Are you the writer? Do you want to avoid going through the publishing house or have no idea or contacts to get things done in so far traditional way of book publishing. Is writing your hobby but never had the courage or budget to reach out to the market. Well with the iPad reaching out to people and providing a great tool for reading books there are many new opportunities available for writers. One of them is the recent announcement from Apple about self-publishing on the iBookstore.

Publishing your books through iBookstore is definitely a win-win situation for writers and Apple as it cuts the middle man out and provides writers the instant reach without much hassle and I consider this as the best opportunity for new not so popular writers.

Check out the following steps to get you started

1. Before you begin setting up the account with iBookstore, you’ll a valid US Tax ID, a valid credit card, a Mac running OS X 10.5 or later and an iTunes account.
2. You’ll need the ISBN number for your book. Since Apple will not provide the ISBN number for your book so you need to do that on your own. Before you think, it’s getting complex, wait it may not. Check out the US ISBN Agency site for more details on getting ISBN number.
3. Check out all the self-publishing requirements for iBookstore here.
4. You’ll need to submit the book in ePub format during your submission and it should be validated against epubcheck 1.0.5
5. Once the book is approved, you can choose to sell your books in the iBookstore in several countries. You can also limit the countries and price for each country for your titles.

Apple hasn’t announced anything on the revenue sharing from iBookstore for writers and Apple as of yet. For the apps it 70-30 ratio where apple keeps the 30% share. Same as Apps the book submission will go through the Apple’s rigorous approval process and it’s policy to the explicit sexual content.

So, now is the time for writers to jump start and grab this opportunity. You decide the price and you decide the countries where it’s available – all in a hassle-free manner. While the service is currently open to users in United States only, I believe it’s a matter of time before it’s opened up in other countries as well.