At last you’ve finished your thesis!

Your Masters or doctorial thesis represents years of study, thought, writing and re-writing. But, now that you have submitted it, the examiners have had their way with it and, hopefully, passed it, what happens?

No doubt it will become an item on the digital theses online database of your country where it will be accessible via your university library catalogue and, perhaps, one or two other specialised listings.

But who is going to search for it? Maybe, out of curiosity, a few of your friends and colleagues will search on your name and, if you’re lucky, download it and read it. If no one else knows about it, what a waste of your years of effort?

You obviously feel that the subject of your thesis is important, maybe even that it can ‘make a difference’ in your area of interest, and you may have thought of the options of trying to convince a publisher to produce and market it as a book, or you might have thought of publishing it yourself. The first option is unlikely and the second is expensive.

But all is not lost!

e-publishing now gives you the opportunity to put your thesis online and make it immediately accessible to billions of people. You may even make money out of it.

Why e-publish your thesis?

It is estimated that 100 million e-books were sold in 2010 and that in 2011 500 million e-books will be sold.

In short, millions more people each month are turning to the internet for their sources of information.

Obviously, it makes good sense to e-publish your thesis.

The first step is to make sure you have the permission of your university to e-publish your thesis, then see below.

Options for e-publishing your thesis

There are basically three options for converting your thesis to an e-thesis: convert it yourself, use an automated conversion program, or contact e-publish-you.

Convert it yourself

If you decide to hand-format it yourself, guides exist on the internet to help you. You can expect to spend considerable time formatting. Because each thesis and the level of expertise each person has are different it’s impossible to guesstimate how long it will take you, but expect at least 10-15 hours.

Use an automated conversion program

Using an automated conversion program may mean, for example, just uploading your .doc or .pdf file directly to Amazon Kindle, say, then previewing it. You can expect to see odd page breaks, missing text, varying font size, and strange paragraph breaks. So, you fix the problems, upload it again, preview it again and so on . . .

In other words, if you want the appearance of your e-book to be consistent throughout, after using an automated conversion program you will almost certainly need to go through and fix the errors by hand after the initial conversion.

Use e-publish-you to format your thesis by hand

Rather than put your thesis through a “sausage machine”, which often produces an unsatisfactory result, we will format it by hand to produce a truly attractive, professional e-book for any type of e-reader. After that is done, we will give you the opportunity to preview it and then we will make necessary changes.

Use e-publish-you to upload your book

When you are happy that your e-book is ready, e-publish-you will upload it to AMAZON.com for Kindle readers.

If you want to upload to Apple’s iBookstore, one of the largest e-book retailers, your book will need to be perfectly formatted in EPUB, the international standard for e-book publishing. It’s a very difficult standard to comply with but Apple will accept nothing less than exact compliance. There are currently about 30 e-book retailers, including Kindle and Apple's iBookstore, Sony, Kobo+Borders, Borders and Barnes & Noble—you choose which ones you want your e-thesis submitted to.

It’s not just about payment, but payment is important

Although e-publish-you will upload your e-thesis to any or all of the e-book retailers, we prefer that you create your own account with them so that ALL royalty payments go directly to you, we don’t take any sort of cut or commision.

The Adobe.pdf option

Some people like to have a printed book in their hands, so another option is for you to offer your book as an Adobe.pdf file for PAID DOWNLOAD. If you choose this option as well as, or instead of, the e-thesis option, we will give you a quote to create webpages for it on the e-publish-you website and PROMOTE it for you.

The webpages may include a list of contents, a summary and blurb and, if you choose, some sample pages.

Contact us now for further information or a quotation.