Kraken eBooks
Cuneiverse produces eBooks for the Kindle and also the ePub format (think Apple iPad) under the Kraken eBooks banner. We have been involved in putting book and journal information on the web since the very beginning, one of the Cuneiverse staff was working for an independent scientific press in 1994 publishing things on the web and its continued since. Recently, we’ve been helping people put their own books and articles into these formats, and it’s been fun and exciting, so we’re extending these services generally.
We recommend for people starting out in the ebook space that you think about publishing for the Amazon Kindle first, not only is a Kindle a hardware device, it’s available as software for platforms ranging from Windows to the iPhone, with a MacOSX version forthcoming. Also, people are used to the idea of buying books from Amazon, and Amazon already sells a phenomenal amount of eBooks, so you can be part of this exciting process.
There are three ways in which we do this:
Pay to Play: You tell us what you want to convert to an ebook, we bid on the conversion, load it into the Amazon self-publishing interface, get it approved, and send you the password for the account after you pay us. When people buy the book, Amazon keeps a percentage of the fee and then sends you the rest. (Details available on their site.)
Payback: For some authors, we’re willing to convert the ebook and then get the money back as a share of the revenue from Amazon. The process is similar, but we mail you a copy of the Amazon statements and we give you the password for the account when you pay back our fees. We’ll also give you the password any time you pay the money. At no time do we own or make any assertions of intellectual property over your book, but we control the copy in the Amazon store until we get paid. You can choose to take it out of the store at any time. In general, to determine whether you can convince us to do this, think about whether you can convince us that it will earn the fees. We’ve started web startups and worked for presses and are generally cynical but happy to hear from people.
Consulting: We’re also happy to teach you to make your own eBooks in either format. Someone who’s familiar with HTML editing and has a bit of information about graphic design, image formats, layout, and a few other topics that we cover could learn to do this relatively quickly. In general, this is an important topic that we’re happy to share information about. Now, with less dead trees!
We’ll also help you with Marketing advice if you like. Specifically, we talk to you about how to market things and then put you in touch with some people who can carry out plans. Again, we’ve done the work to cut through a lot of the BS that weak-sauce SEO people put out, and generally are prepared to help you with advice. We’ve thought about how to advertise our forthcoming line of materials, and we’ve done this by surveying the web, so we’re prepared to share the benefits of our research with other people.
Although we suggest starting with publishing for the Kindle because of its general availability, we are also available to help with conversions to the ePub format that many eBook readers including Apple’s forthcoming one use. Most of the work that we do is applicable to either of the eBook technologies, and doing one with us makes it possible for us to produce the other format rapidly — they’re both, in the end, specialized applications built on top of XHTML.
Contact us at kraken@cuneiverse.com for more information for what we can do for you. To hear about our plans for ebook production, you’ll have to wait a little bit more.