Help! I want to E Publish! By ChrisKeys

E PUBLISHING? HOW DO I DO THAT? WHERE DO I DO THAT? BY Chris Keys


Author of Reprisal! The Eagle Rises! Due summer 2010 & The Fishing Trip-A Ghost Story-eBook-soon?



Well as life goes along I find that everyday there is something new to learn. Today is no different. I’ve recently finished my second short story and I’m wondering, what I do with a short story. I mean it’s too small to print as a book and it’s too large to submit as an article to a magazine, so what do I do with it?



I was reading a blog somewhere, and wouldn’t you know it, I have forgotten where I saw the blog, but it talked about selling books through e publishing. He claimed to see sales of his seven or eight books over the last year of twenty thousand plus downloads and having made on average something like four dollars and change a book. Now that’s not bad for short books about topics like how to cut wood for your fire place and then build the prefect fire. Really, people will buy something like that? Of course he had couple of crime novels as well which sold for more money.



How real are these claims? Can we really sell that many books as e books? Can we really make that kind of money from them? I mean that’s as good as the numbers thrown about by publishers for paperback books.



So I went looking for the e publishers, and low and behold, there are thousands of them. Of course, I couldn’t seem to find out, what they charged to save my life, but there they were. They were all quick to point out that they were friendly, easy to work with, but they didn’t exactly make the contract easy to find or their prices easy to find either. In fact of the fifteen to twenty sites I looked at I got so bogged down in the technical aspect of the process, which they were all real big on explaining, I gave up and decided I’d write this blog instead.



I would think, they would make their site as easy as possible for the non computer savvy person to find their way to the important stuff and have a package ready and waiting for them, that just takes their book and publishes it in e format. Something that would let a writer like myself turn over the manuscript, edited and ready to go and they’d make a cover, do the formatting and provide the proper listings, where ever eBooks get listed, and that would be that.



Not that I found. Now that doesn’t mean it wasn’t right there in my face and I just missed it. That happens, just ask my wife. So I need some help. Anybody know how to get your e Book published without having to learn a new computer language to convert word to PDF? What is PDF anyway? I still am not completely up to date with the word program I now have. When my last computer died, I went word ’97 to word XP and I still can’t figure out all the stuff they changed to make it better. More confusing is what I say. I understand typewriters and word processing from back in the last century. Does anyone under forty remember typewriters?



Ok, back on subject, HELP, I want to publish my short stories as E books and I haven’t a clue how! Any recommendations for publishers? Do you know where they list the eBooks for sale other than on Amazon? What’s a reasonable cost? Chris Keys