The New Era of Publishing - Smashwords, Kindle Books, and Cheap Ebooks
It's a new era of publishing. And, I am jumping on the bandwagon!!!!!
What's a Kindle
? A Nook
? A Smashwords? An ipad
? An iphone
? A computer? All ways for you to read books now. And, I love book, books - don't get me wrong. I will always have a physical bookshelf full of them at my house. Always. But, digital is coming and fast!!! And, I am super excited because it means a new way of publishing.It means that the tons of hours I spent querying agents only to get rejection letters can be put into self publishing and I can spend them marketing my own books. And, I plan on working it...to the bone. Writing is important to me and I'd rather focus my energy on that and self promotion. Don't get me wrong - if an agent or a publisher say - "Hey! We Want You!" I'm in...well, as long as we agree on a contract, of course. But, I know I can write and now I can put it out in the ether and help people in finding it.
How did I happen to jump on the self publishing bandwagon? I had thought about it in the last year with the rise of ereaders, but I was scared. Something about the word self published was always lacking and have you ever talked about it with say, your parents? Yeah.
That is, until I read the story of Amanda Hocking that a friend emailed me - the gist: a 26 year old girl started with 99 cent ebooks...and is making a million dollars this year. AWESOME! I can do that! So, I did.
It took me a couple of months to get the ball rolling, but now my first book is up on Smashwords - Adventures In Funeral Crashing. Why did it take so long? I had to figure out what to actually do first! Did I go straight to Kindle? Or what? How do you publish on itunes? Ahhhhh! Then a friend referred me to Smashwords and I found what I needed - a site that takes care of all that small work for me and publishes to all the ereaders. That's easy. I can do this!!!!!!!!
So, I had to start by editing my own work. It had started out as a submission to the 3 Day Novel Contest in 2009. So, 30,000 words of it were written in a weekend! Crazy, right? Crazy fun actually. Then I went back, revised some, and added details. Still, I thought it was in good shape. I had mailed query letters on it and everything. Still, when looking at putting it out into the world...I knew it would need some editing and re-reading first before I let a reader read it for real. So, I read and re-read and had my cousin, who loves to read, help me too by reading my book a billion times. We spent months doing this - trying to fix grammar errors, errors that made the reader pause as they read, logic errors with the murder mystery that were blatant and I hadn't noticed. There was a lot of reading and rewriting involved and my cousin was a life saver in helping me - thank you, Lauren Cramer.
Then I needed to learn to format for Smashwords. I was scared. Was it going to be complicated? Their free ebook suggested it was going to be a piece of cake. Okay. I'm game. And, you know what? It wasn't so bad. It was totally do-able if you follow it step by step.
The only glitch I had was when I got to the hyperlinks. You use hyperlinks to link your table of contents chapters to the chapters in your books so ereaders can jump to whatever chapter they want to - a must have for any ebook. It's great! Except my version of Word for Mac...was driving me insane. It wouldn't do a hyperlink! Ahhhh! And, then I googled and discovered THAT version of Word wouldn't do them. Of course. Great. So, I asked a friend to borrow his version of Word for Mac. It was a couple years old (not the 2011 version, but the one before that). And, I downloaded it on my computer....and discovered there was a glitch with that one too! Maybe it was my computer...but I'd add a hyperlink and then Word would tell me the file became read only...so I couldn't save it! Can you say - pull my hair out, Word? So, I gave in and went to the Mac store and plunked down $180 and bought Word 2011. It worked. Thank God.
In the meantime, I finished the formatting and had hired a friend, Brett Gilbert, to work on the book cover - also necessary to sell any book. And, Smashwords offers you a list of people who will do covers if you don't know any artists off hand. Cool.
Now, I wait to see if Smashwords approves me for inclusion in their directory...so that I get wider distribution. It mostly has to do with formatting, which was why that was so important. Keep you posted if I encounter problems since I know that's what I'd like to hear about. Right now, it's all a learning experience. And, I am learning.
What next? Marketing. Getting my book out there to readers and Smashwords helps you with that too! Yes, I'm gushing about it...at least so far. I can't help it. They're letting me do what I really want to do - publish my books!!!!
And, that's all I really want - people to read my books and hopefully, enjoy them. I don't need to be an acclaimed author....I just want readers who love what I write. I've always wanted to tell people stories and now I'm getting my chance! This is an amazing world we live in!
Look forward to my next ebook - The New Girl Who Found A Dead Body in July 2011. That's right, one book a month. That is my goal. They've all been sitting in my computer...and now they're going out into the universe to be read! And, I'm writing a new one.
Happy reading! I'll be writing!
