Top 4 eBook Hosting Platforms for Self-Publishing

by | Published on Mar 18, 2021 | Document Conversion / Scanning Services

eBook market is growing at a rapid pace, as it provides diverse advantages for readers and authors. Digital books require only one device to carry around even a library. eBooks can be read on any device such as eBook readers, smartphones, laptops etc. They are more flexible than paper books and readers can enlarge the font size and thus make reading a comfortable experience. eBooks are environment-friendly too. Unlike traditional book publishing, eBook self-publishing adds more convenience. Any number of books or journals or magazines can be downloaded and read anytime. Authors can benefit from professional eBook conversion services to convert printed books into eBooks.

Whether you are writing a book for business purposes or a fiction or novel, there are many advanced and reliable eBook publishing platforms. Such platforms provide a space for you to advertise and sell copies of your eBook as well.

Top 4 eBook Publishing Platforms

Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)

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In this fast, easy and free platform, authors can publish their book in less than 5 minutes and the book appears in Kindle stores and is easily accessible to millions of readers on Amazon within 24-48 hours.

For a better Amazon self-publishing experience, it is recommended to opt Kindle’s KDP Selects program. KDP Select helps optimize book sales with handy features such as promotional tools like rewards and offers for the purchase of the book, international sales expansion, and options for higher royalties.

Kindle readers can access eBooks available on Amazon. With KDP, authors can benefit from a variety of useful features such as free file conversion, sales tracking, and additional tools to help format special types of books such as textbooks and kid’s books. Authors can set their own list prices and they are free to make changes any time to their books. Books can be published in digital or print versions. Users can publish Kindle eBooks and paperbacks for free on KDP.

Barnes & Noble Press™

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Formerly known as Nook Press, this eBook publishing site is an innovative self-publishing platform with a huge audience. Providing a much easier, fluid, and simplified user experience, the B&N Press website has gained popularity quite rapidly. Users can easily upload their books and make it available for purchase on BN.com, on NOOK devices and in stores. Fast and free to use, this platform takes less than 72 hours for the book to show up in B&N’s online bookstore for readers. Authors can benefit from printing services where customers can order hardcover or paperback versions of the eBook. Users can also monitor sales on a daily basis with enhanced reporting tools.

To get their books published, users can create an account and choose whether to create an eBook or a print book. B&N Press helps to format the interior and cover files and make it ready to upload. For personal use, users can order the print book that will be delivered to their doorstep within a week. B&N Press is free to use from start to finish and there is no delivery fees or production costs. This platform also provides comprehensive tools and tips to help writers maximize their marketing opportunities, among many other benefits.

Smashwords

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On this platform, authors can upload their books and it’ll reach Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and many other major online publishing platforms and library networks except Amazon’s KDP. In 2013 and 2014, Smashwords was named as “One of America’s Most Promising Companies” by Forbes Magazine. One of the pioneers in eBook publishing, Smashwords comes with a large selection of published books containing works of more than 40,000 authors. This is an ideal platform for publishing novels, short fiction, poetry, personal memoirs, monographs, non-fiction, research reports, essays, or other written forms.

Publishing books here is easy and does not require any technical experience. Publishing involves steps such as –

  • Signing up for a free account
  • Downloading The Smashwords Style Guide for simple instructions to format the manuscript as a Microsoft Word .doc file
  • Choosing “Publish” and following the simple steps to upload your book and cover image

Authors can also upload professionally designed EPUB files in Smashwords. Users can get daily sales reporting from the biggest stores to track how well their book is doing. It also provides options to publish your eBook on the site without any cost. Its online Metagrinder tool will create an eBook in the required format within just a few minutes. Here, authors and publishers have complete control over the sampling, pricing and marketing of their written works.

Apple iBooks Author

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iBooks Author is a platform to create and submit books to Apple Books or distribute anywhere on the web. It allows exporting EPUB files created in a different program to iBooks Author, and then selling them on Apple Books or distributing them for free. Users can also add artwork and metadata to their book.

To publish books from iBooks Author, the first step is to export it as a PDF, text file, EPUB, or. ibooks file. Users can choose the best format for their book and then decide how to distribute it. iBooks Author provides option to add video, image galleries, drawings, audio, and more to their book.
Here, authors can also organize their books by navigating with an automatically generated table of contents, adding links to webpages or other pages in the book, creating and saving template to use again as a model for new books and duplicating, moving or copying and pasting pages or sections of book.

Converting printed books to eBooks could be a time-consuming task for publishing industries, universities, libraries, museums and enterprises. For them, eBook conversion solutions provided by experienced document scanning companies could be of great support to publish user-friendly eBooks.

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