eBookit Review

Ebookit charges a flat fee of $149:

What WE Do:

1. We Prepare Your File for Conversion
2. We Assign You an ISBN
3. We Convert Your File To Many Required eBook Types
4. We Check Your Converted eBook for Quality
5. We Distribute Your eBook to the World
6. We Promote Your eBook! (optional)
7. We Pay You!

Fine print on #7: they take 15% of royalties. However, that’s the same as Smashwords – but at Smashwords you have to meatgrind your book yourself.  This is also 15% on top of what you’d get from the 30-70% at Kindle, so one option would be to opt out of everything except the Kindle and do this directly (that’s what I’ve done for my own books). What’s missing is sales you might get from the Smashwords site itself. Ebookit does sell books on the site, but it’s nowhere near as vibrant as Smashwords’ community, and frankly it’s hard to access. One does have the option of distribution through Ebookit and posting it on Smashwords without distribution.

Also: “Updates made to your eBook are billed at just $49/hour.” I wouldn’t necessarily put that under “just.” Make sure that everything’s clean before approval. Finally: promotion:

We Promote Your eBook! (optional): For an additional fee of $195, we will send your book description and contact information to hundreds of the top US media outlets via our MediaBlast! Service. This includes leading newspapers, television, and magazines, including All Things Considered – NPR, The Today Show (NBC), Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Good Houskeeping, Harper’s Bazaar, O, The Oprah Magazine, People Magazine, Reader’s Digest – Online, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Los Angels Times, New York Times, USA Today, and hundreds more! We also offer our International Book Promotion Service ($995) where we write a professional press release for you, submit it through PRWEB, and send your release to thousands of media contacts around the world, carefully chosen based on the content of your book. This includes the MediaBlast! service above.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this step unless it’s non-fiction in a highly-marketable niche.

Michael Marcus at Book Making Blog has this to say about Ebookit:

I was impressed by the company’s ultra-friendly website, phone calls with Ryan Levesque and emails with boss Bo Bennett.

Bo says, “I created eBookIt.com out of my conviction that an author should have an inexpensive, simple, and truly fool-proof way to get their book converted to eBook format, and submitted to the major online retailers fast.”

eBookIt does exactly that.

I am extremely happy with the company’s quality, speed, responsiveness and price (just $149 for multiple formats). The eBookit website is easy for even a non-geek to use. It’s always easy to see what work has been done, what has to be done, and to review communications with the eBookIt staff. The eBookIt site is a model for online customer service. Other companies should emulate it.

Some of my emails were answered within minutes, and I don’t think I waited more than 24 hours for any of them.

A disclaimer: I have not used this service for my own books, but I walked my dad through the process for his novel and it was very easy. The book was converted literally overnight. At first, he decided to opt out of Amazon distribution, but then decided against it, and the change was also made very quickly.

One knock against the conversion process – it was not done with right-aligned margins. There are arguments for and against this. Personally, I think it looks cleaner with margins aligned. However, not all distributors or ereaders handle right alignment in the same way, so it’s sometimes a safer bet to spare the alignment. If this is a concern, ask upfront for margins to be aligned during conversion. The service does say this:

We convert your book to the formats offered by the major online booksellers, to each retailer’s specifications.