Print Books to Writing and Selling Ebooks: Making the Transition

Published authors all over the world are migrating from bookstores to online ebook sales in an endeavor to increase their book sales. Many of them are also making a transition from producing printed books to creating ebooks that don’t require expensive print processes and binding, or costly transportation for distribution.

This is especially true of self-published authors, and those whose books have long been out of print.

While the world’s established publishing houses continue to produce hard-copy books, they too are utilizing the opportunities of online sales and marketing.

As the Internet continues to burgeon and develop in ever-increasing directions, digital publishing has opened doors to authors who never thought it would be possible to create their own books of any kind. It has also opened up possibilities for those, like me, who own copyright of text in books that have long ceased to be available, except perhaps in random second hand book shops.

As long as you own copyright of the text you have written, there are all sorts of things that you can do with the material you own. For example you can repackage the text in its totality and turn it into an ebook. If the content is non-fiction, you can take relevant parts from your book and focus on a particular area of expertise covered in the book. The latter approach will usually enable you to create several different digital publications from one original book. It may also enable you to produce niche market ebooks that can establish you as an expert in profitable fields. I hope that’s what I’m going to be able to do.

Before you start any ebook writing based on an existing publication you have written, you must just be sure of the copyright issues, since publishers invariably hold the rights to the published edition. So you can’t just OCR (optical character recognition) it and present the original in digital form.

You will have to present it differently which, unless you have proven design skills, will mean you will need to hire the expertise of other people. If the book has been illustrated with drawings and/ or photographs, you will also need to be sure you have permission from the copyright owner if you intend to include some or all of these.

Many of the books I have written have been related to home improvement and DIY projects; I have also designed more than six of these. Having made a decision to produce and sell ebooks, I have been forced to analyze which parts of the books will translate best into a digital format. I doubt that I’ll be producing digital versions of any of my books in toto, but rather extracting really useful information and repackaging that. I have the happy advantage of having hands-on experience because we have always carried out the DIY projects we include. This means I can add real and relevant problem-solving advice to the text that I have already written.

A particular challenge is that (unlike ebooks I have written for other people) all the books I have written are heavily illustrated with full color photographs taken by my partner and husband. While that is a great benefit for the printed editions we have produced, including lots of images will make PDF editions a lot larger than ebooks that aren’t illustrated, which will take them longer to download. Furthermore, the more photographs I include in the digital editions, the more ink it will take for purchasers to print them out.

At the same time, for me the transition from print to digital is inevitable. Non-fiction how-to books are not the stuff that best-selling novels are made of. Even though there certainly is a market for them, there is definitely a much bigger virtual market of people who:

a)      Have more focused needs, and

b)      Who don’t want to spend money on good-looking coffee table DIY books.

It’s early days yet, but I feel it in my bones that writing ebooks based on my own books is going to be an interesting and hopefully profitable journey.

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