Becoming An Epublisher

sigogatt@gmail.
com 31 Oct 2019
BECOMING AN E-PUBLISHER
BY NIK PEACHEY
PEACHEYPUBLICATIONS.COM
sigogatt@gmail.com 31 Oct 2019
INTRODUCTION
In this short book I’d like to share a little of what I’ve learned over the last
few years from crowd sourcing funding for my award winning ebook Digi-
tal Video - A Manual for Language Teachers to becoming a digital pub-
lisher and launching PeacheyPublications.com.
I’ll look at some of the key issues involved and try to help you decide
whether crowd sourcing and or self publishing is for you and, if it is, how
to avoid some of the mistakes I made along the way.
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In the ebook I’ll cover:
1. Crowd Sourcing Funding

2. The Writing Process
3. Creating the Product
4. Choosing a Distribution Platform
5. Marketing your Book
If you are reading this, then like me, you may have been wanting and
thinking about writing a book for years. A few times I put together propos-
als for books and expectantly sent them off to publishers only to be disap-
pointed and even more times I started to write my book and then just lost
momentum as other work took over and bills needed to be paid.
I finally decided to crowd source the funding to develop my book and

launched my crowd sourcing campaign in January 2014. I managed to
raise £5,000 in 3 months and used that money to produce - Digital Video
- A Manual for Language Teachers. When I raised the money to create
the book I thought it would take me around 3 months to produce. I finally
finished and published the ebook in the summer of 2015 about a year
over schedule.
In 2016 the ebook was shortlisted by the British Council for an ELTon - In-
novations Award - in the Teacher Resources category and to my utter
amazement, despite some really string competition from the established
publishing houses, it won.
This may sound like a fairy tale success story, but it’s not, well at least not
yet and it may well never be, but it is a story or a road map of how you
can make your own book a reality.
Since completing that first book I’ve published 6 more ebooks, lots of les-
son plans and materials and launched PeacheyPublications.com. All the
other books I’ve written have been produced without funding in my own
time whilst also working full time.
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CROWD SOURCING FUNDING

Crowd sourcing funding is a means by which anyone can attempt to raise
money to fund a project. Whereas, traditionally anyone wanting to raise
money for a business project might go to a bank or investor and get a
lump sum loan to fund their project, crowd funding relies on using the inter-
net to collect small amounts of money from a large number of people.
These small amounts are usually given in exchange for a range of rewards
which the owner of the project should deliver on completion of the project.
This process is usually facilitated by some form of web platform.
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Why crowd source funding
If you write a book for a publisher they will usually give you an advance
on your sales and this will help pay for the time it takes to actually write
the book or at least get started. If you are self-publishing then raising
money in this way can replace the advance and buy you some time to
start writing.
If you are self-publishing there are other things to pay for apart from
your time. You may want to hire an editor, proofreader, illustrator, de-
signer and maybe even someone to pull the ebook together and get it
online for you. Even if you don’t hire in any of these people - and I
didn’t, then that’s more of your time that you’ll need, so having some
money in advance can help to ensure that you can do all this.
Crowd sourcing funding for your book also gives you a way to get
some proof of concept. If you can’t raise the fund you need from your
crowd funding campaign then that might indicate something about the
chances your book project has of being a success.
Why self-publish
Well the first and most obvious answer to that is the publisher might not
want the book you want to write or may not want you as the person to
write the book.
Doing it yourself does also mean that you don’t have to compromise
and you can produce the book the way you want it to be. In my case
this was very much a driver behind my decision. I wanted my book to
be an ebook. I wanted to embed video into the book. I wanted full col-
our illustrations and screen shots on every page. For a publisher of pa-
per based materials most of these things are either to expensive or im-
possible.
I also wanted a ‘tools section’ with activities built around up to date

tools and again for a publisher this is problematic in that it shortens the
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life span of the book or at least the time between revisions as many of
these tools disappear quickly and the book can easily become out of
date. Publishers look for generic ideas that aren’t tool specific.
What costs are involved
If you have basic tech skills and by this I mean word processing skills,
image editing and a reasonably good eye for design, then you can pro-
duce and deliver an ebook to market at minimal cost. Really it’s just
your time. I used iBooks Author to produce my master copy and I was
able to publish it directly to the iBooks Store from the software. I used
iBooks Author to export a PDF version for other platforms. I chose this
option because it’s free if you have an Apple computer and because
you can make the results look professional without too much knowl-
edge of design. There are other options though and I’ll deal with these
in more depth in a later chapter.
For me the real benefits of producing an ebook are the low production
cost - you can do everything yourself and the low distribution cost. You
don’t have to pay for lots of printed copies to be produced and shipped
all over the world.
As my ebooks are about technology, it also enables me to make the

books more interactive and I can add multimedia.
Lastly, another big advantage for a tech book is that I can update the
ebooks and then push a new version live within hours if I want to
change something. That kind of thing is close to impossible with paper
based books.
How to raise the money
To raise the funding for your book you’ll have to set up a campaign on
one of the many crowd funding platforms. These work in different ways
and I’ll go into more detail about this in one of the following chapters,
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but basically what you do is use one of the platforms set up a campaign
and offer the people who fund you some kind of ‘reward’.
I used Indiegogo.com. You should use your campaign to give potential

backers information about what you want to do and shows them a num-
ber of levels at which they can back you and what they will get in return.
Fund raisers offer a wide range of rewards from ‘gratitude’ to a mention

in the book, advertising space, a personal message, free copies, etc. If
you decide to try this it’s worth looking at what other people have of-
fered to get some ideas.
When raising the money for my own ebook, what surprised me was that
the most popular rewards were those that got people involved in contrib-
uting to the book in some way.
Many of the backers paid to contribute their time to editing drafts, re-
viewing materials and looking over and sending in feedback. This was
enormously helpful for me as it saved me paying for an editor and proof-
reader. It also helped me to get some feedback and reassurance that
the book was going in the right direction. As a self publisher working on
your own book without an editor, you have to be very disciplined and of-
ten it’s hard to make tricky decisions like whether or not a chapter or
paragraph is really necessary or whether you are explaining your ideas
clearly and concisely enough. Working without an editor is for me one of
the most difficult aspects of self publishing and I have since managed to
persuade my wife (a former English and Spanish teacher) to take on the
role.
Promoting your campaign
It’s essential that you share your campaign as widely as possible and es-
pecially through social media, but you need to start building your social
media network way before you launch your campaign. This is where
blogging comes in really handy. If you can manage to build a following
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around your writing then those people will be much more likely to have
the faith and confidence to invest in you. Build a professional Facebook
presence either through your profile or by creating a group. Build up a
Twitter following, launch a YouTube channel and build a following there.
All of these platforms and connections will be useful when you launch
your campaign, but don’t over estimate the influence that these will
have. If you have three thousand follower on Facebook or Twitter don’t
assume that they will all rush to fund your project. To give you some
idea of ratios I had a combined social media following of around 100k
when I launched my campaign, but it was funded by 136 of those peo-
ple.
Crowd funding platforms
The number of crowd funding platforms has grown enormously over the
last couple of years and it can be difficult to decide which one to use.
These are a few things to check on when choosing the best platform for
your project:
• What percentage of the money you raise does the platform keep?
There will also be other charges such as bank transfers and tax to
take into account. I actually received four of the five thousand pounds
I raised and that money was still liable to income tax.
• What kinds of projects usually get support on the platform? Some plat-
forms lean more towards creative projects, whereas others are more
business or charity orientated.
• How is the money collected? In some cases people need to have a

particular kind of account to back you or they need to register on the
site first. Look for a site that makes it as easy as possible for your
backers to deposit their contribution.
• What happens if you don’t raise enough money to meet your target?
When raising your funds you have to set a target. In some cases you
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can opt to keep the money and still produce your book using the
money you have raised, but on some platforms if you don’t hit the tar-
get the money is returned.
Risks or pitfalls
One of the greatest risks is that you don’t convince enough people of
the value of your project and your campaign fails. The main damage
there is to your self-esteem.
One of the other great risks is that you do meet your funding target and
then realize that the book is going to take much longer than you think
and you run out of money before it’s finished. This leaves you sacrificing
any free time you may have and paying for things from your own pocket
to ensure that you finish the book and honor the commitment you made
to your backers.
Lessons learned
One of the biggest mistakes I made was to be overly ambitious in the

scope of what I wanted to produce. My final publication was over 400
pages with more than 300 images and almost 30 video tutorials. Really
what I produced could have been two or even three books. The best ad-
vice I can offer anyone who is starting out on the path to writing their
own book is to think MVP (minimally viable product). Try to design your
book to be a simple as it can be. That way it’s much more likely to get
finished and much less likely to bankrupt you.You can always write an-
other one with the ideas you have left over.
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THE WRITING PROCESS

Once the euphoria from raising the funds you need to write my book
wears off you are left with the task of actually producing it and working
alone on this can be a daunting task. When you crowd source funding
through platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter they usually give you a
completion deadline by which you should honor your commitment to your
backers and deliver the finished product. At the time I raised the fund for
my book, the deadline was 3 months.
I actually took 18 months to deliver mine! Here’s what went wrong and
what I learned from it.
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Structuring the ebook
Before I wrote the book I decided to crowd source the content. That
doesn’t mean that I got other people to write it, though a few people
did contribute small parts to the book as part of the fund raising cam-
paign, but I created a questionnaire to ask teachers what they wanted
or expected to see in the book. I used a great tool called Tricider:
http://www.tricider.com/ and created a questionnaire which I circulated
through various teacher networks on social media. Here you can see
the results of my questionnaire:
http://www.tricider.com/admin/1JDbP/37TZEX
There were loads of great suggestions so I took these suggestions and

built the chapter structure around these. This turned out to be a big mis-
take. I tried to include everything and that’s part of the reason why the
book took 18 months and was eventually over 400 pages long.
Motivating yourself without a publisher deadline
I was already an experienced blogger and materials writer and had pro-
duced a lot of work for publishers based around quite tight deadlines,
but producing a whole book is very different and has a very different dy-
namic from something like blogging.
When writing for blogs I can generally finish a posting and publish it the
same day. Then I start getting feedback, responses and my serotonin
boost from the accompanying social media attention. This short writing
to publishing cycle is much easier on a motivation level as you see the
results of your work very quickly and then move on to something else.
When writing a book you have to handle the very long delayed gratifica-
tion cycle so retaining motivation is much more difficult. This is, how-
ever, where the crowd funding aspect did help. Having received my
funding based on pledges, in many case from people who I knew ei-
ther personally or professionally it was that sense of honoring the com-
10
mitment to them and the trust they had placed in me that kept me push-
ing the project forward even when I really wanted to give up.
Working without an editor
As part of the crowd funding process ten volunteers had agreed to give
editorial advice on parts of the book and read and feedback on the com-
pleted book. That was great and really helpful, but can’t compare to
having a professional editor who is with you from the very inception of
the book. A full time editor would probably have persuaded me to drop
a few of the chapters (which I eventually had to do) and help me with
some of the tough decisions involved in trimming and deciding what to
leave out of the book at the very early stages before I wasted a lot of
time and energy trying to produce too much. You can also bounce
ideas off an editor and get an outside perspective on the form and struc-
ture of the work and whether what makes sense in your head actually
makes sense to a reader.
Lessons learned about the writing process
Well I got a lot of things partly right. It was great to crowd source ideas
for content from the potential audience for that content as this acts as
your market research and tells you what they want. The problem was
trying to deliver such a large chunk of information in one product.
What I do now is based on a concept I have taken from technology

product development and this is an MVP or minimally viable product ap-
proach. An MVP is a product that is developed with sufficient features
to satisfy early adopters. Then the final, complete set of features is de-
signed and developed in staged iterations after considering feedback
from the early users.
So in the case of my books, I have my large overview of the book I’d

like to create, but I split it up into smaller products or chapters that I can
publish as individual units. Then I can get feedback on these smaller
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units, generate some income from them and eventually combine them
into my larger overall product.
This is how I approached my recent ebook - Thinking Critically through

Digital Media - I started by writing and publishing individual lesson
plans, then I combined the lesson plans into a book of ten which be-
come 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy. The next stage was to write a
short booklet on Exploiting Infographics which had started life as a col-
lection of articles from my blog https://nikpeachey.blogspot.co.uk/ and
so on until I had the finished book.
Approaching the writing in this way - starting from blog posts and les-
son plans, building them into chapter size booklets and then combining
these into books provided me with much more attainable milestones
and helped me maintain a level of motivation. It also made a better fit
with a manageable writing schedule.
With the first book I had taken a month off to write, but this meant writ-
ing 8+ hours a day, which is pretty hard to maintain. Now I just write for
2 - 3 of hours each day, I can achieve a tangible result in those hours
and the overall material develops at a much more steady and consis-
tent pace and best of all I can fit that around a full time job so I still have
an income.
My final piece of advice is - get an editor, or at least someone you can

bounce ideas off and talk to about the book at various stages. This can
really make a lot of difference and help you to stay sane and motivated
through the long haul to finally publishing the completed book.
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CREATING THE PRODUCT

Okay so you have raised your funds and written your book, but what do
you do now? This is the point at which you would usually hand over your
finished manuscript to your publisher and then sit back and wait for a pub-
lication date and your first royalty check.
Your publisher would then take your manuscript start creating graphics,
sourcing images and mocking up design before turning it into a publica-
tion ready book. With self-publishing this is where you need to roll up your
sleeves and start developing your new skill sets and for me this is where
things start to get interesting and creative.
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From manuscript to product
I’m a Mac user so I normally do all of my writing using the Apple equiva-
lent of MS Word - Pages, but you can use either or even create the text
part of your manuscript using a plain text editor. The thing to remember
though is don’t start trying to format, design and layout your text to
make it look nice. If you do you are potentially creating more work for
yourself later on. Things like layout, fonts and design are things you
should deal with in your publishing software. It’s much better designed
to do this, so keep things very simple at the writing stage.
Software options
There are a number of free and commercial options available depending

on how and where you want to publish your book and how important
the look and design of the book are to you. If your book is only text and
laid out quite simply like the average novel then you can easily export
your file from your word processing software to the .epub format and
you should be able to upload that along with a book cover to a wide
range of platforms. If like me you want something a bit more elegant
and with illustrations, images, and nice design, etc. then you need
something a bit more sophisticated.
iBooks Author
Again partly because I’m a Mac user and it comes free and with my
Mac I use iBooks Author: https://www.apple.com/uk/ibooks-author/,
but there are other reasons.
• iBooks Author is the easiest route to getting the book published on

the iBooks Store. I’ve heard of quite a few people using other soft-
ware getting their books continually rejected because of strange for-
matting anomalies that they then have to fix. With iBooks Author I’ve
never had any of those problems it just takes care of all of that in the
background, so I just design my book.
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• It has stylish modern templates that I can adapt and import my text
into directly from Pages.
• iBooks Author enables me to add a range of interactive and dynamic

widgets to the book too, so I can drop video into the pages, make in-
teractive images with hotspots, add quizzes and a whole range of
other stuff.
• I can also export my books as high quality PDF documents that I can
then distribute through a host of other platforms.
Kotobee
If you are a non Mac user or if you want to convert your book to an app
for the Google Android platform then you might also consider:
https://www.kotobee.com/ This is free software that you can download
for Mac or PC and use to create interactive ebooks that can be pub-
lished in a wide range of formats including desktop widgets for Mac or
PC as well as the iBooks Store and Google Store. The software itself
isn’t as elegant or easy to use as iBooks Author so expect to spend
some time getting up to speed on it, but it can produce a good range
of interaction and transform your book from a simple text into a truly me-
dia rich interactive ebook document.
Kindle Textbook Creator
If you want to publish to Amazon then you can download the free Kin-
dle Textbook Creator from:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1002998671 This
runs on either Mac or PC and is pretty simple to use.
Others
There are also a host of other free and freemium tools around that help
you to create your book and make it look nice. These are just a few of
the ones worth looking at:
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http://papyrus.yourstory.com/
https://booktype.pro/
https://madmagz.com/
https://www.activetextbook.com/
Creating your master copy
The actual process of creating the ebook can be quite simple depend-
ing on which software you use and how interactive your ebook is. You’ll
need to spend some time adjusting to it, but software like iBooks
Author isn’t really any more complex to use than the average word proc-
essing software.
The point at which it can become tricky is when you finish the ebook
and want to push it live to the marketplace, but again that depends on
which marketplaces you choose. I googled and read a few blog posts
and watched a couple of videos before getting my book onto the
iBooks Store. Be careful though, some of the posts I read made it
sound much more complex than it actually was because they were offer-
ing commercial services to help.
Coping with design
If you are reading this and considering using clipart images in your book
then I would say stop now and hire a designer. If you are willing to put in
some time to look at examples of good modern design and learn from
these examples then doing your own design can be a really rewarding
experience. I’ve done all the design work on my own books and it’s
something that I really enjoy. If you’re not sure you could always invest
in a good ebook about design. There are lots to choose from on Prod-
uct Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/topics/books?subtopic=179
but be sure to read the reviews.
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What you can do to move beyond paper
If you want to make your book really move beyond what can be done
with paper then there are lots of options. You can add in video, create
an interactive glossary, add different quizzes, 3D objects, images that
zoom in and out, animations, polls, questionnaires. In fact you can add
almost anything that you can find on a website or in an app. If you want
to see some examples of widgets have a look at:
https://www.bookry.com/. This site specializes in providing interactive
widgets for iBooks Author and has a vast range of interaction and me-
dia type widgets. There are a few things though that you should be
wary of:
Adding lots of widgets increases the file size of your ebook and some
users are much more reluctant to pay for ebooks that take up a lot of
storage space on their device.
Using a 3rd party company like Bookry for your widgets may involve an
additional cost and does make you dependent on the stability of the
company (if they go bust or change their code, elements of your book
may stop working).
If you want to publish your ebook to multiple platforms and in different

formats you may find that your widgets don’t work or need to be
changed.
When I did my ebook on digital video I decided just to drop in video tu-
torials to some of the pages, then when I created the PDF version I
placed images where the videos should go, linked them to the online
video and added QR codes so users could download the videos to a
mobile device. This did take a little extra work but I think it was worth it
to include this feature.
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Copyright issues
Teachers can be particularly lax when it comes to copyright and feel

that anything they use is covered by fair use for educational purposes.
Let’s be absolutely clear that this doesn’t apply to creating your ebook,
especially if it’s going to be a commercial product.
Here there is one simple first principle:
“If you didn’t create it then you don’t own it, so you can’t use it.”
As with all rules there are some exceptions. There are some sources of
images and videos, etc. that allow for free commercial use. You can
also ask for permission to use an image, video or text. You may well get
it - I didn’t have a single refusal, but it could take a long time and you
may never get a reply.
Lastly, you could ‘risk it’. If you do this and use something that you
don’t have permission for you may end up having to remove it or face
legal action, so think very carefully before taking this option.
One thing that I used a lot was screen shots of websites and even
though I got permission from the site owners, in some cases the con-
tent they host comes from various creators and they can’t give you per-
mission for that 3rd party content, so for example you may get permis-
sion from a site or app owner to show part of their app, but it may have
an image of a celebrity on so you need to get permission for that sepa-
rately.
Creating graphs, images and videos
You should create all your own graphs unless you can find the one you
want and get permission to use it. Creating graphs and screen shots
can be quite easy though. I created all the graphs in my books using:
https://www.draw.io/ This is a free browser-based tool that allows you
to drag and drop various elements onto a canvas and then save them
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as images. There are lots of similar programs and if you want more tradi-
tional type graphs you can also use spreadsheet type programs and
use the images from there.
I created and edited all of the screen shots using Skitch:

https://evernote.com/skitch/ which again is free and easy to use.
For the video tutorials I used Screen Flow:

http://www.telestream.net/controls/screenflow/download-screenflow.ht
m which is about $100. There are free apps available for creating video
tutorials, but I prefer Screen Flow as it’s really versatile and can deliver
very high quality results that I can easily edit.
Copyright free images
First I would say where not to find images and that’s clipart. Nothing
says amateur more loudly than a clipart image.
If you have a reasonably good digital camera or even a good quality

smart phone you can use free image editing software and produce
some reasonably professional results. I’ve actually taken many of the
photos that I use in my own ebooks. It also really helps if you have
some photogenic friends who are willing to model for you. One thing to
avoid here though is creating images that include people whose permis-
sion your don’t have or which show brands or logos.
If you don’t think you can produce your own images there are lots of
sources of ‘free to use’ images that are published with attribute or non-
attribute licenses for use in commercial products.
These are a few good sources for photographic images:
• https://unsplash.com/
• https://stocksnap.io/
• https://pixabay.com/
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You can also find icons and image graphics that can be really effective
here:
• https://icons8.com/
• https://iconstore.co/
• http://www.freepik.com/
The main downside of these is that lots of people use them and you
may find the image that you use for the front cover of your ebook on
someone else's’ site or product. Also - Always check the license to
make sure you are using it within its defined limits.
Read more about design resources at: https://inscribemag.com/
Other things to consider
The last thing you need to think about carefully before you start creating
your ebook is where you want to launch and sell it. This is something
that I will focus on in the next article in the series, but just to start you
thinking about it, the first thing you need to consider is how much will it
cost you to deliver your ebook through the platform? And after the
taxes and VAT are paid how much will be left for you? Costs can vary
enormously and there were platforms that I looked at where to deliver
the book at the price I wanted would have cost me money. More on
that in the next chapter.
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CHOOSING A DISTRIBUTION
PLATFORM
So you have done all the hard work of raising money, writing your book
and turning your manuscript into a beautiful ebook. Now you have to get it
online and up for sale.
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Things to consider when choosing a platform to sell your ebook
There are lots of different e-commerce platforms you can use to sell
your ebook and potentially you could use any or all of them, but there
are a few things you should consider first.
The most obvious one is cost. All of the platforms charge in some way
or other, so be sure to check out how much commission they charge.
This can vary tremendously from around 5% to as much as 70%. Also
look for other hidden costs. Some also charge a flat rate transaction
fee per sale and even a file hosting fee. Depending on the size of your
ebook file this could be quite expensive. You may also be charged a
transfer fee when you move the money from the platform to your ac-
count. All of this can mount up quite considerably.
You shouldn’t forget about tax and VAT either. You will of course need
to pay tax on the money you make from your ebook sales, but you may
also need to pay VAT especially if your sales are EU based. In some
cases the platform will manage the VAT payments for you and deduct
and pay the money before paying your royalty.
You should also check how long you have to wait and how often you
can withdraw your money from the platform. In some cases the money
comes instantly on the sale of each book, but with other platforms you
may have to wait until you reach a specific time or target amount before
you can transfer the money out.
The other financial aspect you should check is how the platform takes
payment from your customers. Make sure the payment system is flexi-
ble, trustworthy and as international as possible. Systems that rely
solely on PayPal, for example, may limit your accessible market as
many people aren’t able to have a PayPal account.
Many platforms cater for specific types of customers who are looking
for a specific product. There are many platforms these days which ca-
22
ter for teachers who want to buy and sell teaching materials. If the con-
tent on these platforms is similar to what you are selling then this may
be a good place for you.
Check out the marketing features that the platform offers. Some plat-
forms maintain ‘ownership’ of the customer and in some cases charge
you to access the customer. This means that you have no means of
contact with the people who buy or may want to buy your books, un-
less of course you pay the platform to access them. Platforms that en-
able you to build up a customer list and build your own relationship with
your customers are likely to be much more successful for you. Other fea-
tures to look for are things like the ability to create sales or discounts.
These are going to be essential when you start trying to market your
ebook.
You may also want to consider how much copyright protection the site
gives you and how easy it will be for someone who buys your ebook to
share it with others. In many cases there is very little you can do about
this.
The pros and cons of platforms
iBooks Store
My first choice of platform was Apple’s iBooks Store.
• This is a useful platform because it works within Apple’s ecosystem so

people already have their payment system set up and it minimizes the
amount of ‘friction’ between the point where they spot your book and
commit to buying it. Basically they can just click on a button and the
book is paid for.
• iBooks Store also gives you some copyright protection as it’s very diffi-
cult to pirate an ebook from one Apple device to another unless they
are both on the same account.
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• In my case I was also producing the books with the iPad in mind so
all of the iBooks Author interactive features will work nicely on the de-
vice.
• iBooks Store is also accessible in more than 50 countries and sorts

out any local taxes that need to be deducted, so it minimizes the
amount of financial work you need to do.
• There is also no up front cost to adding your ebook to the platform,

so it’s low risk. No sale no charges.
This all sounds great, but there are some downsides too:
• It can only be accessed by people who own Apple devices, so that

limits the potential market considerably.
• The iBooks Store is a very crowded market place so it’s very hard to
get your ebook noticed.
• Apple owns the customer relationship so you have no contact with or

knowledge of who your customers are beyond the location.
Amazon
I also looked at Amazon as a potential platform for my first ebook. It felt

like an obvious place to market the book as it’s a very popular platform
with book buyers and has a solid reliable and trusted payment system.
The costing structure though is quite complex and for me the biggest
problem was that the file size of my ebook was quite big and so the
hosting charges were very high. In the end I decided that it just wasn’t
worth my while to try to sell there and looked for other alternatives.
As I said earlier there are a number of sites specifically for teachers who
want to buy and sell teaching type materials. I thought these would be
really useful as they limit the target market to the people I want to sell
to.
24
Teachers Pay Teachers
I tried Teachers Pay Teachers as that is one of the longest established

sites of this kind. They allow you to set up your own store if you have
enough materials to populate it:
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Nik-Peachey and you get
a limited tool set for marketing. You can build up a community of ‘follow-
ers’ and ‘follow’ and that opens up a degree of contact with your cus-
tomers. If you set up a free account the charges can be quite high, but
you can also have a premium account which gives you more marketing
features and reduces the item by item charges you pay. The main down-
side of the platform though is that although there’s a huge potential mar-
ket place of teachers there it’s still a very crowded market with lots of
teachers trying to sell, so it’s hard to stand out.
Others
Other similar platforms are TES Resources where I also created a shop:
https://www.tes.com/teaching-resources/shop/nikpeachey , Educents
https://www.educents.com/ and Teacher’s notebook
http://teachersnotebook.com/.
I’ve actually had very little success with any of these dedicated teacher
platforms. This may well be because my materials aren’t so well suited
to the market or it could be that the marketplace is over crowded with
teachers wanting to sell their materials.
Payhip
The most useful and successful platform I have discovered so far is Pay-
hip: https://payhip.com/peacheypublications. Payhip is a platform for
the sale of any kind of digitally downloadable materials. The main
strengths of Payhip are:
• There are no upfront registration charges and their commission

charge is very low (around 5%).
25
• They handle EU VAT payments.
• The platform integrates with stripe.com which allows you to take

credit card payments as well as payments through PayPal.
• They have a really good range of marketing and analytics tools to help
you create sales and see who your customers are.
• Payouts are almost instant, so as soon as a book sells the money is

transferred to your account, though the process takes slightly longer if
it’s a credit card transaction.
The only downside with Payhip is the very limited copyright protection -
The email address of the customer is added to the document. This
does give you some comeback if you find someone has uploaded your
ebook to another site and started selling or giving it away, but that’s
about as far as it goes.
Using multiple platforms
It’s true that the more places you upload your materials, the more likely
you are to make a sale, but the problem comes when you need to up-
date one of your books. You have to go around each platform and en-
sure that you have the most up to date version available. This may not
take long with one book, but as you build up your catalogue this can
become very time consuming.
Proof reading and fixing errors
You should really have your finished book proofread before you think of
it as finished, but it’s still easy to miss something or decide that you
want to change something after the ebook is for sale. In some ways
this is one of the great strengths of digital publishing and it can help
you keep your book up to date.
26
If you do spot an error or something you want to change it’s pretty easy
to do. You just make your changes and upload your new version to the
platform.
Other things do you need to prepare
Before you start uploading the file you’ll need:
• Marketing blurb to describe the book. This is worth taking your time
over and thinking out carefully. It needs to be reasonably short and
snappy, but will also need to give a good full impression of what you
are selling.
• Images of the book. This should include at the very least the front
cover and if possible some of the more visually attractive elements of
the book.
• A free sample. This should be a part of the book that potential custom-
ers can download and read before they decide to buy. This needs to
be rich enough in content to convey the quality of the book without
giving away so much that people take the sample and then don’t buy
the book.
• A video. In some case you can upload a video to show your ebook. I
made a number of these for each ebook simply by recording the
ebook on my computer screen and then adding titles and a sound
track. Video ads like these should ideally be between 30 seconds and
a minute long.
Next
Well the next and perhaps the most challenging step is to actually con-
vince people to buy your ebook. That’s a complex process and one that
I’ll be dealing with in the next a final chapter.
27
MARKETING YOUR BOOK

If the previous stages in your journey to getting your ebook written
funded and online were difficult then this part might seem impossible.
For me actually selling the ebook has been the most challenging part of
the process.
The first thing to remember is that the concept of “Build it and they will
come” is as fictional as the 1989 film it came from.
28
Why selling an ebook is challenging
There are a number of reasons for this:
• Habit. Most of us have grown up with physical books and teachers

particularly find it hard to change those habits. Many of us have very
strong attachments to the smell, feel and flexibility of paper. This will
take time to change.
• The perceptions of quality regarding self-published ebooks is also

quite low. Many people feel they aren’t produced to the same stan-
dard as a book from a recognized publisher, so they are reluctant to
buy, especially if you are a relatively unknown author.
• Electronic payments can still be quite intimidating for some people

and having the trust to put their credit-card details into an unfamiliar
site can be an obstacle. Added to this there are still many places
around the world where people just don’t have the financial opportu-
nity or hard currency to make international electronic payments.
• Marketing. If there is one thing that publishers still do well and are pre-
pared to invest in it’s marketing, so you are also competing with the
established publishing houses who have deep pockets for marketing
budgets and in many cases a huge staff and international distribution
network and of course a huge reputation built up over many years.
• There is also the perception, especially among teachers, that digital is

or should be free and constantly available. This in many ways is some-
thing that bloggers like myself and many of the ELT publishing houses
and organizations like the British Council have contributed to by mak-
ing so much free content available online.
29
Pricing your ebook
I’ve always felt that part of the problem with ebooks and why the estab-
lished publishers have failed to have much success with them is be-
cause of the price point. This is usually around the same or at times
higher than that of a paper copy. Publishers are very reluctant to under-
cut their existing paper based products. Paper has been very kind to
publishers over the years so by pricing a digital copy well below a paper
copy puts them in competition with themselves.
However, the costs of producing and distributing digital products is

vastly less than that of paper ones. There are no printing costs, no
physical material costs such as paper and ink and you don’t have to fly
heavy boxes of them all over the world, so you can potentially price
your book at a fraction of the cost of a paper book.
Initially with my ebook on Digital Video I set the price at £4.99. This
made it about 20% of the price of a similar paper based book. Later I
thought that if I dropped the price to £1 I would be able to sell far more
copies and make it affordable to even more people, but to my surprise
the price didn’t have any impact on the number of sales, so I set the
price back to £4.99. What I learned from this is that price isn’t really the
key factor involved in selling the book and that if someone sees value in
the book they will pay a reasonable price for it.
Advertising your ebook
Well the obvious place to get started is your social networks on Linke-
dIn, Facebook, Twitter or wherever you have built them. The bigger the
network the greater potential you have to make a sale. In many ways
building your network should be the first thing you do before even writ-
ing the book. It takes time and work to build a useful engaged network,
but don’t over estimate the value of your network. It’s easy to build a
large network by giving away content from your blog and sharing and
curating content and people may love your materials when they are
30
free, but convincing someone to take out their credit-card and buy your
materials is very different.
Here’s a reality check for you. From my own calculations I estimate that
I can make one sale per 1000 followers. So to sell 100 books you’ll
need to have a following of around 100k. And that figure isn’t 100
books each month. That’s 100 copies of any one product in total.
Selling more copies
The rest of your sales you have to work hard for, but there are a num-
ber of ways to do this even without a budget, but they take time.
Here are a number of things I’ve tried.
• Create a website - Most of the platforms you use to sell your ebook
will provide you with some sort of home page or storefront, but par-
ticularly if you have your ebook or books on multiple platforms that
can make promoting the book difficult. It’s better to create a website
that you can use and develop. You can then also use it as a central
place for other kinds of activity like blogging and saving information
about conferences and links to mailing lists or newsletters that you cre-
ate. All of these additional activities will improve the search engine
ranking of your site, attract more visitors to the site and build up your
profile and reputation. I built my own site:
https://peacheypublications.com/ using a free https://wordpress.com
site, but many people also opt for https://www.wix.com/ which is
probably a simpler option if you have very limited tech and design
skills.
• Video ads - Video is a very strong medium of communication and so-

cial media, and particularly Facebook loves video so having a short
video advertisement about your ebook will help to create more of a
buzz and get you boosted through various social media channels. I
created my own adds using video screen capture software and then
31
edited in some text and a sound track that I created using Apple’s
free GarageBand software. This is an example I create for my most re-
cent ebook - 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Class-
room https://vimeo.com/213495944
• It’s better to create the video with text titles and a simple sound track
rather than voice over explainer as a lot of video played through social
media is played with sound off. Also be sure to keep the length of the
video to no more than 1 minute and if possible 30 seconds. Anything
longer is wasted and probably won’t be seen.
• Webinars - Doing webinars for your target market for the book can
also be useful. These can enable you to help people understand how
to use the book and what value it can bring to them. It’s also a good
idea to give discounts or a few free books to attract people to come
to the webinars, but make sure you do that at the end of the webinar.
• Conference presentations - Doing conference presentations, like webi-

nars can help to inform people about your book and be a good place
to sell a few extra copies. Make sure though that your presentation or
work shop delivers some value for those who don’t want to buy the
book too. People can be very turned off by conference presentations
that turn out to be a sales pitch and even though they may not have
paid to come to your session they have committed their time and they
should get something of value for that.
• Write for other blogs - Writing articles related to the topic of your
ebook for other blogs or online journals can help to build awareness
and reputation for you as a writer and point people towards your
work. As with other activities though, don’t make these long advertise-
ments for your book. Make sure you are giving people something of
value and hope that they follow links to your profile or work through
the article.
32
• Free copies to influencers - Giving away copies of your book to key in-
fluencers within your field can also help to create a buzz around it.
Think particularly about the kinds of people who can use or tell other
people about your book. Other bloggers, writers, conference speak-
ers or people who run teacher training courses and might want to
write your book into their syllabus are all great people to share your
book with.
• Free copies in exchange for reviews - You can offer free copies to po-
tential reviewers through your social media channels. Don’t expect a
review from everyone you give a book to though. Many people think
that writing a review in exchange for a free book is a great offer, but
once they have the book the motivation to produce a good thorough
review tends to fall off quite quickly.
• Awards - Winning an award for your book can be pretty challenging,

but that shouldn’t stop you from trying. Even getting shortlisted for an
award like the British Council’s Innovation Awards can help to boost
people’s confidence in your products and your ability as a writer and
so lead to greater sales.
All of the above methods are fine, and are things that you should do,
but are also hard work for very limited returns on your time.
The things that I have found that tend to work particularly well are differ-
ent forms of limited time offers. These are tings that are enabled
through the Payhip platform that I use for the PDF versions of my
books.
• Cut price sales - Through the platform I can create discount codes. I
can choose the percentage of discounts and how long or how many
purchases of each book the code is valid for and then share these
codes through my social media network. Creating sales and dis-
counts that have a very finite time or number increases the perceived
33
value and urgency to use the code and help you over come the per-
ception that digital is constantly available.
• Social discounts - Through the Payhip platform I can also set up so-
cial discounts that enable the buyer to get the book for a reduced
price once they share a link to it through their social media network.
This can be a great way to access the networks of your customers
and help to build a wider market for your products. Again you can
limit the time that these social discounts are available which encour-
ages the customer to do it now rather than forget to do it later.
• Affiliates - Building up a network of affiliates can be a really useful way

to boost your search engine ranking through increased links in to your
products and also build up sales. Through the Payhip platform I can
set up affiliates with a unique link that tracks any sale of a book back
to them so that they have a share of the income. This is a great way
for bloggers or reviewers to potentially generate some income from
for their work buy selling your products. Remember that these are
sales that probably wouldn’t happen without your affiliate’s help and
100% of nothing is nothing, so be sure to offer a good percentage of
the sale to make it worth your affiliates time.
Working your network
If you are constantly trying to sell to your social media network then you
will soon find that your network will start to shrink rather than grow and
your sales will shrink too. The best way to avoid this is through value
and variety.
• Variety - You should ensure that you vary the way you promote your
books as much as possible, sharing links to article and blog posts
you have written, sharing links to your video ads, making sure you
have a good variety of images and media to share about the book
and best of all having a variety of products to promote, rather than
just one book can make all of this much easier.
34
You should also build your network across a variety of platforms. These
are some of the platforms I use:
I have a blog where I publish unique content for teachers. I also use
these as a platform where I can drop in ads for my ebooks. The content
should give my potential customers some idea of the quality of my writ-
ing and give them confidence in the products.
• https://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/
I have a Facebook page where I share links to articles and resources

that may be of interest to my potential customers and of course I can
drop the occasional ad for my books into the feed.
• https://www.facebook.com/ICT4ELT/
LinkedIn is a great platform to share posts to potentially interesting con-

tent and also to share ads for your products with your network. Linke-
dIn is also good because there is a higher expectation that links will be
more commercial as it’s a more professionally orientated platform.
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikpeachey/
I also curate useful links to resources through to scoop.it sites and

again I can use these to drop in the occasional link to one of my
ebooks.
• http://www.scoop.it/t/tools-for-learners
• http://www.scoop.it/t/learning-technology
I’ve built up a strong network through producing a twice monthly free

eNewsletter using the free TinyLetter service. Again the majority of the
content I share there is links to useful articles and tools for my readers
but i do add in an offer or promotion for one of my ebooks to each edi-
tion.
• https://tinyletter.com/technogogy/
35
By using these networks and integrating my own work with links to

other useful content and the occasional ad I can deliver a valuable serv-
ice to my network as well as promoting my products and establishing
my own authority, knowledge and credibility within my community.
Paid advertisements
I’ve tried paying for ads on both LinkedIn and Facebook.
I was given a free voucher for $50 of LinkedIn marketing so I thought I’d
give it a try. To use it I had to create a LinkedIn Business page, but that
was quite quick. LinkedIn works a little like Google Ads in that you have
to bid for marketing space, so you set a time, audience and budget
that you are willing to pay. As far as I know I didn’t get any direct sales
from my $50 voucher. It may be that it works better for other types of
books or perhaps there is a financial threshold you have to reach before
this becomes successful, but for me it didn’t work at all.
I also advertised through Facebook for a while. This is much cheaper to

do, but again you can’t do it through your personal profile, you have to
set a business related page and then you are offered the option to
‘boost’ your posts through your network. Many people don’t realize that
when you post something to a Facebook page or to your profile only a
small percentage of the people following the page actually see that
post. Facebook shows your post to the people who are most engaged
with what you do (liking or commenting on your posts) and only if they
respond to your post in some way will it start to be pushed to other peo-
ple within your network. Boosting posts is a way of encouraging Face-
book to push your content to more of your network, and if you choose,
the network of the people who follow you (the friends of friends). The
best thing about Facebook advertising is that it’s very low cost and so
very low risk. You can boost a post for the day for as little as £2. If you
decide to do this then make sure that your posting includes a link to
your product, an image and if possible a video clip. Facebook likes
36
video and so a post that includes video is more likely to generate re-
sponses and help get your post pushed to more people. I have had
some limited success with these kinds of ads, but again big success
might come with a larger investment in advertising and at present I
don’t really have the budget for that.
Freebies
I do give away a lot of copies of my work for free. Usually I give away
free copies of the smaller works such as lesson plans or the chapters
of the books that started off as MVP books. Doing this can help build
my customer base and build confidence in my products and hopefully
anyone who likes the free products will come back and buy something.
Giving value beyond what’s online for free
This is a challenge particularly for digital publishing. In the short term I

think you have to make sure that your digital products really give extra
value beyond what people can find online. Even if it’s just the conven-
ience of having everything they need in one place in the book rather
than scattered around lots of different websites. That can help and
save their time - after all time is becoming one of our most valuable
commodities these days.
I have thought though about other models for financing my books that
would enable me to give them away for free. In away the crowdfunding
model could help to do that. I’ve also considered generating the money
through advertising, after all free products reach a far greater market so
the potential to generate revenue through ads is much bigger that way.
Actually reverting back to a very historical model of patronage through

sites like https://www.patreon.com/ that enable crowdsourced patron-
age from a large group of people who commit to donating a small
amount of money to support the work may be the way forward.
37
As a writer I would much prefer a model that enabled me to give away

the work for free. In then end what I want to achieve is the maximum
number of people with access to my work and free can certainly do
that. The challenge though is to be able to do that and still eat and pay
the bills.
38
BIO
Nik Peachey is a freelance teacher trainer, writer,

course designer, conference speaker and learning
technology consultant.
He has been involved in education since 1990 and
has lived and worked all over the world.
He is a two-time British Council Innovations Award
Winner and the Co - founder of
PeacheyPublications.com.
He has worked with a wide range of educational
companies, publishers and institutions including
Macmillan, CUP, OUP, British Council, International
House, Bell Educational Services, University of
Westminster, The Open University, The BBC, Google
Creative Labs, EtonX and many more.
Nik is a keen blogger and content curator. You can
find his blog at: https://quickshout.blogspot.co.uk/
and his curation sites at:
http://www.scoop.it/t/tools-for-learners and
http://www.scoop.it/t/learning-technology
xxxix
He also publishes a twice monthly Learning Technology

and ELT newsletter at: https://tinyletter.com/technogogy/
He has four times been shortlisted for the British Council’s

Innovations Awards - In 2010, 2012, 2016 and now in
2018. He won the award for Innovation in course design in
2012 for the Blended Learning in ELT course he designed
for Bell Educational Services and again in 2016 for Digital
Video - A Manual for Language Teachers.
xl
COPYRIGHT © 2018 Nik Peachey

This book is an independent publication and has been
created in my own time and at my own expense.
I depend on the proceeds from the book so that I can
produce more work like this and so that I can feed my family
and send my daughters to college.
When you copy, download or share this book illegally or
without my permission you are stealing from me and my
family.
If you have downloaded this book without permission or
paying, please do the right thing and go buy a copy from:
https://www.peacheypublications.com/ or
https://payhip.com/peacheypublications
If you can’t afford or don’t have the means to buy it, then
read on in peace and I hope that it helps you and your
students.
Thanks
Nik Peachey
All chapter images were sourced from:

https://unsplash.com/ and owned by the original creators.
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In the ebook I’ll cover:

1. Crowd Sourcing Funding

I finally decided to crowd source the funding to develop my book and

CROWD SOURCING FUNDING

Why crowd source funding

I also wanted a ‘tools section’ with activities built around up to date

What costs are involved

As my ebooks are about technology, it also enables me to make the

How to raise the money

I used Indiegogo.com. You should use your campaign to give potential

Fund raisers offer a wide range of rewards from ‘gratitude’ to a mention

Promoting your campaign

Crowd funding platforms

• How is the money collected? In some cases people need to have a

One of the biggest mistakes I made was to be overly ambitious in the

THE WRITING PROCESS

Structuring the ebook

There were loads of great suggestions so I took these suggestions and

Motivating yourself without a publisher deadline

Working without an editor

Lessons learned about the writing process

What I do now is based on a concept I have taken from technology

So in the case of my books, I have my large overview of the book I’d

This is how I approached my recent ebook - Thinking Critically through

My final piece of advice is - get an editor, or at least someone you can

CREATING THE PRODUCT

From manuscript to product

There are a number of free and commercial options available depending

• iBooks Author is the easiest route to getting the book published on

• iBooks Author enables me to add a range of interactive and dynamic

Kindle Textbook Creator

Creating your master copy

Coping with design

What you can do to move beyond paper

If you want to publish your ebook to multiple platforms and in different

Teachers can be particularly lax when it comes to copyright and feel

Here there is one simple first principle:

Creating graphs, images and videos

I created and edited all of the screen shots using Skitch:

For the video tutorials I used Screen Flow:

Copyright free images

If you have a reasonably good digital camera or even a good quality

These are a few good sources for photographic images:

Read more about design resources at: https://inscribemag.com/

Other things to consider

Things to consider when choosing a platform to sell your ebook

The pros and cons of platforms

My first choice of platform was Apple’s iBooks Store.

• This is a useful platform because it works within Apple’s ecosystem so

• iBooks Store is also accessible in more than 50 countries and sorts

• There is also no up front cost to adding your ebook to the platform,

• It can only be accessed by people who own Apple devices, so that

• Apple owns the customer relationship so you have no contact with or

I also looked at Amazon as a potential platform for my first ebook. It felt

Teachers Pay Teachers

I tried Teachers Pay Teachers as that is one of the longest established

• There are no upfront registration charges and their commission

• They handle EU VAT payments.

• The platform integrates with stripe.com which allows you to take

• Payouts are almost instant, so as soon as a book sells the money is

Using multiple platforms