http://www.atlantiswordprocessor.com/en/

I’ll be writing about this at more length soon, but the short answer is that our books will be completely accessible. We will not be using DRM of any sort, so the read-aloud feature should work on your device or application of choice.

Likewise, our books will be reflowable, so you’ll be able to adjust the font size while maintaining readability.

We’re also planning to make samples available for each book. At least the first chapter, but very likely more.

1) Make sure the e-books are in a format that allows them to be read aloud by a computer, and also allows the font size to be enlarged if the buyer chooses. Lots of vision-impaired people are buying e-books but find it incredibly frustrating if they can’t read them in large type or can’t have them read aloud to them via their computer.

2. Have the first chapter available as free-to-read on the website where the e-books are sold.

We made a concerted decision to focus our initial investment on building the best possible infrastructure. While we’ll be talking in more detail about this over the next few months — hopefully dispelling the myth that anyone with a laptop and Internet connection can create a viable digital publisher! — this investment includes building a good process for converting your manuscript file into a clean EPUB file (which will then be converted to various file formats for customers), ensuring we have a good title management system in place (essential for making sure books have good metadata and other information for selling), editorial (I am a firm believer in good editing!), and even a robust royalty system (making sure authors get paid in an timely and accurate manner is essential!).

Oh, and marketing. You asked about that specifically, and I’m going to answer what I believe is your question (if it’s not, shout out and I’ll give it another go). It makes no sense of us to publish a book and then not market it. We plan to focus our efforts on marketing that sells books. This means trying different approaches and making sure we get out to where readers are. This marketing effort is a key part of our initial and ongoing investment.

That being said, it’s important that authors participate in marketing efforts as well. Nobody cares about your career more than you do. We’re building tools to help authors learn more about social media, social marketing, and other online efforts (websites, blogs) — we want to make sure you understand this media, how it works, and how to use it to your best advantage. We have no intention of throwing you out there and saying, “Here’s your book, go sell it.” Your success is our success, and we want to make sure you get all the support we can offer.

If you have any more questions, please ask. While we won’t offer up Social Security numbers, but we’ll answer as fully and honestly as we’re able.

Good luck!

Re: formatting. It seems most of the world uses Word (for better or worse) so that will very likely be our preferred submission format.

We’re working on some super-secret ninja conversion processes that will minimize many of the issues you’ve noted.

We’re also working on a Word template that authors will be encouraged to use. That should greatly simplify conversion to HTML, EPUB, and other formats.