For the past several years, I’ve been publishing a couple of amateur radio license study guides, the No-Nonsense Technician Class License Study Guide and the No-Nonsense General Class License Study Guide. These are available as free downloads from my amateur radio blog.
For a while, I tried selling a print version through a print-on-demand (POD) outfit called BookLocker. Doing so was not a big success. I sold some copies, but overall, I don’t think that I recouped the fee I paid BookLocker to produce the POD version of the book.
In May of this year, I updated the No-Nonsense Technician Class License Study Guide so that it covered the same material as the new exam question pool. Since May, it’s been available as a free download on my website, but not as a printed version.
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to produce an e-book version of the study guide and began reading up on the process. As it turns out, it’s not that hard to do.
The first step was to download Calibre, which is e-book management software for the Mac. Calibre does a number of different things, including converting documents in other formats to the epub format, managing your library of e-books, and downloading your e-books to devices, such as my iPod Touch. All I had to do to produce the epub version of my study guide was to import the PDF file into Calibre and then have it spit out an epub.
Unfortunately, the formatting wasn’t quite up to snuff. To correct that, I downloaded Sigil, a WYSIWYG e-book editor. It’s much better for editing epubs than Calibre. It’s too bad that you have to use two software packages to produce e-books, but Calibre and Sigil are a terrific one-two punch for doing this.
I’ll describe how to get the e-books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iTunes in another post, but suffice it to say that I managed to get it listed on both Amazon and Barnes & Noble earlier this week, and it will soon be in the iTunes store. Amazon’s already sold one copy and I got an e-mail earlier today from someone who wanted to buy the Nook version.
UPDATE 8/19/13
Since first publishing this post nearly three years ago, I’ve since published three more books:
- No-Nonsense Extra Class License Study Guide
- 21 Things to Do After You Get Your Amateur Radio License
- Having Fun With Amateur Radio: Letting My Inner Geek Out
I’m not getting rich from the sales, but they’re significant, and I am continuing to write more books.
I’ve also changed the way that I produce e-books. Now, I use Jutoh. Jutoh is a great program and allows me to take a manuscript and turn it into an e-book much faster than with Calibre and Sigil.
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