Ebook Sample Content Preview:

Want to see how your podcasts are performing? Podbean's powerful analysis tools gives you an in-depth dimensional view of your visitors, subscribers, hits and geographical distribution.

Navigate to top menu "Statistics", each submenu represent a specific type of podcast stats. Includes episode hits, subscribers, site visitors and geographic distribution.

Episode Hits - Hits for each episode. different type of reach will be categorized three areas: feed, download and streaming. Feed reflects the number of times your content is fetched via a subscribed Feed; Download is the number of times that your content files are downloaded directly through the web; While streaming is the number of times that your content files are played online.

Subscribers - Approximate measure of the number of individuals currently subscribed to your feed. It's based on an approximation of how many times your feed has been requested by many different feed readers (ex:google reader) and podcatchers (ex:iTunes) in a 24-hour period. Request from robots will not be counted.

Site Visitors - Provide the number of visitors to your podcast site. Any number of visitors with the same IP address will be counted only once in a 24-hour period.

Geo Stats - The measure of where the audience comes from.

Each stats consists of graphic view, summary, and raw data, which are generated based on the criteria at the top of the page.

Embeddable Player

Eager to share your podcast to millions users in Facebook, MySpace, or integrate to your own blogs and websites? The embeddable Player is just designed for this purpose. The unique feature "Embed Once, Use Forever" let you only do a simple Copy & Paste and the playlist will be updated automatically in the future.

Embed Podcast Everywhere - To get the embed code of your Podcast Player, simply click "Manage" tab, then "Embeddable Player" sub-tab. For Facebook user, click the link for Facebook and follow the steps. For other websites, select the colour and size of the player and click "Get Embed Code". Note there is a link "MP3 Audio Player" besides the headline of the page. This is an audio player with similar features, but only collect the episodes with MP3 audio format.

Embed Single Episode - To get the embed code of the Podcast Player for a single episode, you click "Manage" tab, then "Posts" sub-tab, click the "embed code" button at right side of the post.

Once a new publish is done, some backend works are needed for player to get updated, such as video encode, generate thumbnail and regenerate the playlist etc, which may take up to 24 hours.

Ebook Sample Content Preview:

When creating a child's picture book you should consider your font, the colour of your writing, and your illustrations, and how to all work together. Of course if you intend to publish your eBook on Kindle, many factors will change. For example, on Kindle the images are converted to black and white. So no matter what illustrations you decide to go with, make sure you check how they translate when made black and white.

It is actually quite easy to create your own illustration without hiring a professional, however, if you can afford a professional artist, you should consider that option because many picture books are defined by their beautiful artwork (eg. Gruffalo) and yet some books are defined by the simplicity of their drawings (eg. Diary of a Wimpy Kid). Whether you decide to create your illustrations yourself, or hire someone professionally, it is the end result that matters.

Paid Software Options

The most popular software tool used online to create illustrations is Adobe Illustrator, there is a similar (free) Open Source alternative called Inkscape (which we look at later).

Second to Adobe Illustrator is Photoshop. The difference between the two programs is that Adobe Illustrator is more about creating "clipart" type drawings, like illustrations for a children's book, whereas Adobe Photoshop is more suited to "photo editing".

Many illustrations can be created using the Adobe Photoshop software too, and Adobe Photoshop is arguably easier to learn and use. One advantage to Adobe Illustrator is that it creates your image in very high resolution, called "vector". The beauty of "vector" images is their clarity and their ability to increase and decrease in size without affecting the resolution of the image. If you "expand" a JPG or PNG file image in Photoshop, it soon starts to "pixilate" and it is that "pixilation" that renders the photo unusable at some point, because it gets to "blurry".

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Keep your word count relevant to your target demographic. Babies to Toddlers should have minimal words, 4-5yos should have short paragraphs on each page at the most, primary school age and above have 500 words in total and upwards depending on your book.

Always use simple fonts like Times New Roman (this eBook uses Calibri in size 14). Font sizes should be 12 to 14.

Keep away from bullet points, don’t use page numbers and you can centre items, in fact for images, you should centre them.

Map out your eBook story on a “story board” which is simple collection of mocked up pages, telling your story in summary. How many pages and how long your story depends on your intention as an author. If you are in any doubt, always check out your competitors as a guide.

Always check each publishing company’s individual formatting requirements, and always check your formatting in a finished published format before you walk away from the project.

Remember many eReaders (like most Kindles) are only black and white. Therefore, you should make sure your images look nice in colour and in black and white too.

If you are not an artist or illustrator, and you don’t want to buy stock “sold to the public” images, you can hire someone online (outsource) to do the work for you. Don’t be afraid to give illustration creation a go, you’d be surprised how easy it is. Kids don’t need fancy, they need fun and colour.

Mock up some basic graphic picture ideas whether you intend to create your own images or outsource the work. Either way, you or your artist have to work from some baseline of what you want to achieve overall.

There are many ways you can “colour” your images, you could leave them black and white (like an outline), you could colour them in online with a graphics program like Photoshop (paid), Gimp or Inkscape (both free online), you can colour them in offline with a colouring paint medium to use on paper, like oils, acrylics or water colours.

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You have two choices for publishing with Apple. You can use iBooks Author, which works pretty well for picture books, and is easy to use if you have no technical knowledge. Alternatively, you can convert it as a fixed-format EPUB, which will require solid HTML/CSS skills.

iBooks Author formatting

Creating an iBook has been made quite easy with the introduction of the iBooks Author from Apple. Ever since Apple’s iBookstore has brought forward an open platform for publishing, regular eBooks have been provided with a chance to become more interactive and fun. The iBook format can allow you to create a reading experience that’s unique and pleasant. Another plus point to creating books through the iBook format is the fact that it’s quite simple to do because you don’t have to be a skilled programmer for using these basic creation tools. Plus, the app can be downloaded from the Mac App store for free so there’s no hassle involved of any sort.

Before you can create your very own iBook, there a few things that you should consider at first. To begin with, the iBooks Author app can only be run on a Mac. Plus, the iBook that you create can only be read using an iPad and put for sale in the iBookstore. You need a MAC

Although, your book can be distributed for free and can be easily exported in plain text or PDF file format. A backdrop to using this app is that you can’t use it to create a standard format file used widely for digital publishing ie. the ePub.

Creating an iBook is also easier because there are a number of ready to use beautiful templates designed by Apple that you could choose from right at the beginning.

These templates exist in a range of styles in both portrait and landscape orientations e.g. a photo book, textbook, or cookbook, etc. Page layouts can also vary with each template and there’s also an option of creating your own template if the provided templates are simply not working for you.

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Writing is difficult. It doesn't matter whether you're writing an article, blog or simply jotting something down in your daily diary, it takes special care and attention for transforming your thoughts into actual words. And, this task becomes even more difficult when you've decided to share your thoughts with the rest of the world. Certainly, in order to attain some tangible recognition for your work, the project you're working on would be a demanding one.

Once you're done writing, there are a number of ways that you can use for sending out your manuscript to various publishing houses, hoping that one of them will take a liking towards your book and offer to publish it. And if all goes well, your script will be read and selected for publication making it available for all to read. Unfortunately, this situation does not apply to everyone. Therefore, it is important for you to look for another way (of publication) in case there's a rejection or disinterest displayed over your work from the publishing side.

Of course, there are individuals who find it distasteful to involve themselves with these demanding companies and therefore, seek an alternate way for getting through to others with their work. For these individuals, the Kindle Direct Publishing or KDP on Amazon (formerly known as Amazon's Digital Publishing Platform or DTP for Kindle) may be the right choice.

A prominent advantage to publishing your eBook with Kindle is the fact that any account created on Amazon.com can do the trick for you. There's no need to create a special account to access the Kindle Direct Publishing page (previously known as Digital Publishing Platform) on Amazon. All you have to do is use your log-in details on the KDP entrance screen and you'll be ready to move forward.

Since it will be the first time that you've started using the Digital Publishing Platform or Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) service, there will be a couple of questions that you'll need to answer regarding the specific settings of basic publishing i.e. your preferred method of payment and tax information, etc. There are no complexities involved in this process as it's quite straightforward. Hence, you won't be having any trouble starting off.

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In order to publish your eBook in other formats, you must first format your Microsoft Word document appropriately. Thus, you'll have yourself a downloadable file (MOBI and EPUB) for the Kindle and iPad devices.

The layout and size of your document in Word should be vertical or portrait as eBooks bearing a landscape design will not be accepted for publication. Furthermore, if you want to put in images (pictures or graphics) inside your eBook, remember to resize them first using a small editor or Photoshop etc. You can then save these images and reinsert them into Word. Charts should be converted into images too in order for them to retain their original formatting.

Also, when using Microsoft Word, do not use text wrapping around images as they should be positioned in-line with the text instead. Another point to keep in mind is that the images included in the eBook should not be placed next to each other. That's because the type of layout then prepared will not work in favor of e-readers like Kindle or iPad. Also, avoid using any special characters or symbols unless it is absolutely necessary because there's a good chance that these characters may not be properly converted into the eBook formats if they're not part of a standard set of font. That is why many writers are told to choose fonts like the Times New Roman for the symbols and text.

Creating eBooks also means that you don't have to worry about any costs that will be included along with any illustrations or images that you want to add. For Word, you can simply insert images and illustrations by converting them into .jpg or .gif files. Programs such as Photoshop can help you enlarge, reduce, or crop images along with making other necessary modifications. You will also be able to save these files at a decreased resolution, thus the file size will be reduced.

Incorporating illustrations in your text is easy when you're using Microsoft Word but placing them in a precise manner could be a bit difficult than insertion. If your eBook requires a lot of illustrations or images (i.e. if it's a picture eBook), then using a program like desktop publishing would prove to be quite beneficial in making things work. Also, whenever you're laying out illustrations or photos in a Word document, try placing them in such a way that there's always an ample boundary between the adjacent text and the image. Captions should also be included where appropriate.

Page breaks should also be included between every chapter when using Microsoft Word. To do this, place your cursor right at the end of your text and click the page break option present on the insert bar. Indenting your paragraphs is also an important part of creating an eBook. To do this, you will have to click on the page layout bar and insert a measurement for first line indentation instead of using "Tab" from the keyword.

The Table of Contents or TOC of an eBook forms an essential part of the entire document because it's the first thing anybody would come across whilst reading your book. Therefore, be sure to put in a TOC using the reference table (there are a few styles that you could choose from). Moreover, your eBook should not contain any blank pages and the headings for every chapter should be written using the "Heading 1" option on your home tab. In order to activate your TOC within Word you will need the Heading 1 formatting set up on the headings anyway.

Ebook Sample Content Preview:

Some images are available online to download are free, and some are for sale. Usually the quality and size you can download has a lot to do with the price (if it is for sale). But this is not always the case, many online image websites change their policies from time to time with special promotions, therefore you should always keep your eyes out for new special offers.

No matter which images you chose to download, it will be owned by someone else, and therefore subject to copyright. You must read their terms and conditions prior to downloading and using that image in an eBook (or for a cover).

Remember, "Royalty Free" does not mean "no copyright". It simply means (subject to their terms and conditions) you can use the image without paying them any money (ie. No royalties). It does not necessarily mean "you don't pay to use the picture up front" and it may have restrictions on what you can use and when - it may just mean you don't have to pay ongoing royalties when sales are made of products bearing that image. Often royalty free images are used a lot, it is not "exclusive" for to use it.

You can use "Public Domain" images however you please. But most public domain photos are not that inspiring. Google "public domain images" and you will see what I mean!!

"Rights Protected" images are bought for a certain time period for a specific project. These images are negotiated beforehand with the photographer, for a fee. Then you will be entitled to exclusive rights to the image during the time period. While this is often how commercial projects are done, for small bloggers like us, this can be too expensive.