Book Formats

Print Books
POD Books
PDF Books
Ebooks
Audiobooks

Print Books

Print books have a great advantage in having been around for a long time. Print books make up around 94 percent the current book market. Here are some of the paths you can take to build and sell a print book. No matter what path you choose, if you have a nonfiction book, you will need to hire your own indexer for your book. For how to do that, see Wordmaps Indexing FAQs!

Four ways to build a print book

1. Publish with a traditional, independent press, or a small press publisher. You will need to hire your own copyeditor, indexer, proofreader, and possibly your own publicist and marketing expert.
2. Put together an author-support team. Hire your own copyeditor, indexer, proofreader and possibly your own publicist and marketing expert. Hire your own editor, cover designer, layout specialist, printer, book binder, administrative assistant, and distributor too.
3. Do all or some of the above author-support team jobs yourself as you build and sell your own book.
4. Use a POD publisher for some of the above author-support functions.

To understand what traditional publishers and their editors do for authors, see my Publisher Services Checklist. You will need to some of these things for yourself or find professionals to do them for you.

The main functions of publishers are: book production and book distribution. Publishers market books too, but their marketing is very limited. Publishers specialize in coordinating all the services an author needs to build a book and sell it.

Publishers also do a variety of important administrative tasks such as registering copyright, getting an ISBN number, and sending your book to the Library of Congress for preliminary cataloging information (included at the bottom of the verso of your title page).

If you publish on your own, there are specially trained freelancers called Virtual Author’s Assistants (VAAs) who will do the same things editors at publishing companies do. VAAs also know how to do things like set up book tours, do research for you, and get permissions for photographs or quotes. For a complete list of experts you may need to help create and market your book, see Author’s Dream Team.

POD Books

POD books have a great advantage if you don’t have space to keep a lot of copies of your book. Their drawback is that you will need to find readers for your book yourself. While POD books have some online distribution, they don’t usually have the wide range of outlets available to traditional print books or even to ebooks.

POD publishers print each book “on demand.” They usually provide software for “typesetting” your book. Lest you think this is more work than going through a regular publisher, be aware that regular publishers vary greatly in the amount of typesetting they do. Many ask their authors for “camera ready” copy. In other words you do it yourself, and with your own software.

However, many POD publishers with special software for book production are limited in the support they offer authors. They truly are Do It Yourself when it comes to designing. They may confine you to very simple options for layout, illustrations, and your cover.

Some POD publishers market and distribute your work just as regular publishers do, but some do not. If they do not promote and distribute books, you will need to take care of these things or hire professionals to assist you.

Some POD publishers offer a variety of other services for authors, such as providing you with a free ISBN (international standard book number) and UPC (product code strip) for your books. Others do not, and you’ll need to pay for these things yourself. An ISBN and UPC is essential if you plan sell your book through bookstores and/or if you’re marketing to libraries.

For more information see “Is POD Right for Me?”

PDF Books

PDF books are a hybrid. They lie somewhere between a print book and a digital book. PDF books are downloadable digital files that can be printed out and/or read on the screen. However, these digital books do not need a special eReader device to view them. PDF books are created using Adobe Software’s PDF formatting, and can be read using an application such as Preview on the Mac or Adobe Reader on the PC.

PDF books are popular with business professionals and experts. These people use them to provide information to their customers or create business for their services. Companies use PDF books to create sales handbooks for employees. Professional coaches and trainers use them online workshops. PDF books are often referred to as handbooks, guides, or manuals. Librarians sometimes refer to them as “ephemera”.

PDF books are generally sold from author web sites or blog sites using online vendor payment and distribution services available from companies such as 1shoppingcart.com, paypal or ejunkie. They can also be sold through the use of affilates online.

PDF books have the advantages of fast turnaround time for production, inexpensive cost, and the capability of being easily and quickly revised whenever an author wishes.

In addition, PDF books can be easily converted to ebook format. That’s because PDF pages are used for ebook formatting. However, if your ebook file will be revised, broken down into separate parts in the future, or otherwise “chunked,” it is best to have an XML file formatted for your book. XML is a software program that dynamically encodes the bibliographic elements within your book; things such as title, headings, table of contents, index, etc.

Ebooks

Ebooks have a great advantage over print books in that you get to keep about 70% of what your book sells for in ebookstores. But way more people buy print books right now. This, of course is changing. Ebooks are something you should consider seriously, especially if you plan to write more than one book.

Like POD publishers, ebook publishers have special software that helps you put together your book. The two main protocols are Epub (for Nook, the iPad and other brands of eReaders.) and Mobi (for the Kindle) and

Unlike POD publishers, most ebook publishers own their own distribution channel. In fact ebooks are largely distribution-driven. The fastest growing market for ebooks is now the mobile (cellphone) market! If you want, you can market your book to a wide variety of ebook distribution sources at the same time.

In general ebooks require less assistance than print books to produce. However, ebook indexes are more complicated. Ebooks do not have pages. Therefore, extra work has to be done after your indexer is finished in order to make your index look like a typical book index. There are many tricks to typesetting an ebook. You will probably need some help from a digital formatting expert when putting one together.

Because the technology is new, ebooks have limitations print books do not. Photographs in digital form can only be so big. Other things commonly found in print books can’t yet be duplicated in an ebook. But the future is wide open. Many writers are exploring interactive apps for ebooks they plan to publish for the iPad. Ebooks can even offer readers “augmented reality” by putting additional information about you and your book “in the margins” of your ebook. And at least as of now, a big plus for ebooks is: no ads!

Click here for my Digital Book FAQs

Audiobooks

There are two separate types of audiobooks: commercial audiobooks and audiobooks for the blind/hearing impaired. Each requires a different product to create and listen to an audiobook.

Audiobooks for the blind and hearing impaired use a special protocol called Daisy and require an eReader or a software download via the Internet to hear them. Libraries in the United States have a program for distributing these kinds of eReaders and ebooks to the blind and sight impaired.

The protocol that audiobooks for the blind and hearing impaired use allows for adding an index to the audiobook. The index is readable as a whole, although it is not searchable by voice command. However, a voice command using a term from the index in an eReader for the blind or sight impaired will take the reader right to the paragraph that index term refers to.

Daisy is a powerful international protocol that lets readers flip from chapter to chapter, search for terms in the text and take a lot of other actions readers of print books can take.

Commercial audiobooks do not use the Daisy standard. As a result, most audiobooks by commercial publishers omit the index. And they must be read straight through. Most commercial audiobooks are fiction books.

According to Spoken Books Publishing, a quality commercial audiobook POD publisher, over 40 million audio books were sold last year.

It is easy to make either kind of audiobook. If you have an audience already lined up, you can quickly create and package an audiobook to sell to them. Otherwise, bookstores, both virtual and non-virtual, are your most likely distributor. Schools and public libraries are your primary market for both commercial audiobooks and audiobooks made for the blind and hearing impaired.

For the blind and hearing impaired, service organizations like the Lions Club and senior citizen organizations are interested in audiobooks, large print books or Braille books.

For an overview of publishing today see my Author Choices Mindmap. On the left side of this map, you will see traditional print publishing. On the right side you will see the details for all of the new options for authors that this page covers!