EEEeeeasing into ebooks...

More than a year ago, I made some initial steps to convert my first published book, Shiny Spots In The Rust, as an ebook. I checked out the pertinent pages on Amazon's site and tried to format my manuscript file accordingly. Amazon has an emulator which supposedly lets you see how your file will look on a smartphone. Despite repeated tries, I could not get page breaks to remain when uploaded; everything seemed to run together. So I gave up and didn't follow through.
Recently, though, I received an email from Barnes & Noble regarding their own ebook venture, which makes books readable on B&N's Nook reader or on phones equipped with a Nook app. Since I had just been thinking that I ought to do something with my unpublished novel, I decided to try their site out. They also feature an emulator and I experienced the same problems trying to follow their instructions. I checked back with Amazone to see if their ebook program had progressed any since I first tried it. It seemed like the answer was no. Both sites make it very difficult to know how to format your text file and their emulators do a poor job of showing the results. I was frustrated.
But I went back to visit a site I'd come across a couple months ago. I had downloaded an ebook about an Irish girl's experience coming to America to work at Disney World. It's called Mousetrapped. I found the book to be a pleasant read and rather casually decided to check out the author's blog. There, I was greatly interested to read Catherine Ryan Howard's entries regarding her venture into self-publishing. She gives some great, step-by-step guidelines to formatting for ebooks which are much, much more accessible than those from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. I followed her directions and soon decided I would submit my novel to both B&N and Amazon. I uploaded the text file and the cover .jpeg at 11:30 on a Friday morning. When I woke up the next morning, my ebook was already listed as for sale on both sites. Can't beat that for speed! And there is no charge to do this. When you sell an ebook, you get a nice share of the price while the web merchant keeps a share for themselves. No printing costs, no inventories to manage. It's really a no-lose situation.
Wanna know the financial stuff? I set the price of my ebook at $9.99. When I sell a copy, I get $6.75 of that. This is a much bigger slice of the pie than you would get from a traditional publisher.
The only problem with self-publishing this way is that you're not gonna sell any copies...unless you do some promotion. But that's another subject