Learning about Self- Publishing

My first two mini books are practice runs for my real book. Self-publishing all on my own made me realize next time around I need  beta readers and a real editor so my writing and presentation are professional looking. Echoes of the Divine  was published for free on Smashwords first and has 198 reads in three weeks but is the highest rated Christian Family Living book since 2011. I only begged two people to rate it,  so this is basically an honest rating ( laughing). Smashwords step by step guide to self-publishing  is  wonderful, explaining every step with diagrams and in ordinary terms  in a  Smashwords Style Guide.. .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.

I am not sure how I feel about the result but perhaps I do not have any perspective. For my real book, I will need people to beta read, edit and give me honest suggestions.

Echoes of the Divine  is free on Amazon as well. How about checking it out and giving me some honest feedback so I can learn.

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.

Anyone who downloaded the first epub version of my book Echoes of the Divine saw the print overlapping. Now the print is clear and does not overlap. Simply download the newer version from Smashwords. It took me awhile to fix it https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/521798