Yes or no, don’t let this story discourage you from eBook publishing. If anything, this case should be encouraging independent news publishers to jump into the eBook market.

Why? As Talking Points Memo explained, this case boils down to an alleged attempt by big book publishers to collude to get an “agency” deal where they would get to set the price of the books they published and were sold on Amazon.

The TPM summary didn’t mention it, but that agency pricing model is the pricing deal that you get with Amazon as an independent eBook publisher. Why is that a price fixing offense for them and not for you? In short, because they allegedly colluded to get particular prices under that deal, according to the TPM summary.

Econ 101 lesson here: If you can enter a market where existing players are colluding to hold up prices, you have a huge business opportunity if you can undercut them on price. Typically, when big businesses try to collude on price, it’s because they have high barriers to entry in that business that keep potential competitors (i.e. disruptors) on the sidelines.

And that certainly was the case in the book publishing industry just 10 years ago. Today, however, the barriers to entry to book publishing are about the same as the barriers to entry to website publishing were 15 years ago – pretty much zilch. You need some tech know-how, but it’s nothing more than a sharp learner can teach herself or himself within a few weeks.

Remember, the big book publishers – like the big newspaper chains before them – have highly specialized, multi-level workforces that can drive their operating costs higher than Voyager 2. The traditional book publishing operation model includes

• authors
• agents
• book editors
• copy editors and proofreaders
• interior designers
• cover designers
• manufacturing
• publicists
• distribution
• retailers

Each book sold must pay a portion of the salary or wages of each person that chain. And don’t forget that each company involved needs to pay for all the managers overseeing these people, as well as a cut for profit as well. No wonder book publishers are trying to inflate the prices they charge.

Publishing an eBook independently through a retailer such as Amazon takes the manufacturing, distribution and retailing roles off your table. Independent publishing also removes the need for acquiring an agent and a book editor (though I recommend showing your work to a trusted colleague for feedback before moving into copy-editing).

As an online journalist, I have the ability to write my own book, to edit it, and to code up the HTML for the eBook design. As a website publisher, I have built an online community of tens of thousands of frequent readers to whom I can market my books, and the social media skills to help empower them to spread the word virally on my book’s behalf.

All this means that I can handle pretty much all the work of publishing and marketing an eBook. Which also means that I can keep all the money my books earn for myself. Sure, retailers such as Amazon will take a cut, but in Amazon’s case they do bring something very valuable to the table – a recommendation engine and category best-seller lists that help drive sales of your books. That’s worth the cut they take, in my opinion. (Barnes and Noble? Not so much.)

All the rest is yours. You don’t have to set aside anything for managers or for shareholders. That should give you the ability to produce and market your work for a fraction of the cost of producing and marketing that same work through a traditional publisher, even if they were producing only the same eBooks. And you can do that while making more money than you would as an author if you had published through a traditional publishing house. So let the federal government, the New York publishing houses and Amazon fight it out. Ultimately, the future of book publishing belongs to the independents.

I’m nowhere near unique among journalists. If you’ve worked in online journalism, you probably have a similar skill set to me, and can handle the work of self-publishing your best reporting work into eBooks. With lower expenses, you can undercut “the big kids” on price. That leaves it up to you, and your skills as a storyteller, to compete to attract the attention – and purchases – of readers.

You want to stay in the news business? Here is your purest, most direct shot to do that. If you can tell stories that people want to read, eBooks are a marketplace in which people are paying authors – nearly directly – to read them. No employer or publisher can tell you ‘no’, or silence you. No big business can beat you on price.

So why not jump in?

I thought again that as I read the New York Times’ story about Barnes & Noble from last weekend, The Bookstore’s Last Stand. The Times wrote of the publishing industry’s hope that Barnes & Noble will be able to stand up to the challenge from Amazon.com, preserving a major retailer where their companies’ products are king.

Like many struggling businesses, book publishers are cutting costs and trimming work forces. Yes, electronic books are booming, sometimes profitably, but not many publishers want e-books to dominate print books. Amazon’s chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, wants to cut out the middleman — that is, traditional publishers — by publishing e-books directly.

Which is why Barnes & Noble, once viewed as the brutal capitalist of the book trade, now seems so crucial to that industry’s future. Sure, you can buy bestsellers at Walmart and potboilers at the supermarket. But in many locales, Barnes & Noble is the only retailer offering a wide selection of books. If something were to happen to Barnes & Noble, if it were merely to scale back its ambitions, Amazon could become even more powerful and — well, the very thought makes publishers queasy.

If Barnes & Noble’s future is tied to that of the print book publishing houses, then Barnes & Noble is as doomed as Borders, Crown Books and the other brick-and-mortar booksellers that have proceeded it into oblivion.

The Nook alone will not save Barnes & Noble’s business because the change that is roiling the publishing business today – whether it be for books or for newspapers – is not simply a transition from printed media to digital. It’s a transition from a marketplace where information was controlled by a few gatekeepers to one where anyone may offer their content to a mass audience.

This isn’t about eBooks versus printed books. It’s about a book industry where supply is controlled by a few publishing houses or one where supply is opened to all who wish to publish something.

In short, it’s not the medium; it’s the market. If your business model is based upon controlling access to the information marketplace, you’re doomed. If your business model is based instead upon enabling and expanding access to the market, you have a chance of succeeding. And that is what has the book industry scared.

The traditional publishing houses, like traditional print newspapers, built their businesses as gatekeepers. And despite its development of the Nook to expand into the digital marketplace, Barnes & Noble appears to be playing along. I’ve written before about Barnes & Noble restricting independent eBook publishers to its hard-to-find PubIt! ghetto on the BarnesandNoble.com website. I suspected that decision was driven by a desire to protect traditional publishing houses and the Times article only strengthens the impression that Barnes & Noble and the publishing houses have tied their futures together.

But by favoring print publishers in its retailing, Barnes & Noble is under-utlizing the one unique tool it could be using to lure eBook publishers and readers from Amazon.com – its physical stores. Instead of consigning eBook publishers to a tiny link on the BN.com home page, Barnes & Noble could be incorporating titles by independent publishers into section by section best seller lists, and individualized product recommendations, as Amazon does. Barnes & Noble (or its book publishing partners) could be offering a seemless ePub-to-print-on-demand option for indie publishers, as Amazon does through CreateSpace. But one thing that Amazon cannot do is to move the best-selling indie-published print-on-demand books into physical stores, located throughout the country. Only Barnes & Noble can do that. Nor can Amazon conduct book reading and signing events for indie authors at bookstores around the country. But Barnes & Noble could.

A decade ago, newspapers had a similar opportunity. They could have used their print publications as a lure to encourage would-be bloggers and smart commentators to publish on newspaper website community portals instead of independent websites, denying those competitors many voices with which to grow. Just select the best community content from the website each day, and print it in the paper. But papers were slow to embrace web-to-print, and now they’ve lost too much of the brand-name appeal and traffic advantage they once enjoyed over online start-ups.

Sure, book publishers don’t want to lose market share to independents. But book consumers want to select from the broadest possible selection possible, with easy to find links to both the best and most popular selections in desired categories, whether they come from New York or an indie publisher with just a PC and an ISBN. Ultimately, retailers like Barnes & Noble have to decide: Do you work for your customers, or your suppliers?

The book publishers could have a future. Beyond controlling access to the marketplace, book publishers provided one other, very valuable service to authors – book editing. And the demand for editing, guidance and advice for authors is growing as the number of authors grows. Book publishers could find ways to transition their business models to serve the growing number of eBook publishers, instead of hoping that Barnes & Noble shuts them out. But it’s becoming clear that they won’t.

Don’t be fooled by the industry’s attempt to distract from their failure by conflating their future with that of authors in general.

While publishers’ fates are closely tied to Barnes & Noble, said John Sargent, the C.E.O. of Macmillan, it’s not all about them.

“Anybody who is an author, a publisher, or makes their living from distributing intellectual property in book form is badly hurt,” he said, “if Barnes & Noble does not prosper.”

I call B.S.

If you are an author with a New York publishing house contract, perhaps your fate is tied to the publishing industry’s. But if you are not, well, you shouldn’t waste a moment of time rooting for a business that’s not rooting for you.

Nope, not even close.

Oh…kay, so is Apple’s new iBooks Author at least another option for writers looking to pick up some extra money writing eBooks?

Sure.

Apple released its new eBook production tool last week, coupled with an upgrade to its iBooks app. Apple’s trying to get into the textbook market, positioning its iPad as an electronic textbook reader. But to do that, Apple needs an ongoing supply of eBook textbooks. The company’s signed deals with some textbook publishers, but it’s also offering the iBooks Author tool to encourage more people to create texts, as well.

The iBooks Author app’s gotten plenty of attention since its release for its user license restriction that any book created with it can only be sold through the iBookstore. No Amazon. No Barnes and Noble. While iBooks Author can export files as a PDF, it won’t generate the ePub file needed for best results in publishing eBooks through those and other online vendors.

That alone disqualifies the iBooks Author app as a serious option for any journalist looking for a single eBook creation solution. Better to continue creating an HTML file using your favorite editor, then running that file through Calibre to generate your ePub, which you can submit to Amazon, BN.com… and the iBookstore. The iBooks Author app also requires that you be running Mac OS Lion – it won’t download to Macs running Snow Leopard or earlier versions of the Mac OS. And if you’re using Windows? Fuggedaboutit.

But if you do have Lion, creating a book through iBooks Author and selling it exclusively through Apple is better than not making or selling eBooks at all.

The iBooks Author app offers several templates from which to choose in creating an  eBook textbook  eTextbook  TexteBook book. Your new book doesn’t have to be aimed strictly at students to use iBooks Author, but it seems a waste to use iBooks Author to create a novel or other text-driven book with few or no graphics.

So why not try taking advantage of all that the iPad can do better than a printed page? Most newsrooms at this point have multimedia associated with major story packages. The iBooks Author app allows you to add those some of those elements into a pre-formatted book template with drag and drop ease. (You’ll need to convert to AAC from MP3, if your media files aren’t in Apple’s preferred formats already.)

The templates are quite nice, though if Apple doesn’t expand the selection soon, there’s the danger they will become cliche from overuse. It appears possible to alter Apple’s templates, though I didn’t spend a great deal of time investigating that. I suspect that anyone capable of doing that intensive of design work won’t be messing around with the aimed-at-beginners iBooks Author tool, anyway.

If I had a hot story package with several must-see multimedia elements that would play at book length, I’d give iBooks Author a try to throw that eBook out there and see what I’d get. (Here’s a good, in-depth guide from Lifehacker.) Remember, you’ll need to promote your work aggressively through your own publications and social media channels. Chances are, no one’s going to find your book on the iBookstore, unless you send them there to look for it.

While the iBookstore continues to have a supply problem that limits its market share relative to Amazon and Barnes and Noble, the store’s biggest challenge is that its interface simply doesn’t enable readers to find additional titles of interest as effectively as those competitors do. Adding more title to the iBookstore, through iBooks Author’s exclusivity requirement, won’t address that issue.

If Apple wants to get more authors submitting more title to the iBookstore, it’d do better to improve the store’s interface so that it encourages more sales by books that aren’t in the Top 10 in the iBookstore’s limited number of categories. (I wish that Apple would spend a little of its huge pile of cash to buy a service such as Goodreads, then use it as a base upon which to build a social recommendation engine for the iBookstore.) That, plus a one-click publication function within iBooks Author, would be enough to make the iBookstore every bit as attractive to new authors as submitting to Amazon.

For what it’s worth, I hope that Apple succeeds in shaking up the print textbook market. Watching my children struggle under the weight of their backpacks when they go to school every morning frustrates me, as does the political process by which textbook contracts are awarded by states and school districts. I’d love to see students freed from the burden of heavy, out-of-date, static, printed textbooks and better engaged by frequently-updated multimedia texts, contained on an easy-to-carry tablet. I’d also like to see schools freed from having to install, maintain, assign and monitor lockers, which (outside gym class) would become unnecessary with tablet-based textbooks. And I’d like to see the political influence of textbook manufacturers diminished, which will only happen if the barriers to entry into this business are reduced by a disruptive technology such as eBooks.

So while I wish Apple success in disrupting the textbook market, I also hope that the company will further develop its iBooks Author tool, adding templates for other genres of publishing as a well as an ePub export tool. While I understand Apple’s desire to use the app to boost its share of the book sales market, I think that Apple’s best approach for doing that lies not in restricting authors, but in encouraging consumers to buy more of the books that Apple does sell.

If you’re not a regular reader of OJR, last summer I wrote about my first effort in eBook self-publishing. I’m a big believer in eBooks because I see them as a medium where readers have proven that they are willing, even eager, to pay for content. Forget about chasing pennies from paywalls. Go where your readers are buying eBooks by the millions, instead.

Newspaper publishers have been publishing books for decades, but the printing and distribution costs have limited those efforts to only the most highly popular subjects, such as national championships by the local sports team and blockbuster investigative works. But eBooks lower the cost of production and distribution substantially. Now, many more long-form investigative works, ongoing columns and popular long-standing can be converted to eBooks, with good profit potential.

Adding eBooks to your repertoire provides you another revenue path to supplement advertising, underwriting or whatever else you’re using to bring in revenue today. I’d encourage publishers to look beyond repurposed content, and consider how original eBook content might fit within your news product mix. Find the right story, and the demand is there. From paying readers this time.

If you’re interested in getting started with eBooks, please click into our archives and take a look at my three-part introduction to eBook publishing. Today, I’m going to refine my original advice by letting you know what I’ve learned from selling eBooks through several popular online bookstores.

When I started, I submitted my eBook to four retailers that would accept works from first-time self-publishers: Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble and Google Books. I linked to all four stores when marketing my eBook to the readers of one of my websites. (The book was a collection of stories from that site, re-edited and with a few additional chapters.) I signed up for the various retailers’ affiliate programs, not only so that I could make a few extra cents from each sale I referred, but also so I could get some information about how many sales were being driven by me, through my website, and how many were bring driven by links on the retailers’ stores.

The results humbled me. After the first day or two, the number of sales I referred dropped to a small fraction of the overall sales of the books – less than 10 percent. Which is great – exactly what you’d want to see. That shows that eBook publishing can expand your market, and bring your work to an audience and customers you’re not already reaching.

But I also found that the retailer-driven sales I was seeing were far from uniformly distributed. Within a month, it was clear that almost all of my sales were coming from just two stores – Amazon and Apple. So I did some clicking around to see if I could find out why.

One of my favorite nuggets of advice for any business person is to put yourself in the customer’s position and take note of what you see and how you’re treated. So that’s what I did. I went into each store as a customer and tried to find my book. The easy way to do that would be to use the stores’ search functions, and those turned up my book almost instantly.

But anyone who’d be searching for the exact title of my book would have heard it already. If my book was to reach a new audience that wasn’t already familiar with my work, those readers would have to find my title by browsing through the site – not by searching.

That’s where I found my explanation. Google Books has little presence on the Web, and generated almost no sales for my book. (Google has no affiliate program that I found, but when I stopped linking to the Google Books version of the book from my website, sales dropped to near zero.) Browsing through Google Books’ homepage really didn’t get me anywhere. Like Google itself, this is a search-driven interface.

Barnes and Noble bills itself as the world’s largest bookstore. And while Barnes and Noble sells millions of eBooks, it banishes self-published authors into a virtual ghetto called “Pub It!” Titles published through the Pub It! store aren’t displayed in BN.com’s category bestseller lists, and unless a reader decides to click the Pub It! link on BN.com, he or she would never find my book from browsing the site. Again, once I stopped linking to the Barnes and Noble version of the eBook from my website, sales through BN.com dropped to near zero.

It was a different story on Apple and Amazon, neither of which discriminate against self-published books in their listings. The initial push from orders from readers of my website helped move the book onto the bestseller lists in the Travel category in Amazon’s Kindle store and on Apple’s iBooks store. That made it easy to find for readers browsing through both retailers’ stores. Additional sales from browsing readers also helped move the book up the charts, and my book topped out at number 2 in the Travel category on iBooks. (Apple’s iBooks store offers significantly fewer titles than Amazon’s Kindle store, meaning there’s less competition to get onto the bestseller lists for publishers who can make it through Apple’s stricter tech standards for submitting a new title. But still… number 2! I’ll take that.)

Unfortunately on Apple, you need to stay on those category bestseller lists to keep moving product. Apple lacks the recommendation features readers find on Amazon, meaning that once you drop off the bestseller lists, there’s no easy way to browse to your book any longer. So, yep, even though I still link to Apple, sales have dropped to just a few copies a week now.

So, as an independent eBook publisher, I say, thank goodness for Amazon. With Amazon’s recommendation engine pushing my title to readers of books similar to mine, sales of my book on Amazon have remained healthy four months after it debuted. And Amazon offers bestseller lists in many different subcategories that drill down much deeper than “Travel,” allowing would-be customers to browse to my book even after it has dropped down the main Travel bestseller list. Amazon mixes eBooks and print books in category bestseller lists, too, exposing my book to readers who don’t think to look exclusively for eBooks, too. That gives it a sales edge over Apple, which sells only eBooks.

(Of course, Apple has its own advantage, since it has now barred direct sales of books on iOS devices through Amazon’s Kindle app. If you want to buy an eBook through an iOS app, you’re buying an eBook through the iBooks store. Of course, the workaround is to just use the browser and go to Amazon.com. That’s what I do.)

Now, will my experience apply to you? I don’t know. But I hope that this might help you prioritize where to focus your energy in publishing your first eBooks. My advice is… make Amazon your top priority. Getting on Apple can be worth the effort, too, at least in the short term. Once you have an Apple-compliant ePub file, it’s really not much extra effort to go ahead and submit it to Barnes and Noble or Google. (Though you’ll have to wait much longer to show up on Google – nearly two weeks in my case. Barnes and Noble had me up the next day.) But don’t expect much from those stores.

Looking forward, this experience convinced me that I don’t even want to consider buying a Nook. For eBook reading, I’m going all-in on Kindle. Why? Perhaps Barnes and Noble is trying to protect its relationship with the print publishers that stock its chain of brick-and-mortar bookstores by minimizing exposure for independent titles. But I want to see the full universe of available eBook titles when I go shopping for books online. And I want to be able to browse deeply into many various subjects to find title that might appeal to me.

My experience as a publisher and a consumer of eBooks shows me that Amazon is doing the best job of providing that now, by far. Which leads me to suspect that other consumers will feel the same way, ultimately powering Amazon to a dominant position in eBook and reader sales. That’s something for publishers to be thinking about.

Kindle Singles.

Kindle Singles is Amazon.com’s effort to promote shorter-length eBooks, between 5,000 and 30,000 words. Prices are low, too – Amazon requires that eBooks selected for the Kindle Singles program be listed between 99 cents and $4.99. However, all titles listed under Kindle Singles are eligible for a 70 percent commission to authors instead of the 30 percent commission it offers for titles priced under $2.99.

(By the way, if you haven’t read our series on publishing eBooks, you might want to start there before reading more about the Kindle Singles program.)

With Kindle Singles, Amazon’s using the flexibility of the eBook medium to target stories whose natural length falls in the gap between magazine articles and books:

“We’re looking for compelling ideas expressed at their natural length–writing that doesn’t easily fall into the conventional space limitations of magazines or print books…. A Kindle Single can be on any topic. So far we’ve posted fiction, essays, memoirs, reporting, personal narratives, and profiles, and we’re expanding our selection every week. We’re looking for high-quality writing, fresh and original ideas, and well-executed stories in all genres and subjects.”

But can Amazon create a market for this content? To get a first-person perspective on publishing a Kindle Single title, I emailed Will Bunch, who recently published October 1, 2011: The Battle of the Brooklyn Bridge about a pivotal day in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“As a writer, it’s always exciting to experiment,” Bunch replied. “Although I was pleased with my 2010 book about the rise of the Tea Party, The Backlash, it was hard to get people’s attention with a $16-20 hardcover book with so much good free and immediate writing on the same topic on the Internet. I thought with the Kindle Single I could produce a piece of writing that would come at the right time (when Occupy Wall Street was still at the top of the news) at the right length (14,500 words) at the right price (99 cents, in the spirit of the 99 percent.)”

Anyone who publishes an eBook on the Kindle platform can request to have his or her title considered as a Kindle Single. You can’t submit excerpts of a larger work, or republished work. Amazon’s also not now accepting “how-to manuals, public domain works, reference books, travel guides, or children’s books” as Kindle Singles, either. That doesn’t mean you can’t sell those items in the Kindle Store. It’s just that you won’t get the promotional boost of being listed on the Kindle Singles pages, and if you price under $2.99, you’ll be stuck with the 30% commission rate.

Kindle Singles also provides eBook publishers the opportunity to work with publication agents, a rarity for solo publishers in the eBook world. As an established print author, Bunch’s literary agent made the initial contact with Amazon, but once Amazon agreed to include Bunch in Kindle Singles, he got the chance to work with Kindle Singles editor David Blum to focus the end product.

Don’t expect Amazon to do all the work, though. In my experience, Amazon is the best eBook retailer in “suggested sales,” pushing your titles in front of consumers who have bought similar works. But to take full advantage of Amazon’s social recommendation system, you need to launch your title with a big push to generate those initial sales. So how did Bunch launch “Battle of the Brooklyn Bridge”?

“I don’t think it’s much different than regular books,” Bunch replied. “Become a presence on social networks, and use blogs intelligently – TV and radio is great if you have the right subject. You have to compensate for the fact that you won’t likely get traditional book reviews – but there are fewer and fewer reviews of conventional books anyway!”

Bunch introduced the eBook to readers on his blog and Twitter account, as well as in a post he wrote on Huffington Post. Additional links came from liberal blogs Firedoglake and Eschaton, and Bunch also made appearances promoting the book on radio and Keith Olbermann’s TV show. The blitz helped push Bunch’s book into the top 100 for all Kindle titles. Now, Bunch is trying to build on that momentum by reaching out to the progressive community online.

“One of my ambitions is to chronicle current events and politics in a writerly fashion – with a point of view, but not necessarily the kind of polemic that dominates the political best seller,” he said.

So is a Kindle Single a worthwhile option for other journalists?

“I think narratives and essays or meditations on topics that don’t merit a full-length book work well, and of course short stories for fiction writers,” Bunch replied. “Don’t have grandiose expectations — if you find the right publisher (like Amazon) you may earn as much as a major magazine article, but fortune is a longshot, fame not quite as much.”

Will he write a Kindle Single again?

“You bet. One benefit of the Kindle Single is that it’s a good format for experimentation; for example, I’ve long had an interest in other topics outside of politics, such as sports, and this might be the best way to take a risk with a new direction.”

Now, how much are you spending on developing eBooks for your newsroom content? I’d be surprised to find a newsroom that’s spending even half of what its devoting to app development on eBooks. In fact, I have yet to find a major newsroom that devoted more than a token amount of time and money to eBook development. (If you’re in newsroom that is spending time building eBooks, please let me know. I’d love to tell your story on OJR.)

Here’s why you should consider amplifying your investment in eBook development. Here are the prices of the top 20 paid apps in the iOS app store, as of last night:

$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$2.99
$0.99
$0.99
$1.99
$1.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99
$0.99

Now, here are the prices of the top 20 paid eBooks in Apple’s iBooks store, for comparison:

$9.99
$14.99
$12.99
$2.99
$12.99
$12.99
$0.99
$9.99
$12.99
$1.99
$12.99
$11.99
$14.99
$14.99
$12.99
$3.99
$14.99
$9.99
$12.99
$14.99

In which market would you rather try to make money?

Let’s sharpen the focus a bit. In the News category in the app store, most expensive paid app in the top 20 is Instapaper at $4.99. There is no News category in the iBooks store, but let’s use Politics & Current Events as the closest approximation. Of the top 20 paid eBooks in that category, 19 of the top 20 sell for $4.99 or more.

Clearly, the public is willing to – and does – pay more for content in eBooks than it does in apps. That fact should encourage any serious news business to take a serious look at eBooks.

But what about volume? That’s where I couldn’t find reliable data comparing sales in the app store versus sales of eBooks. But it’s clear from the pricing that a news organization would need to sell many times more apps than eBooks for apps to have better sales revenue, given the higher price points routinely supported in eBook stores.

There’s the possibility of ad revenue too, but I’ve yet to hear from any news organizations that are earning the several dollars per user on app ad revenue that they would need to in order to close the gap between app and eBook pricing. (And let’s not forget that a sharp businessperson could find a way to employ advertising in certain eBooks without killing consumer demand for the book, as well.)

And don’t forget the expense side. Outside development for both apps and eBooks can be expensive. But while writing an app can mean creating and compiling executable code, creating an eBook required no more tech skills than writing HTML then zipping some files. (Here’s our handy three-part do-it-yourself guide for publishing eBooks.) There’s no reason why a competent online publishing business – whether it be a large newsroom or a one-person shop, can’t publish eBooks in-house, keeping expenses to a minimum.

I’m not trying to dissuade you from developing apps – they can be an important part of your product mix in serving readers and customers. But I am trying to open your eyes to a paid content publishing option that too many news businesses are overlooking. If you’ve made a business case for app development, the business case for trying eBooks is much, much easier to make.

After all, apps are, literally, applications. They’re programs – the work of tech companies creating functionality for a market that wants to do something.

EBooks are content. They’re the work of content companies that create words and narratives for people who want information. Any special section, extended report or beloved series of 20,000 words or more than you create or have created for your newspaper or website can become an eBook. If you’re covering a geographic community, you should have an eBook guide to that community that you’re selling to travelers or people relocating to the area. If there’s a special event or sports team in your community that brings in visitors, you should publish a fresh edition of an eBook covering them each year. If you’re creating content, then why not leverage that content through the eBook market, as you do through the Web and other media?

In summary – eBooks sell for more than apps. They cost less to develop than apps. They’re content, not programming, so they’re a better match for the content companies in the news business.

So if you’re developing and marketing apps to expand your market, why aren’t you developing and marketing eBooks, too?

And so we’ve endured years of conference panels, email exchanges, and blog posts about paywalls and paid content strategies, as publishers try to figure out exactly how much people are now willing to pay for news content.

Lost in this is the realization that people have been telling us – for generations – how much they’re willing to pay for news.

Start with newspapers. For most of my life, newspapers cost 25 or 50 cents per daily copy. Think how many stories appeared in each of those papers – perhaps a dozen or so staff-written stories at smaller papers, up to several dozen or more at a major metro. Add in the wire stories and syndicated features, too, and we’re talking about hundreds of items of content in each daily paper.

Now consider that the cost of the daily paper included home delivery of a physical copy and usually included a fair number of coupons, too. Subtract the value of the delivery, the copy on paper and the coupons. How much of that 25 or 50 cents is left? Not much. Divide that paltry remainder by the number of items of content in that paper. It ought to be clear that the marginal value to a consumer of each newspaper story is pretty much zero.

Let’s think about magazine stories. Magazines cost more, from a couple bucks to several dollars a copy. And they include fewer, though often longer and more in-depth, stories. Again, you’ve got the benefits of home delivery and a copy on paper (but typically not so many coupons as a newspaper, if any). Once you subtract the value of that delivery and the paper copy, you’re left with a much more than you had after you subtracted the same from the cost of a single issue of the newspaper. Divide that remainder by the number of stories in the magazine and you will probably find that each magazine article has some value – though it is small, ranging from a few cents to closer to a dollar for exceptional examples.

Still, it’s better than the newspaper articles’ value.

Now let’s consider books. A typical non-fiction book retails between $10 and $30 and usually has just one item of content within – the narrative of the book itself. (Anthologies are different, of course.) Again, you have the value of the printed copy, but there’s no home delivery (if there were, you paid extra for it) and almost always no coupons. Therefore, the marginal value of the content in a book is substantial – several dollars per work.

That’s the way it’s been in the past, and if you’re willing to face facts, that’s the way it remains today.

Consumers have told us what they believe the value of journalism to be. And in a market economy, consumers’ word is law. Incremental, commodity daily news reports have close to no cash value to the consumer. Longer, more in-depth magazine-style pieces have small but significant value, but almost always under a dollar and usually just a few cents.

Only book-length journalism has substantial per-unit value, in excess of $1 and often much more.

That is why I’ve been writing so much about eBooks lately. Incremental daily journalism traditionally has had no financial value to a publisher beyond its value as a vehicle for advertising. Magazine-length journalism has had some income value, but typically has relied upon a healthy amount of advertising income as well. Only book-length journalism has been able to rely consistently upon the income from its consumer value.

As Internet competition has cut the price of advertising, it has cut the income of publications – such as newspapers and many magazines – that are dependent upon the value of that advertising. But what the Internet took away from journalism in newspapers and magazines, it is giving back in books. Journalists who can produce book-length-and-quality work now have unprecedented ability to publish directly to a global marketplace. And the collapse in advertising revenue is not affecting them one bit.

Yes, there’s more competition in the book publishing space, too. But 1,000 eBook readers deliver a heck of a lot more income to a writer than 1,000 blog or newspaper website readers. If the journalism industry is going to keep professional reporters employed, books and eBooks are going to have to play a much larger role in this industry than they have in the past.

Ask your current readers

Any time you launch a new product, present it to your current readers and customers first. They’ve already demonstrated an affinity for your work.

I also think it’s a good idea to “beta test” new products, including eBooks, with selected readers before introducing them to the public. Your readers can provide fresh perspectives that alert you to issues you might have missed before launch.

While beta testing’s invaluable for catching buggy code, I think “early reviews,” if you will, from an audience can help you clean up and sharpen an eBook before publication. They are especially helpful if you’re truly publishing on your own, and haven’t otherwise had another set of eyeballs on your copy before you publish.

Your current readers are your viral agents, too. You need them telling their friends to tell their friends to buy your book, just as you need them telling their friends to tell their friends to read your website, “like” your pages on Facebook, etc. Do what you can to get them excited about your book.

You ought to know by know what resonates with your audience, so I won’t get specific here. Some audiences love a direct approach. Others like a sarcastic take. Pick what works with your readers. But do not neglect to engage them as you prepare your eBook for sale.

In the marketplace, pick your targets wisely

If your eBook is successful, most of your sales will come from people who aren’t your current readers, but who find you through the big online book retailers, most notably Amazon.com.

But how will prospective readers find your book among the millions for sale online?

Some strategy can help your book stand out. Three factors affect how many people will find your book when they are browsing through an online bookstore:

1. How many books you’ve sold so far
2. Reader reviews of your book
3. The categories you select for your book

A strong launch with plenty of sales from your exiting readers can help with #1. Encouraging those loyal readers to submit reviews of your book cam help with #2.

But you need to choose your categories wisely on #3.

Why? Readers drill down through the retailer’s categories to find books, and while you need strong sales to appear high on the sales lists and good reviews to convert views to sales, not all categories require the same number of sales to move to the top of the best selling lists.

Drill down the retailer’s website to find the categories that you think best represent your book before you submit it. Don’t rely on the category drilldown within the submission interface. I found the hard way on Amazon that some of the categories available to publishers in the book submission interface don’t actually appear in the category drilldown on the Amazon.com website. Obviously, choosing those categories wasn’t helping my book to be seen by shoppers. I changed my categories to ones that appeared on the website and appeared in bestseller lists – with a sales boost – the next day.

Obviously, you shouldn’t pick an unsuitable category for your book’s topic, but it’s best to start in categories with lower overall sales, so you can move up the lists quickly. Pick the right categories, and sales in the dozens can get you on top sales lists on Apple’s iBooks and Amazon.com. Stay away from categories, such as “Humor,” which are dominated by books on the overall best selling lists.

Once you’ve increased your visibility and sales levels, maybe then you can move to other categories with more overall sales – but only after you’ve sold enough books to appear on their Top 50 or Top 100 sales lists.

Same principal applies to promoting any digital content. Start in niches, neighborhood and markets where you can win customers and notice, then expand into larger markets, if you feel the need.

Get social with other publishers

Don’t stop with your current readers and those who find you through the retailers. Reach out to other people publishing in the topics your book covers. Use your skills as a journalist to craft press releases to other publications and appropriate emails and messages to leaders of other online communities. Spread the word about your book. Offer sample chapters that others may publish. Make yourself available for interviews and chats.

And help make your case by returning the favor for other writers, too.

If you’ve isolated yourself from others publishing on your beat, this provides an opportunity for you to finally break that old-media habit. Whether you publish eBooks or not, online journalists ought to quit worrying about whether they’re sending readers to “competitors” by linking them or talking about them. Your readers know what’s out there. Spend your time and energy creating original and insightful coverage that others will want to link and discuss. Abandon the old gatekeeper model once and for all.

Become part of an online community that extends beyond your website, and you’ll develop the friendships and professional relationships that extend the social network you need to promote your best work. People who never get out and around because they’re trying to guard gates never enjoy those opportunities.

Now that you have an HTML file for your book, along with a cover image and all the images and other media that will appear within the book, it’s time to compile that information into eBook format.

Formats, actually. You might need to convert your eBook into multiple formats, due to requirements from the various major eBook retailers. Start by zipping your .html file, cover image and embedded image files into a single .zip file. (On Mac, that’s as easy as selecting the files, then Control-clicking them and selecting the “Compress” option.)

The two biggest online bookstores, Amazon and Barnes and Noble, will accept the .zip file as your eBook upload. However, I’ve had little success with this method producing a nice eBook with Amazon. There, I had to go ahead and used Amazon’s preferred method of running my eBook through Mobipocket Creator first.

On Barnes and Noble, though, the .zip file uploaded fine. Even better, using the preview option Barnes and Noble offers you after uploading your file, Barnes and Noble gives you a link with which you can download the ePub file that Barnes and Noble generates using your .zip file.

If you get lucky, and you formatted your HTML well, you can use that ePub file to submit to Apple’s iBookstore, as well as to other online eBook retailers. If not, you’ll need to read through the error messages that Apple throws to you, then recompile your .html file into ePub format using Calibre.

Before uploading anything, however, you’ll need to join the Big Three’s direct publishing programs. Follow these links:

• Kindle Direct Publishing on Amazon
• Pubit! by Barnes and Noble
• iTunesConnect on Apple.com

In each case, you’ll need to create an account with each business. (A general Apple ID works with iTunes Connect.) Expect to wait up to a day or so for your application to each program to be approved, allowing you to then upload your eBooks. Once you’re good to go, try uploading your .zip file.

One more note on Amazon: There’s pricing quirk in Amazon’s commission structure that might influence your decision how much you charge for your eBook. Amazon offers a 70% commission to publishers (minus a 15 cent delivery charge), but only on eBooks priced between $2.99 and $9.99. That means that if you planned to charge anything between $10 and $19.83, you’ll actually make more money if you drop the eBook price to $9.99, since you’ll get only a 35% commission on eBooks that cost $10 and more.

Since you want your book to appear on as many platforms as possible (and those platforms might not list you if you undercut their price on Amazon), that means you’ll need to drop your list price on all platforms to that level, as well.

If, once you’ve uploaded your eBook to Amazon, you’re not happy with the results, go ahead and try to rebuild the eBook using Mobipocket Creator. That’s a Windows program, and I use a MacBook Air for my publishing work. But rather than try one of the various work-arounds you can find searching the Internet (mostly involving running a Windows emulator on Mac), I just dusted off an old Windows laptop I had in the closet and installed the program there. I brought over my .html and .jpg files on a thumb drive and was good to go.

Here are your steps in Mobipocket Creator:

• Under “Import from Existing File” select “HTML document”
• Browse to your HTML file and click “Import”
• Click “Cover Image” on left to upload your cover image.
• Click “Add a Cover Image” then browse to that image. Select it, then click “Update” to save.
• Click “Table of Contents” to create that file for your eBook.
• Look for “Table of Contents Generation rules:”
• Type h1 under “Tag name” in first cell on the “First Level:” row. Click the button to proceed or update.
• If you have additional images embedded in your book, click “Add File” on the left to add those illustrations and other assets.
• Click “Build” at top when ready to create file to upload to Amazon.
• Once the build is finished, click next to “Open folder containing eBook” and select “OK.”
• Your eBook file will be in .prc format, located in your My DocumentsMy Publications folder (unless you are hard-core geek and selected a different destination folder during the set-up process).

Upload that .prc file instead of the .html file when you edit your eBook on your Kindle Direct Publishing page. You can submit new books, or modify existing ones, by clicking the “Bookshelf” link at the top of the page when you log into KDP. (Depending upon your screen resolution, you might need to scroll right to get to the action button next to each eBook name.)

You will use the iTunes Producer program (Mac only) to upload to Apple’s iBookstore. Apple’s interface is easy to figure out, but Apple’s the most finicky retailer when it comes to accepting files. Formatting that worked with Amazon and Barnes and Noble will cause Apple to choke. Click “Create a New Package” to upload a new eBook, or “Open package” to modify an existing one. You’ll place metadata about the book under the “Book” tab, select and upload your ePub and cover image files under the “Assets tab, then click “Deliver” under the “Delivery” tab and hope for the best.

If Apple won’t accept the ePub file generated by Barnes and Noble, you can generate a new ePub file using Calibre. First, using the error data you get from iProducer, go back into your .html file and make whatever code changes you need to correct the error. Remember that you cannot have spaces or special characters in the file name of the .html file or of any embedded asset, including all your images.

Rezip your files using the corrected .html file, then import that .zip file into Calibre. Click “Add Books” if this is your first attempt, browse to the .zip file on your computer and select to import it. Then click “Edit Metadata” to add your book cover and authorship information. Click “OK” to save.

Finally, you’ll highlight your title and click “Convert Books” to begin the conversion process.

• Select “EPUB” as your output format, in the upper right.
• On the left, select “Structure Detection”. Under “Detect chapters at (XPath expression):” change that content to “//h:h1″ (no quote marks.) Do the same under “Insert page breaks before (XPath expression):” Click “OK”
• On the left, select “Table of Contents”. Next to “Number of links to add to Table of Contents” and “Chapter threshold” type the number of chapters in your book, including “chapters” for the copyright page, about the author or any other sections you’ve added. If you don’t know the exact number, guess high. So long as the number you type here is greater than the number of chapters in your eBook, you’re okay.
• Under “Level 1 TOC (XPath Expression):” type “//h:h1″ (no quote marks) again. Click “OK” to save.

Close the window to complete the conversion process. Once it is done (which should just take a moment), highlight your book title in the main window, then click “Click to open” under your cover image, on the right. That will open the folder with your .epub file, which you now can upload to Apple, or any other eBook retailer.

Once Apple’s accepted your files, you can expect to wait more than a week for Apple’s editorial review process to accept your book and list it the iBooks store. Acceptance and listing happens in just a day or so on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

There you go. We’re done. You are a published eBook author. Now it’s up to you to promote the heck out of what you’ve done. Be sure to tell every living person you know about your books. Post links to them on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and your websites. Email family, friends and colleagues, in addition to including links in your email newsletters. Submit a class note about the book to your alma mater. If you want to earn a few extra cents from the sale of each book, join the Amazon and Barnes and Noble affiliate programs and generate links to your books through them.

Don’t just ask people to buy your books. Ask them to review them on the retailers’ websites, too. Reviews help increase the visibility of your books, as do sales.

EBook promotion is a whole ‘nother topic to discuss, and we will in the weeks ahead. But for now, live by this rule: You can’t ask too many people to buy your book.

Thinking about your content is always the first step in publishing. But physically formatting your content will be the toughest step the first time you produce an eBook.

That’s why many services exist that will do all that work for you, for a fee. I’m not going to analyze or recommend any of those services today. Instead, I’m providing the cheapstake’s method to eBook publishing. These are the steps you can take to get your eBook published with the major eBook retailers, without having to pay anyone else a thing*.

*With one exception. And let’s start there.

You’ll need to buy an ISBN [International Standard Book Number] for your book. That means a trip, with credit card in hand, over to myidentifiers.com. Buying a single ISBN from the registry is outrageously expensive – $125 – but the price comes down significantly if you buy multiple ISBNs at once. Ten ISBNs will set you back $250, and 100 sell for $575. Go ahead and buy in bulk – once you get the hang of eBook publishing, it’s easy enough that you’ll want to keep publishing eBooks, and you will need a new ISBN for each.

Okay, there’s a second exception to the no-spending-money rule, but only if you’re ham-handed with graphic design. You’ll need an attractive cover for your eBook, one that in a single image will effectively communicate to your potential customers what your book is about and convince them to buy (or at least sample) the book. If you’re not confident in your ability to design such a cover, delegate or outsource this to someone who can. Don’t screw up your cover, because that represents your first and best chance to convert interest into sales.

Your coverage image should be 2×3 width-to-height ratio, at 300 dpi resolution. Don’t skimp on the resolution size. You want something that looks good to your readers when the open it for the first time in their eReader. Your customers’ first thought when they prepare to read your book never should be: “Oh, no, I paid money for this?” Go look at every cover in your eBook and printed book collections and decide if you’re up to this task.

With an ISBN and effective cover design in hand, you’re ready to begin formatting your book’s content. (We talked about creating and editing the book’s content in the previous entry, in case you missed that.)

When I started editing my first eBook, I made the mistake of copying all my webpages I wanted to include in the book into NeoOffice, then stripping the HTML coding, so that I could copy-edit in NeoOffice. Only when I finished, and prepared to format the copy for my eBook, did I learn that eBooks basically just are… HTML.

(Insert Homer Simpson forehead slap here: “D’oh!”)

The “source code” of your eBook document is nothing more than an HTML page, contained in an XML “wrapper.” But there are a few tricks that can fool you.

Be certain not to use any spaces or special characters in the file name of this HTML page, or of any file names of images or any other media that you embed within it, including your cover image. You can use any old file names that you wish – none of them determine the title of your book. If you do use spaces in any file names, however, this will come back to haunt you later! So don’t.

If your book is a collection of previously published Web content, I’d just paste the HTML of each article or post you’re including in the book into a single document, leaving out all the page headers, footers and other associated stuff you won’t be including in the book. If you must work in a word processing program – such as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice or NeoOffice – to copy-edit effectively, you’ll want to export an HTML version of that document once you’ve edited it, then go over that generated HTML by hand to edit out potential coding problems.

You’ll also need to place a copyright page in your eBook. I suggest placing this page at the end of the book, as the final “chapter.” Why? Most eBook retailers allow would-be buyers to download a certain percentage of the book as a sample, starting at the front of the book. That makes the front of your book a great sales tool. Don’t waste that valuable space with copyright notes, author biographies or other extra information. Stick those in the back of your book.

As for the specific format of your copyright page, just find a model you like in some other eBook and copy that. Remember to place your ISBN on your copyright page, too.

Don’t worry about a table of contents, either. That will be generated automatically for you later, provided you mark up your chapter titles correctly. More on that in a minute.

Once you have an HTML document and cover image, you will be using a variety of other programs and online tools to compile them into eBook formats. If there’s a problem with your HTML, the document won’t compile, and you’ll be stuck in the developer’s hell of trying to figure out which line of code is throwing the error. To avoid that fate, here are some notes to consider as you edit your HTML code: