How to Boost Your Book Sales

I don't know about you but I like transparency in my business transactions. It's normally something you can insist on - either because it's your statutory right (in the case of public utilities for example) or through the simple act of 'taking the ball away'. For example, how many of you would think of buying some expensive item from a delicatessen counter where the weight of the item wasn't at least visible to you - never mind printed out for you to check on your own scales?

We’d quibble over some relative small-change yet we’re prepared to put our books up with the big distribution companies and hope that they'll be straight with us about how many copies have actually been sold and that our book’s ranking and those of other books in our book’s genre, are fairly calculated and applied. That's a lot of trust to be placing in anyone.

It reminds me of something my old boss used to joke about more lifetimes ago than I like to reflect on: "Open your wallet and repeat after me". He'd say that when he was suggesting someone could be patsied, that they were a soft touch and that they wouldn't ask pertinent questions for fear of being rude.

I'm not casting aspersions on anyone, merely remarking at how trustful we've suddenly become – I hope that trust is justified.

With Mary Ann's blessing, I'm now going to propose something which I hope every author reading this will find relevant and of interest. It won't cost you a bean, there's nothing to buy (anyway) and there are no restrictions attached. In other words, I’m not about to launch into one of those awful, intellect-insulting exercises in thinly-garbed hard-sell.

Simply put, we're able to offer authors another way of selling their books and in 3 different formats; mobi (Kindle), ePub and PDF. We'll take your book and cover files, format them (to those 3 formats) and upload them securely in a way in which anyone buying them can't use to give others free downloads. The amount your book will be sold for will be identical to the price listed on Amazon.com and the amount we pay you per sale will be identical to what Amazon would pay you.

Thus, a book selling for $3.00 would accrue $2.10 in royalties from Amazon so we would pay you $2.10 for every book sold through us and a $1.50 book would accrue $0.525 per book in royalties - again exactly what we would pay you.

Using our service to sell your books means extra exposure, more customers (not everyone uses Kindle) and the ability to send customers straight to a sales link using 3 URL's we'd supply you with (one for each format).

Since you don't pay us for setting it up and you get paid exactly the same per sale (although we pay quicker than the big companies), there's absolutely zero to lose and everything to gain. There are no catches, no small print, no nasties. We do ask that you're with us for 6 months (to give us a fair crack at getting our setting up costs back) but that's about it.

This is a win-win situation and one which we hope you'll take full advantage of. For more information, please visit www.anysubject.com/sell

5 Publishing Formats

Mention e-books and everyone automatically thinks of Amazon's Kindle but that's not the whole story if you want to make it as a top publishing company – you need to be aware of the others and their markets.

Here are five of the main formats and how they are used:

Mobi

Variety is the spice of life, they say

Mobi or mobipocket as it is more correctly called, was developed around an HTML framework by a French company to be used largely by PDA's (Personal Digital Assistant). Later on their programmers expanded the application’s coverage to include the first ebooks. Amazon took over the software 8 years ago and then combined it with their own Kindle readers, giving it the household name status that it currently enjoys.

With freely available software for the PC, Mac, Blackberry, Android or Apple, there are few people who do not possess the wherewithal to read a Mobipocket ebook.

File extensions: .azw, .mobi and .prc (no significant differences)

ePub

Utilizing an XHTML platform, ePub was intended to be the industry standard for electronic books allowing, as it does, a greater range of formatting possibilities than the rather limited mobi file extension. Without Amazon's choice of mobi, ePub might well have become more popular however it’s still used by the Barnes & Noble Nook, Sony Reader, the Apple range of iReaders, Linux computers and Android-based tablets.

Turning one's back on the ePub market is ill-advised and the top publishing company will be well aware of this.
File extension: .epub

PDF

PDF or Portable Document Format might seem a surprising inclusion on this list but it's got a very definite marketplace. The format was introduced by Acrobat to allow universal reading of material without the need to buy an expensive software package such as Microsoft Office. Its beauty is this universality but PDF is not without its drawbacks such as page scalability issues and also the time investment in creating a working table of contents.

As any top publishing company will tell you, there are plenty of 'quick-fix' conversion programs which will convert a standard document file to PDF but it takes care and painstaking attention to detail to create a table of contents - something which will be expected of you by your readers.

PDF is popular with companies like Gardners who distribute, inter alia, to the major supermarket chains.

File extension: .pdf

PDB

Using PML (Palm Markup Language) instead of HTML, PDB works as a text-type file with formatting tags which is then reassembled into an e-book using an application such as Studio or Dropbook. It's favored primarily by Blackberry, Palm, PocketPC, iPhone/iTouch and Android and Symbian devices.

It's usage by Barnes & Noble's eReader makes it worth considering as an outsider.

File extension: .pdb

LIT

LIT was developed by Microsoft using a compressed HTML system nearly 10 years ago. Nowadays, with a rapidly dwindling market, it's hard to find a top publishing company who will want to devote resources towards creating books in this format. That said, there are still some customers who use it.

File extension: .lit

Any Subject Books offers a full range of services to the self-publisher including formatting and editing. See the website for more details and current rates.