Smashwords: Your Ebook, Your Way
Smashwords is an ebook publishing and distribution platform for ebook authors, publishers and readers… At Smashwords, our authors and publishers have complete control over the sampling, pricing and marketing of their written works. Smashwords is ideal for publishing novels, short fiction, poetry, personal memoirs, monographs, non-fiction, research reports, essays, or other written forms that haven’t even been invented yet.
It’s free to publish and distribute with Smashwords. (Smashwords.com)
I’ve been hearing more and more about Smashwords.com lately:
And just about everywhere else that folks are chewing the publishing industry fat. I’ve wandered their website and read miscelaneous tidbits here and there, but I’d really like to hear some firsthand accounts. Have you published a digital version of your book with Smashwords? What was your experience? Thanks!
Related articles
- How to Self-Publish an Ebook with Smashwords: 31 Authors Share Their Tips and Tricks (smashwords.com)
- Smashwords introduces ebook publishing and distribution service for literary agents (teleread.com)
- In Praise of Simple Ebooks (smashwords.com)
- 85,000 Titles Strong, Smashwords Pitches the Agents (ereads.com)
- On Smashwords and Amazon (joleenenaylor.wordpress.com)
I have three novels, a non fiction, and a bunch of free reads on Smashwords. I won’t lie, the sales numbers were slow in coming. It’s been only been the last year that I’ve made any money through them – though a portion of that is *my* fault for a lack of advertising. The last three months my sales numbers for Barens & Noble (through Smashwords) have been equal to what I sell on Amazon, who was my biggest seller up to now.
Formatting for smashwords is pretty easy. Adding Apple to the mix complicated it a little, but the style guide spells it out in simple terms – in fact it over simplifies it so that it makes it look scarier than it is.
As far as customer service goes I’ve had an excellent experience with them. I also appreciate the ability to set books for free or to create coupons for your book – I’ve used that in many promotions and always been successful (I once participated in a “free for a day” promo where each author set one of their books free for one day and we shared the code. I had 200+ downloads and it was after that when my sale numbers started to pick up for all the books – to anyone considering this idea, this promo only really works if you have more than one book published.)
Smashwords distributes to Apple, Kobo, B&N, etc, so rather than doing it myself I’ve let them handle it. My one complaint would be that they’ve gotten pretty slow about actually getting the titles shipped to those retailers. I think a lot of that is the sheer volume (I uploaded a short story yesterday and it was number 332 in the que) The last novel I published took over a month to get to B&N, so in the meantime I had to sign up for pubit and upload a copy there myself because I had emails from fans who had Nooks. I’m hoping that they can get that sorted out and speed it back up to the two weeks it used to be.
Hope this helps ;)