The Joy and Pain of Self-Publishing

Echoes of the Divine is my first e-book and it is free. You can help me if you download this mini e-book and gave it a rating because if it is successful, a publisher might consider my upcoming book. How about checking it out and giving me some honest feedback so I can learn. The book has received premium status already and will be listed on Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Nobles within days.

And don’t forget, I will be happy to answer any questions. Trust me, no question will sound dumb to me because I have asked them all. https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/521798

It took me a year to read the more than 100 pages of Smashwords Style Guide. However, the guide explains every step with diagrams and in ordinary terms ...but I am a technological idiot. After days of fumbling, forcing myself to work as if I was technologically intelligent, I finally self-published a short, free e-book on Smashwords.

Supposedly, this process only takes a couple of hours but I inadvertently downloaded Microsoft doc.x instead of a simple doc. file. Then, I typed the meta tag for my name without capitals which prevented the entire thing from working. That little mistake took hours to uncover.

Link to Echoes of the Divine

Finally, my cover was one I designed on Word and took a couple of days to decide upon which version to use but I could not convert it into a jpg image. It was difficult to find an image with enough pixels on the internet. In the end, I simply found a huge old master painting by Mary Cassatt, used Pic Monkey photo editing and slapped on a title but it looks okay. Figuring out how to get a free ISBN from the Canadian site called Ciss ( kiss) wasted more hours.