Getting your book published has never been easier than it is right now. In just four short years, electronic books have outsold paper books for the first time in history. The sales of electronic books increased by a whopping two hundred percent last year alone! With Kindles, e-Readers, Nooks and more reader coming out all of the time, downloading books is not the wave of the future, the future is here now. Electronic books can even be downloaded to a cell phone.

It is a win win situation. No money is invested by anyone. The data is stored on hard drives, then when a person purchases your book, you get paid your royalties. The difference is where traditional paper books only paid you about an eight percent royalty, electronic books pay seventy percent! However, many still prefer paper books and this market is also available to you at no cost. Once your manuscript is finished, you simply design the cover and back flap from easy to use templates. Then you upload the manuscript. Again, no money is spent until someone orders your book. This is known as a "print on demand" book. If five thousand people order five thousand different books on any given day, the codes are typed in and a super computer printer combination prints each book, binds the pages and puts on the cover. Several companies offer this service.

Compare that to traditional publishing. Once your manuscript is finished, you then search out publishing agents to send a query to. Each agent has their own criteria for submission, so you can't just submit a dozen blanket queries in a day. For example, one agent may want a biography of yourself, a synopsis, any credits that you may have, the first three chapters and perhaps even a picture. All of them are different in their submission requirements. So you follow the instructions, submit to them, then wait. If you are lucky, you will get a form rejection letter politely telling you that your material is not quite what they are looking for. More often than not, you never even hear back from them. With the advent of electronic books and self publishing, I see many agents with drawers of form rejection letter being unemployed in the near future.

Now, on to the process of self publishing. First, your manuscript must be finished and edited. You may read it on your computer monitor many times, but when it is in print, the errors will leap out at you. Print it out and put it in a binder. Then you edit it and ask someone else to edit it. When you are satisfied that it is up to your standards, it must now be formatted to an acceptable form for electronic publishing. The easiest way that I found to do this was to download "Open Office". It is a free word processing program that will have all of the tools that you need to reformat your manuscript. The page size must be five inches by eight inches, this is easily accomplished using the tool bar. It also must be single spaced. The final step is to highlight the entire manuscript, the choose "file" from the toolbar. You will see the selection, "Export as PDF File" When this is done, save it as a PDF. You are now ready to submit your book.

Several companies offer free uploading and printing of your book. I used "Createspace" as I found it to be very user friendly. When you go to Createspace it will ask what you want to upload, a book, CD or video. You simply choose "book" then it will walk you step by step through the creation process. You can upload your own cover as long as you own all rights to it, that is, it is a picture that you took or drew yourself. The cover text, back flap and author picture are also uploaded. Then you upload your manuscript and wait. Once it passes the review process, you have a choice to order a proof order for final approval by yourself, or to just go ahead and have it made available for sale.

About Author / Additional Info:
Fernandez is an internationally acclaimed author of historical fiction and action/adventure books. You can visit his website here..http://thepiratescove.yolasite.com/