Brave new e-book world

[DavidDvorkin]

Or abject surrender to market realities. It's one of those.

After a couple of years of trying to publish my latest novel, Time and the Soldier, the traditional way, which included acquiring a high-power New York agent who then decided to leave the agenting business (not because of me!), I've accepted reality and self-pubbed it as an e-book: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/25273

Now I'll turn my attention to the next book, which will be one that will revive my career in traditional publishing and finally make me a millionaire and my name a household word! Or not.

[Dappleganger]

1. Just shared it with 1800+ Facebook friends.

Hope that's ok with you. Do you visit mobileread.com? There's an author's forum there which may interest you. It seems like the best way to spread the news about your book is getting it out on facebook and certain blogs. After I finish reading it I'll also post a recommendation on reddit. Best of luck!

[DavidDvorkin]

3. Thanks! Of course it's ok with me.

I hadn't heard of mobileread.com. I'll give it a look. Thanks.

Man, I love the DU community.

[Dappleganger]

5. It's all about networking...

my husband has been laid off often enough to know that, lol!

[wellstone dem]

2. bookmarking

I don't have time now, but I want to check out your other published books too.

[DavidDvorkin]

4. I've been reissuing the old ones as e-books

However, there are a few that I don't yet have in electronic form. I have the published books and will have to scan them in and laboriously correct OCR errors. I've been putting that off!

[Dappleganger]

6. If you go to mobileread

there is a forum there also which can help you with that. The ebook community there is quite helpful in that regard (wish I could help you, but unfortunately I'm just a reader).

[Prometheus Bound]

7. Did you do all that conversion work yourself?

HTML, Java, Epub, LRF, PDB

Or are they all as easy as making a PDF?

[Dappleganger]

8. It's generally better to do two files in excellent quality...

then people can convert them using Calibre themselves as they see fit. IMO .epub format (nook, sony, adobe) and then .mobi (Kindle) are the two main ones to make available.

[DavidDvorkin]

9. Smashwords does the work for me

That's the lazy way, and it's probably part of the reason for the site's popularity.

You upload the book as a Word file to www.smashwords.com and their software ("The Meatgrinder") does the rest. You do have to observe a few simple formatting rules. You can download an free e-book from the Smashwords site that explains all of that.

At this point, they're still tweaking their software so that the Kindle result is satisfactory to Amazon. So unfortunately they're not delivering Kindle versions to Amazon yet. Any day, real soon now. Or so they keep saying.

They are delivering to Sony, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and some others.

[MANative]

10. Mobileread is a great idea

I'll second Dappleganger's recommendation of mobileread.com. It's a fabulous resource for both readers and writers. I post there as cklls, and I'm ALWAYS looking for a new book to read. My Nook has 258 awaiting my eyes, so I'll check out mobileread and/or Smashwords (another favorite!) for your book to add to my collection. Good luck!