While traditional publishing is still the goal of many authors, a new wave of scribes have seen the electronic light and are opting to publish their work themselves through the use of electronic media in the form of an e-book.

An e-book is simply and electronic version of a book, and more popularly, an electronic version of a book that can be downloaded from a web site and read on a personal computer or laptop.

The benefits of electronic publishing are many. Getting a piece of literary work published traditionally is a time consuming effort. The process of querying an agent to represent your work to the publishing community or to contact the publisher directly is an art all its own.

If you are fortunate enough to catch the attention of a publisher, the industry average time to production is currently a year and a half to two years. That is a long time to wait to see your work in print.

Once your work is in print, you can expect a good chunk of the profits to stay with the publisher and a decent percentage to stay with your agent.

According to industry sources, roughly 52% of all print books sold are not sold in traditional book stores. This means that most of them are sold on the internet.

Online sales mean that when a person searches a subject matter online, not only do they see the title of a paper back book, but for electronic books as well. This levels the playing field for authors who want to publish electronically.

Electronic publishing is fast, inexpensive, and you get to keep more of the revenue generated for your work.

One of the most preferred formats for e-book publishing is Adobe’s PDF format. PDF stands for portable document format and allows a user to read a document, in this case your electronic book, across a variety of platforms and operating systems by use of the Adobe Reader, which can be downloaded for free.

Books created in Microsoft Word or some other word processing format can be easily transferred to PDF format and several security measures can be implemented to protect your work from piracy.

Once you have your book in this format, the next step is to sell it. An easy way to get quick access to the millions of potential readers for your book is to offer it for sale on a web site that promotes and sells digital media.

Such sites contain all of the tools you will need to sell your book and supply the web space to display your book.

When the visitor is ready to buy, all of the necessary tools to allow them to purchase the book by credit card are in place.

Once the transaction has been approved, the buyer is allowed to download your book right from the seller’s web site.

Authors have password-protected access to check their sales figures, and the host web site will send along royalties for each purchased download.

Listing on a website that sells digital media should be free, and most listing hosts only collect a small percentage of the retail price as a fee, and only based on actual sales.

Such a sight is basically a vehicle to drive your book to the masses.