Rosalie Sneyd's memoir recounts her childhood in Blenheim during World War 2 and her teenage years when it was over.
Now, for $3.20, anyone with a Kindle or an iPad, or similar, can download it from Amazon.com.
Tired of the "hassle" of traditional book publishing, Mrs Sneyd found an easier way to get her work in front of the reading public.
"One of the reasons I am very happy to give her anything of mine is that I do not have to bother about it any further."
While buying e-books is as simple as handing over your credit card details to a dotcom like Amazon, selling an e-book is more complex.
Cathy Sneyd took her first step into the world of DIY e-publishing six months ago because she was bored.
"I did it for fun."
She had been writing romance novels for traditional publishers like HarperCollins, Kensington Books and Ellora's Cave but had "lost the spark".
"I didn't want to be tied to deadlines and didn't really care if I made much money off my books.
"So I decided to write exactly what I felt like writing and publish it myself."
Since then, she has built up a pioneering knowledge of how to deal with e-publishers like Amazon, Smashwords and Pubit.
She recommends Amazon over the other two because she says Amazon is more convenient.
Pubit requires authors to have a United States bank account, she says, and it is "considerably more complex" to format a book for Smashwords than it is for Amazon.
"And the first and only book I loaded there has not sold a single copy, so I haven't bothered to load any more.
"Amazon, as far as I'm concerned, is the easiest place to start."
Seattle-based Amazon.com was launched in 1995 as one of the first e-commerce companies to sell goods over the internet.
It now has 14,000 employees, tens of millions of customers and offers almost a million books and other publications for sale.
Ms Sneyd says there are several things for DIY e-publishers to do before beginning to deal with Amazon.
They need to obtain an American "individual taxpayer identification number" known as an Itin.
That requires the downloading of the latest W-7 form from the United States Internal Revenue Service which must be completed and posted off with a passport photocopy.
Expect a 10-week wait.
As well, e-books generally include an international standard book number (ISBN), which assists those involved in marketing.
The numbers are available, free of charge, from the National Library in New Zealand but also via Amazon.
DIY e-publishers also need to make sure their manuscript is "Kindle-friendly".
"This is actually the easy part," Ms Sneyd says.
"All you really need to format an e-book for Kindle, as long as it is text-based and doesn't include pictures, is Microsoft Word.
"You need to make sure your manuscript is clean: no blank lines, no page numbers, a consistent style throughout, words in italic as necessary, not underlined as you would for a manuscript.
"You can't force anything, except page breaks, as it has to be able to be made readable on all sorts of different machines.
"There is no need at all for anything more than this."
Ms Sneyd says she has not tried to upload a book with pictures but suggests Amazon's "community site" has instructions.
Once the manuscript is in good shape, and the Itin number has arrived, it is time to begin grappling with Amazon.
The first step is to go to Amazon.com, click on the link "Self-Publish with Us" and sign up with Kindle Direct Publishing.
Amazon describes this as "free, fast, and easy".
However, it is only "free" if you overlook the 30% of every dollar your book earns going to Amazon under its "royalty programme".
Using Amazon, however, does mean that your book becomes available to a range of devices including Kindle, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, PC, Mac, Blackberry, and Android-based devices.
The Amazon site steers DIY e-publishers through the process of uploading their book files, which are automatically converted into the Kindle format.
Once uploaded, a book can be checked for formatting inconsistencies, corrected in Word and reloaded if necessary.
Ms Sneyd finds creating a cover "a bigger hurdle" than uploading the book file itself but "if you want to sell books, you need to create good covers".
She calls on a daughter with "the artistic gene" to create covers in Photoshop.
"There are detailed instructions for creating them on the Kindle Direct Publishing community site: minimum and maximum image sizes, etc.
"You can load a book without a cover and a default cover will be created by Amazon, but it won't sell you any books, so I don't recommend it."
Ms Sneyd says she spends three to six months writing and editing a book but because at the end of that process she has a "clean manuscript", formatting the book for e-publishing takes only an hour or two.
Ms Sneyd spent several months "off and on" researching e-publishing but had been keeping up with developments for years.
Registering with Amazon and uploading her first book took her a weekend but now she can upload a new book in 15 minutes, plus half an hour to check the formatting.
She set the retail price "within Amazon's rules" and is expecting her first royalty cheque in June.
"You get your first cheque two months after the end of every month in which your royalties are more than $100.
"We won't get rich in a hurry, but then again, it costs nothing to set up if you do all the formatting and cover creation yourself."
She says once the completed e-book is at Amazon and ready for readers to download, DIY e-publishers need to turn their attention to marketing.
Amazon put 43,000 new titles on line in the last 30 days alone, meaning a new book can easily be overlooked.
Ms Sneyd says she and her mother already have a readership, built up from publishing through more traditional channels.
"It would be a lot harder to build a readership from nothing."
Ms Sneyd ensures that as she loads each new e-book she includes "lots of keywords" so people will find the e-book when they go looking to buy.
She says the "author page" should be set up on Amazon and she suggests using Facebook and Twitter to tell people about the book.
"A website is not necessary, but I think it is a very good idea.
"Join online writing groups. Join local writing groups. Send it out to review sites."
Ms Sneyd says she reads e-books "almost exclusively" since her partner bought her an iPad.
"They are cheaper than hard copies and don't take up any space in my house. I ran out of bookcase space years ago.
"And I have infinite choice and can buy a book at 11pm on a Tuesday night if I want to.
"When I went away on holiday last year, I took 30 books with me on my iPad.
She considers, however, there will still be a place for hard copy books "for a while longer".
"Lots of people like the touch and smell of books. I do too. I just like my convenience more."
While she is not expecting her DIY e-publishing to be more lucrative than working through a traditional publisher, she considers it has been "more fun".
"And I have total control over the whole process, which I like.
"I always wanted to have my own bookstore, but I don't believe they are a good market to get into; so this venture is my dream bookstore."
