You can pay any amount of money to publish your book on the internet, depending on how much you are willing or able to do yourself.
Amazon, one of the largest publishers of ebooks will make your word document into a PDF file for $300. This is a ridiculously high price for reformating a document.
Even if you don't own the software, you can go to the Adobe site, get a free software trial and make your own PDF's for free.
The premium publishing package at Amazon is over $5,000. and includes cover art, formatting, publishing, and marketing. There are other sites available. I was able to publish my book in paperback for $7.00 at Lulu.com, doing the work myself.
Internet publishers are many, and many are expensive. Smashwords is a highly respected site that offers free digital publishing to authors, and free E-books to readers.
http://www.smashwords.com/about/how_to_publish_on_smashwords
"Smashwords makes it fast, free and easy to publish and distribute your ebook to the world's largest ebook retailers and mobile phone apps. Authors control the pricing, sampling and marketing of their books."
Marketing is crucial to an author's success, but how to market is a matter of hot debate.
I found one SEO--search engine optimization company that argues for paying perhaps thousands of dollars a month for their services. This is what they claimed in their website:
"The easiest way to be 'penny-wise, pound-foolish' is to hire an SEO company or professional who is only going to charge you $50 for a month's link building activities. $50? What a great deal, especially if they promise that this includes blog commenting, content marketing, blog writing, press release distribution and directory submission. Let me be the first to tell you that doing all of that can take 20, 30, 40, even 50+ hours when done right. If someone is only getting paid $50, chances are you aren't going to be getting their best work. They might be employing black hat SEO techniques or outsource their projects overseas. Both of these scenarios are going to cause problems down the road for you and your website."
It is unclear what it is that you are paying for. Even $50. a month is costly. I can't imagine spending thousands.
There is a sucker market on the internet where you can pay too much for too little. Unless you have proof of the SEO company's success with other clients, I would be very wary.
I did become concerned that all our digitized information might be tainted, manipulated by advertisers, and the search engine optimization companies.
According to their website, Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Advertising is clearly identified as a “Sponsored Link” at Google, and its founders state that ads do not compromise the integrity of their search results.
Google's 'Ten Things' is a very inspiring list of their core values. This is one of the list:
"Democracy on the web works.
Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of every web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been “voted” to be the best sources of information by other pages across the web. As the web gets bigger, this approach actually improves, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted. In the same vein, we are active in open source software development, where innovation takes place through the collective effort of many programmers." From Google 'Ten Things'
http://www.google.com/about/corporate/company/tenthings.html
I imagined Google as a monster trying to eat the library, but they are entirely dedicated to the search, and have made many useful liasons with the library.
Google Book Search expands through digital scanning partnerships with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, University of Michigan and Oxford as well as the New York Public Library in 2004.
In 2005, more than 100 libraries on 10 campuses of the University of California join the Google Books Library Project.
Together with LitCam and UNESCO‘s Institute for Lifelong Learning, Google launched the Literacy Project, offering resources for teachers, literacy groups and anyone interested in reading promotion.
Googles history belies manipulation by the search engine optimization companies, so is there anything they offer that the consumer can't do for themselves?
This looks like a helpful site for publishing opportunities. It is possible an author would gain more name recognition by publishing in specialized sites dedicated to a single genre.
http://www.marketlist.com/writers_index/
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