When god first created the earth. He created winners, losers and nutcases like me!

    May I firstly say hello to our blog-viewers from Lithuania and Chile. IF YOU NEED ME TO TYPE S-L-O-W-E-R, just let me know. Please feel free to hit the "follow" button, it's good for my self-esteem.
    So! What's been happening in my crazy world of becoming a multi-billionaire self-published author? Well, what can I say? As I mentioned yesterday (sorry, I hope all of my American friends enjoyed their 4th July celebrations. Last time, I witnessed your Independance Day frivolities was on a Carnival Cruise liner out of Miami to the Western Carribean. Carnival! I know. One lives and learns, but by God! That was a steep learning curve. Anyway, I digress) Did I mention how impressed I am with smashwords.com?
    Now if you are not a writer please skip the following red text as it will probably be as interesting to you as a Red Sox game to the Queen of England. Ok, I'm typing quietly now, so as not to disturb the readers who aren't interested. I uploaded my book The Sunday Club on Smashwords.  It was displayed as #580 in line for publishing. Two hours later, I received notification that it was live and one hour later I received the email to inform me that I had sold one copy and two more samples had been downloaded.
    KINDLE versus SMASHWORDS: I say tomartow, you say tomayto, Lithuanians say something else. Now don't forget, I am new to this game. I know nothing. Jack-shit! but that is the whole idea of this blog. The blind leading the blind. To be brief, Smashwords appears far superior to Kindle in as far as it's submission system, it's dashboard (which offers far more statistics), once published you can download an instant copy of your entire book in HTML format to review the layout etc, etc, blah, blah. As I mentioned yesterday, you must download the Smashword Style Guide to get your formatting correct, if not, you will have problems getting published. It sounds daunting but Mark Coker's book (which is free) is written for the dummies like me and explains the whole process, gives you screenshots etc.
    My first $0.99 sale on smashwords pays me $0.56 as opposed to Kindle's $0.35. You can do the math (or maths as we say in the land of red buses and royal weddings).

    I can smell the money! That extension on the villa is going to be awesome at this rate. Pretty soon I'll be able to buy a pencil so I can start designing it.
    Now I am probably like most virgin self-publishing authors. You write a book, you upload it and sit back waiting for the cash to roll in, right? I mean my book is almost 80,000 words so it should be worth at least $10. Well, as they say, something's only worth as much someone is prepared to pay for it. I'm sure there are some oustanding novels out there in Kindleland, with sales of zero because the lazy b+stard that wrote them is sitting on his/her arse/ass playing computer games all day.
   Ergo, Phase 2 of my soon-to-be-famous plan. Part one of my novel "The Facebook Killer" will be published to Smashwords later today and it will cost nothing. I'm going to give it away to any Tom, Dick, Harry or Ramirez that wants it. The ultimate loss-leader. Then Part 2 will be released, as arranged, the end of August (for a moderate sum - say $1.99, maybe less.) Will my free book of 48,000 words "outsell" the one I'm charging for? Or is it really a case of people not being able to find them yet? Let's see.
    Sorry non-authors...One other good thing about smashwords is that they list the amount of words in the book which you are about to buy, instead of a KB size. My goodness there are some books for $3.99 with only 4,000 words.
   
    So in short, today will end up with The Facebook Killer being offered for free on smashwords and a small bombardment of UK Fiction sites. Work in progress: Still tapping away at my controversial book.

    Drop by again soon folks. We'll have a big party when I reach double figures.

author@mlstewart.com