Now, authors can sign up for free on Smashwords and do this themselves if they have time. We’ve discussed before that yes, E-books are formatted much differently than regular book manuscripts.  Read The Smashwords Style Guide for free to learn more!  However, for someone who may not have time and energy to invest in this – afterall you just poured out blood, sweat and tears over writing that book – you might prefer to have someone do it for you.  So, if you are publishing with Wordclay, I think the $75 price tag is not too bad. According to Wordclay’s FAQ about this service, authors are entitled to their full royalties earned through sales through Smashwords, which is up to 85% of each sale!

The FAQ also points out that Wordclay only does the formatting; the author is then responsible for signing up with Smashwords and uploading their own work.  This means you can determine your own price.  And at 85% of each sale, with proper marketing, you can make back your $75 investment and then some in no time.

Here are three reasons E-book publishing is important, which were sent out in a Wordclay email blast promoting this service:

1. Expand Your Audience: A growing number of people are using e-readers, smart phones and laptops to read e-books. Gain access to a wider range of gadget-loving readers by letting them decide when, where and how to read your book.

2. Unlock the Power of Online Marketing: Reach more readers with less effort by promoting your e-book or published book on social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

3. Publish Quickly and Affordably: Through Smashwords, you can deliver your e-book to the masses instantly and without cost. And if formatting your e-book for cross-platform presentation is more work than you have the time, skill or patience to complete, our pros can do it for you through our E-Book Formatting service.

With that said, it’s important to realize that E-publishing has a whole different set of rules when it comes to formatting your manuscript.  Rather than list them here for you, I’m going to point you in the direction of a formatting guide written by Mark Coker, Smashwords CEO.  It’s called, quite simply, The Smashwords Style Guide and it can be downloaded for free!  That’s right.  It’s free!  Thank you, Mr. Coker!

This style guide is not just a guide to follow when choosing to publish on Smashwords, but also rules to consider for the Kindle and other E-reading sites.  As Mark points out, e-publishing follows a whole different set of guidelines.  Guidelines that I myself have broken because of the lack of formatting options available when making your Lulu book available on Lulu as a download.

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t polish that manuscript when you DIY for the Kindle, Smashwords, or whereever else you make your book available for downloading.  Afterall, that’s why they call it SELF-publishing!  So, just when you thought you’d conquered all there is to know about putting your best trade book forward… now you’ve got a whole new set of rules to learn and follow for the next generation in reading.  The E-Generation!

- Improved battery life (25% more to be exact)
- 20% faster page refreshing
- A text-to-speech feature which reads books aloud (a topic of early controversy)
- The overall thickness has been reduced to 0.36 inches (9.1 millimeters)
- More storage (now holds roughly 1500 titles instead of just 200 or 1.4 Gigabytes)
- Improved display (clearer reading, less headaches)
- Keep in mind the Kindle 2.0 has done away with any SD memory card slots
- Whispersynch (a new technology that allows you to synch two or more Kindles)

I, myself, have heard kudos for the smaller page turning buttons located down the sides.  On Kindle 1, the buttons took up the entire margins which made it too easy to hit them by accident causing you to turn pages.

Those 1 star reviews have been conveniently tucked out of view today, but click on the “1 star” and they will come into view if you care to read them.

As an E-author, I’m just happy to see the Kindle available again…new and improved or not.  These last two months have been my slowest in Kindle sales ever since Kindle 1 went out of stock right after Christmas.

For readers out there wanting to jump on board the E-train, the Kindle 2 is just $359.00.  And for authors wanting to get on board as well, it costs nothing to publish and you can earn 35% royalties. Sign up here!