How to Prep Your e-Book for Maximum Success

Book Promotion: Leverage Your e-Book Layout
Apart from your manuscript content, what should your print book or your e-book contain?  And how can you promote your current and your former books to new readers and customers?  How to encourage book reviews and sign-ups for email newsletters?
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Book-Layout

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Traditionally the first page of print books are set up according to the Chicago Manual of Style. The front matter pages get lowercase Roman numerals instead of regular Arabic page numbers – however only in print books – e-books don’t use page numbers. Read more about print book layout here in this blog article.
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The books’ first pages are set up in this sequence:

  • half-title page
  • series title
  • title page
  • copyright page
  • dedications
  • a quote or epigraph
  • Table of Contents (TOC)
  • list of illustrations
  • list of tables
  • the foreword
  • preface
  • acknowledgements
  • introduction

Only the title page and copyright page are mandatory – also for e-books.

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Look Inside

When people use the “Look Inside” feature, especially in e-books, those traditional front matter / first book pages could easily take up half of the feature. So you better move everything but the title page, copyright page, and the Table of Content (TOC) to the last pages of the book.
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Copyright
The copyright page is essential as many e-book retailers won’t accept an ebook for sale unless it includes the copyright page. It should consist of: Copyright [Year] Author name, e.g. ‘Copyright 2012 Allen Miller’ or ‘© 2012 Allen Miller’.  Quite a few of the content in a printed book’s copyright page is irrelevant to an e-book.
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Table of Contents (TOC)
Chapter entries in the content listing should be hyperlinked so that users can go straight to the start of a chapter from the TOC. Distributors, such as Amazon will insist that you do this or they won’t accept your e-book. It improves the quality and usability of your e-book.  Don’t include page numbers from your printed edition – it doesn’t make sense in an e-book.  Due to a variety of eReaders, tablets and even computer screens where e-books are read – and even more due to the font size an e-book reader may choose – page numbers are useless.
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Take Advantage of Hyperlinks
An e-book is simply a specialized web page. Capitalize this fact for some “free advertising” of your other books, of your Social Media sites, to gather email newsletter sign ups and book reviews.
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Set up the following pages, right after the books’ last page:

  • Review Links: Give your readers a reasons to leave positive reviews and to recommend the book to others. Once readers have finished the last page and like your book, they are more inclined to leave an immediate book review.
  • Set up an opt-in link for your newsletter / mailing list
  • Link to all your Social Media sites, for example to:
  • Amazon author page and all your book online retailers
  • GoodReads.com and other book communities
  • Your own website and blog
  • Google+
  • Twitter.com
  • Pinterest.com
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If there are buttons already set up for Google+, Twitter, Goodreads, etc. on your website, just click on them, copy the URL out of the address bar on the bottom of your page, and create the link.
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Make it Easy for Reviewers
Amazon uses their own identifier for ebooks—ASIN—which means you have to wait until after the book is definitely published on the Kindle Store to create a link. As soon as your book is uploaded, you can use your books Amazon page, for example http://www.amazon.com/your-title-ebook/dp/B00000ABC/  and link to     “Post your own review”.

Building these links is just a matter of copy/paste. If you are not familiar with HTML, ask your e-book formatter or your web designer to do it. It’s worth the small effort – and a great chance to make the next sale, get reviews, new fans who rave about your book and followers on your Social Media sites.

You can certainly use logos or sharing buttons.  How this works is described by David Kudler here for HTML-based ePub files and here for Word and Smashwords.

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Retweet Buttons
People are naturally inclined to share content they find valuable. It shows to their followers that they are someone worth following because of the useful information they share, making them a valuable contributor to the social networks. Encouraging your readers to share your book’s content in social media also extends the reach of it to people outside of your direct network.

A special retweet button allows any reader to easily post a tweet into his or her Twitter account.  And it’s not just any tweet, but one that’s prefabricated by you and links back to your e-book. Retweet buttons allow any reader to easily post a tweet into his or her Twitter account. And it’s not just any tweet, but one that’s prefabricated by you and links back to the original landing page where your document resides.
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Retweet Buttons: Step by Step Explained
Create a small graphic (a blue bird on the graphic gives a visual signal to Twitter users) you can place it in your manuscript. Place the retweet image in more than one location of your future book.

  • So where do you want to send readers? Certainly to your books’ sales page!
  • Use a link shortener, such as bit.ly, as the original Amazon link is too long.
  • Create a short recommendation text to accompany the link.
  • Avoid hashtags or replace them with %23, so instead of #reading, use %23reading.
  • Acrobat Pro will allow you to create hot-links inside your e-book file.
  • Use the “Link Tool” in Acrobat Pro (under the advance editing menu), locate the retweet buttons you added into your file and create a clickable link for each retweet graphic.
  • To keep the link type invisible, highlight style to ‘None’ and select ‘Open a web page’ as the link action.
  • Then hit the ‘Next’ button.  You will be prompted to enter your special URL.
  • Now repeat the process for all the retweet buttons you have in your e-book manuscript.

More tips, for example how to do it in InDesign, can be found in this article by Marissa Treece.

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The Last Pages of Your Book
Once you created all these URL’s, you may then add these pages to the end of the book:

  • List of your previous books with sales page URL’s
  • Acknowledgements
  • “About the author” or bio
  • Bibliography
  • Index Links (for non-fiction books)
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Remember: The first page sells your book. The last page sells your next book!
Setting up your book layout in the same professional way as trade publishers do and leveraging the fact that you can incorporate links, re-tweet buttons, sign-up forms and review encouragements in your e-book will bring you many more new readers for your books!

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If you would like to get more support in all things publishing, have your book intensively promoted and learn how to navigate social media sites – or to learn how you can make yourself a name as an author through content writing: We offer for three months all this and more for only $179 – or less than $2 per day! Learn more about this customized Online Seminar / Consulting for writers: http://www.111Publishing.com/Seminars

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