Starting An Internet e-Publishing Business Was Not Easy

On July 1st, 1999 I had retired from the Hammonton, New Jersey Public School District as a middle school English teacher after thirty-four years of service. I knew there would be an eight hour daily time-void in my life, so I decided to fill it by making my avocation (writing) my vocation. The task of becoming a successful Internet author was much more formidable than I had originally anticipated.

I had written and re-written a dozen book-length manuscripts over the past three decades and knew I could get over a million words in print within several months. My naïve strategy was to blitz the Internet marketplace with my dozen e-books and cause a chemical reaction. People tend to be binge readers, I thought, and if someone were to read one of my books, I figure that person would immediately desire to read another of my works. Right? Wrong!

My first task was to find a workable pen name. Samuel Langhorne Clemens used the pseudonym Mark Twain, William Sydney Porter was O. Henry, H.H. Monroe became Saki and Mary Ann Evans did pretty well using the name George Eliot. After several weeks of serious deliberation, John Wiessner reckoned his pen name would be a corruption of his initials J.W., Jay Dubya.

You could imagine the elation I felt on Monday morning September 16, 2002 when I turned on my computer and first visited Amazon.com to see how my e-books were doing. My Black Leather and Blue Denim, A 50s Novel was Sales Ranked at #70 on Amazon.com out of over three million products in books, videos, toys, games, DVDs, CDs, software, music, electronics and kitchenware.

Then I excitedly visited Amazon.co.uk and found that BL&BD was Sales Ranked #438 in the United Kingdom and after visiting Amazon.co.de (Germany), my Pieces of Eight and Pieces of Eight, Part II were Sales Ranked #67 and #68 in Germany. My young adult fantasy trilogy of Enchanta, Pot of Gold and Space Bugs, Earth Invasion was beginning to move in Japan. On September 16, 2002 some of my books were outselling most Harry Potter novels and most Britney Spears CDs and DVDs at Amazon.com sites around the world. How had all of that come about? Believe me, it wasnt easy.

I had known from preliminary research that e-books were selling well on Amazon.com. The Art of War by Sun Tzu was for months one of the best selling product on Amazon.com, and it was an e-book. E-books by established writers associated with big New York publishers were also highly ranked, and Amazon Press had re-published novels and novellas by famous authors in e-format and those works were also selling big. What I did not understand at the time was that e-books by non-established writers like Jay Dubya were selling zip.

I signed on with three Australian, five American and two Canadian e-publishers. I had my e-books produced in Adobe Reader and Microsoft Reader downloading formats for desktop computers and in Mobipocket Universal Download for all hand-held computers. Expensive artwork for all twelve titles had to be done for Internet display, so already Im out about a thousand dollars an e-book, or twelve thousand bucks without recouping a penny.

I had e-published my books with cyberread.com, ebookmall.com, ebooksonthe.net, electricebookpublishing.com, ebooks-for-sale.com, ebookland.net, ozonebooks.com and ebookstand.com in Adobe Reader downloading format. Ebookstand.com also would produce Print-On-Demand paperback versions of my books. Pretty neat strategy? Well, not really! Sales were still zilch!

I then spent countless hours listing and describing my books in directories such as ebooksandbytes, ebookpalace.com, authorsden.com, Hammonton High School Directory, Bookzone, Bravenet.com, ebookheaven.com, e-book directory and knowbetter.com. Most of these listings were free, so I thought I was developing a good base. Jay Dubya and my book titles soon appeared on Yahoo, Google, AOL Search, MSN Search, Lycos and FAST, Netscape, Hot Bottom, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves and All-the-Net search engines. I was happy, but then I realized that I still wasnt selling any books.

I published articles on writing at SSF World.com, ebookpalace.com and authorsden.com. This brought me certain recognition, but I still was not selling any books. I was becoming mighty frustrated, but I persisted and persevered. Google and Yahoo featured over 5,000 web pages for "Jay Dubya," but I still wasnt selling any books. It was as if I was functioning in a foreign reality, in another universe!