{"id":1840,"date":"2012-04-16T23:42:00","date_gmt":"2012-04-17T04:42:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-03-27T21:18:07","modified_gmt":"2020-03-28T02:18:07","slug":"ebook-marketplaces-from-indie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/2012\/04\/16\/ebook-marketplaces-from-indie\/","title":{"rendered":"Ebook Marketplaces from an Indie Publisher\u2019s View"},"content":{"rendered":"
With the DOJ\u2019s efforts to remake the ebook marketplace, I thought it would be a good idea for me to take a good look at the marketplaces I do business with and document how it\u2019s going right now.  In a year or two, maybe I\u2019ll take another look and see what, if anything, has changed.  These reviews are subjective, my opinions after having dealt with them for years now.<\/span><\/div>\n
I\u2019m Wire Rim Books<\/a>, my own publisher, publishing my own books.  I do everything myself, from writing, to book design, to marketing — with a couple of exceptions.  I often buy artwork for interior or cover purposes, and I have a wonderful set of friends who provide invaluable editing advice.  I produce trade paperbacks and ebooks in ePub and Kindle formats.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
My workflow is designed around producing a good quality trade paperback, and then taking the same source files and generating customized ebook versions.  While that workflow may be interesting, it\u2019s not the focus of this review.  Just consider that on publication day, I have paper books being shipped and master copies in Kindle and ePub formats.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Kindle – Amazon<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
https:\/\/kdp.amazon.com\/self-publishing\/dashboard<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Amazon\u2019s Kindle Direct Publishing site is a high quality web site where I can upload my kindle-formatted ebook, a copy of the cover jpeg, and fill out all the metadata blanks, like ISBN number, the description, age range, BISAC categories (like fiction\/adventure, etc.) and pricing. It is relatively easy to use.  You can easily request books free of DRM with a simple checkmark.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Disadvantages are Amazon\u2019s constant advertisements of its extra features, like KDP Select, all of which are designed to lock you into an exclusive arrangement, forbidding you from dealing with any of the other marketplaces.  If you see anything in bold print with fancy graphics, be careful or you may find yourself locked into Amazon alone.  In fact, the very first checkmark, before you even think about uploading your book or title, is KDP select.  Watch out.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Amazon also claims price matching.  If it detects any other marketplace selling ebooks with the same title and author, but at a lower price, it will lower your price on the Kindle store.  There is a well-known example where Amazon\u2019s automated price checkers made a mistake and reduced one author\u2019s books to free.  You should also know that the contract you make with Amazon absolves them from any mistakes.  They won\u2019t make it good if they mess up.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
In my history with Amazon, it\u2019s been simple and straightforward and I have had no problems with books I have entered on the KDP site.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
There was a recurring problem when I was also selling mobi formatted books through Ebookbase.  Kindle was making their own Kindle versions from my mobi books contrary to my direction on the Ebookbase site.  I had to email them to get the bogus versions, which did have DRM, removed.  This is documented here.<\/a>  However, Amazon has absorbed and shut down Ebookbase, so that is no longer an issue.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
There doesn\u2019t appear to be any direct customer service contacts.  It\u2019s all web, with an occasional email when they had to double check that I had the rights to sell my own books.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Pubit – Barnes & Noble<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
http:\/\/pubit.barnesandnoble.com\/<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Pubit is a very similar website to Amazon.  You upload your ePub version ebook and the cover art and all the meta data.  After a couple of days, the books appear on the B&N Pubit site.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
For a number of months, there was a glitch in their website that rejected some of my books for no obvious reason — it failed with a ‘technical difficulties’ message when I clicked the button.  With no customer service contacts, I had no way to make contact with them to request a resolution.  However, they did respond to my twitter complaint, but they didn\u2019t fix the issue then.  Over time, the site has improved and all of my books are accepted fine.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
I have no issues with Pubit at the current time.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Kobo<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
http:\/\/www.kobobooks.com\/<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Kobo is a different animal.  Once the account is set up, you have an FTP site to upload the ebook, optional cover art, and an Excel spreadsheet template which you fill in all the meta-data.  When a new book is uploaded, you can\u2019t even see it ( a write-only FTP site) and only recently have they added an email notification that the files have been received.  While I do have real people at real email addresses to query about problems, I may be too small a publisher to get much attention.  There is a chronic problem with DRM that I can\u2019t seem to get resolved.  In spite of always requesting DRM-free in the spreadsheet, and emails confirming that I want all my ebooks to be DRM-free, some of them consistently show up with DRM added.  I have also had problems in the past with the cover art not showing up on the marketplace site.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Apple iBookstore<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Apple does not use a website either.  You download a Mac application called  iTunes Producer which collects the same data — ebook, cover art, metadata and pricing.  The application does a number of pre-flight checks to insure that the ePub file matches both the technical specs of the ePub format and makes sure your pricing fits Apple\u2019s tier levels.  It also handles the uploading of the data and saves the \u2018package\u2019 so that you can revisit it to change pricing or other data.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
While some complain about having to have a Mac to run the application, I had the same problem with eBookbase, which only ran on Windows.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Apple is very strict about adherence to their guidelines and the specs.  They are also not very forthcoming when a rejection happens.  I currently have one book that I cannot get uploaded, and I still don\u2019t know what is causing the rejection.  Although Pubit, Kobo, Google, and Apple all take ePub, I frequently have to create a customized ePub just for the Apple site to get it through their rules.  One problem I have recently run up against was the rejection because there were URL\u2019s to places to buy other titles.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
There does not appear to be any customer service contacts.  I will get a reject email, but those appear automated.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Google<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
https:\/\/books.google.com\/partner<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
There are two layers to the Google book site, the books sampling part, and the ebook part.  At the beginning, I was uploading the PDF of my trade paperback books so that Google would serve as a way for people to sample my books before they made a purchase.  The Google website allows the author\/publisher to set limits what percentage of the book will be made available.  While I wasn\u2019t really looking for more work to do, keeping this site updated, I found that if I didn\u2019t supply a PDF of the book, Google would just go scan a copy anyway, and I might not like either the quality or the available percentage of the book made public.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
After a while, Google got into the ePub book selling business as well, and was going to blithely sell copies of ePubs that they auto-generated from my PDFs, regardless of the quality.  When I signed up to supply the ePubs myself, and make sure that I got paid, some money showed up in my account — I guess from sales they had made without prior permission.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
That\u2019s the story with Google.  You have to stay on top of everything, or they\u2019ll just go ahead without you.  If I\u2019m late getting official copies of my books on their site, they\u2019ll have poor ones there already.  If they add a new \u2018feature\u2019, the default choice may not be what you want.  I always have to double-check all the options on my books, and have to go back and clear some of the permission grabs that have occurred.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
When adding a new book, I have to add the PDF first, and then once they process it, I have to go back and add the ePub some random number of days later.  When mistakes happen, there is no customer service to handle the issue.  For some time now, Google has displayed the back cover of one of my novels as the front<\/a>, and even with re-uploads, nothing has changed, and I\u2019ve given up on it.  The Google Books site is also morphing into the Android Marketplace for books, trying to become something like Apple’s iBookstore.  They were also offering to be an ebook marketplace for indie bookstores, but I have recently heard that they are dropping that service<\/a>.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
Ebookbase<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
This is obsolete, but I ought to mention it.  They were bought out by Amazon when Amazon acquired the mobi ebook format and made it into the Kindle format.  I had problems with Amazon grabbing mobi format copies of my books and making their own Kindle versions, but that\u2019s all shut down now.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
In summary, I am feeding my ebooks out through a number of marketplaces, this means that I\u2019m left out of the Kindle Select program, but I\u2019d rather serve more of the customer base.  None of the sites is perfect, but none of them has quite reached the point where I\u2019ve given up in disgust either.  Because of Amazon\u2019s and Apple\u2019s price policies, I list the prices identically to all the marketplaces (some discount, some don’t), although I wonder of that will change in the future.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
On the worst of days, I wonder if I should have gone with Smashwords which feed most or all of these marketplaces from a single input, but I\u2019m too picky with my formatting to put up with their automated process.  I could hope for some cheap assistant to enter all that metadata over and over again, but I can live with that as well.  On the best of days, I see all those direct deposits showing up in my bank account.  I hope that keeps happening!<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
That\u2019s it for now, my 2012 review of ebook marketplaces.  I hope it\u2019s helpful to someone out there.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With the DOJ\u2019s efforts to remake the ebook marketplace, I thought it would be a good idea for me to take a good look at the marketplaces I do business with and document how it\u2019s going right now.  In a year or two, maybe I\u2019ll take another look and see what, if anything, has changed. … Continue reading Ebook Marketplaces from an Indie Publisher\u2019s View<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[49,112,113,114,115,116,96,117,24],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4t90x-tG","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1840"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1840"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1841,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1840\/revisions\/1841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}