As I announced last week, Train Wreck has advanced to the quarterfinal round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest.

You can check out all of the other quarterfinalists here and even read a sample from each book.

To help Train Wreck stand out from the competition, please take a minute to go to the “General Literature” section, click on my book, and download the free sample to your Kindle/smartphone/computer.

Time for some more book bragging! Today, Train Wreck advanced to the quarterfinal round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel competition.

That means it was selected as one of the top 250 entries in the general fiction category. You can check out the list of all the winners here.

Amazon is supposed to be posting excerpts of all the quarterfinalists soon, so I’ll post another update when that is live. 50 semifinalists will be chosen from the remaining contestants wish me luck!

I found out today that my debut novel, Train Wreck, has advanced to the second round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel competition!

That means it was selected as one of the top 1,000 entries in the general fiction category, and I’ll be receiving a book review from the Amazon editorial staff. Pretty cool, huh? You can check out the list of all the titles in the second round here.

The contest is open to all self-published or unpublished authors, and the grand prize winner will receive $15,000 plus a publishing contract with Penguin. The general fiction field will be narrowed down to 250 quarter-finalists in late March.

According to novelist Ewan Morrison, the outlook for self-published authors is growing bleaker by the day. We’re heading towards a bubble, he claims, which will mimic other market collapses in the history of our fickle economy.

Like the dotcom bubble, the commercial real estate bubble, the subprime mortgage bubble, the credit bubble and the derivative trading bubble before it, the DIY epublishing bubble is inflating around us. Each of those other bubbles also saw, in their earliest stages, a great deal of fuss made over a “new” phenomenon, which was then over-hyped and over-leveraged. But speculation, as we’ve learned at our peril, is a very dangerous foundation for any business. And when the epub bubble bursts, as all previous bubbles have done, the fall-out for publishing and writing may be even harder to repair than it is proving to be in the fields of mortgages, derivatives and personal debt. Because this bubble is based on cultural, not purely economic, grounds.

I won’t pretend to be an expert in economics, but I can assure budding writers that there is no need to panic. Morrison’s attempt at labeling self-publishing services as some form of Ponzi scheme is silly. When you upload your novel or nonfiction book to Amazon or Barnes & Noble, you’re not investing any money - just time and energy. No returns are guaranteed, and the only thing writers risk losing is some confidence thanks to grouchy reviewers.

While Morrison’s bubble theory is flawed, his post does bring up some valid warnings for those thinking about joining the self-publishing movement. Here are the two most important things you need to know:

1. You are not going to become a millionaire from self-publishing ebooks. Don’t expect to even earn a decent living from them. Anyone who tells you that you can substitute writing ebooks for a full-time job is trying to deceive you. There are only a handful of true self-publishing success stories. Find a stable job and make writing your hobby, or else devote yourself to the craft of freelance writing and start finding some real clients.

2. You should not be paying anyone to publish your ebooks. Amazon and Barnes & Noble are running legitimate services, but there are plenty of swindlers out there trying to game the system. If you need help publishing your book, contact a tech-savvy friend or use the endless resources online before opening your wallet. During the publishing process, the only things you should even consider paying for are cover design and advertising space. Self-publishing is great because it lets you maintain control over your own work. Don’t give up that power because you’re too lazy or too scared to see your project through to the end.

In case you haven’t heard, my debut novel is now available in paperback and on sale at Amazon. With the self-publishing community growing so feverishly, I thought I’d share the experience of printing my first book.

I released Train Wreck as an ebook in September of last year, and the question I got more than any was: “When will it be available in paperback?” I told people that it might happen someday, but at that point I was convinced that the money and time required for paperback self-publishing was outside of my budget.

While I was promoting the Kindle and Nook versions of the novel, I kept hearing good things about CreateSpace. CreateSpace uses a publishing method called on-demand printing, which means they don’t print a copy of Train Wreck until you order one on Amazon. Then when a purchase goes through, CreateSpace takes a cut for printing costs, Amazon takes a cut for vendor costs, and I get to keep the rest as royalties.

And the best part is that I paid NOTHING up front to get my book into the CreateSpace system. Don’t listen to self-published authors who try to tell you it takes thousands of dollars to print a book on your own.

I set out to create a paperback edition of Train Wreck when the calendar flipped to 2012, and now it’s just three weeks later, and my book is already on sale. Here’s a summary of the process:

Step 1 - I set up an account on createspace.com and created a new entry for my book with the same description and genre settings that I used for the Kindle edition.

Step 2 - I requested and received a free ISBN (this takes only a few seconds).

Step 3 – I took the final draft of my manuscript and converted it from a word processing document into a professional book layout PDF. This was the most time-consuming part of the process by far, but I really enjoyed having complete control over the look of every page and messing with stuff like line spacing, chapter headings and page numbering.

Step 4 - I downloaded a cover template from CreateSpace and used the cover image from the ebook edition of Train Wreck to start building the print cover. Having that graphic already available made things a lot easier for me, as I basically just had to add a spine and back cover to my design.

Step 5 - I set the list price for my book and submitted the cover and layout files. Then the CreateSpace folks did a quick human review (this took less than 48 hours) and my proof copy was en route to my doorstep.

Step 6 - I closely examined the proof copy (which CreateSpace does charge you for) and then submitted my final approval online. A couple days later, the paperback edition of Train Wreck appeared on Amazon and magically synced up with the Kindle version.