My First eBook – Download FREE for You!!!

Probably a month back, I read Lisa’s article on her experiences writing her first eBook. That was all I needed to put a stop to all my ongoing projects, and start writing My First eBook!!!!!

Believe me, it was easier thought than done, I have never imagined myself writing more than a few pages, and the thought of writing several pages of the same topic, was like a nightmare. However much time I gave it, I couldn’t come up with what would be the best topic which I could write about and make a book out of it.

After several thoughtful sessions with myself, I decided on a “How To” guide for blogging, since that is the one topic which I am really comfortable writing about. So, here it is, after a month’s effort at writing, it is finally published and available “FREE” for all those who subscribe to my newsletter here – Subscribe to DMC Newsletter.

If you have read Lisa’s article on her experiences writing her first book, you should know the basics of writing a book and why a blogger would like to even offer an eBook. I second those thoughts and my experiences were somewhat similar.

Why this eBook –

I have a section dedicated to this in my book, hopefully you have already downloaded it and started off reading. I am having two blogs but have no products or services that I offer on either one of them. All I have is thoughts that I share, reviews that I write on various gadgets, guest articles that I accept from my fellow blogging friends, and sometimes an affiliate product that I promote.

I really wanted to have a product that I can boast about and say it belongs to me because I created it. Getting my book published gave me that immense satisfaction and I am pretty confident that I have shared some good tips on blogging in the hopes of helping out some new bloggers out there and also maybe motivate some friends who are hesitant to start a blog.

Treading on the Feared Path –

Yes, I was dreaded by the fact that I had to write a book, though it seemed easy at first, I drew a blank when I started out with my Table Of Contents section. My approach was first to identify the topics that I would consider appropriate for this book and list them out in my TOC. Then, address each one of them and explain them in detail, this technique actually worked good after I was done picking up the topics.

I spent considerable time, formatting my word document, adding headers, footers, images, links etc etc, and finally was done with my book which comprised of 30 pages!!!! Yayyyyy!!!! Pat on my back!!!!

I was little aware that the real challenge started after the fact that I finished my book 🙂

I accepted Lisa’s suggestion of publishing my book with Smashwords, and went ahead and created my profile and started looking at their publishing guidelines. Believe it or not, they have a book on how to format your ebook!!!!!!! But of course, if you send an email out to their contact person, you will be sent a list of professional ebook formatters and cover page designers. Now that was easy and I started getting in touch with couple of them to help me out with my publishing.

But I realized that the way I have written my book and the content of it demanded a heavy price to format it as per Smashwords guidelines 🙁 and I was back to where I started with an ebook in doc format with no publisher.

Hail Fiverr –

Of course if I had a budget towards my book, I would have gotten done at the exorbitant prices these professionals were asking, but my aim was to get it out there free to my readers, and wanted to do it at a minimum cost (who wouldn’t?)

That is when I read this article by Sue – How to Design your eBook Cover For Free. The tools mentioned in this article are just awesome, Paint.net is easy to use and anyone can design their cover page and side pages with basic knowledge of the tool. If you have an image that you can use without a need for licensing, you can use that on the cover and it should take just a few moments.

The 3d-pack.com site was a wonderful surprise for creating a 3-D image of my cover and side page. I was done doing that and at no cost!!!!!All that was left was the Smashwords formatting.

I resorted to search for the service in Fiverr, and ended up buying a gig for $5 to format my book and also include a 3D cover as my first page in the book. The job was done in an hour and I was excited at having found the perfect solution. Here is the fiverr profile of Nat who did the fomatting for me.

Then I realized that the cover page I designed myself was not professional enough and since this was my first book, I wanted it to be a little more attractive, and now that I was getting a hang of Fiverr, I searched once again, and found Sapizol, who helped me design my 2D and 3D cover pages.

So, there I was, spent $15 and got my cover page ( paid $5 for finding the image) and the formatting done for Smashwords!!!!!

Smashwords Publishing –

I was under the impression that once I submit my work to Smashwords, they will surely take a couple of days to review and edit some content, go back and forth with the author(me) before they actually publish it.

Yesterday night, I filled out their Publishing form and attached my word document along with the 2D cover (they do not accept 3D) and hit the Submit button.

I got a message, that mine was #12 in the queue for review, I was about to switch over to another browser, when I noticed that the page auto-refreshed, and I was #2 in queue and in a flash, my document was getting converted into all their publishing formats. In maybe around couple of minutes, my ebook was reviewed, converted and published!!!!!!!!!

Well, there I was, a proud author of my first eBook, written and published successfully. My sincere thanks to all these service providers and of course many other blog articles which provided me a source of inspiration as well as information to find a place for my book.

Subscribe & Get it Free –

As a note of thanks to all my readers, I will send you a coupon code when you subscribe to my newsletter using the link – Subscribe to DMC Newsletter. I appreciate it if you could keep your copy for yourself and not distribute it or make it available online. A word of recommendation to your friends and followers would work great!!

Hope you find my book useful and informative. I would love to hear from you about any suggestions for improvement or if any mistakes in my writing. There is always room for making it better, and I will look forward to your comments.

Thanks for reading!!!

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