Finally.
It’s here.
The book that hits the sweet spot for everyone who has a personal or professional interest in the ebook revolution from the author’s or publisher’s side of the equation. From a Guy who has made a very successful career of hitting the sweet spot ever since he played the role of Apple’s “chief evangelist” in bringing the product now known as the Mac to public awareness back in 1984.
As someone who has done my own fair share of writing about “the ebook revolution from the author’s or publisher’s side of the equation” during the past five years, I wish I’d written this book. But the fact that I didn’t, combined with the fact that there is currently no existing sponsorship or other business relationship between Guy Kawasaki and Kindle Nation Daily, allows me to be absolutely authentic and unburdened in telling you that this is a book that every author, literary agent, or other participant at any level of the book or ebook publishing industry needs to read, preferably today.
The book is APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur – How to Publish a Book, by Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch. Beyond the imperative that I’ve tried to share above – you need this book and whether you get it free via Kindle Owner’s Lending Library or spend $10 on it you’ll probably end up making that money back a hundred times over — I’m going to try not to gush about this book. Let me try to make three points:
- This is far more than a How I Wrote and Published a Bestseller success story. Such stories can be helpful and inspiring, but they tend to be rather personal. The achievement of authors Kawasaki and Welch in APE is that they do a consummate job of what, back in my community organizing days, we used to call “keeping one eye on the sky and one eye on the cracks in the sidewalk” so that readers get both an objectively recognizable, fully detailed “big picture” and a nuts-and-bolts guide to all of the steps necessary to take any book as far as they can take it in the fullest possible sense of that verb “publish” in this book’s title.
- It’s probably obvious to you already that APE‘s mission has nothing to do with the craft of writing the next Great American Novel or Great French Cookbook, but it is nonetheless a professional, well-written book that is appropriately reverential toward the writing process and is full of the kind of imagination and vision that can help us all to think freely and usefully as we chart new pathways during these revolutionary times. One small and perhaps easily trivialized example: Kawasaki’s recognition that we have arrived in a new territory where terms like “self-publishing” are no longer useful, and his offer of new terminology such as “artisanal publishing” to describe the kind of care and control to which authors must aspire now. (That term may already have been corrupted beyond recall by Doritos and Dunkin’ Donuts, but time will tell about that.)
- Forget what I say. Forget the fact that it has received 200 rave reviews out of 202 total reviews at this writing. I’ll just let the book’s Table of Contents stand for the third point. Please take a look and see if you don’t agree that it covers the waterfront with respect to the sub-topics on which authors all owe it to ourselves to be well-schooled. But what I can vouch for is that every chapter in this book is a well-researched model of care and thoroughness.
[ Author ]
1. Should You Write a Book?
2. A Review of Traditional Publishing
3. The Self-Publishing Revolution
4. The Ascent of Ebooks
5. Tools for Writers
6. How to Write Your Book
7. How to Finance Your Book
[ Publisher ]
8. How to Edit Your Book
9. How to Avoid the Self-Published Look
10. How to Get an Effective Book Cover
11. Understanding Book Distribution
12. How to Sell Your Ebook Through Amazon,
Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google, and Kobo
13. How to Convert Your File
14. How to Sell Ebooks Directly to Readers
15. How to Use Author-Services Companies
16. How to Use Print-on-Demand Companies
17. How to Upload Your Book
18. How to Price Your Book
19. How to Create Audio and Foreign Language
Versions of Your Book
20. Self-Publishing Issues
21. How to Navigate Amazon
[ Entrepreneur ]
22. How to Guerrilla-Market Your Book
23. How to Build an Enchanting Personal Brand
24. How to Choose a Platform Tool
25. How to Create a Social-Media Profile
26. How to Share on Social Media
27. How to Comment and Respond on Social Media
28. How to Pitch Bloggers and Reviewers
29. How We APEd This Book
APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur
4.9 stars – 202 Reviews
