| Answering several questions in one reply: There are no shelves people can browse to stumble on your eBook, so owning your metadata for discovery and SEO is vital. Don't let someone assign one. They then own the metadata and can bork you, intentionally or accidentally. I think outside the US, ISBNs are free or low cost. Here, RR Bowker has a monopoly and prices them unreasonably high (to be fair to them, they are used to dealing with businesses, not writers).
http://www.bowker.com/index.php/supportfaq-isbn No one will want to read your book, so don't push it on them with emails asking them to review it. Everyone already has a huge backlog. I don't know what your subject matter is, so what Tucker Max just wrote about might not apply, but some might:
http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/09/28/tucker-max/ Don't join social reading sites and befriend people only to pimp your book. People hate that. There are really only two formats for eBooks: Kindle format and ePub. Both are based on HTML, more or less. PDFs are another matter and are suited best for desktop, notebook, and possibly tablet (iPad) reading, but aren't considered eBooks per se. For PDFs, it's also good to customize them for eInk devices so people don't have to do reflow. See Sony's guide here, but there are now eInk devices with 5" screens, so keep that in mind too. Direct PDF link: http://www.sonystyle.com/wcsstore/SonyStyleStorefrontAssetSt... Check out also Self Pub Review and Publetariat. http://www.selfpublishingreview.com/
http://www.publetariat.com/ Stay away from all the "services" that charge. I think HN readers have the skills to do all that themselves -- and better. This all I can think of at the moment. I'm battling a cold and am groggy. Hope it helps. |
If you publish poetry, you wouldn't want the text to reflow. You want it to stay exactly where it is. Just give it a 3:4 format (1:1,35) at eg. A4 paper size or larger, have it on screen in eg. an iPad size, and you will have a book that looks spectacular - and in 5 years too. And you can even have a cover on your book...