How to Get Your Book Into Libraries Using Smashwords

This week Smashwords announced that all 100,000 of the e-books they have in their catalogue will be available to public libraries through Baker & Taylor (a large distribution firm). What does this mean to self-publishers? It means we have another avenue for selling books!

Just who is Smashwords? They are the leading distributor of independently published e-books. They distribute to such online retailers as Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, and Diesel eBook Store. Their books are also available for certain mobile e-reading applications such as Blio, Aldiko, Stanza and FBReader. It is free, easy and fast to get your book converted and available for readers to download. Dan Poynter highly recommends them.

Have a look at their website and blog to see if this would be a good fit for you.

When I finish converting my books for Kindle, I'll do them in Smashword and report to all of you.

Is there an easy way to convert books to e-books?

Amazon.com has detailed instructions on how to turn your book into a Kindle e-book. It gives directions for both Mac and PC platforms. But the basic premise is that you have to use your original Word document to make the change. They recommend Word because it's easy to format. If you have your book broken into separate files for each chapter, start a file called "Your Book, Kindle version" and copy/past each chapter into the one file. Insert a Page Break at the end of each chapter. Save your file to a .doc file and not .rtf or .docx.  The newer versions of Word do not translate well to Kindle.

I am now converting Self Publishing in Canada Second Edition to a file for the Kindle reader. Of course I will use other formats too. Most public libraries across Canada are using the Kobo reader as their platform for lending e-books. That is a whole different format to  convert our books into. So why can't they just have a standard? Is there an easy way to convert books to e-books?