Many months ago, it occurred to me that ebooks were a huge hit waiting to happen…and I, as an indie author, could join the party. If Japanese commuters were downloading millions of these electronic reads to their smart phones every year, the platform had to have a rosy future.
I own full copyright on a couple of my previously-published mysteries so I figured, why not turn them into instant cash as ebooks?
That was the original idea; how it played out is another story.
My ultimate goal was to have my work available on Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. Right from the get-go, I was blocked. The Kindle market is open only to those publishers who own the lucky trifecta in electronic publishing: a US address, a US-based bank account and a US tax number.
Temporarily stumped, I decided to publish where I could and work on getting the Amazon info.
To create an ebook, first you need your manuscript in digital form. Makes sense, however, my two mysteries were published a decade ago and both former publishers had gone under…so I had to get my printed books back into digital files.
Thus began hours of scanning (kinda like photocopying forever) and then correcting the scanned pages, for my two books Teed Off! and A Hemorrhaging of Souls.
Boring, time-consuming but essential. Eventually, I had the digital files in Microsoft Word, and was ready to tackle e-booking. After researching online ebook sites, I choose one that seemed straightforward, simple and open to indies like me: Smashwords.com: the ‘people’s ebook site’.
It took some study, a lot of tweaking and a few hair-pulling incidents but amazingly, I was able to upload my work and soon had ebooks for sale online at smashwords-nicola-furlong.
That was pretty cool and I’ll explain how I did it in my next post.
