For those not familiar with Smashwords.com, they are another place to upload and self publish your work. The site is relatively easy to navigate and their uploader is decent. The only problem is they don't give me any sales whatsoever. That along with the fact that you have to format your work a certain way and also add a Smashwords.com disclaimer in your book to be considered "eligible" for their premium catalog makes it very hard to like them. In most ebooks, we already place a little copyright message letting people know it's against the law to redistribute our work without our permission. Smashwords takes it even further, making you practically use the disclaimer they have or no premium catalog for you. With all the hoops I;ve had to jump through with Smashwords, it hardly seems worth the effort. Even with entry into their premium catalog, I've recorded exactly no sales from any of my works so why do I keep using it?
I really can't tell you.
It seems kind of pointless to keep up with it. I do it right now so I can know I have the most exposure for my work, but with no sales generation I am about ready to dump them and just go with Amazon. If anyone can think of a good reason to stick with them, let me know. At this point, I am on my way to pulling all my works from them and just doing Prime Service with Amazon so I can get some free sale days out of them for exposure.
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I've had a few sales through Smashwords, and it's very useful for making your book easily available in all formats (and also for offering discounts and freebies, which Amazon only allows under certain conditions). However, I decided to drop them for the time being because I wanted to enroll in KDP Select. It is more work to go through Smashwords, mostly because I generally have to reupload a few times to fix formatting errors after it comes through the conversion. (I tend to have less problems with Amazon.) So I'm not sure it's worth the extra effort right now, as much as I like offering my book in multiple formats...
ReplyDeleteThat's my thought. My friend has gotten a little cash from borrows via Prime Lending and has yet to see a sale from Smashwords the same as me. Seems almost pointless to have them. At one point, I was the 5th most popular author on there, yet no sales.
ReplyDeleteI actually make more through smashwords than Amazon. I use them to distribute to b&n etc. I don't sell a lot on smashwords site itself but through the other channels. It makes dealing with appl e much easier. And they have the free coupon option and let me set things free. I use freebie short stories as a promo tool.
ReplyDeleteI've done the same. I've just not had the same success on Smashwords. I was talking to a friend and they mentioned genres. They have friends that write erotica and they do well on Smashwords. Perhaps Smashwords just attracts a different audience that what my work is aimed for which is people that like slice of life and drama.
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ReplyDeleteI've found them to be a pain in the ass. The client side is junk and that styleguide they make you read is pretentious and ironically full of the same sort of formatting and layout faux pars they insist you don't do yourself.
ReplyDeleteMy biggest criticism is of the premium category listings though. I'm only using SW to get onto Nook and iTunes but they keep rejecting my work with extremely vague feedback to do with formatting. I've done six submissions now and each time its something different, but instead of giving it all to me in one hit I keep getting a different issue each time.
Yesterday I discovered that Lulu will offer practically the same rates and has a better set up wizard to get onto the other channels and since I have a print book with Lulu already its one less thing I have to log into. I'm not exactly a Lulu fanboy, but so far its worked out the best of all of them for my needs - For someone outside the US it works Lulu is good because they: Pay by Paypal and: Don't dock me the 30% US taxation until I go through the horrible process of all those stupid tax forms and set up.
SW is only useful for distributing eBooks for promotion in my opinion, and they're not even that good at that because they don't allow / have DRM.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote another post stating that I ended up dropping them. I went through the same stuff you did. My work was rejected several times with very little feedback as to why it was. In fact, the last time I submitted it for review, I was so frustrated that I didn't even change anything...yet it was suddenly accepted. Sometimes I think they do these things just to let you know they can screw with you as much as they want. Well, many of us are getting hip to their game and bailing. Simply not worth the headaches.
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