After 8 months writing and editing...

Go to:  hewittmbm.com/juno_letters

I have spent the past 8 months writing and editing The Juno Letters - a labor of love, sweat, and tears!  I was excited to get it published online, but was not quite prepared for how much work it would actually be.  I wanted top share some thoughts:

BE PATIENT.  The publishing industry infrastructure is robust and slowly becoming a part of the electronic world.  Many components are not "plug and play."  So be prepared to wait long periods for things to be processed and approved, and pay attention to details.

Check and double check everything.

ISBNs - Get them.  Get 10 - you will need one for every version, and the cost for 1 was $125, for $10 was $250.  I used the site at myidentifiers.com/home and was very satisfied.  Again, be patient and follow the instructions carefully.

COVER ART.  You can change cover art.  All of the sites say so.  However, it is not that simple.  Take the time to design a cover that is readable as an icon as well as a book cover and get other people's opinions on it before you place anything online.  You will have to wait sometimes days to get a cover replaced otherwise.

AMAZON.  This was the easiest to publish to.  I simply made a RTF version (rich text format) and it translated to Kindle first time.  The book was available within a few hours.

GOOGLE.  I have a program (Pages on the Mac) that saves to ePub, so formatting was easy.  The processing period is more extensive than with Amazon, and you then need to prove your copyright status - having your ISBN handy for every version is a must.

ITUNES CONNECT for IBOOK - I optimized my book for iBook, then ran into a brick wall at Apple.  The issue is simple - they need the IRS to verify your payment reporting status with a SSN or EIN, which can take several days.  The problem is that they provide no feed back as to why you cannot log in to the iTunesConnect site - it simply returns an error.  It took a small act of Congress to get through to find out what was going on.  It makes perfect sense, but will take time.  Apple needs to provide a status page like Google does.  I told them so rather succinctly.

I am up on Amazon, and ready to sell.  I will follow up on the issues I find with the others.  After 8 months I was hoping for a quicker solution, but there ya go!