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building an indie business in the center of venture capital i am alex edmonds some people know me as supremerumham on the internet and this is the building indie business podcast okay so let's get started today um today i'm going to be going over how to make an e-book and make a million dollars with that e-book okay so i'm going to be going over how i created the ebook how i created the cover um how i turned that written document into an actual ebook the platforms i've been using to sell the ebook and uh why not amazon and also how to make a million dollars okay so let's get into it so i started on google docs um yes i did so i would write no what i would yeah so here's what i would do i made each chapter its own google doc and then i took all those google docs and i put them in one huge file and every couple of days i would back up the files to my my seagate my external storage just because you never know what would happen with um things and the cloud so i don't trust it and now that i said that something bad will happen to me um that's a cloud issue okay um but seriously um i i don't use microsoft word so i'm not sure if they have this feature but um you can download your google doc as an epub file which uh saves you some headaches in the future if you're making an ebook and then for the dark mode version of the book i did this by making the page color gray so how you do that is you go to file page setup and then you make the font white no you make the page gray and then the font white and that is how you create a dark mode um ebook okay so the next thing you need after you have your book is your cover and so i used photoshop to make my cover you can also use canva but whatever i use photoshop i have for over five years now um and so the size that i made my cover is uh 469 pixels nice by uh 751 and the reason i did this is because when i uploaded other books to caliber books that looked nice in the in my book app that that was the size of their cover so i just copied them okay now caliber um caliber is the ebook management app i guess i would say that i used to take my epub files and turn them into an actual book because you see i didn't mention anything about putting the cover in the google doc or the table of contents or metadata for the book so this is how i created all those things so you upload this is a little bit confusing right here you upload the epub file from google to caliber and then you [Music] convert that epub file into an epub file and a pdf at the same time this is where you add the cover and you create the table of contents so to create the table of contents you want to set the roles for the table of contents to only use the h1 tags and the h1 tags in a book are the title chapters so it would be live streaming to grow your podcast um using surveys to grow your podcast random tips those are the chapter titles so you uh in in your google doc you're gonna make those in h1 tag and then when you um when you set up your table of contents um it'll ask you what style of heading do you want your h1 tags to be right now your your table of contents to be and you have h1 tags if you leave it normally it'll do h2 and h3 it'll do all the h's and then your table of contents is like 10 pages long this is actually something i struggled with and it took me a lot of effort i don't know a lot of trial and error to fix this problem because it's not just like it doesn't say oh what headings do you want in your table of contents it's like this whole string and you have to um figure out what that string means and so yeah it's kind of difficult okay so the next thing you're gonna do in caliber is add your metadata to the book so that when you upload places it keeps this data so tags my tags were like marketing podcasting podcast things like that oh comedy stand up comedy and then you're gonna add the publisher so just for fun i made the publisher open podcast community so yeah and then you're gonna add your author metadata i don't know who the author was so okay um and then once you do this you're going to convert it no you're gonna you're gonna accept that you're going to make it your actual ebook that's what i'm trying to say then that ebook will have formatting issues so you need to fix those so my formatting issues were that um in at the last second i decided to center all my h tags so my h2 my h3 and then for some reason when i would make it into my ebook uh the h tags were not centered in like just a few of them so i had to figure out why it wasn't centered i don't even remember why but like a couple i missed of course because there was probably over 100 so i'm gonna miss a couple and then yeah those just weren't centered so i had to make sure the formatting was correct and it was aligned with all the other ones make sure i didn't do anything different with those tags versus the other ones so i had to fix those and it happened again and happen again so yeah from caliber you're going to get the epub and the pdf file and then you're going to take those files and you're going to add them to gumroad lean pub and google books so um the fees for each one gum road is 8 plus 30 cents um in other episodes or future episodes i might refer to it as just 10 percent just easier in my brain to think about it like that then the lean pub um lean pub is 20 um google ghoul's 30 um but over 9.99 at the fee is 48 so i i made the book 1949 and so that i get uh 51 of each sale yeah okay and so the difference between gum road and lean pub is gum road is just its own it's like your storefront there's hardly any like discovery where um you can get organic sales through gum road and with lean pub it's like a it's an online bookstore so you can cert or like users can search for things and that's the difference that's why lean pub is 20 and gum road is 10 um there is a gum road feature like gumroad discover feature and this is where people can search for things and that's where they take twenty percent but uh yeah i don't think if you have a small audience i guess um you're not gonna be using that or people aren't going to be discovering your product through that whatever okay so you may have noticed that there's one um sales platform that is missing and that is amazon okay so let's talk why not amazon um many people have asked me why not put it on amazon and i'm gonna discuss it right now okay so the very first thing is that they have their own format and with that format you have to jump through extra hoops and that format is mobi you can get it on caliber um but it is different from an epub and the pdf um before like i i would convert it into a mobi but there was there were different formatting issues that would come up that the epub and the pdf did not have so i looked this up i was like what is mobi for and it turns out it said that it's only for amazon it's amazon specific format for their ebooks and so i just dropped it immediately right there um yes so that is one reason um also amazon is a sales platform only to be honest it doesn't mean i'll make more sales or any sales for that matter so i can be jumping through all these hoops doing everything they ask and it doesn't mean i'll sell another book or more books on their platform okay um i'm not a fan of monopolies uh you hear me talk about big business all the time so i don't wanna it's like voting with your dollars right so when you sell a book on their platform they make money so you're supporting them another thing with amazon is i don't know who buys my book so for lean pub um with the other one gumroad i don't know if google for sure but i can i have the email with everyone who buys any product right so i can reach out to them i could tell them about something i'm working on i could tell them about the podcast if they don't know about it um i can't do that with amazon it's not cool um and they're i didn't even start to put my book on amazon but they're probably no analytics so there's that too um and finally um i get six dollars a copy no matter what um not no matter what but that's so they take so it's similar to google so it's thirty percent uh for if your book is at nine ninety nine then if your book is over that they take seventy percent so at 1949 i would be making six dollars still right um so yeah that's six dollars a copy um i didn't want to be making six dollars a copy because as i said earlier in a previous episode my book was to make um fifteen dollars a copy and sell 25 copies so that number at six dollars a copy would have to be more than twice that i'd have to sell sell 50 copies and yeah not cool um so you're probably wondering what's the difference between amazon and google because they have the same fee structure basically the one ammo or google's is 48 not 70 so they're not taking the majority away and two and this is an even bigger reason is that i didn't have to jump through hoops to put my ebook on google it was just the epub file and the pdf file they didn't have a special format and that's it the only real issue that i had with google is that um i had to confirm my bank account my bank account to um put the book live on google books or whatever it's called um yeah but that wasn't like the book was already uploaded and i just had to come back like three or four days later i didn't have issues that i had to fix and keep fixing and fix again and fix again until it got perfect for them and i also think on amazon they may have actually or they might actually read the books and um approve them which i didn't have to do for any of the three platforms and i am not going to do it for amazon period okay um finally the question you've all been waiting for how do you make a million dollars from an ebook okay um the first thing you do is you make the price one million dollars and then you find one person to buy it okay that's it um uh i run the open podcast community and we have the open podcast community podcast so if you don't have um if you want experience without if you want experience podcasting without going through the hassle of setting up a podcast talk to me um reach out to me on twitter at supremerem i'm on telegram same uh username and email me supremeramham gmail.com um there's also the open podcast blog i'm looking for writers so if you want to write about your experience podcasting or setting up a podcast or whatever you could do that with the open podcast community audience thank you for listening have a nice day bye