Thankfully there is a solution where you can publish your own book, or sell it in a bookshop. The best thing is, you don’t even have to spend a cent. And here’s how.

Lulu.com allows you to sell your book in bookshops, online and allow buyers to purchase printed copies in a simple 5-step process. If you have created eBooks before, this is a service that you must use. You easily and cheaply get your book published in a printed format with its own ISBN number.

Before you start, it is a good idea to already have an eBook created. It is also advised that you thoroughly check it and make sure it has been proofread and edited. If in the future you do find mistakes, you can easily add a revision to the published book.

So lets publish our own first book. The first step is to select whether or not you want to have a hard cover and a paperback. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, but it is your book, so I’ll let you decide which option you want to take.

Once you have selected your type, you can now enter the title of the book. Remember that you can change the title later if you haven’t thought of one yet. Next, select how you want your book to be distributed. If you want your book to have an ISBN and sold in shops and online bookstores, choose the last option. With this, you may have to purchase a Distribution Package. This can cost around $75. If you don’t want any of these services, and have your book promoted to a global network, you can choose just to sell it on the Lulu Marketplace.

The next step is to choose the size, binding, and colour of your book. It also gives you the manufacturing cost and this will be deducted from the total sale price of the book when it is sold in print. You may also want to check out the Book Pricing page which tells you how much cost is taken out of the book when someone purchases it.

If you have chosen to get an ISBN for your book, you can then choose one of the preferred options.

The next step is to upload the electronic version of your book. Simply click on browse and upload your file. Remember to ensure that your file does not have a cover page on it as this will be created later. Your upload may not be accepted by Lulu as well. Make sure it is in a format that they accept and the font the text is in is acceptable as well.

Now, the fun part – creating a cover for our book. There is a simple wizard that you can use to make the front cover and the back cover of the book. You can add images, write a blurb, change the theme or change the layout to the many different that options Lulu offer. Make sure you have a look at all the themes and layouts and choose one that you like.

Now that our book is complete and we have a front cover, it is time to give our book a description, put it in a category, give it some keywords and add a license to it. This is to ensure people can find it on the Lulu Marketplace, or other locations where it may be viewed (such as Google Books)

Since our book is ready to be published, the next step is to set a price. I have decided I want to make $10 profit from this book. If you want to offer a downloadable version of the book, make sure you select the option. When setting your price, decide between your acceptable profit margin and readership. So it may be worthwhile to have a lower price and allow more people to buy it. This can benefit you in a number of ways. Firstly, the more people that buy your book, the more publicity and exposure it receives. Secondly, people have a higher chance of buying the book at a lower price which means more sales and effectively making up the difference in price if you would have set a high price.

We are now done. All you have to do is to review your book, and to make sure that all the information is correct. Once done, click Save and Finish.

Congratulations. You have now published your first book. All you have to do is promote it and watch the royalties role in. A good way to promote something is on a blog. So if you want to learn Java Programming, why don’t you have a look at my published book on Lulu.com?

Have any of you, MakeUseOf readers published a book? Here’s your chance to share it.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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I came across a number of online pyramid schemes on the IBM mainframe-based email system I was using at the time. I’d received an email from a friend and it sounded convincing, and way too good to be true. So what did I do? Well, I tried it. It was one of those deals where you send a dollar to the five names on the list, replace one with your own and then email it to a number of your own friends.

It didn’t take very long for the mainframe admins to suspend my email account and issue me a stern warning against using the University system for pyramid schemes. My response was, “What’s a pyramid scheme?”

The fact is, you can quickly become sucked into a marketing scam without even knowing it, and the world of reselling ebooks for profit is no exception. You’ll find volumes of websites out there on buying “resell rights” or “private label rights,” known as PLR, for ebooks that you can turn around and sell on your website for tremendous profit. It sounds too good to be true, as they always do.

The Right Way to Resell E-Books For Free Online

How do you tell the difference between a legitimate ebook business and an online marketing scheme? All get-rich-quick schemes have two things in common: first, they involve little to no effort on your part in order to get filthy rich; and second, they don’t work.  The primary reason that these particular scams don’t work is because when you purchase a book with “resell rights,” you don’t own exclusive rights. In other words, a hundred other people could also own resell rights to that same ebook, and they’re all trying to sell the exact same book on the Internet.

With that said, there are legitimate ways to make some decent money when you resell ebooks for free online, but it comes down to the source of your “free” ebooks.  The following article will cover the three best sources for ebooks (not all of them completely free) that you can resell so that you can get your online ebook business off to a decent start without getting ripped off.

#1 Offer To Publish and Promote

If you can come up with unique ebooks that are in hot demand – you’ll do very well in terms of ebook sales. The only way you can do this successfully is by becoming a “publisher” of those ebooks and maintaining exclusive rights to the writing so that only you and no one else owns it.

It also helps if the ebooks are well written and cover popular topics. One way you can do this for free is by becoming an online publishing house and ebook store and attract up-and-coming writers who just want to get published.

There are a few examples of such sites that offer writers the opportunity to get published online if their writing is “accepted” for publication.

For example, sites like Nocturne Horizons offers new writers the opportunity to get published online and get their work and name “out there” for the world to see. Many of these sites are accepting free writing from authors that they turn around and publish in a magazine, e-zine or other medium which they sell for profit.

Many times writers receive nothing more than a copy of the magazine, if that. This is possible because the goal of most writers is just to get their work distributed and their name out there. However, you’ll need a contract that clearly lays out the fact that you publish those ebooks for sale in an online bookstore and the author would agree.

#2 – Offer to Pay Royalties Or An Up-Front Payment

Another approach, and one that I personally consider a bit more equitable (but not completely “free” for you) is to offer the writer either an up-front payment or royalties per sale for the ebook that they produce for you. This is not only fair, but it’ll attract a greater number of high-quality writers.

Knowledge Base Publishing, shown above, is one example of one website that does just that – each month they pay accepted authors a royalty check for all ebook sales that month. The cool thing about building your business this way is that you aren’t doing any of the work to create the content yourself – you’re simply serving as the middle-man to sell the ebooks for the author and taking a cut in the process. DPdotcom is another good example of such an online ebook publisher.

DPDotcom takes a 50% cut, which may seem like a lot but in reality you’re providing an important technical service for these writers who may not have a technical bone in their body. Once your website is set up and you have writers signing up, you can sit back and enjoy the profits.

You could also just post requests for ebook writers on the topics that you want at the many freelance writing forums and boards across the web and you’ll have lots of writers knocking at your door and ready to produce your ebook for you. After you pay a one-time payment for exclusive rights (meaning only you own it and can sell it), you can resell the ebook as many times as you like and earn quite a bundle.

#3 Rewriting PLR Ebooks

The last approach I want to cover is a bit more geeky, but I really like it as an alternative for the person who really doesn’t want to write an entire ebook from scratch.

There are loads of sites out there that sell Private Label Rights ebooks, with basically two options. You can either buy them for cheap, like at the Canadian site BestChoiceforEbooks, or you can pay a monthly membership where you get free access to thousands of titles, such as the PLR Ebook Club.

I would not suggest paying a monthly membership unless you plan to offer a high volume of Ebooks for sale. Either way you go, you’re going to need any easy way to modify the Ebook to make it unique, otherwise you’re selling the same exact book as everyone else.

To do this, you can either hire a writer or you can do it yourself using software.  One of the best applications out there that’s customized specifically for this purpose is WordFlood. The software is free, but for the activation code you just have to sign up to receive a newsletter.

The reason WordFlood is the best option is because all the other “article spinner” applications out there that promise to automatically rewrite text just turn an excellent article into garbage. Writing an algorithm that can replace the mind of a good writer is just about impossible, so WordFlood offers the next best thing. When you insert the original article, it immediately identifies and highlights the phrases and words that you can modify without significantly changing the meaning of the text.

If you place the mouse over any of the blue text, you’re offered alternatives from the thesaurus for those words. The underlined text are phrases, and the software offers alternatives for those as well, as shown above. As you go through and change the article by simply clicking on the alternative text that you determine flows well within the context of the article, the software displays the percentage that you’ve changed the article. The closer you are to 100%, the better.

As you can see here, in about 5 minutes or so, I’ve changed the article by 22% just by going through and changing the words where it made sense and leaving it be where it doesn’t (this is where most automated systems fail). By combining both the human touch and the software approach, you’ll end up with a unique Ebook that you purchased dirt cheap, but which you can sell at a huge markup for huge profits, over and over for as long as you like.

Have you ever attempted to start an Ebook sales business? Do you have any tips or advice for readers? Share your feeback in the comments section below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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“Wow, self published, eh? That’s got to be expensive. I looked into it a while back.”

“No, not really. I found a publishing house that published it for free, and just takes a portion of the sales.”

“Really? That’s awesome! Who does that?”

“PublishAmerica.com. Here’s my card with the address on it.”

So I bought the book. It was awesome! Best pirate book I’ve read since Treasure Island. Okay, it’s the only pirate book I’ve read since Treasure Island, but I still recommend it.

I walked away with dreams of publishing that one book that someone said resides in all of us. PublishAmerica, you must be too good to be true. How can it be possible to publish your own book for free? But then I went to the site.

Here’s what I found…

You write your book. You e-mail or mail it in to PublishAmerica. They review it for quality and grammar and see if it will garner some sort of market. If that’s all good, they’ll talk to you about a contract. You sign the contract. They design a cover for the book. They market the book on their website and to different booksellers such as Barnes and Noble, Ingram, Borders.com and others. They also give you some advice on promoting the book yourself.

Your book sells and they send you royalty payments. No, really, that’s it! All of that and more for free,  while you retain complete control over their intellectual property and rights to it, for say, movie deals or what have you.

“But Guy, I can get my book vanity published or hire an agent to take care of that? Isn’t that easier?” you ask with smugness dripping from your disdainful face.

Well, vanity publishing costs a lot of money and unless you are a superstar marketer with a genuine bestseller on your hands, your odds of recouping what you paid to self-publish are pretty slim indeed. You have to take care of getting your own ISBN, or copyrighting the book as well as the cover design and art work. Or you can pay the vanity publisher more to do that for you.

If you choose the literary agent route, then you’re looking at trying to find an agent who will take on an unknown author, and will actually work hard to get you published. Then they take a slice of what you make on the book, on top of everyone else traditionally involved in publishing taking their slice. That might work out if you sell 4 million books, yet the odds are slim on that as well.

“Okay, Guy,” you inquire with some trepidation and eagerness, “so what’s the downside?”

Well, I don’t know exactly what the percentage is for royalties. They also do not accept manuscripts from outside Canada or the United States of America. Oh, and they don’t accept books in the genres of coffee table books, screenplays/scripts/movies, theses, text-books, gift books, or books of quotes.

While they don’t publish every manuscript that comes to them, they do take more risks than other traditional publishing houses. They have published over 40,000 authors since 1996. Some of those authors have gone on to make writing their career, have movie deals and receive some pretty significant critical praise.

Really, in the years that I’ve spent trying to find a way to publish that great Canadian novel I have in my desk drawer, this is by far the simplest and least expensive route that I have found.

Have you self-published a book? Do you know of any other publishing houses like PublishAmerica? I’d love to read about it in the comments. Put your literary skills to good use and leave us a note.

Don’t think your writing is good enough? Then check out 7 Online Resources To Help Improve Your Writing.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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After the installation however I found that there were so many controls and options, and I found myself googling for podpress tutorials. Unfortunately, there is very little material on how to podcast with Wordpress.

Assuming that you know how to install Wordpress plugins, and burn your feeds using Feedburner, I’m going to show you how to get your podcast file from your hard drive to the iTunes podcast directory. Don’t worry, it’s very simple really!

WP admin

After you’ve installed and activated the PodPress plugin, go to the settings page in your Wordpress admin.

Go to the ‘Feed/iTunes Settings’ under the PodPress plugin menu in your sidebar. In there, you will find PodPress has automatically filled in several details like your feed URL and such. You need to enter details like your Podcast title and other details. Your main job here is to provide thumbnail images for display in the iTunes Podcast directory.

You can browse through the General and Player settings to see what options you want to tweak, but you don’t need to worry about much as the settings are auto generated.

Burning your feed

I’d highly suggest you burn your podcast feed using Google Feedburner. This will let you analyse your traffic better than just feeding iTunes directly. To burn your feed, copy the feed URL from the ‘Feed/iTunes Settings’ window, and paste it into the Feedburner’s field. Check mark the “I’m a podcaster” option while you’re at it.

Writing your post

Write your post as you normally would. However, under your writing window you will notice the Podpress controls. Click ‘Add Media File’ and specify your podcast file from the drop down list. The podcast file itself needs to be uploaded (using an FTP client) to your wp-content/uploads/ folder to show up in the list.

Once you select your podcast file, you’ll need to specify the kind of file (whether it’s a mp3, movie, etc), while the size and length can be auto detected. You can also add specific settings for iTunes, like whether the episode is explicit or not. Failing to comply will result in your feed getting banned on the Podcast directory so be sure that you take care of these things.

Submit Your Podcast to iTunes Store

In the iTunes Store, navigate to Podcasts from the left sidebar. At the bottom left you will see a link to submit your podcast (direct link) to iTunes. In the following window you need to specify your feed URL. Paste in the feed that Feedburner provides you with. After this you will be asked to specify your category, whether it is explicit and a few other details.

The iTunes staff will then review your podcast and accept or reject it based on their criteria. This can take up to 2 days. They will send you an email when your podcast is accepted or rejected from the store so you don’t have to keep checking.

That’s it. The next time you post, all you need to do is upload your media file to your Uploads folder, and specify it while writing your post. Just hit publish, and watch those subscribers flutter in!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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“Yeah, I know man…the technology is almost there. It won’t be long now.”

So I went on my way, angry that mobile technology couldn’t keep up with my ultra-geek needs. Just a few years later, mobile technology has advanced to the point where visiting a website as simple as eBay is child’s play. Today you can check movie showtimes, email videos clips and pictures (captured with the phone itself) to your friends and family, and you can use applications like Fring to chat with your IM buddies without using up a single minute of your cellphone time.

Now you can moblog with Blogger.

One of the relatively newest mobile Internet advances is a phenomenon known as “Moblogging,” or mobile blogging. The way this works depends on which blogging platform that you use, but generally it involves sending a text message or an email to a particular address, and that message is automatically routed to your blog as an instant update. Why would anyone want to blog from their cellphone? If you consider the possibilities, it’s pretty obvious how this can come in handy.

• Post updates to a blog while you’re hiking the Appalachian trail.
• Update your family with mobile snapshots of you and your friends at Spring Break (or maybe not…)
• Investigative journalists can instantly publish breaking news to a news blog before anyone else.
• Publish a snapshot of that UFO to your blog before the FBI can confiscate your phone.

The possibilities are limited only by your own imagination.

How to Post To Blogger With Your Cell phone

Many websites that provide for mobile functionality require cellphone users to have an expensive data plan for their cellphone account. However, Google found a way to provide all cellphone users with the ability to moblog with nothing more than a text message. However, if you do have a data plan, Google also offers the ability to post even more content, including images, to your blog by simply emailing your post to a special Blogger email account.

Step 1 – Register For A Mobile Blog

Setting up your phone to moblog with Blogger is very simple. First, you just need to either text or email a message “REGISTER” to go@blogger.com from your phone. In my case, I have a data plan, so I used Yahoo Go to send the email to Blogger.

Within barely thirty seconds of sending the email, I received the following response back from Blogger.

A few seconds after receiving this response, I received a second response with my new blog name and the claim code. This code is how you can connect this particular device with any blog you like.

Step 2 – Enable Your Mobile Blog With The Claim Token

The next step is to use the code to claim your new blog.  To do this, get on any regular computer (not your mobile device) and visit go.blogger.com. On the right side of the page you’ll find this Sign In area.

Enter in the claim code that Blogger just emailed to you, enter the human code below it, and then click continue.

Step 3 – Configure your existing blog as your mobile blog

If you sent the “REGISTER” command with the same email address that you used to register existing blogs with Blogger, the system will recognize that you have other blogs, and provide you with the option to connect your mobile device with those blogs.

The new blog assigned to my mobile device was owlnut631, but on this screen, Blogger recognizes that I have three other blogs and offers the option to change where my mobile posts are published. Finally, I click “Switch to Better Content,” and I’m done with the registration and set up process.

If you don’t have any other blogs, then you can keep the default blog that Blogger created for you as your new mobile blog.  Also, if you sent the “REGISTER” command from a different email address, you’ll need to go into your mobile blog and modify the “Mobile Devices” setup displayed on your Blogger Dashboard page.

How to Make a Mobile Blog Post

Now that the mobile account is set up to forward posts to the correct blog, all you need to do is make a post!  If you are sending Instant Messages to go@blogger.com to create your posts, the procedure is pretty straightforward. The MMS text you type in becomes the post. If you send an email from your phone, you have a little more flexibility.

If you send an email from your phone to go@blogger.com, the subject becomes the post title, the body becomes the post itself, and you can even insert pictures as you would with a regular blog post. To test it out, I sent the following email to go@blogger.com.

After sending off the email, within just a few seconds I received confirmation back from the Blogger gateway that the post was successful. I couldn’t believe it posted so fast, but sure enough, when I checked my blog I discovered the post.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen the capability to convert data from a mobile phone into a web page so quickly. However, this sort of technology is booming. Now, you can also share photos, or post to YouTube, eBay, or Facebook. There’s no end in sight to both the possibilities and the potential for this kind of technology that integrates your mobile world with your online world. Today, there really is no such thing as being “offline.”

Do you post to your blog with your cellphone? If so, what have been your experiences with it?   Good? Bad?  What about moblogging to other blogging platforms such as Wordpress? Does anyone have any advice on how to go about it?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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The site is growing in leaps and bounds. As the tentacles of the Creative Commons organisation lengthen and curl, and its presence is felt in every corner of the web (who hasn’t read a plethora of blogs with the disclaimer ‘licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 by-nd license’, or some such) it’s time to explore how online users can get the most out of this newfangled intellectual copyright phenomenon.

1. Search for Usable Content

If you’re a blogger, musician, photographer, researcher, writer or creative person of any kind, you’ll know how annoying it is to chase up ‘permission’ to use the images, soundbytes etc. you want to include in your work. Creative Commons licenses make this easy by dividing content into categories, and allowing people to use content as long as they agree to the terms (for example,  ‘No Derivatives’ means you can use the content as long as you don’t modify it, and ‘Attribution’ means you must give credit to the original author/creator). No need to send a sycophantic email (’I LOVE this image! Can I reproduce it?’) to a photographer ever again.

Head to the Creative Commons search website and you’ll see an entry bar with two adjacent search options. Check the appropriate box and enter your search term.

Below that you’ll see a list of tabs – three familiar ones (Google, Yahoo, Flickr) and three relative obscurities (blip.tv, OWL music search and SpinXpress).

Now, this is an important thing to recognise about Creative Commons. The organisation doesn’t actually keep a comprehensive database of licensed content. There’s been a small trickle of criticism over this, because of the potential for fraud that it introduces (if I really wanted to I could apply for a license, get it, then destroy all copies of my licensed content and be free to accuse a random, innocent remix artist of nicking my stuff because no one has records of what I actually licensed in the first place) But that’s not worth going into here. So far, no earth-shattering lawsuits and CC is looking into building a database.

The point I was making is that when you do a Creative Commons search, you still need to nominate a search directory. If you nominate Google you’ll get a bunch of (hopefully) relevant articles. Interested in images? All the usual Google rules apply – you’re still able to fine tune your search by typing ‘images’ after the query term. What you’re doing is a Google search restricted to Creative Commons licensed content. The same goes for the other directories (Flickr, Yahoo, etc).

Note: Always use the top (green border) entry bar to limit search results to Creative Commons content. The lower entry bar (under the directory tabs) does not limit results – it does a standard search with Google, Yahoo, etc.

2. Learn the Jargon

When you stumble upon something fabulous you want to use, it’s important to understand what it means for something to be licensed under a ‘Creative Commons Attribution- No Derivative Works 2.5 License’, for example.

It’s not as complicated as it sounds. Creative Commons has four sets of license terms.

Attribution – the original author/creator must be credited.

Non-Commercial - the work must not be used for commercial purposes.

No Derivatives – the work must not be modified.

Share-alike – any derivative works must be licensed under the same Creative Commons license.

These are combined to produce the variety of CC licenses available.

Some popular combinations are by- nd (Attribution + No Derivatives) and by-sa (Attribution + Share-Alike). ‘No Derivatives’ and ‘Share-Alike’ are obviously mutually exclusive. You’ll never see these together.

Sometimes people will only use abbreviations and symbols to specify how their work is licensed, so it helps to know them.

Attribution = (by)

No Derivatives= (nd)

Non-Commercial =(nc)

Share-Alike = (sa)

3. Know the Alternative Databases (what is blip.tv anyway?)

Who can be bothered, right? That’s what we’re here for! Here is a run-down of three less common Creative Commons search databases.

blip.tv

Kind of what it sounds like. A database of user-generated video content. The focus is on content creators making ’shows’ or ’serialised content’, not posting friends, family and pet videos. This is how blip.tv has distanced itself from YouTube.

A wide range of upload formats are available, from WMV and MPEG to obscurities like Ogg.

OWL music search

This one is pretty spiffy. Search for music not by entering keywords, but by uploading your sound files. OWL will search their database for songs that are similar! You can see how this could be useful for remixers.

SpinXpress

All the content here is Creative Commons licensed. Search an incomplete database of CC content, from within Flickr, blip.tv and a number of other archives.

SpinXpress also has a ‘community’ element- users are encouraged to sign up and collaborate with others uploading to the service.

Now that you know all about Creative Commons, why not submit your images and photos to the MakeUseOf Flickr photo group?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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