Publishing ebooks is a lot easier than you think! Listen as Jim Azevedo, marketing director at Smashwords, the largest distributor of self-published e-books, shares the fast, free and easy “must knows” about publishing and distributing your ebooks.
Since 2008, Smashwords has helped authors around the world publish and distribute more than 420,000 titles to top e-book retailers, subscription services, and public libraries, as well as serving over 120,000 independent authors, publishers, and literary agents.
Jim’s career began more than 20 years ago in the Silicon Valley high tech world, and for the past 15 years, he’s been a drummer for Rivals, a popular San Francisco Bay Area hard rock band. Wow, that’s quite something. Jim’s forthcoming book, How to Get Your Band Out of the Garage, will be published in the next few months. Jim, thank you for being this week’s guest expert and mentor.
Excerpt from this week’s podcast “How to Make Publishing eBooks Fast, Free and Easy”
Q: Jim, let’s start with the basics of how our listeners can actually get started creating an e-book.
A: It’s a lot easier than they may feel it’s going to be. Many authors enter into this feeling like they’re just overwhelmed, “How am I going to do this? It sounds so technical,” and it’s really not. If you’re using a computer to write your book, chances are you’re already using a popular word processing program like Microsoft Word. Really, that’s all you need. We recommend Microsoft Word, and we’ll provide a formatting guide to help you through that process of formatting your manuscript to get it ready to be converted into an e-book. That’s really all it takes. Working with Microsoft Word, you’ll learn how to format your paragraphs properly, you’ll learn how to adjust your chapter headings, how to insert images if you have images, how to create a table of contents, and do these things properly so that your book can be converted into popular e-book file types, say like .epub and .mobi for Kindle-type devices that will ensure readers can read your books on whichever device they choose.
Download the transcript from this week’s podcast interview “How to Make Publishing eBooks Fast, Free and Easy”
For more information about Smashwords and how to publish your ebook check out the following links: