I’m busy this week — Today and tomor­row, I’m blog­ging at Just Roman­tic Sus­pense (with a give­away). Tomor­row is also my day at The Blood-Red Pen­cil. And Thurs­day evening, I’m over at Tri­an­gle Vari­ety Radio for another interview.

Mark Coker of Smash­words gave a sec­ond pre­sen­ta­tion at the Pikes Peak Writ­ers Con­fer­ence. This one was about the Best Prac­tices in ePublishing.

He opened with a sim­ple truth. Pub­lish­ing an ebook is easy. Reach­ing read­ers is not so easy. He’s writ­ten a book, THE SECRETS TO E-PUBLISHING SUCCESS, which is free at Smash­words. He touched on some of the more than 25 points he makes in his book, and I’m fur­ther touch­ing on those, so this is a diluted report. Elab­o­ra­tion, and deeper expla­na­tions of all his points can be found here. These are some of his suggestions.

1. First, you have to have a great book.

2. Be care­ful choos­ing a pen name. This is not to say he rec­om­mends using a dif­fer­ent name from your own, but you have to con­sider search engines. He says to avoid ini­tials because there are too many ways to search, and you might get missed. For exam­ple, if you’re going to use the name J. D. Smith, peo­ple might leave out the spaces, or add or omit peri­ods. So they could be look­ing for JD Smith, or J D Smith, or J.D. Smith, or J. D. Smith. Also, don’t use ‘cutesy’ names. If your name is Nate Forsyth, don’t spell it N8 4cyth.

3. Get a good cover. And make sure it looks good in thumb­nail size, which is the first image a reader is going to see.

4. Pub­lish another great book. If read­ers like your first book, they’re going to be look­ing for more. So don’t spend all your time mar­ket­ing. Write.

5. Max­i­mize your dis­tri­b­u­tion. Coker sug­gests that most books are dis­cov­ered while read­ers are look­ing for some­thing else—something sim­i­lar to your book. So, the more places your book is avail­able, the greater your chances of some­one find­ing it.

6. Patience. It takes time to be dis­cov­ered by read­ers, who then tell other read­ers. (Sounds a lot like my “It’s a marathon, not a sprint” mantra)

NOOK Con­test Ques­tion #2 (remem­ber, use the Con­tact form, NOT the com­ments, to answer)  In what state is WHEN DANGER CALLS set?

7. Don’t worry about piracy. DRM is coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. Pirates can strip it in sec­onds, and it just irri­tates read­ers who might want to read the book on another device.

8. Plat­form build­ing starts yes­ter­day. Use the social media to build your name (but don’t get a rep­u­ta­tion as some­one who does noth­ing but tout your own books. It’s about shar­ing, not hound­ing.) Google gives Google+ pref­er­en­tial treat­ment in search engines, so it’s wise to get a pres­ence over there.

9. Pinch Pen­nies. Don’t ever spend money that should be used for food and shel­ter on your book or marketing.

10. Think glob­ally. Coker reports that 45% of Smash­words sales through the Apple iStore are out­side of the US. And, he pointed out that other coun­tries are about 2–7 years behind the US in e-books, so your mar­ket is just start­ing over there.

He also showed us, based on an infor­mal sur­vey, how read­ers find books. The biggest per­cent­age of sales (29%) come from rec­om­men­da­tions from oth­ers (4% are from per­sonal friends and fam­ily). The next biggest per­cent­age (18%) is sales of favorite authors. You can see the full break­down, com­plete with a pretty pie chart, in Mark Coker’s blog post here.