We’ve recently added some emphasis on the publishing features of Feedbooks: you’ll notice that there’s a new Upload link in the main menu, and our help pages now includes 2 pages dedicated to our publishing features.
The first one is dedicated to self-publishing on Feedbooks:
If you’re an author and you’d like to publish your books for free as e-books, Feedbooks is perfectly suited for several reasons:
- No specific digital publishing skills required: it’s designed for authors, you’ll just have to understand a few basic concepts.
- Upload once: you’ll just have to publish your work once, instead of struggling with the different e-book formats.
- Direct distribution to connected devices: your work will be directly available on the iPhone through Stanza, on the Kindle through our Kindle Guide or any PDA/Smartphone thanks to our mobile website.
- Reach your audience: there’s hundreds of thousands of users using Feedbooks to discover and download e-books, this is the perfect place to build a fan base.
The second one is about publishing on Feedbooks in general: both for self-publishing or if you’d like to contribute to our selection of public domain books:
Whenever we use a word processor or do any sort of text editing, we usually work on a single flow of text.
Rather than dividing the text into separate elements, we modify the style of the text to give a visual indication that there’s a division: a slightly bolder font or a different alignment.
Feedbooks rely on a different paradigm: we consider that the structure of the text is very important.
Thanks to this structure we can automatically build a table of contents or divide the text into multiple text flows (which is necessary for advanced formats such as ePub).
Based on the output format we can also style things differently: while Mobipocket provides limited options for chapter headers, we can create good looking ones in PDF and ePub.
To help any author using Feedbooks as a publishing platform, we’ve also extended the distribution of their books to the iPhone and Kindle. On the iPhone if you’re using Stanza, you can access these books in the “Original Books” catalog, while the most popular books are now accessible on the Kindle through our dedicated guide.
In the upcoming months, we’ll dedicate most of our ressources on publishing and self-publishing in particular, as we’d like to create a great platform for authors and readers looking to discover new books.
If you’d like to write your first novel, November is the perfect month thanks to NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). This year, NaNoWriMo celebrate their 10th birthday. If you plan on writing a novel this month, or if you’d like to publish a novel that you’ve created for NaNoWriMo, tag them with nanowrimo (it’s case sensitive) on Feedbooks. We’ll do a special feature on our website, in our Kindle guide and on Stanza once we have enough books tagged this way.
