While not a new trend, more and more bloggers will put out ebooks in 2012 as a new source of ongoing income. The timing is right: there’s now a general acceptance of ebooks as legitimate and a pleasant experience to read on ebook readers, ebook readers are selling like crazy and sales of ebooks are soaring.
Bloggers are also in a great position to launch an ebook: they have loyal readers – people who enjoy reading what they have to say, they’re people who enjoy reading and are likely to have an ebook reader.
There’s more and more DIY tools for bloggers looking to write an ebook or a printed book:
- Today Apple announced its iBooks Author software, a new tool to help people build multi-touch books for the ipad.
- Blurb offers a blog-to-book tool and an ipad book tool, more suited to photo books rather than full interactive ones.
- Amazon has its Kindle self-publishing tool and so does Nook.
- Tools such as Scrivener and Storyist help you put together a book and then export it into the various ebook formats.
I’ve worked on four different ebooks in the last few weeks and I expect we’ll see more spin-off ebook projects during the year as bloggers expand their offerings. When doing research for ebook cover design for Dianna Huff’s ebook (now available for purchase), I was astounded at the general low quality of ebook covers which made me feel like there was a general low quality of content inside – bad I know, but it’s hard not to judge a book by its cover. There’s plenty of room for improvement with ebooks there.
Here’s three sites I’ve found for ebook and book cover inspiration:
The Book Designer is also running a monthly ebook cover design competition.
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