson. I've already recommended this class to my sister who has signed up for the next session. Thank you for "bringing it"!
I'm a CPA and required to take 40 hours of continuing education each year. I wish my CPA classes were this good. The instructor was excellent! The material was just the right amount for each lesson. I've already recommended this class to my sister, who has signed up for the next session. Thank you for "bringing it!"
Excellent course. I now have created my own on-line publishing house. Thank you for the inspiration.
This class was so enjoyable yet practical. I will be reviewing this class for real life purposes. The professor was the most available and helpful instructor I have ever been taught by. Her teaching style is void of negative ego and I really felt that she cared for me and the other students through the discussion board and the excellence with which she presented the material. A true expert and professional.
I really enjoyed this course and learned more than I expected! I highly recommend it! Linda was an excellent teacher and provided so many helpful and useful answers to my questions. Thank you!
I enjoyed this course. I found it interesting and helpful. I really had no understanding about e-books and publishing until I discovered Linda's course. I appreciate all the work that went into engaging me with the resources, videos, games, assignments, and quizzes. This instructor is a professional who cares about her students.
This class was extremely detailed - beyond my expectations. The supplementary material was so useful and I would never have found this information on my own or even thought to. Kudos to the instructor for delivering amazing material.
The course clarified what I needed to know about getting a book on the market in one way or another, and that was my chief objective. The instructor was everything she should be and more and I learned far more than I anticipated. I had no idea the area was so complex.
Although I blindly stepped into writing my own book this course has further strengthened my interest in self publishing. It reviewed the knowledge I had gleaned from experience, answered many perplexing fears, and enhanced my ability to self publish 150%. Great information!
Linda is the most helpful, knowledgeable instructor I've encountered in my Ed2Go classes. She takes extra time to truly connect with her students and answers every question with such in-depth information that her discussion areas are equally as valuable as the actual lessons. I'd highly recommend any class she teaches!
I'm a CPA and required to take 40 hours of continuing education each year. I wish my CPA classes were this good. The instructor was excellent! The material was just the right amount for each lesson. I've already recommended this class to my sister who has signed up for the next session. Thank you for "bringing it"!
I'm a CPA and required to take 40 hours of continuing education each year. I wish my CPA classes were this good. The instructor was excellent! The material was just the right amount for each lesson. I've already recommended this class to my sister, who has signed up for the next session. Thank you for "bringing it!"
Excellent course. I now have created my own on-line publishing house. Thank you for the inspiration.
This class was so enjoyable yet practical. I will be reviewing this class for real life purposes. The professor was the most available and helpful instructor I have ever been taught by. Her teaching style is void of negative ego and I really felt that she cared for me and the other students through the discussion board and the excellence with which she presented the material. A true expert and professional.
I really enjoyed this course and learned more than I expected! I highly recommend it! Linda was an excellent teacher and provided so many helpful and useful answers to my questions. Thank you!
I enjoyed this course. I found it interesting and helpful. I really had no understanding about e-books and publishing until I discovered Linda's course. I appreciate all the work that went into engaging me with the resources, videos, games, assignments, and quizzes. This instructor is a professional who cares about her students.
This class was extremely detailed - beyond my expectations. The supplementary material was so useful and I would never have found this information on my own or even thought to. Kudos to the instructor for delivering amazing material.