Online publishing: How to maximize the pros and minimize the cons?

[Giovanni]

One pro is no paper waste (and printing on physical paper is costly). BUT what about making money from my work?

I read somewhere to set up a free website and there sell my work with the help of PayPal or some other payment company? Which company is very good for payment transfers?

Also, I'm worried about copyright issues. If, for example, somebody purchased my ebook, and then he decides to reproduce it electronically -- is there a special computer program that prevents something like this?

Is Amazon Kindle online publishing the best in online publishing? Or is there another better?

Thanks for anybody's help!

[TheBellJar]

"Online publishing" and epublishing are not synonymous with self publishing as every decent publisher produces books in ebook form these days, not just self publishers.

I know a lot of people making a LOT of money from free self publishing. (Not from any scam vanity publishing where you pay for a package.)

You aren't worried about "copyright issues" you're worried about piracy issues. And no there is f*** all you can do about it except send legal take down notices when you it happening. There is something called DRM but all it does is piss off customers by making it ten times harder to download the book and the pirates know how to strip it off anyway. A lot of people who don't want to risk the harm downloading from pirates sites can do to your computer and people will still buy the book. Pirate sites load up people's computers with malware, spyware and viruses when people download the stolen books.

[Sarah]

I use kindle kdp and so far it's the best self publishing platform for ebooks I've found. There are other that let you keep 100% of your royalty but you must purchase your own ISBN, like lulu.com. If you're interested in print on demand paperbacks you might want to try createspace.com
But about the only thing you can to about piracy is sending a cease and desist order.

[cathugger]

That's why you use Amazon and the other major ebook sellers instead. Publish it on Amazon (then on the other ones). They will put DRM copy protection on it so it can only be read on Amazon Kindle devices/apps registered to the account that purchased the ebook. The other major hardware-specific ebook sellers work the same way (Barnes & Noble for Nook, Kobobooks for Kobo, Sony Ebooks for Sony readers).

Get a decent ebook editor (or you can use Microsoft Word).

Here is Kindle's KDP for publishing on Kindle
https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A37Z49E2DDQPP3

Or you could look into Smashwords - I don't think you make as good a royalty but they can publish on multiple platforms for you: