Russell C. Conner spoke on ebooks today, revealing some of his personal experience with the format. He’s actually found his self-published ebooks outselling his hard copies by 8-to-1!

The two C’s of electronic media:

• Convenience—it must be easy to download and customizable
• Cost—the price must be lower than its physical counterpart

Compare, for instance, the price of a book at Amazon:

• Retail hardback: $27.99
• Audiobook: $26.39
• Discounted Price: $14.50
• Kindle Price: $9.99

Even if you sell your ebook for $6.99, your royalty per book is $2.45—much more than you’d get through a physical book!

How to set-up a quick-and-easy ebook:

1. Use Times New Roman, no bigger than 16pt font
2. Use center, bold, italic and underline…that’s about it
3. Use asterisks as page breaks to keep it simple
4. Save from Microsoft Word as an HTML web page
5. Go to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing and upload
6. Go to Smashwords to get an ISBN for $10 and upload (but keep Amazon separate)

Young adult fiction writer Jamie Harrington talked at the DFW Writer’s Conference about Paying It Forward. Here are some of my favorite points she made:

The good thing about paying it forward is that it helps you find the perfect critique partner, builds a strong support system and you might make some real friendships. The bad side? You may trade work and find you aren’t a good match, or you may agree to do too much because you always say yes.

Some online tips:

• Set up a Google alert for yourself. You want to be notified the moment someone mentions your name or your book.
• Comment on other people’s blogs. This means so much to people. It will build your online connections fast.
• Whenever someone mentions you, go to Twitter and share the love—mention them and point people to their blog.
• Tag people on Facebook. When you do, it alerts those people that you’re tagging them and encourages communication.

How to start a critique group:

• Look for people at the same stage in their career as you.
• Cultivate online friendships the same as you would offline relationships.
• Keep it simple. If your crit group isn’t working, dump it.
• Don’t stalk people. If they stop answering, stop the communication. It’s not a good fit for you.