You might be interested in a fairly simple process that got one office ebook in print and in circulation four times in one fairly long day.

The whole ancillary or open publishing format is a sort of miracle to those of us who have been publishing since cars had running boards and crank windows. (Don't people hide crank in the window wells now?) I'm getting the same manuscript out so the chosen publishers can be selling and distributing it while, they say, I sleep. (They can also sell it while I'm awake.)

Here are the details.

A few weeks back I wrote a fairly long report, actually 104 8.5 x 11 pages, called €Four Special Tools That Get Speakers Booked First.€ It's about how professional speakers can move themselves near or to the front of the booking line through the use of books, reports, ebooks, half-books, booklets, and tip sheets. Yes, that's six tools but the second, third, and fourth are so similar I count them as one. (Anyway, six tools might scare the talkers back into the woods.)

I never intended to release this as a bound book, rather I prepped it as an ebook which we now sell from our website as a digital download for $10.

So I took the core material and converted the Word document into ebook format, all to sell at $9.95 so it stays in the Kindle-Nook 70% royalty range. I restructured the front pages; reduced the text to 11-point Times Roman (12 or 13 for the chapter titles); got rid of the headers/footers, numbers, and symbols; reconfigured the page set-up; tightened up the four images, and made the other changes that make running text in ebooks so ugly. I had about 65 pages of core book left. That I saved in Word.dig, which I sent to LSI (Lightning Source) for their cost-free (to me) ebook store. One book done!

I had created a plain Jane front cover in Word, saved it in .pdf, and then converted that into .jpg. It had a design, the title, a short sub-title, and a by-line. See my free November newsletter about that process. I sent that to all four markets.

I then modified the core text for Smashwords, Nook, and Kindle.

Smashwords took the most time because there I had to make the layout fit into ePub so it can be sold to iPad and others through their Premium catalog. They ran my Word file through their Meatgrinder and spit it out in a half-dozen tongues. I didn't check the others because once I get it to work in ePub it will work in the rest€"and they don't submit to Kindle though they do translate it into Kindle-tongue.

I re-read Mark Coker's style guide again and refined my earlier conversion, but somewhere I had a bug that took me several hours to find and exterminate. Turns out that in Word the rejected markup text was returning from the dead to confuse me and bewilder anybody else. So I sent the file through the Meatgrinder seven times before it looked fine.

I've found that the ePub works well in PubIt's Nook system, so I opened it up next. Nook is easy to use but painfully slow to proof, and damn if that markup stuff resurrected itself a third time, but only in the hardest places to detect! So I had to play with that for an hour or two, and about five submissions. Until it looked good.

Kindle was last and while I used to cuss Amazon roundly because it was almost incomprehensible to techno non-nerds like me, either I've gotten better at it or they have, because this time I plopped the Word version (ebook converted) and it was 98% ready to go. A half hour later off it went.

Mind you, before wading into this free ebook land I had prepared a bio about 1,000 words long, plus a book description about twice that length that I could simply insert when the last three asked. I do the description first when my mind is freshest. It is the sales copy (with the title) that will separate buyers from their recession-afflicted funds. At Smashwords I also wrote down the categories this ebook fit into, and the keywords that might get it called up in Google, to use at Nook and Kindle too.

All that remained was the pesky ISBN. Since Smashwords requires one for the iPad section, I used one of their free ISBNs on the premise that this ebook will never become a bound book (in which case I would have used two of my own ISBNs, one for bound, the other for digital books). Nook and Kindle didn't require one, nor does the ebook section of LSI, so that was that.

I'm done, except for calling attention to others that this gem is now available for their desktop, laptop, phone, tablet, or whatever else is about to pop up to befuddle running boarders like me.

The lesson here? The order of submission. My book should help. It even explains Blurb, Lulu, and Scribd for the truly greedy or adventuresome!

Go to it. The trick is to write a good book (or copy) first. Then the conversion and sales is easier and more fun!