Hello, I'm new on this forum, so excuse me if I'm not in the right section or if there already is a topic on this subject. Also excuse me for the poor quality of my English (I'm French so please correct my grammatical mistakes). Recently, I've been thinking on writing a book about bodybuilding, in which I would give to anyone (beginners, intermediate) a 6-month muscle building program. As I'm on a mac, I've downloaded the app iBooks author, which works great and is well-designed. However, I have many questions about publishing on the iBook store (you must publish your book on iBook store if you use iBooks author, and nowhere else): 1) Is iBook store a good place to sell books? I mean, I had never heard about this store before, so I'm wondering if I will make a decent amount of money (for a beginner). 2) How much money should I expect (on average)? 3) Can I use pictures found on Google Image to illustrate my book? If not, how can I know if a picture is protected by its owner? 4) Are there other better means to get my eBook published (it seems like the Kindle store is pretty huge)? Thank you for your concern.
No; definitely not. There is no reason to expect those images to be copyright-free. There are sites with public domain images, but I think that it's quite risky to use even images from those sites in a work like a book. You can't be absolutely sure that the person uploading the image is truly the copyright holder, you can't be sure that images with pictures of people don't require a release, you can't be sure that an image _in_ the image isn't copyrighted (for example, if there's a poster in the background, that's probably separately copyrighted), and so on. For a book, I think that you should have a pretty clear provenance for the image and its copyright status.
For illustrations, your best bet (1) is to take pictures yourself or have a photographer friend help you with this, or (2) purchase the images from a stock photo site. I can't speak intelligently about the iBook store (I currently am using Amazon exclusively). My advice would be to locate other self-publishers with iStore experience. This board is not really a hangout for self-publishers, so you won't get much insight here on store specifics. However, there are other boards that cater to writers with self-publishing experience.
Honestly, you won't be the first person with an idea. So you need to stand out and you need to advertise it. Otherwise you'll earn barely nothing and maybe the only customers you'll get are friends and family.
I seem to sell about a third as many e-books from the Apple store as I do from Amazon, and in the summer doldrums I've often sold more e-books there than on Amazon. Apple and Kobo are about equal as my second best-selling outlets for e-books after Amazon, and they often pay better royalties.
Thank you all for your answers. That's interesting. But I thought if you sold your book on iBook store, you were not allowed to sell them in other e-books store? If it's not to personal, would you tell me how much you've earned from this business? Also, how many books have you written? Thanks for your concern.
I'm a little surprised that apparently if you publish in the iBookstore you can't publish elsewhere. I haven't researched it thoroughly, but this seems to be true - exceptions can be made with written permission from Apple. Though it's a good publishing medium - and I think if you could list in the iBookstore and elsewhere then you should certainly publish to the iBookstore too - but it seems like a bad deal and that you're giving up a lot of rights. Most info I found on this is from 2012, so it's possible it's changed; it's also possible this isn't strictly enforced.
Woops, I spoke to soon. After a little more reading I came across this: It looks like you can only publish works in the .ibook format in the iBookstore.
Are sure there, Daniel? It appears to be saying that the restriction for where you cans sell only applies if you are charging and you used the .ibooks format (the end format created by the iBooks Author application). If you offer it in PDF or .epub, then the restriction on distribution does not apply. It doesn't seem to me to be saying you can only publish in the iBook store in the .ibooks format.
I'm sure, I think we're actually in agreement. Sorry if I was being unclear. I'm saying the iBookstore sells books in the .ibooks format and Apple is saying that if you publish in their iBookstore with their the .ibooks format, then you can't distribute your-digital-book.ibooks outside of their iBookstore (unless it's free). If you want to distribute elsewhere it must be a different file format. My understanding is that they aren't limiting where you can publish (you can publish on Amazon, print, etc.), but partially how - they are only limiting the use of their .ibooks extension.
