As of now, I’ve put 2 of my short stories up online for sale, “Cyber” and “Ugly Night.” They were published on Smashwords, an ebook distributor. Smashwords is the only venue I’ve published my ebooks on so far, so I’ll be dealing with their process for now. I do have an account on Createspace, which is the distribution system for Amazon.com, and I will be adding my ebooks there soon – so more on the Amazon/Createspace process when I have actually done it successfully. I published my ebooks on Smashwords through my publishing company Web of Life Solutions – more on the reasons for using a publishing company to publish your ebooks a bit later on. There are some very good reasons to have an umbrella company to publish your ebooks, either a separate company of your own, or someone else’s.

The two short stories that I’ve put up on Smashwords were stories I’ve had sitting around on my computer for some time, ready to go. I wanted to use them as my trial runs for making ebooks, before I published my longer works. This was suggested by a number of authors, as there is quite a lot to learn in epublishing, and it’s better to make “mistakes” on a shorter piece, than a longer piece. Though, the term “mistakes” is not really accurate.

Since ebooks are in the digital format, everything about them can be changed at any time. Mistakes can be fixed easily, but they will slow you down. As, to make a change in your ebook, you must go back to the original file, then upload the corrected version. In the case of Smashwords, your uploaded file in translated into at least 7 ebook versions, each of which (ideally) should be checked for any formatting errors introduced during the conversion process. So, you can see how updating a file, while an easy and quick process to do in terms of getting the file to Smashwords is concerned, costs you quite a bit more time in the review process.