I can’t possible begin to share all that has happened, or not happened, since my last blog post. I thought that getting my books out in print was the hard part, but that is a piece of cake to getting my eBooks published. There are numerous problems and issues and the first is that while CreateSpace is a POD publisher, they are mainly associated with Amazon, and hence, are not looked on by brick and mortar stores as someone to deal with. To get my books into the brick and mortar stores, I need to deal with IngramSpark, and that means a new account, different rules and procedures. So besides this “war” going on in the print book business, it’s also going on in the eBook business and is even more complicated.

But, there is more. Amazon is mainly interested in electronic sales of eBooks, and so eBooks that are sold though Amazon, need to be in either the Kindle or Mobi (both proprietary) formats. Trouble is that while Amazon has over 1/3 the eBook sales, they don’t distribute any eBooks in other formats like ePub, or iBook. So to get my books distributed, I also have to get another distributor like Smashwords of Bookbaby. Of course, all this means that now I need to edit my print books to make them available to all these different eBook formats like, KF8 ( Amazon Kindle) Mobi, ePub, iBook (Apple) LIT, ODF, PDF, HTML. So while my revised print book looks good in a ePub, it’s a mess in Kindle or other formats.

But there’s more… Every eBook needs to have its own ISBN number and each distributor has different rules for metadata, categories, sub-categories, keywords and tags. Also, each distributor has their own marketing plans and programs that you have to investigate before jumping on-board. To say this experience is frustrating, is putting it mildly.