Electronic Publishing

"There are currently more than 100 royalty-paying e-publishers, a number that doubled every quarter during 1999," John Rudledge of Dead End Street Publications tells us.

Electronic publication is meant for reading on a screen.  It takes a variety of forms -- short forms like online articles found on Web sites or in electronic newsletters, and longer or book-length forms published on diskette or CD-ROM, published in Portable Document Format (PDF), HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) or a proprietary variant for hand-held devices, or published on the World Wide Web for downloading onto your desktop or your handheld device.

This ever-changing new venue has its blessings of being low cost and instantaneous, and its frustrations – chief among which is the issue of writers’ rights to their material. The matter of rights disappears when you self-publish electronically.

The advantages of e-publishing are attractive. Cost of production is greatly lower than paper and ink production, though either format still calls for editing and design.  E-publishing extends the life of a book.  Another advantage is a smaller investment in inventory, since electronic storage is much less expensive than physical book storage.  E-books are easily updated, which is a strong point for books where currency is crucial. An appealing advantage is the ease of wider distribution. The portability of e-books in quantity is appealing.

For all the advantages, remember that e-publishing is simply another mode of publication.  It does not eliminate the need for careful editing and design, and e-books require just as much promoting as hard copy books. But e-books are here, and it's worth investigating whether producing them is a good decision for you.

For a full discussion, see the online seminars, Is Self-Publishing for You? and How To Get Published in the International Markets