This past week I took another small step up the writing career ladder. I posted a short story, TO LIGHT AND GUARD, for sale on Smashwords. I am now a millionaire and can retire.
Okay, I drifted off into fantasy for a minute there.
Seriously, this seemingly minor step of posting a short story for sale is a big step in the psychological progression of my career. I have been published, but never for pay. So the moment I sold my first copy of this story, I became a professional author, because someone purchased something I wrote. (Definitions of “professional author” vary from writer to writer–this is mine.)
Celebrate!
Posting to Smashwords was painstaking but not technically difficult–at least, not for a geek like me. If you find it too hard to follow their incredibly thorough Style Guide, they will provide you with a list of people you can pay to format your book. Basically, what Smashwords needs is a file with all the auto-formatting stripped away, then selective formatting put back in strategically. Like I said, painstaking, but not terribly hard.
So now my story is up on Smashwords in all formats. It has not yet been distributed to all other channels, such as Sony and Apple, but should be this week sometime. Amazon is another issue altogether. Apparently, Smashwords has to manually upload their files into Amazon, which as you can imagine takes a lot of time. As a result, Smashwords requires $2,000 in sales on their site/other distributors before they will upload your book to Amazon. So unless 2,000 of my blog readers are willing to pony up the $0.99 for the book to get me there, I will need to look into how to post my story to Amazon separately.
I am extremely excited to have taken this step in my career. I am using this short story as a learning experience (as well as hoping for some sales!) both technically and marketing-wise. I am having fun with it and hoping to have other short stories to join it eventually.
A small step, perhaps. But a long journey is accomplished one step at a time.
What steps (small or large) are you celebrating in your career right now?
