Ebook Publishing Project
Kate Pullinger is an award-winning writer, Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University, and collaborator on our sister project, The Writing Platform. Kate hired us to work with her to publish and promote four of her backlist titles as ebooks.
Kate has a long-standing interest in digital writing and publishing, but this is the first time she has independently published her own work as ebooks. As a digital publishing consultancy, and an arts organisation working with writers, we are naturally interested in the new avenues open to authors as a result of the digital transformation of the sector and the new challenges they face.
The project included the global publication of four backlist titles that had never before been available as ebooks and the digital-first publication of her new novel, Landing Gear, in the UK and Europe.
The project was timed to tie-in with the launch of Landing Gear in Canada, where it is published by Doubleday, and in the US where it is published by Simon and Schuster.
Kate’s criteria for the project were that the ebooks were top quality in terms of production, that they were made as widely available as possible, and that she would be able to gather as much sales data as possible. Kate also wanted to us to document the process in order to make it available to writers as a resource.
Our work included:
- Creating an e-book publishing and promotion strategy including pricing strategy
- Commissioning a designer to design covers for the ebooks and Kate’s imprint, Kate Pullinger Books
- Working with an ebook designer to scan the three titles where there were no existing digital files, creating a style that would carry across all the ebooks, formating them and supplying them as ePub and Mobi files
- Publishing the ebooks directly on Kindle, Kobo, Google Play, Nook and Scribd
- Selecting a distributor who would distribute Kate’s ebooks to a wider pool of aggregators/retailers, and supplying them with the data and files they required
- Writing metadata and new copy for the ebooks, updating Kate’s profile on retail and social platforms, integrating dynamic elements such as as mailing list subscription, blog RSS and Twitter feeds where possible
- Identifying the best solution for Kate to sell her e-books directly to readers and working with Kate’s web developer to integrate the online shop into her website
- Creating a rolling advertising campaign on Good Reads and Facebook. We took care of creative execution and copywriting.
- Devising a UK media campaign for Kate and Landing Gear. We secured coverage in Stylist magazine, BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, the Guardian’s Books Podcast an Review supplement.
Kate has written a post about the start of the project over on her site, and you can read about what we learned from the process in this article on The Writing Platform.
Kate’s backlist novels are now available as ebooks on Amazon, iBooks, Kobo and Google Play and most other ebook retailers.