Jill Williamson is a chocolate loving, daydreaming, creator of kingdoms. She writes weird books for teens in lots of weird genres like, fantasy (Blood of Kings trilogy), science fiction (Replication), and dystopian (The Safe Lands trilogy). Find Jill on FacebookTwitterPinterest, or on her author website.

Authors wear many hats.

Too many.

I mean, it’s fun sometimes, learning to do all the different things I need to do to help my books have the best chance of success. Other times, it’s not so much fun at all.

Traditionally published authors wear quite a few hats, but if you self-publish, you wear so many more. In the past few weeks, I wore the following hats:

author
researcher
editor
proofreader
marketer
publicist
typesetter for print books
ebook designer
information technician
graphic designer
web designer
virtual assistant
personal assistant

I think that’s all of them. The I.T. hat was the most difficult for me.

Why was I messing around with computers to such a degree, you might ask? Well, I’ll tell you. I was trying to create an ebook sampler to give away at Comic Con next weekend. This required me to first learn how to create an ebook using Scrivener. This I needed to do anyway to release the Storyworld First ebook, which I’ve done. (Yay!) So I created my ebook sampler, no problem. (That’s a bit of an over-exaggeration. It took me a full week to learn to create an ebook in Scrivener, but now that I know how, it’s a lot faster.)

The problem came when I tried to upload my ebooks to my website so that people could download them. My WordPress site would not accept the files. They were too big. And also, there was something vague about WordPress not supporting .mobi and .epub file formats. Maybe it was both. Who knows?

After a few hours of frustrated Googling, a tip from John Otte panned out. I used Filezilla to upload the large files to my server. Then I added the links to the download page. Done! Right?

RIGHT???

Um . . . nope.

When John tried to download them, a password box popped up wanting my login information. I certainly wasn’t going to post that online!

So I had to call my hosting provider for help, and they saved the day.

But then it turned out that they actually didn’t, and I had to call again.

:-/

But the second guy was a superhero genius and saved the day for real.

To celebrate, I wanted to give you all access to the ebook sampler and ask your help. If you want it, please download it and share your experience in the comments. Just a simple, “It worked” or “I can’t download it” will help me. I know this method of posting the sampler on my website isn’t perfect, but if there are consistent problems, I’d like to fix them before Comic Con. Thanks so much for your help!

Here is a little bit about the sampler:

The 5-6-7 eBook Sampler is the ultimate introduction to the writings of Jill Williamson. Five chapters each from six books and a seventh complete short story. 

Includes excerpts from: By Darkness Hid, Captives, The New Recruit, Replication, Go Teen Writers, and Storyworld First. Plus a complete short story called The Senet Box. If you like fantasy, dystopian, mystery, adventure, science fiction, and books on writing, check out this sampler. 

Click here to download your copy. Enjoy!

What hats beside “author” have you worn this week?