A bit of advice please...

[VydorScope]

Originally Posted by JamesO'Neill

Hello, I have just written my first book and I have been advised to release it as a an eBook.

I was wondering if any of you could advise me on the best sites to upload to and can you use more than one.

Should I enable DRM or not.

and just another other advice in general would be much appreciated.

Kind regards

J

So setting aside the get the book ready question... others seem to want to debate that so I will leave that to them.

For distributing your book:
(This advice is all USA based, I do not know other markets)
First and foremost publish to Amazon. They are the big dog right now. Between 50-100% or your sales will come from them, and its more likely to be 75-100%.

Next look at Smashwords or Draft2Digital for distributing to the rest of the world. Draft2Digital is a newish strong upcoming competitor for Smashwords and while they do not have the reach quite the reach of Smashwords they are getting close and appear to have better customer service and reporting. I have all my books with Smash (and have not used Draft2Digital), but that is largely because there was no other viable options for me when I started. I am not sure I would make that same choice today.

Even if you do not use Smashwords, get the Smashwords Style Guide for formatting your book. A portion of the advice is dated now, but much of it is still very good.

Those 2 channels will get you started.