I published my first ebook (and you can too)

With all this talk about the shifting industry and the conflagration of ebooks, I felt pretty overwhelmed about figuring out how to actually publish on my own. 

Before I go further, I want to assure you that I talked with my agent about what I planned on doing, and she was fine with it. I'm still quite committed to traditional publishing, but there comes a time when you run into an idea that just doesn't fit the traditional model.

Some of you know that I wrote a blog called Wannabepublished for a few years where I freely gave advice on how to get traditionally published. When I let that go, I felt sad that I wasn't giving that information out anymore. Sure, I came alongside writers at conferences and as God sent folks to me, but I still wanted to do something with all that information.

So I uploaded all my posts into a word document and ended up with well over 60,000 words of useful information. I edited it, then went through a process to bring it to publication. If you'd like to know that seven step process, hop on over to my blog to find out how you, today, can publish an ebook.

The $2.99 book is called The 11 Secrets of Getting Published. It's basically me sitting across from you, telling you every single thing I can think of about how to get traditionally published. You can buy it on Kindle here, on Nook here, or in PDF here. 

It's been an interesting process. One fun thing is that I get instant statistics about how many books I've sold. In traditional publishing, I would find this out every six months. Another fun thing is that there are rarely returns. (I've received negative royalty statements because my books were returned.)

My next ebook will be Watching the Tree Limbs and Wishing on Dandelions, my first two novels that I now have the rights. I'm already super excited about the new cover for Tree Limbs. What do you think? A huge thank you to Tekeme Studios for their inspired work. (They did the 11 Secrets cover too!)

I don't think I'll become like some of those runaway bestsellers. But I will make passive income, something every novelist should have in her back pocket. There's a lot of up front work, but once that is done, everything is profit.

I know this isn't for everyone. But it has been an interesting process and I'm learning a lot. There's a certain amount of empowerment that comes in producing something yourself and seeing what happens. But there's also pressure too.

Q4u: Have you ever considered e-publishing? Why or why not? What holds you back? What do you like about ebooks? Dislike?