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One of the most common questions students ask in my virtual classroom for Publish and Sell Your E-Books is how much they should charge for their ebooks. There isn’t, however, one answer (or price) that fits all books. Traditional publishers may have it easier to set prices, because they know their input costs and have a reasonable idea of expected sales. Independent, or Indie, self-publishers may not have any input costs if they’re doing everything themselves from the editing to creating the cover. Instead, they have to formulate some idea of what it has cost them in other ways, such as lost earnings for the time they’ve committed to writing and creating the book. And of course, first time authors (or even mid-list authors) have no way of knowing how many copies of an e-book they’ll sell. E-books don’t have an inventory, so the cost of paying for boxes and boxes of books, plus their storage, is also eliminated. So, how does an indie author set price? Well, one of the best ways is to survey the market and see what it will bear. For checking prices I recommend authors use Smashwords. Why? Smashwords is one of the largest distributors [...]

The fourth session of my new course, Publish and Sell Your E-Books, started last week. I love teaching it and have had the most interesting questions in my discussion areas–in fact, one of my students commented that she learned as much in the discussions as in the lessons. I was pleased! Indeed, the ability to ask questions and get answers is the key advantage to learning in an online classroom. Otherwise, you could research everything you needed to know from a book or the Internet. A number of students have asked how to format pages for an e-book and if they can put in page breaks. This question has made me realize that one of the tough things about going from publishing “regular” books to e-books is the idea that “pages” no longer exist. An e-book is all just lines of text that display on the screen of the e-reader. The e-reader is what determines the size or dimensions of the viewing screen (digital page), plus the font display size the user selects (I love e-readers because I can make the font very large). So, e-book authors need to imagine all those lines of text displayed on anything from a [...]