I am definitely not publishing books for the money!

I received my very first book publishing royalty today! Woo-hoo!

Kind of exciting… even if it was only $12.91…

J. K. Rowling better watch out.

Of course, I am giving away most of my books through my email newsletter. I have distributed over 500 copies of each book in the last few months. (By the way, if you have received one of these books and enjoyed it, a review on Amazon.com would be wonderful!)

If you want to receive my future ebooks for free, make sure you subscribe!

I am getting ready to send out my next free ebook, a 20,000 word ebook on the “Unforgivable Sin.” It should be out in the next few weeks….

Baker books is offering a free Commentary on Ephesians by Robert Gundry.

In these verse-by-verse commentaries taken from the Commentary on the New Testament, Robert Gundry offers a fresh, literal translation and a reliable exposition of every book of the New Testament. Most of these books eBook commentaries will be priced from $1.99 to $5.99 at places like Amazon, CBD, and Barnes & Noble.

But today,  Monday January 9^th, Gundry’s Commentary on Ephesians is FREE to download for 24 hours on Amazon. And you don’t need a Kindle or an iPad to read them. You can read eBooks right on your computer or smartphone.

On January 16^th and 23^rd, Baker Academic will make other selected entries from this commentary series free as well. So stay tuned!

For more information on this commentary series, click here.

Other Free eBooks

And if you like free eBooks, make sure you sign up for my newsletter. I am currently offering a free copy of my short story, The Lie, and I hope to have another eBook ready to distribute for FREE by the end of the month, but it will be for newsletter subscribers only.

So join the newsletter by entering your email address below!

You can also sign up for the newsletter here: Subscribe to the newsletter.

One of the best places out there to learn about publishing an ebook is Smashwords.com. Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, recently wrote an article giving the seven secrets to eBook success. Here they five of them, which I found on the blog of Tony Eldredge: Marketing Tips.

1. Write a great book – If you don’t honor your readers with a great read, they’ll either give you negative reviews (an instant book killer) or they’ll punish you with the worst fate any author can experience – they’ll ignore you. Readers are in control here. If they love your book, they’ll talk it up to their friends and that will drive sales.
2. Write another great book – Each book you publish affords you the opportunity to reach new readers, earn their trust and admiration, and introduce them to your backlist. Make sure at the end of every book you provide a hyperlinked summary of where fans can discover your other books.
3. Maximize distribution – Get your book in as many retailers as possible. Retailers spend millions of dollars to attract readers to their stores, and all the majors, including Apple, Sony, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Amazon and Diesel, welcome indie ebooks. Don’t limit your distribution to only one or two.
4. Have patience – It can take months or years to build a readership and build sales. In the old traditional print world, if your book didn’t immediately sell through within a few weeks, it was forced out of print. With ebooks, you never go out of print. Your book is immortal. We’ve had authors who experience very slow sales at first, but then they increase over a period of years, and then suddenly their book pops into the best-seller lists at a retailer. Often, these books will pop at one retailer but not another.
5. Marketing starts yesterday – Don’t wait until your book is published for the marketing to start. Instead, start your marketing with social networking the moment you decide to write a book. Build your social network, and most importantly, contribute to the network. If you add value to your networks, and if you help your fellow authors succeed, they in turn will help open doors of opportunity for you. Authors need to help authors. Your fellow authors are not your competition, they’re your partners.

Want more tips and suggestions on publishing an ebook? Check out this guide to writing and publishing your ebook.

If you want to read The Lie, my short story ebook on Eschatological Science Fiction (not to be confused with Scatalogical Science Fiction – though maybe the two are synonymous), it is now part of the Kindle Lending program through Amazon Prime.

This means that if you are part of Amazon Prime you can read it for free, even if you don’t own a Kindle.