My ebook Experiment
I promised and I don't go back on my promises. So here you have it. My experience publishing my very first ebook.
All right, my amazing agent is now handling my full-length middle grade and young adult manuscripts, but I'm still submitting my picture books and short stories on my own. Ebooks seem to be the rage right now, and that of course made me curious--like everyone else. Well, back in 2009 I sold a short story called "The Imaginary Friend" to a magazine that has since stopped publishing works by writers outside of the company. So the story and rights remain mine and the publisher wished me luck in finding a new home for the story. "The Imaginary Friend" is about what happens to imaginary friends after kids no longer need them. I love the story (yes, I know I'm biased). I felt it needed to be written. But it's tough to find a market for a story like this.
Enter ebooks. I looked into Smashwords and was instantly overwhelmed by their formatting. I downloaded the long document that explained it all step by step and stared blankly at it for days. Then I forced myself to get to work because the story wasn't going anywhere with me staring in horror. I saved the story as a new document and following the instructions, I had the document show all the formatting. Yikes! Then I proceeded to reformat the entire thing. It took me an hour to reformat a two-part short story. What the heck is a two-part short story you ask? After formatting part one, I realized there was more story to tell. So I wrote a sequel. Yes, a sequel to a short story. Others have told me it reads like an extremely short novella. I'm talking the world's shortest novella because it's really two short stories.
After reformatting the entire document and double checking all my formatting, I had to create a cover. I enlisted the help of my sister who is a talented artist. I started with a picture I took of the clouds and part of a tree. They have significance to the story. It was a beautiful picture but it wasn't kid-friendly. My sister played with the image in Photoshop and added a silhouette of a young girl and we have my cover:
I love it. It fits the story perfectly. Next I uploaded everything to Smashwords and found I was number 759 in line to have my book finalized for the site. 759! Five hours later, my ebook was ready. Now I had to assign an ISBN, but all the free ones through Smashwords had run out. I was told they were getting more soon. In the meantime I created my author profile and set up my method of how I wanted to be paid. I also downloaded a copy of the ebook to double check my formatting. Everything looked good. Yay!
Would I do it again? Sure. Now that I'm familiar with how to format the document, I know I could do it more easily in the future. Of course I wasn't reformatting an entire novel so that helped. My recommendation to you is that if you know you want to go the ebook route through Smashwords, read their formatting guidelines before you write your manuscript. It's easier to format first and type second than it is to go back and change all the default settings your computer will use.
(If you want to check out The Imaginary Friend, just click the cover image above. I decided to price it at $0.99 since I think author's should at least make something for their writing.)
Have you ever created an ebook? What was your experience like? Are you thinking of going the ebook route? What made you consider it or decide against it?
