Attending Bristol Crimefest recently, I was given a list of all participating authors together with all the books they'd written. I was surprised and slightly horrified at how many were out of print. All those good books now no longer readily available. They should be ebooks. Ebooks are there for ever.
I recently began helping my friend and fellow crime writer Alanna Knight put up her backlist as ebooks.
How do we do this?
Firstly we scan an original on my two-sided scanner. This reads the pages into a word document. Scanners are pretty sophisticated nowadays but it still has to make decisions on certain letters/punctuation marks, especially on old and small print. The next stage is going through it carefully identifying any typos. After that it requires formatting to fit Kindle and other devices.
The text ready, we need a cover. If you're doing a series, you need a signature style for it. Covers should be bright, engaging but not too detailed. Most people will only view it as a thumbnail. Amazon has details of both formatting required for text and the size and quality of the cover image.
After that we decide a price, what tags will take our readers to our book and of course a pitch to sell it with.
Thursday is the day Alanna's first two books go on line. And from then the money from the sales will drop into her bank account. Always a good thing.
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