A few of you have mentioned to me that you want to publish and sell some of your writings, so I want to share some information with you. I've recently chatted with Mark Coker over at Smashwords.com. Mark offers a very good service for independent authors. With Smashwords, anybody can sell an ebook, and it gives authors full control over how their works are published, sampled, priced and sold.

They offer many different formats for your ebooks including:

epub
Sony Reader (LRF)
Kindle (.mobi)
Palm Doc (PDB)
PDF and RTF

You can choose to allow readers to sample up to 60% of your work before they buy. If you sign up with Smashwords and poke around, you will also find additional tips to help you sell your ebooks. Writers can also choose to offer their works for free. You have complete control.

If you choose to sell your ebook, you set your own price. You will recieve 85% of the sale price while they keep 15% as a commission. I've been doing some research on selling ebooks and I can honestly say this is the best deal I've found.

Mark cautions writers to to keep their expectations realistic. Right now, sales are low for all ebook authors everywhere.  They will surely grow over time though, but again, authors are best served to keep their expectations realistic.

I'm one of those people who respects paper books, but also believe that ebooks are the way of the future. Mark offers a good service with a reasonable commision. So if you are looking to sell your writings or if you just want to get more exposure, I think Smashwords is a good place to start. From now on we will link to this page from our home page. If anyone has any thoughts about this or if you try Smashwords.com and want to share your results, we'd like to hear about it. I think it will be a good way to share information.