Electronic Publishing: Single Channel

Morning, all! I would have written this last night, but I was up making Butter Bars for my hubby to take to work and then I wrote before crawling into bed around 1:30 am. Then I woke up at 5:30 when my youngest threw up and whimpered in misery for the next two hours. Yeah. Been one of those days, and it's only 7:56 here.

Enough about my woes. Let's discuss Single channel e-pubbing.

If you've been following the market at all, then you've got a pretty good idea as to what e-pubbing is: the release of your work in digital format through a single venue. And you can probably name the leaders off the top of your head.

Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing
Barnes and Noble pubit!
Google ebookstore
Scribd

Each have their advantages and disadvantages (Google is dealing with lawsuits right now), but the basics remain the same.
1. This option is absolutely free. They offer you nothing but a platform and online store for your work.
2. Your royalty is typically 70-85% of your book price, which you set.
3. You have to all the work to transfer and format your work to their unique requirements (and they're all unique).
4. You have to design your own cover, as well as doing all the editing and polishing yourself.
5. You can pull your work at anytime if you get a deal with a traditional publisher, or you just want to do something different.
6. There is no exclusivity agreement--you can publish in one or all of these places.

I hope this series of articles is as helpful to you as it is for me. I've started thinking that publishing a series of short stories I have via ebook would be a good option for me.

Next week we'll talk about e-pubbing on multiple channels, and give you a few questions to think about when you are deciding what road to follow.

By the way, comments on any of my posts the last couple of weeks and today count towards our mini contest!