Apple recently released its much-anticipated iBooks Author software. This software is available free of charge and will give the would-be self publisher the necessary tools to output their own e-books. At face value this sounds like a good deal. Until you do a little more research on the subject. For one, you need a Mac to run the software and if you’re like me—and the majority of people who are using PCs to do the manuscripts for their e-books—this is a non-issue and may actually be a good thing once you read on.

I ask a lot of questions. Why did you write your book? For whom did you write your book? Who are your targeted readers? “Everyone who can read at an eighth grade reading level” is not the right answer. I will probably not read your fantasy book about vampire beavers attacking a muskrat kingdom. Who is your ideal reader? My what? Your “ideal reader?” If you can identify the primary and secondary audiences who will buy your book—and tell other ideal readers about it—you’ll have a much easier time marketing your book successfully and reaping profits as a result. Here are five clues to identifying your ideal reader.

Each one of us is shaped by the experiences of our lives, which is what book writing is: sharing our experiences. In fiction, the writer is sharing a story, and in nonfiction, the writer is sharing information they have learned about a particular subject, to improve the reader’s life. In 2006, I began to consider writing a book about special education for parents, for three reasons ...

Two words… Thor Distribution… Thor was started almost ten years ago as an entry level POD distribution method to pick up an odd sale or two that the author might not otherwise make out of his own inventory. Over time, it has grown from a few nickels and dimes to a great percentage of our authors being issued 1099’s, meaning they earned over $600 for the year with literally no out of pocket investment.

A couple of weeks ago the latest edition of my e-Book Cover Design Awards went live, and I once again had the pleasure—and the frustration—of judging a whole slew of covers. The problems come at the extremes. Commenting on the covers is fun, and selecting out the best ones is never difficult. But when it’s time to narrow it down to the final few and then, at the end, the winners, it can be excruciatingly hard, because saying “yes” to one means saying “no” to so many others. At the other end of the spectrum, the same errors happen repeatedly every month, which isn’t all that surprising.

Are you blog marketing with tips already? Do you fully realize the benefits of that? As you look for tips to help you in your business, millions of others do too. Your online audiences love tips because they don't want to spend a lot of time reading. They want the easy-to-read nuggets that pertain to their needs and interests so they can skim. Your potential buyers want solutions to their problems and concerns.

A professional editor will seek fundamental elements of good fiction within your manuscript—and where necessary, suggest improvements to develop it so that it will “launch” and flow in a structured storyline to better engage readers. Have you ever wondered what goes through an editor’s mind when an author’s story concept falters? What follows is a fictionalized illustration of a possible “stream of consciousness” that an editor might experience while editing the initial part of a manuscript. Because the editor’s job is to step into the shoes of potential readers, it is likely that many of the same thoughts and questions will run through your readers’ minds.

Affordable book cover design and text layout by qualified, experienced designers. I’ve written on this subject from time to time over the years and always end up with a small amount of heated emails from high priced designers but literally hundreds of emails, thanking me for removing the cloud that often surrounds this subject.

As a book designer, when estimating an interior the first thing I do is look to see if the manuscript has been created with “style”. Not if it is fashionable, but if “style sheets” or “styles” were used for various kinds of text. When using a word processing program such as MS Word or Pages for Mac the default style is Normal. You can see this on your toolbar or in the format menu. If you manually highlight type and change the size, boldness, font, etc. the style will still be Normal but you will have overridden the typical normal formatting manually. A better and much more “designer friendly” way to get consistent, heading, text and other formats throughout your manuscript is to use “styles”.

Five words that will change your entire outlook (or freshen it up, even for seasoned authors) on crafting a novel or screenplay: "Story Engineering by Larry Brooks." I’m focusing on “Concept” today. And I’m lucky this was the first section in Story Engineering. Really. It seems so simple, right? A love story. Except that’s not a concept. It’s an idea. And this explanation is exactly what saved my story.

In a recent year, Xlibris, one of the big names in POD (Print-on-Demand), celebrated paying out their one-millionth dollar in royalties. The prior year, they helped authors publish more than 7,000 titles and sell over 300,000 books. Impressive, huh? Well, let’s do the math. $1 million for 7000 titles comes out to an average royalty of $149 each. Not exactly worth bragging about…

The fortune cookie read, “you will find success this year.” Where will success by found? When will I find it? Will I find this “success” before the predicted end of the world next December? I don’t buy it. Any success worth finding is worth earning. This goes for all of us here at selfpublishing.com and it goes for all of the author/publishers that we’ll serve this year … and the next … and the next.

“Total unit sales of print books sold through the outlets whose sales are captured by Nielsen BookScan dropped 10.2% in the six month period ended July 3, 2011…” (PWDaily, July 8, 2011). This is a trend that will continue, according to publishing experts. Combine that with the demise of Borders and the outlook for trade sales of print books is not brilliant. The good news is that there are two areas in which you can generate sustained growth in your sales and profits: ebooks and non-bookstore marketing.

I’ve ghosted books on nearly every conceivable subject. The first question every new ghostwriting client asks is, “Are you an expert or do you know anything about [fill in the blank]?” My answer is usually always the same: “No.” So how do I do what I do? Furthermore, why do these people hire me nonetheless?

Welcome to the Coach’s Corner! If you have your ear to the self publishing blogosphere, you’ve heard the constant buzz on the subject of publishing printed books vs. e-books. If you’re going to self-publish a book this year, there are five points you need to consider as you consider your publishing options.

A majority of booksellers agree that the cover design is the single most important element of a book. The truth is, a book is judged first and foremost by its cover. If you want your book to have a fighting chance among the more than 700,000 new books published each year, your cover must trigger an instant response. And it's not just customers who are influenced by your book cover. A well-designed book can help you secure positive reviews, establish your credibility as an expert in your field, win awards and hopefully generate many book sales. That means your cover must be designed compellingly. How is that accomplished?

NESTING GRAPHICS: Here's a good rule of thumb when submitting files to your printer. Don't nest graphic files within other graphic files. That is, if you create a vector graphic in a program like Adobe Illustrator and save it as an EPS file, do not then place this EPS file in another Illustrator file, save the nested files as an EPS file, and then place the new EPS file in an InDesign document. If you do, you printer may have problems outputting the file as you expect it to look. For instance, the text you included in the nested file may change to a default typeface like Courier. Or there may be problems with gradients and paths. Or the file may not print at all.

I was intrigued by Amazon’s generosity towards the self-publishing market. They’ll put my little self-published book together for me? For free? They’ll sell it for me and take just 35% of the sale price? In the time it takes to chew a stick of gum, I’d ordered Kindle Fire and was ready to roll. I downloaded a lot of free books and some low-priced ones. Just to be fair to the paper people, I ordered a couple of “real” books that my real estate client might like. What a disappointment!

First and foremost… SelfPublishing.com does NOT publish anything… you are the publisher. By definition, “self” publishing means that you are the publisher. There is no such thing as a self-publishing company. That phrase was invented, in the spirit of George Orwell’s 1984, by the vanity publishing industry to make something with a bad connotation, sound good.

As an author, you probably spend a lot of time seeking book promotion opportunities. You’ve researched book review sites, you attend all local book fairs, you’re constantly on the lookout for speaking venues, you have a nice website and you post to your blog every few days or so. But, at the same time, if you’re not paying attention to what’s going on around you, you may be missing out on some good book promotion opportunities.