So, You Want to Publish an eBook? Tips From the #scio12 Pros

By Rachel Nuwer

You’ve just put the finishing touches on your 13,000-word opus. It’s too long for a magazine, and too short to publish as a book. Surprisingly, the New Yorker doesn’t seem interested. But not to worry: the ebook’s got you covered.

As David Dobbs’ runaway success My Mother’s Lover showed, ebooks can be an incredibly viable outlet for making your work live. The numbers say it all. While traditional outlets flounder, publishing in ebooks is exploding these days. The beauty of the ebook is that it provides an outlet for work that is hard to place anywhere else, whether because of its length or its interactive components.

Approaching a project specifically from an ebook perspective has its perks. If you’re going the traditional printing route, a publisher like Random House may suggest an ebook edition. They could do a good or bad job, it’s entirely in their hands. But if you’re goal is an ebook, you can make the project as creative, aesthetically pleasing, and multi-media loaded as you want.

There’s tons of opportunities now, from the new Apple ebook software, ibooks, available just last week, to start ups like the Atavist (where SceinceOnline’s Olivia Koski hails) that work with you to design your perfect digital platform for long-form nonfiction. All venues have the quirks; ibooks locks you into the Apple prison if you use their software, but you can freely imbed videos and only have to forfeit 30 percent of your proceeds to Apple so long as you price your masterpiece below $15. No one gives you an advance for your work in this case, but then, outside of the 30 percent cut, you’re also not sharing the royalties with anyone, either.

At the Atavist, where David Dobbs did his publishing, depending on whether you select the Kindle, ibooks, or other platforms, Amazon or Apple take 30 percent of royalities, then you split the other 70 percent 50-50 with the Atavist. But at the Atavist, someone is working full time to make sure your work looks good on all platforms.

Scientific American book publisher Amanda Moon pushed the boundaries of what makes a book a book with the recent Journey to the Exoplanets. The ebook is essentially a hybrid, combining games, multimedia, and text. Readers can visit another planet and set up experiments to determine whether or not life exists, for example. It’s a particularly good learning tool for kids, and it wasn’t as expensive to produce as some people assume, Amanda said. SciAm plans to do more projects like this in the future.

When Carl Zimmer published his last book, Kindle had it up in matter of hours. He noticed a few typos (editing responsibilities are your own) and sent a list of changes. Kindle changed the manuscript within an hour—they’re good. Not every venue is like this, though.

At places like SmashWords, authors submit a file, then SmashWords helps with formatting and spreading it to different locations. But as Carl said, there is no lingua franca for ebooks. Each place has its own quirks.

Bottom line: all ebook venues are different beasts.

It pays to have agent who’s very aggressive with erights. A good agent markets for better than 10 to 15 percent of the cuts. You can sometimes negotiate a clause into your contract that specifies a reevaluation of the standard industry rights after year in order to renegotiate your royalties if the playing field is significantly better.

Today, ebook success stories are usually in the realm of romance, thrillers, and young adult novels. Unlike fiction authors, science writers can’t churn books out at such a fast pace given the amount of research a single work entails. Some science writers are resistant to the notion of ebooks, but Carl encourages writers to think of ebooks as long form magazine stories that continue to produce income.

If you’re not Carl Zimmer, David Dobbs, or a journalist of similar standing, Twitter and Facebook are useful tools for promoting your work.  Pricing is also an important consideration. Charging less than $9.99 for your ebook may seem like peanuts for all that effort, but it encourages people to purchase it on a whim. If your ebook has a lot of interactive components, people may be willing to pay a bit more, around $13.00.

And one more bonus: Carl volunteered to promote science ebooks on a new blog dedicated to the topic, so get writing!