A Touch of the Strange

So, I self-published an older story, Me and Susannah (a love story between a girl and a cerebral parasite) on Smashwords, partly to find out how it works. Result!

If it passes their vetting system, it should be going up on sale in the Kobo and Kindle stores. Amazing. There's a special tingle in your fingertips when you get the first ISBN that's all your own.

They say Smashwords publishing is easy, but if you want to try this, do it when you have a few hours to spend. They have an extensive formatting guide, and it is not that easy if you're not great friends with Word (or Write) already. I ended up uploading a few times before I had all errors smoothed out. Not to mention that I knocked a cover together only today, too. I know they say not to, but I don't think I'm a complete doofus when it comes to image editing (she said, sure to regret it later).

But, like Lulu, Smashwords offers a free ISBN and forwards your e-book out to the big e-stores. If it works, it's still an enormous time-saver compared to having to figure out Amazon CreateSpace and whatever upload systems Kobo might have. I like their pricing options too, which include an option to have the reader pay whatever they think the story is worth, which is definitely something I'd want to try if I was publishing for charity.

All very exciting! But now I must hurry home and make dinner. I haven't eaten since breakfast.