Byeink publishes your book on Internet in 4 steps
Many writers who like self-publishing on the Internet find a vast obstacle in technical issue: Who designs my eBook?, Who is responsible for uploading it into Internet?, In which platform and how is it distributed? Indeed, the Internet is a world, and there are many ways to publish, many services and shops (some of them seriously huge as Amazon or iBookstore).
As if that were not enough, you have to know a little bit about design, formats and devices before uploading our eBook to the platform we choose. In solving the lives of these people must have been thinking Cream eBooks’ team when they launched Byeink, a service for the creation and distribution of eBooks. What I was very pleasantly surprised when using Byeink is its extreme simplicity and ability to be used in a truly intuitive way and leave entirely in authors' hands the management of their works without complicating their lives with codes, formats and designs. According to its founders, in an interview with Cream eBooks, the author has:
TOTAL CONTROL, the users decide the selling price, if they promote a few chapters just for free, if they sell on their website with Paypal or if they sell on Amazon, if they distribute in their fan page with our Facebook app or using social payments to promote their personal brand. Your book is in the cloud, you can correct errors or make updates, generate again an ePub or mobi and republish. From the beach, the office or over having lunch with JK Rowling.
The service allows you to create from scratch (having written it, of course) an eBook in 4 steps, after which we’ll be ready to distribute it as we see fit, even with the option of charging through Paypal 100% of the revenues of our book, as they have said, because the option is not available right now. At present, they are in a closed beta, and it's necessary to request an invitation in order to open an account, what can be done from the same site of Cream eBooks. Upon check in, they ask us for an email, username, our PayPal and the currency with which we'll work. Just enter on the dashboard and we have two modules: one with our account data and the second one with the data of our publications. Inside it, we'll see the possibility of creating a new eBook or manage or see which we already have created. The system will also include statistics shortly.
If we decide to create a new eBook, we have to fill out some basic data of the book:
For example, the option to write a short introduction to the work
Optional fields to add other collaborators as editor, translator, cover designer, etc.
We can upload there an image for the book cover (should not be less than 600 px. and no more than 2 MB), and the system will automatically make a picture with a vertical format.
In this area there is a section called 'Marketing', which is disabled right now. In a short time we'll be able to set price parameters and payment system just in case we decide to sell our book. At the moment the application allows free distribution. Turning to the second tab comes time to put the whole text of our eBook and determine chapters. As we copy and paste the text into the editor, we can create chapters and also establish styles: headings, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, paragraphs, capital, quotes, bulleted and numbered lists, links, font color, highlighting and page break. You can also insert images in a very easy way, manually scaling its size within the same editor tool.
Once we've finished with the text, we can attend to the matter of publication. At this moment you can see two format options for the eBook: ePub (probably the most widespread and supported by the vast majority of electronic readers) or mobi (Amazon's format). With one click we can create it in the format we want, or both and then check or send a preview, something that at the time I tried it, was not available although they warn you that it will be possible later.
From there we only need the distribution: Cream eBooks provides us a link where it will open the page of our eBook, with its cover, data and introduction of the book that we have provided. The same link can be distributed in four ways from this site:
QR: with the ability to generate a QR code for embedding on our website with a code or save image option.
Social Payment The social payment is a way for users to pay (no cash) for the work or for promotional chapters, or what the author chooses. It's a free download, but with an advantage. To allow book download to a user, he or she must pay with a tweet on Twitter or a comment on Facebook, which can be previously customized by the author, and broadcast by social networks in the following way: "I've just downloaded two free chapters of 'Book Title', a work of @user", for example. It is made by API. This ensures the publication, which once made allows the user to access to the download. In addition, there will be the option to review the statistics of social payment, knowing how many tweets, or shares in Facebook has generated, and will be adding other social networks to leverage the promotion of this type.
PayPalPayment by Paypal is an additional solution to complement the sale on Amazon, Apple and other platforms. This allows author to keep up to 100% of the sale. (Byeink Premium users receive 100%, the 70% free users). All you need is a PayPal account. Seller is not Byeink (they are not middlemen), is the author who receives money directly. The buyer of a work pays directly to the author, to his Paypal, with automatic cash income, something that distributors do not do. Furthermore, author may know all buyer data and establish direct communication with him. The author can also follow the statistics and reports provided by the tool, real-time sales monitoring, income, places where his work was bought, etc. To make this possible, they have created a distribution panel and a number of widgets. The main highlight one is the "buy buttons" that the author can paste into his blog or website. They tell us that they are developing an iFrame that generates a bookshelf to place on a page or blog, and a Facebook app that will do the same, but in the author's fanpage. For premium users will be running an app and webapp to sign books, so the author can dedicate a book and sign it from anywhere, selling and giving away from their own mobile device. These are some of the novelties that Byeink promises for the coming weeks. Currently Byeink's version is a beta, and registered users with invitation are free. All these new features will be available from the first week of October and will gradually extend to all users. It is also planned for the year-end the subscription model launch with more features for premium users.
Read complete Spanish version of this article on Bitelia.com.
