Friday, July 24, 2009

The Story of Saint Catrick -- published at Smashwords

I've made a discovery which I think will be useful to myself and many other authors out there.

The book review I did in my last post was for a book that has been published online at Smashwords. I wanted to post the review on his authors page, and in doing so, I was required to open an account. Later, I realised that my Smashwords account entitles me to publish any of my other (unpublished) novels as well, for the low low price of... -- free!

I had never heard of that before. Either a publisher has to accept your manuscript (with the idea that he/she can sell it), or you have to pay them (as in the case of a subsidy publisher). The reason you pay them is that they put out a lot of work in formatting your manuscript for sale.

However, Mark Coker, the proprietor of Smashwords, has come up with a nifty computer program that will take a Word document (in .doc or .rtf format) and automatically distill it as a whole bunch of files for various e-book readers, including PDF, Kindle, Palm Pilot, Sony and (I think) all the ones Pepe is in. That costs him nothing, therefore, it costs me nothing. This has taken the e-book industry a step further.

Anyway, I decided to republish Catrick. It's now up at Smashwords. It's no longer free, but you can read the first 50% as a free sample before downloading the whole thing for US$2.00.

You can click here for Catrick and my Author's Profile.

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