When does one become an expert?

Over the weekend I attended a class. It was a very good experience in that I learned that what I was doing and my experience doing it was fairly decent. I didn't really learn anything else from the class other than that some folks make e-book publishing hard on themselves in order to save a few pennies.

On the way home I thought about putting together a presentation about my experiences in the past five years of publishing e-books.

Five years? Well, maybe six. But e-book readers have not been around that long. True, but computers and Palm devices have and that is where I got started. Up until late last year I published e-books in .PDF and .LIT formats as well as Mobi for Palm devices (never sold a Mobi version of any of the books.) and distributed them first on CD, then later through email (I even learned how to use PayPal and implement a shopping cart!).

When Amazon Kindle came along three years ago, it was a salvation. Finally a large scale e-book publisher that could distribute a little guy like me globally. Then Smashwords came into being. While their initial masher (the application that converts your Word file into different formats) was a bit clunky and error prone, they quickly fixed it and it now spits out a number of different formats for different readers quickly and clean. Sign me up! Smashwords followed that up with becoming a distributor of e-books with a number of online sellers - sign me up again!

At this point, I have written five different books, sold over 10,000 copies since burning my first CD with PDF files back in 2005 but don't consider myself an expert.

I certainly wouldn't want to stand in front of a class of impressionable e-book author want-to-be's and tell you how to do it. Since things constantly change in this world, the presentation I put together today will be out of date tomorrow. The terms and conditions I present today will be superseded by an update tomorrow.

Do I have some experiences to share? Well, I have written and converted quite a few books (and endless revisions) to a variety of formats (some have gone the way of the Betamax). I've created websites, blogs, and done some interesting marketing to try and get people to read my writings.

But I am by no means an authority on the topic and don't think I'll be putting a presentation together soon. But if you want some advice for someone who's been to the rodeo - let me know.

2010 sales are outstanding

Well, thanks to a special Amazon Kindle promotion in October, book sales hit an all time high in 2010 with over 4,400 books sold by Amazon that month. Total sales for the year on all platforms was nearly 10,000 books and we want to thank all our loyal supporters for making this year a success.

Research is continuing on my newest book, Guilt by Association, with another research trip to Palm Springs at the end of February. Without giving away too much of the book's plot, I've located a trade-person who is very knowledgeable in the topic that killed our poor victim and will be interviewing him to get a lot of details.

In the meantime, other work is continuing, we've revised the first book For Sale in Palm Springs to make it easier to read on Kindle. We've already uploaded that revised edition to Smashwords which makes it available on Barnes & Noble's Nook, Sony eReader and Diesel and KoboBooks but we were hoping that some of the downloads on Amazon would quiet down enough to upload the revision. (Amazon places a one week hold on book sales when an author makes a change.)

We'll try to update this blog a bit more often this year, please drop me a line if you enjoy the books and are following along.

Albert Simon
January 2011