Top three reasons:

1. I have confidence in my writing
   
   I have been published for 22 years: books for children and adults; newspaper columns and op-ed pieces locally and nationally; magazine articles; NPR essays; book reviews; children’s musicals. My picture book won a Benjamin Franklin medal as the best of its kind published that year by an independent press. I’ve worked with dozens of editors through the years, so I know they make my work better. Could an editor at a publishing house have improved my novel? Sure. Kidlit blogger extraordinaire Jen Robinson pointed that out in this otherwise positive review of Caller Number Nine. Every one of my several readers/editors/copyeditors/proofreaders made suggestions. But after a year of editing, I decided it was time to send my novel out into the world, and be proud of it.
    

2. I was ready to move beyond the query/synopsis/will this agent take me on? phase
   
   Again, I felt confident that if I continued pursuing the query route, a traditional publisher would eventually buy my book, and I’d be another “This manuscript was turned down by (count-the-large-number-of) agents/publishers” examples. I never counted the number of agents I queried; it was at least 35. More than half asked for partials or fulls, and almost all of them wrote encouraging rejections. I submitted the manuscript to only one publisher, by email, and only because of a personal contact. Several months later I received a snail-mail letter from one of the editors telling me that every editor in the house had read it, and they seriously considered publishing it. But they didn’t know if kids today would want to read about 1967, and they thought my main character seemed young for an eighth-grader.
   
   Well, teens were younger in 1967. And I believe there’s always an audience for historical fiction. If I got that close with the only traditional publisher that saw it, I was ready to publish it myself—after several rounds of editing, copyediting, proofreading.
   That said, I used the kickass query that got me dozens of personal contacts with agents to good use as the book description for eBooksellers, and the pitch is always at the tip of my tongue. Synopsis? Worthless.
    
3. There’s never been a better time for writers to self-publish
   
   I believed in my picture book, When Molly Was in the Hospital: A book for brothers and sisters of hospitalized children, so strongly I was willing to self-publish it back in the early 1990’s. Then I went to an SCBWI workshop and met a fellow who had published his book, and had stacks of boxes in his garage to prove it. “Trust me,” he warned, “you do not want to be a publisher.” Then he told me about a small press good with niche markets, and I sold Molly within a week. I never regretted that decision.
   
   A lot has changed in publishing since 1993 (she says, stating the obvious). In 2011, it’s the eBook revolution, baby. There are new devices and new ways to get books into those devices. Amazon, which is responsible for Molly still being in print, is now king of eBooks. Caller Number Nine looks darn good on a Kindle, and even better, I think, on my iPad. The new Nook is getting raves.
   
   I will never say self-publishing is easy (to do it right), but with minimal technical knowledge, a small investment and much perseverance, I was able to publish my book six months after one of my young early readers pulled out the pink binder of my manuscript to read again and asked her dad, a university English instructor, “Why hasn’t this book been published?”

I’m eager to share in this blog the steps I took—both forward and back—in the eBook process.

What would you like to know about turning a manuscript into an eBook?