Aviation Text Books

by Danielle Bruckert
(Al Ain, UAE)

Cessna e-training manual

When a fellow pilot and friend (Oleg Roud) came to me with an idea for an aviation text book for aircraft transition or type training, I didn't realise that the writing was the easy part.

My other aviation text books sold well in the local market, small as it was (5 or 10 sales a month), with no effort as they were required for the pilot courses.

The new books, the Cessna Training Manuals, also sold fairly well, but convincing pilots and flight schools that these books were as necessary as the others was the difficult part. Most pilots thought all you need for study is a POH (pilot's operating handbook), and sure you can pass your lisense with only the POH from the plane you're flying, but your knowledge is sadly lacking. The books had an international market, so if we could just get the word out - we'd both be very happy, from a book sales and from a pilot training standards view point.

This, however it seems takes large amounts of time! Some of the stories contained here almost make it sound easy because writers have condensed their experiences into consise summaries, but believe me, it's a constant slog of online reading, writing, and coding (or paying someone to code), setting up mailing lists, strategising on advertising marketing, devising ways to generate traffic...the list is endless. And it's in NO WAY as much fun as the actual writing.

Anyway, this post is about e-books, so I'd like to briefly share what we did in terms of e-books.

The Cessna Training Manuals (a training book for pilots, or people who might like to be a pilot), which I refer to here were created as a document in a word processing program - Open Office, I know this is not 100% correct, as most publishers tell you to format books in a layout or publishing type program. Not being versed in this I stuck with what I knew. The drawback I was told, is that converting the word type document into a pdf without errors was difficult. I must admit that you do need to thoroughly check the pdf produced before uploading, but my experience with Open Office, and with a free program called Cute Pdf, (which by the way is cute!) for converting word files to pdf has had very few problems with a variety of printers. I see both these methods have been mentioned on this site before so I won't elaborate.

Once the book was in pdf format, WITH all the fonts embedded - which is also quite a trick (you need to select the 'download as soft font' and 'optimize for portability' options in the advanced print settings), the file can be sold as either a traditional book by people like Lulu or Ccreatespace, or as an ebook.

Not being a computer person, the term 'ebook' created some confusion to me for a while, but as far as I understand an ebook is just a soft copy of your book. A soft copy is required to get the book printed in todays printing world, so essentially most people will already have an ebook, some of who perhaps don't even realise.

Lulu provides download options in pdf format, which was previously unsecure. That is you could not upload a pdf file with security options, this at first worried me. As if I provide a file format, what is to stop people sharing and copying it? However a quick google search on the available software for removing the security options told me this was possibly unecessary (although I see multiple copies of the books are downloaded by single purchasers).

As a buyer, I always love buying ebookks, purely as I can get them straight away, but in terms of reading I love the traditional books, especially coil bound.

Recently lulu has started offering secure ebook options, I didn't have a chance to check it out yet.

From a writers perspective, of course the profit on an ebook is always potentially much higher (no print costs-duh), but normally perople also expect a lower price. Initially I placed the ebooks at the same profit as the hard copies, making them retail at around 10USD less than the hard copy. Then after weighing up why someone might buy a non-fiction ebook, I increased the prices on the ebook to be the same, basically as I prefer people buying the hard copy for piracy reasons, also as the amount of work that goes into a non-fiction book, in my opinion justified the price, that is, the value of the material was the same regardless of whether it was an ebook or a hard copy book, so the price should remain the same, the format choice was then not a matter of cost but preference.

I am yet to see whether this affects sales of ebooks. But there is a note on the new lulu page that mentions that authors selling ebooks do statistically sell more. Since it's very easy to do I would advise all of you out there who haven't yet done it to give it a try.

(If you are like me and worried about people infringing your copyright.)

Getting a book known about is such a difficult task, if someone buys it and shares it with a few friends, probably all the better, as the word of mouth from those people will be the best marketing you can generate.

Well that's my two cents on ebooks, so hope it helps someone out there.

http://stores.lulu.com/aviationbooksandresources

http://www.unlimitedpublishing.com/redsky/

http://www.redskyventures.org