How To Publish a Travel Book



High Road To Tibet Sales Rank September 29



It’s great to see High Road To Tibet riding high in the Amazon Top 10 best sellers for travel and I’ve shared the good news on various blogs and forums. Some people want to know the process of publishing a book and making it available on Kindle. I’ll summarise my experience of the process here.

I started by choosing Lulu.com to publish my book “High Road To Tibet” as they were the best option at the time. Things move past in the POD world and I'm now working with CreateSpace.com to produce my second book, a collection of stories about growing up in Ireland. CreateSpace seem to be the clear leader at the present.

With Lulu.com, the cost of producing each book was about €11 so I set a selling price of €12.99. I then bought 100 copies in a bulk order which reduced the cost per book to about €6. It took well over a year but I finally managed to sell the books in local shops.

I then published the book as a Kindle download using Kindle Direct Publishing. I priced the book at USD $2.99 to qualify for the 70% royalty and to keep the price low - currently about £2.14 on Amazon.co.uk. Since I did this, sales of the Kindle version have been increasing steadily each month. KDP is great as you can see your sales in real-time. I also published it to Smashwords.com, a free eBook distribution service. While the numbers aren't as good as Amazon, they still give me a steady stream of sales on sites such as Kobo, Barnes&Noble, Apple, and Sony. There's no doubt that Kindle and these other eBook download sites are the growth area for the future.

So, what helps sales on Amazon? I've read loads of blogs about this and, combined with my own experiences, I think the following are important:

• A great book. Write the best book you can, and have it professionally edited. You owe it to yourself and your readers to send out nothing but your best.
• An engaging cover. The first time a reader sees your book on Amazon, what impression does your book cover give? If it's not interesting, the reader will just skip ahead.
• Good description. An engaging description will tell the reader what the book is about and also leave a few tantalising hints about what they could be reading if they buy the book.

Hope this will be of some help to aspiring travel authors out there.

John

How To Convert Your Word Doc to Kindle Format

Converting your word doc to a proper e-book format is one of the most important things you can do before publishing to Kindle or any other e-book reader. There's nothing worse than someone buying your book and then seeing poor formatting, missing table of contents or badly formatted images. If someone took the time to buy your book and spend their hard-earned money on an author they probably have never heard of before, you owe it to them and yourself to give them the best damn book you can. Do yourself and your readers a favor and take the time to ensure your book is formatted correctly. In the coming months, I'm going to create a series of e-book conversion tutorials on how to convert a word document to an e-book format that can be used to publish to the Kindle, Nook, Smashwords or any other e-reader currently available.

The following sites have provided a huge amount of imformation for the articles – the community on KDP, http://www.cjs-easy-as-pie.com and http://guidohenkel.com/2011/01/take-pride-in-your-ebook-formatting-part-vii - I freely acknowledge that these sites are the masters of e-book formatting and I encourage you to visit them. I hope this helps some people to produce a great kindle e-book that your users will enjoy reading with ease.

Welcome to John Dwyer Books

Hello World!
This is the first post from JohnDwyerBooks.com, the new home for me - John Dwyer - and all my current and future writings. The blog is a bit basic at the moment but I'll be adding to it all the time. So follow me and my posts if you're interested in travel writing. I currently have one book "High Road To Tibet" available as a paperback or as a download via Amazon.
Looking forward to lots of blogging!
John