ePublishing: Where to Begin?

When I decided to write a book, by necessity I had to start thinking about publishing. My thoughts lately have turned to the subject of self-publishing.  There are two routes one can go these days: traditional publishing and electronic publishing. The wisdom on the Internet at present is that self-published newbie writers have a better chance of selling books if they go exclusively with ePublishing.  The reasoning behind this is based on the belief that the public is more willing to pay $0.99 to download an e-book by an unknown author than they are to pay $7.99 for a hardback or paperback of the same book. Knowing my own book buying behavior, such wisdom is hard to dispute. 

So I came to the conclusion that ePublishing was the best route for me to go for self-publishing. But where to begin? My research reveals that two of the biggest e-book publishers are Kindle Direct Publishing and Smashwords.  Each of these ePublishers has their strong points. Smashwords offers a detailed "style guide" that is very useful in preparing documents for painless translation into e-books while Kindle has a wider distribution network. Still, which is the better choice? Writer Brian S. Pratt advocates uploading your e-book to Smashwords first for the formatting advantages, then posting the formatted document to Kindle as well to take advantage of the wider distribution. Sounds like a good plan to me. I may just give it a shot when the time comes. More on this subject another time...