At this point I called my literary agent, whom I’d foolishly failed to involve in the project. (Another fantasy of the digital world: Writers can do it themselves and dispense with all those middlemen.) Late that Friday my agent brokered a deal between Byliner and me. The advance was only $2,000, but my work would be available by Monday, for $2.99, and I’d get about a third of the proceeds once my advance was paid off.

I worked through the weekend with Byliner staffers as they crafted a snazzy cover and a subtitle that included the words “strippers” and “cowboys.” In no time “Boom” was live and I was in love. The e-format delivered the timeliness and instant gratification of news reporting, yet with all the trappings of a book, absent the paper. There was even an author’s page with my picture. All I needed now were readers.

Oh, those. I was familiar with the stately ways of old-school book publicity: readings, dwindling print reviews, praying for a call from Terry Gross. Surely, Byliner’s tech-savvy team would move at light speed and deploy new tools like guerrilla marketing.

Except there didn’t seem to be a “team,” just an outside publicist who was busy on other jobs. She circulated a hasty press release and wrote a glowing review of “Boom” on Amazon, the main retailer of Byliner titles. Byliner urged me to “game the system” by soliciting more such “reviews” from friends and relatives, and issued a few tweets touting “Boom.” Then silence.

Physical books live on physical shelves at physical bookstores and can catch the eye of browsing shoppers. “Boom” was floating in the digital ether with millions of other works. How would anyone even know it was there? So I went to work hawking it myself, like a pushcart peddler: calling radio producers, sending “Boom” to big-mouthed friends, boring my tens of followers on social media. I wrote online articles for major sites, for which I wasn’t paid, since it’s generally understood in online journalism that we scribes are “building our brand” rather than actually making a living.

My month of self-flackery seemed to work. In the sales rankings on Amazon for Kindle Singles, “Boom” broke the top 25, and almost all the titles ahead of it were fiction. In categories like “Page-Turning Narratives,” my work often ranked No. 1. I was a nonfiction digital best seller!

Eager to know how many copies this represented, I asked Byliner for sales figures. It took them a while to respond — because, I imagined, they needed the time to tally the dizzying numbers pouring in from Amazon, iTunes and other retailers. In fact, the total was such that Byliner could offer only a “guesstimate.” In its first month “Boom” had sold “somewhere between 700 and 800 copies,” the email read, adding, “these things can take time to build, and this is the kind of story with a potentially very long tail.”