Tuesday Tidbit: Beware of using high-resolution photos in your ebook

You’re probably planning to publish your memoir as a book, but Joanna Penn encourages you to also publish an ebook because, she says, “I made 86% of my book sales income from ebook sales. There’s more profit per book because there’s no printing or shipping [charges]. Readers can also buy immediately…. If you don’t have an ebook version, you’re missing out on a chunk of readers and revenue.” Read about more reasons to publish an ebook in Joanna’s post, How to Self-Publish an Ebook.

Beware, however, of using high-resolution photos in your ebook. Joanna advises, “If you have lots of images in your book,… you will have … a bigger file size, and although ebooks are typically free in terms of delivery, Amazon does include a delivery cost in their pricing setup. That will be higher if you have a bigger file, and images can really expand the file size. If your delivery cost goes too high, you’re not going to make much royalty.”

Darcy Pattison says it this way: “…My profit is being eaten up with Amazon’s delivery fees. In a recent month, I calculated about 20-25% of the gross receipts for my ebooks went directly to delivery fees.... 20-25% in delivery fees! That’s outrageous! The culprit is the file size of a . . . full color illustrated picture book.”

But you want high-quality photos and illustrations, right?

My grandson on the pitcher's mound

So what should you do?

Joanna suggests using a small number of photos in ebooks but posting lots of others on your website/blog and Pinterest. Other pros also encourage using Instagram. And then there’s your Facebook Author Page as well.

But you have other ways to work around the problem. Darcy Pattison offers a very detailed how-to in her post, How to Format Pictures Books for Kindle and ePub3.

It’s a long post and I confess I haven’t read it in its entirety, but believe me, when I’m ready to publish my new memoir as an ebook, I will pore over Darcy’s post. It appears to be a valuable help for all of us.

For now, look over Darcy’s post, How to Format Pictures Books for Kindle and ePub3. She offers you a rich resource!

And do not miss Sharon Lippincott’s post, Photo Scanning Tips for CreateSpace. It’s packed with information you need to know!

So there you have it, your Tuesday Tidbit.