UPDATE: Learn More About eBook Publishing at Our New eBook Page
A little known fact about eBook distribution is that each retail channel has their very own set of requirements for accepting content that your eBook must meet before it can be sold. These requirements may sound scary at first, but they are actually pretty great. By following the requirements set by each retailer, you can be sure your customers get the most robust experience from reading your work. To help, here are the top five reasons we’ve seen eBooks bounce back from distribution.
- No description or description too short – Describing your work might be the most important step of all. Not only does a book description double as a great marketing tool to get readers interested, it’s also used to catalogue your work in retail channels all over the world. For this step, you’ll be asked to provide details including category and genre, keywords, description, language, licensing and edition number. It’s crucial you provide consistent information here that matches any details you have already provided or stated in your book and on your cover. Many retailers require this information to be accurate in order to list your content and make sure it gets in front of the right readers.
- “Metadata” mismatch - Simply put, metadata is the who, what, when, and where of your eBook. Much like your eBook’s description, metadata includes items like your title, author name, volume number, price, etc. and are what most retailers use to appropriately list and categorize your content. Metadata must perfectly match so that customers searching for your eBook in a catalogue can find it.
- Up-selling or listing a price on your cover – You can adjust the price of your eBook at anytime and we encourage you to experiment with different prices that are competitive with other books in the same genre. With that in mind, avoid listing the price of your eBook anywhere on the cover, in the description, or in the eBook itself so you can be flexible to change the price later if you need to.
- Inappropriate or illegal content (erotic, malicious, or plagarized content) – This one is pretty self-explanatory.
- Non-English content – Unfortunately, we’re unable to distribute non-English eBooks at this time.
- Poor image quality (borders, pixels) – You’ve probably come across a picture on the Internet that was hard to see no matter how much you zoomed in or reloaded the page. Pixelated or blurry images won’t show up on today’s high resolution computers, tablets, phones and eReading devices. This means they can’t go in your eBooks either. If you decide to include images in your eBook, we can only accept high-resolution, three color, RGB (red, green, blue) formatted pictures. Four color, CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, key black) images will not translate properly.
understand that many authors have spent so much time working on their book and making it pristine, that when they’re done, the photo can be an after thought. You want to be measured by your skill of the written word and not what you look like. But think about the last time you went to the bookstore. Can you recall picking up a title with a blurry, washed-out photo of the author on the back cover or inside flap? Do you think you’d be as likely to spend your hard-earned cash on a book that had a photo like that on it? In the same way a bad cover can make you second guess the quality of a book, a bad photo can make you rethink the reliability of the author. It helps to think of your book as a business card, and a bad photo is like handing someone a card written in crayon.
