Tendrils to the Moon is currently selling for 99 cents on the Kindle, Nook, Smashwords, and Kobo platforms. Kobo is appealing because of its relationship with libraries and its foreign market presence. Smashwords is a bit of a pain because of the style guide, but worth it because it acts as a middle man for a bunch of smaller vendors.
As far as I know, only my wife has finished reading Tendrils. She called it average. Honesty is one of her best traits. I know "average" is not exactly a glowing endorsement, but I consider it a win for my first self-published book. Supposedly, the books that make it to the publishing stage in the traditional publishing world are the best. So I'm average among the best.
The distribution of free ebooks to people on my mailing list proved to be a major pain. I'm looking into alternative methods, including emailing a coupon code to the ebook on Smashwords, where you can download the book in many formats. That would still require creating an account there. We'll see.
Several people have also requested hardcopies. I'm currently designing the paperback. I went back and forth on whether to buy my own ISBN to publish under my own imprint, but ultimately decided to go the cheapest route and use one of Createspace's free ISBNs. The paperback will be available for online sale in 2 weeks at the most, I think.
A great thing about publishing ebooks is that you can fix errors quickly without interrupting distribution. I've already done so twice, mostly with grammatical mistakes that I missed in the first chapter. One of them was the dreaded they're/their confusion.
It wasn't until I saw my book in production that I realized what long paragraphs I tend to write. A single line in Microsoft Word can run to three or even four lines on a mobile device screen. Many of my long paragraphs are unnecessarily long; they include dialog and narration. I should split those in two paragraphs. I'll do that before releasing the paperback version. Once the book is printed, those kinds of things can't be fixed.
Leave a comment below and let me know what you think! I'll respond to it as soon as I can.
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