Creating and selling e-books of your photographs and artwork is a simple procedure.  While e-books are not as exciting or classy perhaps as a real offset printed hardcover beautiful coffee table book, they are easy to distribute and are very affordable.

For my latest photographic project, “The Flower Cottages of Cape Cod” I conceived the end result as a gallery show featuring individual framed and matted prints of each of the 22 “identical” cottages that make up the series but to support the show, I want to offer a small book featuring all of the cottages.

This way if someone purchases only one of the cottage “portraits”, they can have the book of all of the cottages.

And as a way for my fan base to support the project, I wanted to offer a low-cost eBook version.

There are two ways to self-published a book.  The prohibitively expensive way, through a print on demand services like Blurb or a small run with a printer or binder.  Either way, the books are very expensive and the artist has little room to make any money on the sales.

I’ve decided with my books to go with a more expensive way of using CreateSpace which is a print on demand company owned by Amazon.  It doesn’t cost anything to create and offer your books through CreateSpace.  They even offer a free ISDN number service which is great since getting an ISDN number can cost a few hundred dollars.

I’ve created and sold three books this way.  The quality is lower but the price point makes it very gift-able, as a result, I sell a lot of these books during the holiday season.

the Quotable Westie

Pugs

The Inventor’s Sketchbook

The process I use to create these books is to create a template for interior pages and another for the cover.  The specs can be found on the CreateSpace website for the interior pages and the cover, calculated for the thickness of the book.  All of the individual interior pages  get combined into a single PDF file and is uploaded.  The cover is uploaded separately.   A proof is then ordered and examined before release.

How to create multiple pages PDF file in Adobe Photoshop

Creating and selling an E-book

Creating a sell-able, downloadable e-book is super easy.  Once you have the multiple page PDF file all you need is a place to offer it and sell it.

There are several places you can sell your e-books but like Payhip.  Payhip takes a small percentage of the sales of your e-book and offers a lot of cool features for marketing and promoting your book.