What Makes a Good Ebook

To Ebook Or Not To Ebook

Publishing an ebook is a great way to make your work available to a whole new market of readers! You may be wondering if your book will only work as an ebook or if it can be a print book. What type of books should or should not be an ebook? Except for a few niche genres, anything that can be a print book can be an ebook! All different genres and book types, from cookbooks to poetry, memoirs to illustrated children’s books, can all become ebooks accessible on multiple smart devices.

Advantages of an Ebook

There are no disadvantages of having your book in multiple formats. Having an ebook in addition to your print book is advantageous to your discoverability and profitability. Publishing in only print is like restricting your song to the radio. Though it’s a popular medium, you’re missing out on all of the exposure that Spotify, Apple Music, and others could bring you. No matter what kind of book you’ve written, an ebook version can make your work that much more accessible to readers. In fact, according to a Pew Research Study, 3 in 10 Americans are reading ebooks along with print books. Having both a print book and ebook available naturally increases the chances of someone reading your book!

Top Selling Ebooks

Regardless of the genre, almost all books can benefit from having an ebook version. Some genres are proven to be consumed by readers in a digital format. In this case, fiction is king!

Children’s ebooks is a market that has seen steady growth, especially if the book incorporates an educational component. If your book is in one of these genres, it will work in your favor to have an ebook version available.

Who is Buying Ebooks?

According to the Pew Research Study mentioned previously, while print books continue to be more popular than ebooks in America, there has been a steady increase in ebooks readership in the last few years. Across all ages, women are more inclined to read ebooks than men. Readers 18 to 29 years old significantly lead the way in reading ebooks. As a person’s level of education and income increases, so does their ebook consumption.

Books That Should Not Convert to Ebooks

There are a few exceptions of books that aren’t great as ebooks. Books that include interactive content should not be converted to an ebook. For example: coloring books, diaries, or books that incorporate crafting such as gluing, cutting, or folding the paper in the book. Workbooks where the reader is supposed to write down responses or solve equations in order to move on in the book are not great as ebooks either. Extremely technical content that requires a lot of references, like manuals, reference materials, or study guides, are also not good fits for ebooks. Some medical, scientific, language-learning and legal books aren’t ideal as ebooks either. Essentially, the more encyclopedic and technical the book is, the less well-suited it is as an ebook.