From Digireado:
The training workshops How to Publish Your Ebook are a series of two-hour workshops made available by The Australian Society of Authors. Convened by Linda Funnell they cover the background and current landscape of ebooks in Australia and internationally; preparing and producing an ebook option; sales channels; metadata and promotion. Running weekly, participants also receive comprehensive handouts and references.
Last week Joel Naoum, Publisher, Momentum Books, Pan Macmillan’s digital-only imprint, presented Part 1: The growing market for eBooks and recent developments. You can read about his presentation and view slides. This week it was my job to set out the options for preparing and producing an ebook
Part 2: Preparing and Producing an Ebook
I had just under two hours to cover everything that I thought was important. This time is not long enough to give attendees the step-by-step process, but it is a perfect amount of time to communicate the key points to consider when preparing your file and choosing a conversion partner.
Formats
The format you choose depends on your content.
Is it mostly text based? Perhaps with some illustrations? ePUB is the best option for your book. Some types of content don’t suit using ePUB. These include highly illustrated material like cookbooks or kids’ books. Amazon Kindle has their own proprietary format (AZW or KF8 for the Kindle Fire), but they provide a handy conversion option from ePUB for authors. Fixed layout is handy for cookbooks and layout is comparable with PDF in that it is, well, fixed! iBooks Author allows for greater interactivity, it’s free but of course you can only sell it through the iBookstore and view on an iPad. Yes, you can give it away free and plenty of people won’t mind only selling through Apple.”
(Via Digireado.)