The Digital Scholar

E-books are fast becoming popular with readers, and publishing one is incredibly easy. From a simple text or Word document, you can make your e-book available for free or for sale. You can even receive feedback on it from other readers. These resources will help you publish your e-book in almost no time.

All of the e-book publishing websites listed below are free to join and don’t charge anything to publish your work on their site. Some use elements of online community websites to help you market your writing and to connect with other writers and readers.

Through these websites, you become the publisher of your own book by formatting and uploading the content yourself. In most cases, the process is easy. Keep in mind, however, that when writing for the electronic publishing world, the less formatting your original manuscript contains the better. When you upload your writing to some of these sites, the website converts your text into a different e-book format, so any special formatting your writing originally contains may get in the way of this conversion process.

Most of the listed websites allow you to charge readers money to download and read your writing. You can even set your own price for your book, although the website will keep some percentage of that price. Some sites allow you to make your writing available for free. There are many good reasons for selecting this option, foremost among them is that it will help you spread your reputation faster. Readers are much more likely to download your book if you make it available for free than if you charge money for it.

Through these websites you can dabble in publishing your book without having to find a publisher, and you can publish your work on one, some, or all of them. All of these sites let you edit or even un-publish your book at any time, so they can be a great way to test out your ideas and gauge your market before finding a publisher for your book or article.

If you know of or think I should add other resources to this list, please contact me. I’d love to hear about them.

e-Book Publishing Sites

• Amazon’s Digital Text Platform – Through Amazon’s Digital Text Platform, you can publish an e-book formatted for Amazon’s Kindle Reading Device and sell it on Amazon.com. Note, however, that your book appears only in the Kindle’s proprietary format, and you must charge at least $0.99 for your book. See The Digital Scholar article “Get Published on Amazon.com” for more details.
• Smashwords – The advantage of publishing on Smashwords is that it converts your book into more formats than any other e-book publishing site, so it gives your potential readers the most flexibility in selecting a format that fits their needs. Smashwords has also been aggressively signing distribution agreements, so its books can appear on other booksellers, such as Barnes and Noble or Sony. The website allows you to create an author page where readers can learn more about you, and you can even add an author video. You also have the option of making your writing available for free or for purchase.
• Scribd – Scribd gives you a choice of uploading your documents to share (i.e., offer them for free) or to sell, and the uploading process is incredibly easy. The site offers all kinds of documents, including books, magazines, brochures, recipes, sheet music, and even resumes and CVs. The website also allows you to create communities, where books can be grouped together on a specific topic. Navigating through the morass of titles on the Scribd website can be difficult, but they tell me that they are working on improving the search and browse functions. Books published on Scribd can be read on the website or can be downloaded in PDF or plain text formats.
• Goodreads – The Goodreads website focuses more on creating a community of readers than on a community of writers. As in Facebook, you create a profile where you can share what you have read with other friends, comment on and rate books, and even track your progress in the book you are currently reading. You can also upload your writing to the website by copying your text into their highly structured template, which organizes it into individual chapters. Writing uploaded by individual users, however, can only be read on the Goodreads website.
• Feedbooks – Whereas Goodreads focuses more on sharing the reading of traditionally published books, Feedbooks focuses more on the sharing of writing. The profile you create in Feedbooks strictly centers on content available on its website, which is mainly works that have been uploaded to the website by its users. Unlike in Goodreads, this content can be downloaded in a variety of formats, including Kindle, Sony Reader, and PDF, so that you can take the writing with you.
• Lulu – Lulu allows you to create an e-book in a variety of formats. The company offers all kinds of digital author publishing services in addition to e-book publishing, but it does not offer a robust shopping site for its e-books.

Related Articles from The Digital Scholar

• Get Published on Amazon.com – The details of how to publish an e-book on Amazon.com.
• Electronic Reading/Publishing Communities – A comparison of e-book publishing sites that utilize online communities.