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Leslie Allen's attitude toward publishing her first e-book, "Dandy Do-Little," is that you can't succeed if you don't try.

Allen, who lives in Sand River, has set her sales goal high for "Dandy Do-Little," aiming for one million paid downloads at $1 each.

She's recently published the short fiction book on Smashwords, an e-book publishing site that offers e-books in a variety of genres for reading on smart phones, iPads and Kindles, or just online.

The book is just over 7,000 words, and while it's classified as a children's book, Allen says it's for adults too.

"It's categorized as a children's book because there are animals talking, but I didn't write it for children; I wrote it for me," she says.

The narrator of the book, Dandy, was a real pet of Allen's, although he's now passed away. And some of the events in the book really happened more than a decade ago, when Allen first set the story down. The book was first written in 1995, but has been revised and changed over the years, and Allen says she didn't really pursue self-publishing the book until now.

"It turned out to be a fairly simple process for me, which surprised me," she says. "Within 10 days I had the thing published as an e-book."

The next step for "Dandy Do-Little" is a print version of the e-book, through Smashwords associate site Wordclay, Allen says.

And, to celebrate the not-quite-yet-official Dandy Do-Little Day on June 3 (to commemorate the anniversary of the real dog's death), Allen is providing a coupon code on her personal website that will let readers download the book free from Smashwords for the month of June.

Writer: Sam Eggleston
Source: Leslie Allen, Author