Yep, that’s my latest book titled From Slut to Saint that you see here.

Hallelujah it is finally done.

It is not my first Kindle book that I’ve published on Amazon, but it is the first book that I’ve had the gumption to publish under my own name.

I’ve published several others under various pseudonyms because I find myself writing more freely that way, and I don’t have to worry about privacy issues or anything else.

It’s such a glorious and fulfilling process — and getting paid doesn’t hurt at all. And now that this book is done, once I finally realized I didn’t need to throw my entire life story in one book and just concentrated on an 8-year period of my life (four years prior to salvation in 2000 and four years after) I’m no longer stuck at staring down a huge monolith of a manual to try and compose.

And I’m already off, deep into writing the next juicy book, and another helpful short tome is already in my head. But let’s talk money.

The Kindle book writer who made more than $500,000 in 2012…

Maybe you caught this CBS Sunday Morning segment about Stephanie Bond and other self-published authors making serious money.

Check it out:

Wasn’t that fascinating? (See the full article and video titled “Authors exercise their ‘write’ to self-publish” if you can’t see it above.)

It was enthralling to me when I watched it more than one month ago, and it solidified what I’d already begun to do: change my focus away from the Fulfillment by Amazon product selling and get back to writing and publishing more Kindle books.

After all, I’m a writer at heart, and writing is what I love and believe was put on this earth to do.

God has been great to me in 2012, with my company blessedly still operating well into the black for another year.

But I’ll admit that I hadn’t put as much focus on promoting my Kindle books as I should have. However, without much promotion, one title aimed to help Christian women has steadily and unexpectedly continued to sell each month since the time at the end of January 2011 when I stayed up all hours of the night painstakingly formatting the HTML file in order to make my own deadline of publishing a book by February 2011.

When the hundreds of dollars in royalties continued to show up in my bank account even after I’d turned my focus away from writing for a while, I was surprised. Well, now I’m back and I’m putting more emphasis than ever to let these stories and pent up emotions and lessons flow out of me.

And I won’t mind making it into the royalty-earning realm of writers like Cheryl Kaye Tardif, whose How I Made Over $42,000 in 1 Month Selling My Kindle eBooks really inspired me when I first read it last year, and pumped me up once again when I perused it on my Kindle reader days ago for a refresher on promotion and stuff.

Another great book on the subject I recently read is titled Crush It With Kindle – How to self publish your books on Kindle and promote them to #1 bestseller status, and it also taught me new things about promoting our Kindle books that I hadn’t tried yet.

I did know about promoting our works through the KDP Select program, whereby us authors get a share of royalties even when readers only borrow (and not buy) our books through the Kindle Lending Library.

“A $1.5 million bonus has been added to the KDP Select global fund, on top of the regular monthly fund, during the three-month period from December 2012-February 2013,” writes Amazon, who is always adding incentives to participate in the program.

Another piece of the KDP promotion involves, if you choose, promoting your book by offering readers free downloads for 5 days out of every 90 days, in order to bring great visibility and publicity to our writing — and increase sales when the book goes back to paid status.

I found success in doing this last year, whereby one of my books made it as high as #60 or so on Amazon’s list of Top 100 Free Books, the type of top lists we aim to hit for more exposure. As I learned in Cheryl’s book, the next goal is to hit the Top 100 Paid Kindle Books list, because that’s when the real readers and income flows in.

That’s how Cheryl’s one book made more than $32,000 in one month — and no doubt how romance writer Stephanie Bond brought in more than half a million last year, when books like that one shown in the video that hit #2 on Amazon’s best-seller list rise that high, where lots of readers peruse the list for something to download and read right away.

The bright 2013 Kindle writing year…

The future is definitely looking brighter and better.

My 2013 next steps are to get my writing featured in the Kindle Singles program, which gives greater visibility to authors and their works.

And as soon as I finish updating this site, I plan to run through a list of visible websites that will let readers know about my free Kindle ebook days coming up this holiday weekend. (Just click the From Slut to Saint link to Amazon above to see if it’s a free day…)

Beyond that, more and more books shall follow. Maybe I’ll find the time and inclination to write a detailed book on how I buy images from iStockPhoto.com (or create my own) and use Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 to not only create killer cover images, but also nice internal pics, like a couple of the ones you see above out of the plethora of pics that I loaded into From Slut to Saint.

As I publish more and more Kindle books, I’ve learned a lot about the process of making the books look better, and how to offer a better reading experience for people through well-structured Table of Contents, Chapters, Parts, photos and the like.

So there.

Now that I’ve gotten my “bucket list” testimony out of the way, with the Lord I feel unstoppable.

As always, stay tuned for more updates about my newest endeavors, and share your Kindle dreams with me in comments below.