It took far longer than I wish it had, but Part II is finally out! If you’ve been reading Part I and couldn’t wait to hear what happened next, please check it out here: Robot Awareness: Part II

One disadvantage in publishing the ebook so long after the first one is that I forgot a lot of what I’d learned the first time. Publishing on Kindle is fairly easy, but not completely. Here’s my process:

• First I publish the book through Lulu. I never promote it on Lulu because at $0.99 I make nothing (They take a buck off the top of each sale). I use Lulu because publishing through them gives you a free ISBN number. (You know, or you can pay $130 for one.)
• Second, I select all the options to sell to other sites EXCEPT Amazon. I like to have the book available on other sites, but I don’t actively promote them. Again, I’m mostly in it for the free ISBN.
• Lastly I publish on Amazon. Why do this last? Not only do I have a nice ISBN to enter in the right field, but I also not have the book in epub format, which I can then convert to mobi, an easy format to upload to Amazon. Amazon gives you a nice reader emulator to double-check that everything looks right.

I still saved a lot of time compared to my first attempt. The formatting through OpenOffice (heading 1 for your chapters and text body is pretty simple, but if you use italics you’ll have to go back through and re-add them).

Now it’s time to sell! I’m working on dropping the price of Robot Awareness: Part I down to free (it’s trickier than you think). Keep an eye out for it to drop, or give it a chance at $0.99. I think either way you won’t be disappointed!