Online publishing... oh my.

Ah, technology and publishing.

After posting my short story, "The Bastard Son" and receiving (surprisingly) good feedback, I chose too examine online publishing for (possible, free) download by all the iPad, iPhone, Stanza, Kindle, Sony Reader, Nook, etc fans out there. 

After some quick research, I discovered that two of the "major" databases are: Smashwords and Feedbooks.  There are others, but I'll just focus on these for now.

First, I went to the Smashwords website, hesitant that it could be that easy to (self) publish in their database. The result: amazing. This is clearly the future of publishing in the digital world. People can post whatever work they've done, and the customer "votes" on what is good and what is bad. Bingo...the digital age.

Smashwords even comes with their own how to publish on Smashwords webpage. Included in the site is a FREE Style Guide, which for any new author, has an incredible step-by-step formatting technique (with MS Word of course) on how to format before submitting to the database. They also come with advice on how to obtain an ISBN number. Ridiculous.

I then swing over to Feedbooks, who also have a step-by-step instruction to convert your story to the open standard of ePUB.  Goodness.



I chose to hold off on submitting it to these wonderful sites becuase I'm waiting on a friend. He helped me come up with the story, is volunteering to do an audio version / podcast, and is contributing some art. Once that's done, I'll be off and digitally "publishing" my story.

EDIT: ...and this is not including ManyBooks.net, Free-ebooks.net, and others...

Welcome to the future. :)