A Writer On Writing: Getting to Grips with E-Publishing 2
Sally Jenkins brings another report on self-publishing.
I’m making progress on my e-publishing project – it’s an anthology of 8 short stories that have either won or been shortlisted in UK writing competitions.
The text has been formatted, uploaded to Amazon and checked in their ‘Preview’ function.
But producing the cover has been a battle (see the image on the right – I’m not sure the font is clear enough - what do you think?). In the end I’ve created the simplest of images by taking a free photo from Stock Free Images http://www.stockfreeimages.com/ (in return for this credit at the front of the book – © Vojsek | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos) http://www.dreamstime.com/ and used GIMP software http://www.gimp.org/ (free to download) to add the book title and my name. If anyone else is thinking of doing this, be warned that GIMP is not easy to use – I spent much time searching for help elsewhere on the internet. But it’s probably like anything else, the more you do it, the easier it gets. I’ve listed some of the links I used at the end of this post.
Now I need to decide on the pricing structure. Do I sell it cheap or dear?
If I price the book between 75p and £1.49 then I get 35% royalties, if I price higher than £1.49 then I get 70% royalties. So, by my calculations, pricing at £1.50 would earn me £1.05 per book and pricing at 75p would earn me around 27p per book.
Do you think if I go cheap I will sell four times as many books – or am I merely devaluing the writing?
