Turning word docs into finished ebooks...would you pay?

[Mac the Knife]

Hey everyone!

Ok, I am just wondering if there are enough folks out there who would pay to have their word doc ebooks turned into high quality finished PDF's with graphics. If so, how much? I am toying with the idea of offering this service and even doing 1 or 2 for free for folks for samples...but I just wanted to get some feedback first.

Thanks Warriors!

Mac the Knife

[Mac the Knife]

Hey guys...I need some feedback please, help a Warrior out!

[mla16]

personally I wouldnt be interested..... if I had a word document that I wanted to convert to pdf I would just search for a free converter in google and do it myself

[ASM Marketing]

Hi Mac,

I would pay for a service like this. For certain ebooks, especially craft orientated, the right finish is worth its weight in gold. You can add $'s onto the price tag that becomes a part of your long-term passive income (if the ebook looks the part), and that's something I would be just fine with investing in.

Alex

[timpears]

I am always amazed at what people can make a business out of. I don't see much potential for this however. Even as untalented as I am, this would be pretty simple for me to do I think, and can be done without spending any money on tools. But who knows, I saw someone offering an eBook formatting service in the War Room (I don't know if this was you) for free for a few Warriors. Possibly there is money to be made with it. I just don't see it, personally.

[jacktackett]

Mac can you elaborate - since I get the impression as mla16 does that you're just wanting to convert doc into pdf. But instead are you saying you'll take the finished word doc and do some edits - add a TOC, index, glossary and then format it into a nice presenation with tables, chapter headings, footers, headers, page numbers (a big pet peeve of mine - its not that hard to put page numbers in folks!). May be if you explain more what you're thinking of doing it might help us give feedback.
Personally I've created many ebooks and regular books using my own created templates and those created by a few fellow warriors so while I would not be a potential customer - I could provide you feed back and maybe even send you some business. but I/we need to know exactly what youre trying to do.
best,
--Jack

[ASM Marketing]

In fact, I have a project for you if you will take me up on it as a review? It's cooking based and I don't mind throwing some money your way and a testimonial as a kick-start to your business

PM me if this sounds good to you mate.

Alex

[fthomas137]

Hey Mac,

I've written ebooks and when I do, I will normally pdf them right out of word or will typeset them in a typesetting program, as it offers me much more flexibility in design.

So, I don't know. I would recommend that you offer a service under Warrior for Hire and see. It's only $20 and you'll find out soon enough if it's a waste of time and you aren't out too much.

If you offered the ability to transcribe from audio or video to ebook, there you may hae something really good. Taking screen snaps out of videos and composing them. Depending on price, that would interest me.

Frank

[hotftuna]

I just paid someone at "warriors for hire" to do exactly that.

[DogScout]

Lol, E-books these days actually look like books and the pages are side by side and you can flip the pages with your mouse!
My wife bought a Betty Crocker Cookbook. It amazed me. It was an exe file, but apparently people are less afraid of those than they used to or ought to be.
It was literally like a real 3D book, just on line.

[Fraserb]

Hi Mac,

Just thought I'd put my two penneth in...

I think that if you're going to offer a pdf conversion service you need to offer something special. There are a lot of free tools out there that will convert many file formats into a pdf document.

I agree with Frank, offering a service where you transcribed from say video / audio would perhaps be a more sought after service. Having said that you cannot dismiss this service if you do not try it. There are bound to be many warriors out there who just don't know how to do this - it seems one of the members above has already required exactly that.

Why not see what's on offer and then offer to give a bit of extra value ?

Fraser
:-)

[Jill Carpenter]

Originally Posted by timpears

I am always amazed at what people can make a business out of. I don't see much potential for this however. Even as untalented as I am, this would be pretty simple for me to do I think, and can be done without spending any money on tools. But who knows, I saw someone offering an eBook formatting service in the War Room (I don't know if this was you) for free for a few Warriors. Possibly there is money to be made with it. I just don't see it, personally.

You are not the general public. There are lots of people who have no idea how simple it can be to do this, and they don't know how to secure a pdf, and they may not want to go out and buy the software to do it all.

People just like things done for them and are willing to pay.

I am going to be offering a similar service myself, but not as the only service my company offers. Could one make a full time business out of it? Very possibly yes.

[Slin]

If you could offer ebook cover designs cheaper then most designers I would.

Otherwise open office seems to work fine.

[jagsenghera]

I woudnt be interested. Its so easy to do it my self.

[Daniel E Taylor]

Your problem is that when you ask something on the warrior
forum many people don't read anything but the the title.

Yes it is a very lucrative business. I pay to have my ebooks
PROFESSIONALLY DESIGNED and organized.

It isn't just talking about converting a .doc into a PDF. Dang do
you people read?

If you are going to sell people a $47 ebook the least you should do
is dress it up professionally so people feel they got their money's worth.

Daniel

[jjthomas]

Depends what your quality is. If you had a good quality service, maybe $20-$30.

[Tracy Yates]

Originally Posted by timpears

I am always amazed at what people can make a business out of. I don't see much potential for this however. Even as untalented as I am, this would be pretty simple for me to do I think, and can be done without spending any money on tools. But who knows, I saw someone offering an eBook formatting service in the War Room (I don't know if this was you) for free for a few Warriors. Possibly there is money to be made with it. I just don't see it, personally.

Uh, no Tim, that would be me. I offered the service free to War Room members and let me just add my opinion here to the OP.

Yes, you can make money with an ebook formatting service, and not because most people cannot do this type of thing themselves. A majority of ebook authors can do this.

The main point of offering such a service is because it can save those authors extra time that can be spent in other arenas of their marketing business. And that is what they are willing to pay for. The convenience.

Beyond that, there may be other things ebook authors want with regards to the design layout, as you mentioned in your post, such as graphical elements.

Just because someone can do simple formatting to their ebook doesn't mean they are an all out designer. There is much focus on ecover design, but not so much on the inner workings of ebooks. That part is equally as important.


Tracy

[mgkimsal]

Sorry if this seems like hijacking, but there's interest in this topic and I've got a related question...

Would anyone have any interest or need for a web-service that would dynamically watermark a PDF (and possibly secure it with a custom password)? Rather than doing this individually for each PDF, this would be something done as a one-off for each request/download. I haven't seen others offering this, but perhaps some of the bigger doc places offer this (though I didn't see lulu offering it).

As far as the original poster, if there's something 'extra' above and beyond the data format change (doc->pdf) I think some people would pay, certainly. Do cleanup, choose nice printer friendly fonts, perhaps offer to source royalty-free images - basically act as an editor/producer. "Take your ebook from good to great!" or something like that. yourebookeditor.com is available

[Mac the Knife]

Thanks everyone...good feedback. Sorry if I was not clear enough...certainly going from word to PDF is an element of what I was talking about, but I was also talking about more indepth formatting..."prettying it up" if you will. I have written about 90 or so reports and ebooks for others and one thing I have noticed is...the prettier the book, the higher the price they seem to fetch. I know, I know, there are ALWAYS exceptions. As sure as I write this someone is going to chime in with their story of how they sell ebooks written in mspaint by their 4 year old for $1000, but, for the most part, higher quality products bring higher prices. That is what I was speaking about concerning my service. Someone has a word doc, I take it, format it, add some graphical elements, AND turn it into a PDF...you get the pic.

I think I have the answers I needed and I certainly appreciate those that weighed in. Thanks as always!

Mac the Knife

[SeanSupplee]

I would not be interested in just having someone take my word document and converting it to pdf. However if you offered a service such as adding in images, giving it a nice layout backgound when people open up the pdf file. Making it look more like a real book then yes I would be willing to pay for that. So if thats something your looking to do then PM me Ill have work for you shortly

[Powertreb]

I don't see the immediate value in just getting a word doc converted into PDF, graphics or not. Unless you're talking about a couple of bucks for the service.

I do see myself paying for the following:

Having my file (doc or txt) or batch of posts put together (sensibly organized with chapters) or polished into an ebook, with cleaned up links where necessary, graphics, and TOC, index, basic publishing elements, etc.

And finally having all that turned into a ready to go PDF. The final result would need to have really professional finish.

I'd pay anywhere between $10 to $40 for that (depending on the amount of polishing)

[ktpasco]

I wouldn't pay for something like this simply because I can do it myself no problem.

For a less technical person though... I can see it being desirable for them.