Well, I did it. I created an e-book (okay, it’s just a short story, but the process is the same) and uploaded it to the Kindle store. Don’t go looking for it; Amazon says it may take up to 24 hours for it to appear on the store. Sometime soon, “Mom’s Letter” should appear.

This is an experiment. I checked the e-book out and it seemed to format okay. It looks better with font size 2, since the lines of the embedded poem run to their full length. I priced it at $0.99, the minimum Kindle allows. The royalty is 35%, so for each one that sells I’ll get almost 35 cents.

There were a lot of steps in this. Of course, part of that was the setting up of my account and entering all that information. I won’t need to do that again. Part of it was being uncertain of what I was doing, and so having to read various instructions, some of them twice. One thing that concerns me is the cover may be a bit smaller than they recommend. I think they wanted 1280 pixels mimimum on the longest side. I read that as maximum, and the pic has only 1187 pixels on the long side. Since I don’t know much about digital photos, I wasn’t sure how to change that.

I still have to set up my author page. I’ll do that after supper. I hope that won’t be too lengthy, because I had hoped to work on expanding a couple of chapters of Documenting America. Maybe I won’t be able to get to that tonight, but we’ll see.

A new era has dawned in my life. Let’s see what happens.

When you’re talking about e-self-publishing (eSP), “getting a buzz on” means something completely different than it did when I was in college in the 1970s. It means creating an interest in what’s being published; drumming up publicity; making people salivate in anticipating of your writing. For a major book launch, publishers and authors might begin getting the buzz on six to twelve months before publishing date.

In the old days writers went on book tours. Wait, they still do that and this isn’t the old days, it’s right now. I should say in the old way of publishing, with print on paper, writers went on book tours. They held readings. They did signings. They spoke to civic clubs. They talked to newspapers, radio, and, if fortunate enough, to television. They had a book in their hands, and copies to sell.

Now, with “Mom’s Letter”, all I’m going to have are pixels on a screen, organized into words and paragraphs, not even pages. A reading is out of the question, because I’d read the whole thing and then who’d want to buy it? And book signings at a bookstore are out, because, well, it’s not for sale at the bookstore, and Amazon.com has no brick and mortar stores.

So creating a buzz for the short story will be difficult, but I’ve already started. When I asked my fellow writers at Suite101.com to comment on the two covers I was considering, several expressed interest in buying the short story. The woman here at work that I shared it with on Tuesday, before the storm, read it during the storm, and today she told me she loved it. I think she would write a 5-star review on Amazon. One Suite101 writer is putting together an e-literary magazine, and is looking to do book reviews on it. I’ll be e-mailing him today. As he has no subscribers, but will be selling the mag via Kindle, I don’t know how much buzz that will be, if he even decides to include me in his reviews section.

Then there’s this blog, which has 10 subscribers and about 4 other regular readers, plus drop-bys. If I can convince them to say something about it on their blogs, that would be a few more potential buyers. There’s always Facebook, with my 90 or so friends. If some of them would buy it and read it and post something about it on their FB page, with their hundreds or thousands of friends, maybe that will be a little bit of buzz. My son says I need to join Twitter and begin tweeting to gain publicity. Maybe. I’ll give it some thought.

Also, I can become a little bit active again at Absolute Write, put a link in my signature there, and see what that will do. I will need to add a link to a blogger signature as well. I can also contact local media via press releases and see if I can get a notice there. That seems like overkill, however.

So there’s no shortage of things I can do to promote the book, and I’ll probably do most of them. But the good news is, beyond this I don’t really have to do anything. If it gets a buzz on and begins to sell, great. If it doesn’t, no biggy. If I keep submitting the short story to literary quarterlies and finally get accepted, I could expect a payment between $10 and $50. Actually, the more likely scenario is it would be accepted by one of those literary mags that offers no payment except two contributor’s copies. The holy grail of publishing is to get $1.00 dollar a word, which would be about $1850. To reach that I’d have to sell 5,340 e-copies. To reach $50 I’d have to sell 145; to reach $10 only 29 copies. I think I’ll wind up somewhere between 29 and 5340 (if I’m not being delusional), so already I’m thinking the short story launch is successful, buzz or no buzz.

We’ll see what happens. E-self-publishing “Mom’s Letter” is an experiment. The minimum price Amazon allows is $0.99, with the royalty being 35%. Some have said that’s too high a price for a short story when you have novels on the Kindle platform selling for $0.99. But I feel that as long as I accurately say what the buyer can expect for his or her 99 cents, I’m not cheating anyone. I’m excited. This is the start of an adventure. As with most adventures the outcome is not clear. Let the journey commence, sometime in the next three days, I hope.

I’ve made up my mind. The first work I will e-self-publish is my short story, “Mom’s Letter.”

A short story, you say? What demand is there for a stand-alone short story at any price? Enough, it would seem. Several authors report on Joe Konrath’s blog that their short stories are making enough money to justify the time and limited expense of formatting it, preparing a cover, and listing it. They are all published for $0.99, the minimum allowed for an Amazon Kindle title. The royalty on that is $0.35. So for every ten copies sold the short story will earn $3.50. If I could set it placed in a literary journal, the most I could realistically hope to make is $50.00 (though some pay higher). That means I’d need to sell 143 copies to justify going the eSP route.

This will give me experience with all the techno-stuff related to e-publishing. How to go from a Word document to a Kindle document. How to actually upload it to Kindle. How to see that it’s properly listed. How to add tags to it. How to select the genre. How to do an author page. How to do back-cover text. How to select the amount of preview material. So much to learn, so little time. Oh, yeah, and how to make and upload a cover.

That last one will be close to a deal killer. You might not think a short story has a cover, but for e-sales it does, just as a novel does. The cover shows up as a thumbnail view in Kindle listings, then as a larger view when clicked on. I’m not sure I can do this. I have no artistic skills, I’ve never used artistic software, and am pretty much clueless of what looks good and what doesn’t. But paying to have a cover made costs about $300 the eSP-ers tell me. That’s more than I’m willing to spend.

But I will do this. I have an idea for a cover that I’ll make and upload. If it looks terrible, maybe I’ll spring for someone to make one, if I can find a reduced cost for a short story cover. I ran “Mom’s Letter” through two critique groups, and three beta readers some time ago. I recently solicited beta readers at Suite101.com. Two of the four who were willing to read it have reported back, and say the story is ready to go, with maybe a tweak or two.

I don’t know what my time frame is. It would be nice to get it done before I head to Orlando later this month for a convention, but I’m not sure I can, given everything else going on. Early March for sure.

Stay tuned for results.