I’m pretty sure it’s a Law of the Universe that procrastination is caused by an irrational estimate of the size of the task you’re avoiding. Getting my book out as an ebook seemed, to me, to be an enormous task. It had to be. Put a book out into public where everyone can see it, judge it, criticize it? Surely that must require whizzy skills in json/jscript programming (and I barely know what I just typed) which I don’t have.

But in just about everything I avoid because I know it is too hard, I was wrong.

Earlier, I listed out what I needed to do before publishing my manuscript. The main thing was a book cover that would be accurate to the story, but catches the reader’s eye as she skims the web page looking for something worthwhile. After a bit of research on how to do it and studying a lot of ebook covers, I asked a friend and colleague to help me out. And he delivered a fantastic cover that I would never have created on my own. Though it was his first cover, you wouldn’t know it. And Michael is about the nicest, most professional guy I’ve worked with. You can check out his website here.

Then, Amazon makes it ducky-horsey simple to put your manuscript on Kindle. I spend MAYBE 30 minutes tweaking the Word doc to make sure the format of the book aligned with the Kindles HTML needs. Most of that time was spent scrolling, looking for the next chapter header. Then I spent 20 minutes playing with the Table of Contents format just because I had the time, the house was quiet and I was feeling bold in my newfound expertise.

And that was it.

On November 18, 2012, I clicked the button to publish my book, one day ahead of schedule.

Lesson: It’s never as hard as you think it is.

PS: It’s titled “The Importance of Walking” and you can find it here: View on Amazon

I’ll post more about it shortly.