I find it quite interesting that this week’s post on epubishing happens to coincide with the launch of my first e-published book, You Were Made for Greatness!  It certainly wasn’t planned this way. 🙂 

But our Lord orders our steps, so I am at a strategic point in time to be able to give you some pointers on e-publishing.  First of all, to emulate Vince Lombardi’s famous annual quote, “This is a football,” I’d like to explain that e-publishing simply stands for electronic publishing.  Electronic publishing is publishing that appears on the Internet instead of in print or in actual book form. 

With the advent of the Kindle, the sale of e-books has soared. Recent statistics show that e-books are outselling print books two to one.  As Amazon drops its price for a Kindle to only $79 this Christmas season, we can expect to see the sale of e-books to skyrocket. 

So what does this mean for you, the writer.  It means that you are strategically positioned to get your book into the hands of thousands, if not millions, of people via the Internet.  It also means that there are certain things you need to know to do that.  Here are a few of them: 

1) Traditional books have to be formatted specifically for the Internet. Since I was clueless as to how to do this, I hired a company that did it for me.  The company is http://www.living-parables.com/, and I am happy to recommend them.  Living-Parables turned my book into the proper format for the Web and placed the final copy on Smashwords, which is a portal for most types of e-book formats.  You can find my book here:  http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/93001 

2) Once your ebook is posted on Smashwords and Kindle, you will need to fill out some information on the site, such as price, description, your bio, etc. 

3) Smashwords and Amazon take a percentage of your royalties simply for allowing you to use their site to sell your book.  But you will end up with anywhere from 35% to 70% of the royalties as opposed to 8% to 12% which is the average for print books. 

If you want to stay on top of publishing trends, I encourage you to learn all you can about e-publishing.  It is a great venue for getting your work out there but, as always, make sure your writing is excellent. To that end, I suggest you hire a professional editor before you go electronic.