eStory: The Hero Cleanup Protocol - Published!

After a few months of realizing I needed to edit the story some more to Smashwords' content rules, that I had to follow through to the Premium stage and request an ISBN (which is the ISBN-13 number 9781458089526, I hope), and that I needed to resubmit after all the corrections...

The "Hero Cleanup Protocol" estory is now available for purchase!

I finally got a cover artist, a friend of a friend of a colleague who knows a guy, fellow by the name of Mike Rooth who does this sort of artwork on a commission basis.  A thumbnail copy of the cover is to the side of this paragraph.  Once the cover was finalized I completed the Smashwords submission process and finally got the approval about a week ago.

I was only waiting until now to verify that YES the story is for sale.

Because I've already got two purchases yesterday!  Ahhhhhhhh, the emotional high of selling your work, it's like a perfect drug...

It's selling for .99 per copy, the cheapest it can go, as it's a short story and not a full novel.  The good news is, the overall experience of submitting a work for publication seems relatively simple. As long as I do a better job of planning ahead for cover art, I should get a finished and edited-reviewed draft up and for sale within weeks instead of six months or more with a print book.

The best thing about Smashwords is that, unlike the direct-retailer situation I had with "Welcome To Florida" the story I submitted directly to B&N's PubIt service, what I've submitted through Smashwords is going to show up in other retailers: Not only Barnes&Noble's Nook, but also Sony's Reader, the Kobo, Diesel ebooks, and Apple iBook.  Amazon's Kindle doesn't have it yet, but Smashwords is waiting for Kindle to get the conversion upgrade for DRM formatting, so when that happens you Kindle owners can buy a copy!

My trick now: marketing.  Hoo boy.  So here's the deal, folks.  If you can get 49,998 more people to buy a copy of "The Hero Cleanup Protocol", I'll be a very happy librarian person.  Thank yew.  :-)