Well I did it, my husband and I made the book cover, I formatted the entire book and now my latest ebook, Heart of a Goddess is live and for sale now on Amazon Kindle. I will talk more about the book on another day. Today I want to talk about the process of creating an ebook.
You may or may not remember, I originally wrote the story as an ebook. It was a freelance writing job I picked up. They rejected the story because they said I violated the contract by having adult content. The sex scenes( there are a few) are sparse and really just give a quick overview of the scene, most of them are just one sentence long. Really, way less steamy then any Harlequin. So I am thinking it was all about the gore factor. So now I had a story, I wrote specifically for an ebook so now what was I going to do.
I did some research and discovered Amazon Kindle Publishing is free to upload your book. You even get royalty payments. I had to put in my tax information last night. Amazon offers a free ebook to learn how to publish on Kindle. I followed the steps to the letter. But here is the problem I faced: Amazon recommends using Microsoft Word and I am all about using Corel Word Perfect. In Word Perfect you can use the MS Word workspace. Which works but there are some differences and it drove me crazy but eventually after a lot of yelling and vulgar threats to my computer I figured everything out, made sure I made a cheat- cheat and now I was ready to upload the book.
The one nice feature (and a bitch) at the same time is you can view your ebook before publishing on different platforms. The first three uploads were horrible, everything was off. So that means I had to go back to the original document and try to fix the problem. At one point, the entire format of the text was fucked beyond belief. Lucky I had the original in Word Perfect file. And that meant back to the formatting for Kindle. At least this time it worked out a lot faster. And on the fourth upload the book looked just like I wanted to. On the Apple platforms (either iPhone or Ipad, there are white pages but it is the front of the book).
Once that was done, I had to choose my royalty. I am not going to go into this but if you decide to go this route read it for yourself and make your own decision. I enabled any feature for people to read my book and then submitted my book. You wait for about 12-18 hours and your book is ready to be sold.
I am not going to stop looking for publishers though. I still want to be published traditionally. Kindle offers me a place to put really long stories. Many magazines have a word limit and sometimes I go way over that word limit and with Kindle I can make it into a book. For instance, I do have a full length poetry that I am looking for a print publisher. Because I want people to read my poetry book in the tub, at the beach, spill coffee on it, hell spill their dinner on it. Here are a couple of other perks for self-publishing on Amazon: if my book is sold, I make the money. I own the rights to story so just in case someone wants to make a movie, they have to pay me.
The positives of selling a story to third party: they do the formatting and create the book cover, they pay a flat fee outright (I made $20 for the one story and $25 for the other story.)
So with my chickadees may the sun smile and not let you freeze.
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