Last week, I published a book called Writing Awesome Sales Copy. It’s the first Modern Indie Author’s Guide, and we have quite a few planned. In 8,000 words, this book shows indie authors how to successfully craft “sales copy”. Because let’s face it: Most authors suck at writing sales and marketing copy for their own books. Not because they’re terrible writers, but because writing copy is completely different from writing a book.

But that’s not what I want to talk about with you. Rather, I’d like to share with you how I ate a lot of my own dog food and fully embraced digital publishing at every phase.

First, I wrote the whole thing in Google Drive. This easily let me share my progress with the rest of the ePublish Unum crew. And before that, the book was born as an outline created and shared with WorkFlowy. Conception to written–all online.

And because the book was written in Drive, it made it easy to share with my editors. Jeff served as technical editor, and the fantastic Karen Conlin provided copy editing for the final draft. Oh, did I mention I found Karen online, and the whole process was carried out via email, document revisions, and Google Hangouts? She lives near the North Pole, and I live in the desert southwest. Yet proximity was never a problem.

Cover art was provided by Krista Alexander, whom I’ve also never met. Instead, we exchanged emails while she was in China, I sent her a few book covers I liked, and she went through several rounds of revisions before the final product was created.

Publishing–specifically the creation of the ebook files themselves–was done with Pressbooks. As a long-time WordPress user, I found the interface intuitive and the final outcome exceptional. And I didn’t have to worry about any strangeness added by a word processor.

My promotion is obviously something I’m doing online. This is part of it, but I also sent free copies to a handful of influencers who I thought might like the book and share with their networks. That’s happened, and I’m pleased with the results. But I also didn’t have outrageous expectations, as this is just the first book in the series. That, and it’s highly focused.

Interacting? Well… that’s the easiest part for me. I’d love to know what you think about the book or this entire concept of a series of short, highly focused books aimed at underserved needs of indie authors.

And yes, I actually did force myself to go through the process outlined in the book to write the sales copy that accompanies the book on all the major marketplaces!

Stay tuned. Two more books are in development, and the pool of topics from which we can pull more topics is literally endless. Here’s to many more!