“You should raise your prices – after you’re done with my book, of course!” is not the kind of thing you hear every day running a business, but we’ve had a couple of our customers tell us this. High quality work and low prices continue to stand out as the two things that make our customers the happiest. I view the second, in particular, as a challenge: for a programmer with many years of experience, the technical details of getting an eBook right are manageable. The trick is how to do so, including providing good customer support, at a price that’s reasonable.
Amazon’s KDP is opening up self-publishing to many who might not have considered it. Rather than spend a lot of money and time with a “vanity” publisher, people can just go directly to Amazon with their work, and if it sells, great! But since “there’s no such thing as a sure thing”, if it doesn’t go well, it’s better to keep your costs contained. You can always learn from what went wrong, and try again – edit the book some, improve your marketing skills, and, very importantly, write more. That said, putting a minimum of effort into your books is likely to pay off: make sure the formatting is ok, make sure that the most glaring of errors are edited out, and make sure you have a nice cover image. We come into the picture with formatting and cover images: we take your Word file, and produce a high quality .mobi file. Indeed, I think we meet or exceed the standards of many big publishers’ ebooks, but as the saying goes, we don’t want to “forget to dance with the one that brung you”, and in that case, it’s all of you who are just getting into this self-publishing thing. For those of you who are making money writing, our low prices are just an added benefit.
But how do we do it? Mostly by means of programming to automate the process as much as possible, so that the people doing the conversion for each book can concentrate on what people are good at, and leave the boring stuff to the computer. We have a process for managing your book from start to finish, so that we are efficient in our use of time. There are tools to clean up all the garbage that MS Word leaves in many files, there are tools to help correct common formatting mistakes, and tools to help create a hyperlinked table of contents. On the customer support side, we have a “progress tracker” for every book where our customers and conversion experts can leave comments and ask questions.
Does our automated process leave any room to customize your book? Of course! We don’t add too much in the way of “frills”, since there aren’t that many things that can be done to a book destined for a wide range of reading devices in any event, but we can certainly work with you to personalize your book.
Interested in giving us a try? Our prices and “get started” page is here: http://www.liberwriter.com/pricing
LiberWriter - Friendly, Easy Kindle Publishing 