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Nowadays, the book publishing business is changing, and it's no secret that Amazon has been at the vanguard of this change. Not only are they getting into transitional publishing, with the ebook Kindle platform (not to mention competitors' products such as Kobo, Nook and so on), authors are no longer at the mercy of large New York publishing houses. Nor is the only other choice vanity publishing, where you are forced to pay out a lot of money up front to pay someone to print, bind and stock your books, which then might or might not sell. At this point, it's no problem for first-time authors to write a manuscript, upload it and start collecting payments via Amazon's distribution system.

Still, there are still a lot of pitfalls out there for the unwary. To begin with, there must be thousands of folks who are writing and uploading ebooks now. Unsurprisingly, with such a extensive amount of competition, having your work noticed requires a fair amount of effort. And this is where a lot of new writers are falling down on the job. They seem to think that once the manuscript is done, they're finished. But there are still a lot of things to do.

Number one: get a good cover made. Nothing makes a book stand out from the competition more than an eye-catching cover. And a shoddily done cover will limit sales, because few people will bother to take a chance on a story when the author hasn't bothered to get a decent cover made for it.

Second, there is the technical process of formatting the manuscript for Kindle, Kobo and so on. Each device has a different standard, and just putting an MSWord document up on Amazon is going to create a Kindle book that has odd spaces, line breaks, chapter breaks, etc. In extreme cases, this lack of formatting can render the manuscript all but unreadable, and even in cases where it's not that extreme, bad formatting will leave a bad taste in the reader's mouth. Along the same lines, you should employ a professional proof-reader to give your work a once-over. Misspelled words, run-on sentences and the like will drive away many readers, and if your book should happen to get reviewed by a blogger with a large following, you can bet that technical English issues will draw criticism. Unfortunately, all too many authors neglect this vital aspect of publishing, resulting in books that are, in a word, unprofessional. If you plan to sell your books, that means that you are going to be a professional writer. So you should uphold the standards of professionalism as much as you can.

Finally, there is uploading the manuscript to whatever website or service you're going to use to distribute it. Again, many authors simply don't want to deal with the hassle of this step. But even people who are technically challenged will have to either figure this out or else engage someone to do it for them.

But you needn't despair. There are services out there that can facilitate all of these problems. And they needn't cost an arm and a leg. Depending on the degree of help you need, you can get, for instance, a guide to upload books on Kindle, complete with snippets of HTML code already written out for you, for as little as a couple of dollars. You can employ an editor to go through your (normal-length) manuscript for less than a hundred dollars, assuming it doesn't necessitate an unusual amount of attention. You can also find cover artists who can be contracted for a similar amount. Alternatively, there exist reputable companies that can furnish some or all of these services as a package deal, thereby saving you both money and time... time that you can then spend on getting your second book written.