There are some familiar names on the Advisors list, including Mark Coker (CEO of Smashwords), Joanna Penn (check out her blog, The Creative Penn), Dana Lynn Smith (one of the better book promotion gurus—check her out at The Savvy Book Marketer), and Victoria Strauss, who’s been warning writers about potential scams for years at Writer Beware. All good people.

I’ve been keeping my eye on the website, and though I’ve been tempted to join, I haven’t. The annual membership fee ($99) is a bit steep compared to that charged by other writer/publisher organizations.

Having said that, the list of membership benefits is the primary reason that’s holding me back from joining. If you want me to join your organization, give me specifics about what my membership will do for me. Right now, the benefits page sounds more like a list of goals than a list of concrete benefits.

Examples from the Benefits page:

Benefit from our growing reputation and connections in the literary and publishing worlds.

What connections? List them.

Creative collaboration, cross-promotion and co-advertising makes it so much easier to self-publish well. Members also get together to share the cost and work of book launches and literary/publishing events.

Again, specifics. Give me a testimonial. Which members have collaborated with each other? How have they shared the costs and the work? How does the organization facilitate this?

We speak to booksellers, wholesalers, agents, trade publishers and media, expressing your practical and creative needs and the self-publishing writer’s position on the most important debates. We also advocate for your best interests.

How do they know what my creative needs and interests are? Self-publishers are an independent bunch. We all have our own reasons for self-publishing. Some are in it to make money; others simply want to be read. Some write for large markets; others write for niche markets—that’s why they self-publish. Some take great care to produce a quality book; others don’t. Some desperately want their books in brick and mortar bookstores; others are happy with online bookstores and couldn’t care less about brick and mortar. Publishing our work ourselves is the only thing we all have in common.

The organization needs to spell out what it advocates, so people can evaluate how closely its positions align with their own.

We negotiate great discounts on behalf of our members with printers, designers, editors and proofreaders, PR and marketing agencies — and also for literary and publishing events. Through these, our members save on their subscription fee many times over.

What discounts? Why aren’t they listed? For $99/year, I expect some discounts to already be in place. Tell me what they are.

I believe that an organization like this could be of great benefit to self-publishers, if it brings self-published authors together to accomplish as a group what we can’t accomplish on our own: group discounts, selling our books in venues that normally don’t accept a one-author publisher or require 50+ titles in the publisher’s catalogue, having a presence at fairs and conferences, etc.

Since the organization is new, I’d drop the $99 to something more reasonable (definitely less than $50). A new organization needs an influx of members to raise the energy and buzz level, to build a reputation, and to turn a list of goals into a list of concrete benefits with testimonials.

As it stands now, I think the organization would be of most benefit to writers who have little or no experience self-publishing and would feel more comfortable learning how to do it with a panel of advisors backing them up.

For those who are already self-publishing, the benefits need to be spelled out in greater detail.

Pick up your free copy here.

Kyle from Folium Book Studio alerted me to the online service that will convert a DOC, DOCX, RTF, or TXT document to an ePub book for $79 USD. For that price, you can also use their cover designer to create an eBook cover, and they provide you with an ISBN for the ePub version of your eBook.

Using Folium Book Studio’s tools, you can include and arrange images in your eBook, and create an interactive table of contents. But they don’t support tables. They recommend converting tables to images and including them that way. Most e-readers don’t handle tables well unless they’re included as images.

Folium Book Studio isn’t a distributor, like Smashwords and BookBaby. It’s a file conversion service. You have to upload your eBook to online stores such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

If you don’t want to mess with XHTML and CSS, Folium Book Studio could be cheaper than hiring someone to format your file for you, especially if you’re American and don’t mind your book having a Folium Book Studio ISBN. Using their cover designer to do your cover may also save you some money.

For non-Americans, Folium Book Studio is a harder sell. To get into Barnes & Noble, one of the more important sellers of eBooks in ePub format, we have to go through an aggregator, and some aggregators want to format the file for you. Also, some countries (like Canada) provide free ISBNs to their citizens. Whether to consider a conversion service like Folium Book Studio will depend on which aggregator you plan to use, and how much you pay for ISBNs in your country.

His latest book An Author’s Guide to Fighting Internet Copyright Infringements is available for free for 5 days, after which he hopes to convince Amazon to make it permanently free. Rosenthal talks about the book on his blog here. Grab it while it’s free!

While we’re on the subject, I’m about three-quarters of the way through Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back, a fascinating read that’s particularly relevant today with all the proposed copyright-related bills on the table in several countries. Recommended reading.

Once you have your page, you can request a customized URL, just as you can with Facebook fan pages. Amazon just introduced this feature, so if you’re setting up your page for the first time, it might ask you for a URL as part of the setup process. If it doesn’t, or if you already have an author page, do the following to get your customized URL:

1. Sign into Amazon Author Central.
2. Click on the Profile link at the top.
3. At the top of the right column, you should see something that says Author Page URL. Click on Add Link.
4. Specify the URL you want and click Save. You can’t change the URL later, so choose wisely.

It takes up to half an hour for your customized URL to start working. Then you’ll have a short, readable URL that you can use on your website and other promotional materials.

My customized URL is https://www.amazon.com/author/sarahettritch.

The site offers other services, such as audiobook creation, promotion (this appears to be press releases), and eBook cover creation.

A few folks in the Yahoo self-publishing groups seem happy with eBookIt. If you’re using eBookIt, how is it? Would you recommend the service?

While we’re on this subject, Smashwords has improved its sales reporting from third party retailers. You used to have to wait 3-4 months for sales data. Not anymore; the wait has been significantly reduced. For example, Barnes & Noble sales through early November have already been reported. If you were staying away from Smashwords because of the slow sales reporting, you might want to have another look at it.

If you’re wondering how to do any of this, then run, don’t walk, to Amazon, and pick up How to Format Your eBook for Kindle, NOOK, Smashwords, and Everything Else by Paul Salvette. At $2.99, this book is an absolute steal! As one of the reviewers said, buy it before the author raises
the price. You don’t need a Kindle to read the book. I read Kindle books using Kindle for PC, and there’s a free Kindle reading app for just about every platform out there.

Salvetti’s book covers everything you need to know to format your book for the Kindle, Smashwords, and venues that accept ePub files, like Barnes & Noble. Even if you’re an old hand at this, you might pick up a couple of things.

Want to convert your Word file to MOBI or ePub? The book walks you through how to create clean XHTML from your Word file, and how to run that XHTML through Calibre. Now, there’s plenty of free information around the Net about this, but, as usual, it’s in bits and pieces. For $2.99, you can get a detailed guide in one place that leads you through the steps.

Want to upload your Word file to Smashwords? Follow the steps in the book and you shouldn’t have a problem with the meat grinder or having your book approved for the premium catalog.

I like that the book has a chapter on basic XHTML. It’s great to tell people to do the conversion using Calibre, but what happens if the end result has formatting problems? What do you do then? If you don’t understand some basic XHTML, you won’t be able to tweak the formatting. Having said that, following the steps in this book means that you probably won’t encounter that problem in the first place.

I’ve formatted four books for the Kindle and Smashwords, and I’ve still learned from this book. For example, I didn’t know how to preserve formatting like italics and bold when I prepare my Word file for Smashwords. After nuking all the formatting, I’d go in and manually add the italics back. Salvetti explains how to use Word’s Replace feature to add back the italics in a second. Just that one tip will save me about two hours every time I prepare a Word file for Smashwords.

The book contains tons of images, and links to a bunch of video tutorials recorded by the author. Seriously, spending $2.99 on this book will save you time and, if you were planning to hire someone to format your eBook, money.

And yes, the book is impeccably formatted.

How to Format Your eBook for Kindle, NOOK, Smashwords, and Everything Else

How does it work?

1. You sign up at Kindlegraph and choose a “signature” style you like. I chose one that looked the most like my handwriting.
2. You add your books. They must be available at Amazon.
3. When a reader requests your Kindlegraph, you’ll receive an email.
4. You log into Kindlegraph, write a personalized message, and attach your signature to it.
5. The Kindlegraph is sent to the reader’s Kindle. At the Kindlegraph site, there’s an example of what the reader will receive.

The Kindlegraph doesn’t become part of the Kindle book. It’s a separate page. In fact, people don’t have to own your book to request your Kindlegraph.

Minor drawbacks:

As I mentioned, anyone can request your Kindlegraph; they don’t even have to own a Kindle. A Kindlegraph is a PDF file, so it can be sent as an attachment to an email address.

If a person doesn’t own your book, the Kindlegraph could lead to a sale. On the other hand, if this really catches on and folks start to collect Kindlegraphs for the sake of collecting them, authors could spend a significant amount of time “signing” Kindle books for people who aren’t interested in their books. This will only be a problem if Kindlegraphs really take off.

Signing up requires a Twitter account. Not a big deal. I’ve never tweeted, but I have an account.

If you haven’t signed up at Kindlegraph and you have books up at Amazon, check it out.

The free workshops take place on September 22nd and 27th. They are:

• Book Marketing Myth Busters
• How I Turned My Book Idea into an Amazon Bestseller
• 7 “Vibrant” Online Marketing Techniques

I’ve signed up for the entire conference. The lowest priced tier is a reasonable $27 for 15 workshops, which works out to less than $2 per workshop and allows access to the workshops for 60 days. I don’t recognize many of the presenters’ names, so I’m hoping to hear some new book promotion tips.

The conference takes place October 4-6. Sign up here.

You can check out Appealize’s pricing plans here. For the month of September, use coupon code SEPTSUN to get 10% off.

If you use Appealize to create your apps, let us know how it goes.

I haven’t used Appealize, so if you have any questions about the service, please direct them to Michel at Appealize.