How This Book is Organized

Publishing E-Books For Dummies is split into six parts, and each one is divided into chapters. The parts guide you through the entire e-book publishing process, from your first inkling of an idea to marketing your engaging finished product. Here’s the lightning-fast tour.

Part I: Getting to Know E-Books

Part I walks you through the basic tasks involved in publishing e-books, giving you a quick overview followed by case studies and success stories to inspire you — and to give you some workable ideas of your own. You also get a few crucial tips for writing your e-book — an important prerequisite to publishing it.

Part II: Creating Your E-Book

Part II, which shows you how to turn your manuscript into an e-book file, covers every step you need to take, from creating a clean manuscript in Microsoft Word to producing EPUB, MOBI, and PDF files. (Don’t worry if those file formats look like gobbledygook now. I describe them in Part II.) This part also explains cover design because, like it or not, people tend to judge books by their covers.

Part III: Creating Your Website

Part III spells out everything you need to know in order to set up a basic website. This online home or storefront is a crucial part of your author platform (your ability to reach readers). Many writers struggle to set up their websites and update them, so Part III lays out a simple way to create a site that you can easily maintain and update yourself. This part also looks at a crucial sales tool, particularly for nonfiction e-books — your sales page.

Part IV: Selling Your E-Book

Part IV starts with an explanation of pricing strategies, because unless you plan to give away your e-book (which is a perfectly valid option), you need a way to sell and distribute it. The rest of the part tells you how to sell your e-book from your own website, from the Amazon.com site, and from other online stores via Smashwords — with step-by-step instructions for each one.

Part V: Marketing Your E-Book

Part V explains how to promote your e-book online, without spending hundreds of dollars. The first key step is to optimize your e-book’s presence on Amazon and in other stores. You can also find out about the effective use of key social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads, and read tips for using blogging to promote your e-book — not only on your own website, but also by borrowing the much larger audience of other blogs.

Part VI: The Part of Tens

The Part of Tens gives you three bonus chapters that supply quick tips to help you solve common problems, edit and proofread effectively, and enhance your e-book sales (or even your career). These chapters tell you how to get going again when you’re stuck, what to do when no one is buying your e-book, and how to use your e-book to start a digital product empire. You also find plenty of other handy advice.

eCheat Sheet

To give you a quick overview of the key points in this book, I’ve created an eCheat Sheet, which you can find online at www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/publishingebooks . The eCheat Sheet gets you up to speed as quickly as possible — and serves as a useful reminder of the material presented in this book. It gives you crucial tips for publishing and marketing your e-book, and it lists several useful websites that I mention throughout this book.