: Re: Publishing and selling ebooks What are my: options caveats / pro's & con's reasonable expectations for publishing my work digitally as e-books? I remember Stephen King did something along these

If you ask this question and you hope to make money, it is probably not going to work for you, but have a client (yes, one client) who has had some success doing this.

Marketing a self-published book is the first hard part, if we assume that you had something worth saying, and did a good job of committing it to text. Practically no one writes reviews of self-published books. Still, you can market yourself if you are well connected; the best marketing opportunities are open to those who are prominent within well-established, active communities of expertise (my one success story fits this).

Quality is the other hard part. If you want a professional-looking finished product, you will need to make substantial use of the skilled services of an independent editor —better two, most preferably three— a graphic designer and a typesetter. There are some bureaucratic issues associated with publishing a book, namely getting an ISBN (you may be able to get away with a cheaper, ISBN-less DOI), assembling a copyright page, and ensuring that front matter is properly structured. Marketing a quality product without a publisher's good name and sales infrastructure is hard; marketing an obviously shoddy product without it is an exercise in desperation.

The good news is that there are options that make distribution and sales easy.

On the other hand, you can land a contract with a major-league publisher only to have them put your manuscript through hoop after hoop and then either decide their contract doesn't oblige them to publish anything by you, or publish it and make zero effort, besides putting your book in their list of publications, to market it. Investing a bit of effort into a weblog that drums up interest in your writings has to beat this, and the good thing about self-publishing is that you should acquire the DIY ethic to make the most of the resources you have.

Only self-publish if you can afford to see no income on a big investment of time.

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: Journal subscription secrecy Robert Darnton, an accomplished scholar and important name in the open access movement, has a piece in the current New York Review of Books, The Library: Three Jeremiads,

@Sarah872

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: How to handle foreign military ranks? Suppose you have a character who has a rank in a foreign military - say, Feldwebel Hans. That's the equivalent of a Sergeant. On one hand, having people

: Re: Publishing and selling ebooks What are my: options caveats / pro's & con's reasonable expectations for publishing my work digitally as e-books? I remember Stephen King did something along these

More posts by @Sarah872

: Journal subscription secrecy Robert Darnton, an accomplished scholar and important name in the open access movement, has a piece in the current New York Review of Books, The Library: Three Jeremiads,

: How to handle foreign military ranks? Suppose you have a character who has a rank in a foreign military - say, Feldwebel Hans. That's the equivalent of a Sergeant. On one hand, having people

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