Posts Tagged Smashwords
Book Bonanza September 13th to 17th
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Books, Promotion on September 13, 2017
A lovely group of indie authors has got together to offer a cross-platform e-book 99p/99c special offer – and they have very kindly invited me to join them with the psychological thriller Bedsit Three.
There are more than 75 books on offer across 13 genres, such as Fantasy, Romance, Action and Thriller. And the great thing is they are ALL reduced to 99c/99p. Unusually, this isn’t just a Kindle special offer. Many of the books are available across multiple platforms such as Apple, Nook, Inktera and Smashwords.
Take a look at the 99c Book Bonanza Page and try a new genre or a new author. But do it today – the offer finishes September 17th 2017!
Smashwords Adds New Distribution Channel
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Self-publishing on February 20, 2017
Regular readers of this blog will know that one of the reasons I chose to distribute Bedsit Three via Smashwords is the access it gives to Overdrive, a platform which supplies e-books to public libraries. My original blog post can be read here.
Recently Smashwords announced the addition of a new library distribution channel via Bibliotheca. Bibliotheca is the operator of the cloudLibrary™ digital lending platform which is used by over 3,000 public libraries in America, Canada, U.K. and Australia. So the Smashwords distribution network now includes almost all major library e-book platforms including OverDrive, Baker & Taylor Axis 360, Gardners UK (Askews & Holts and VLeBooks) and Odilo. Those of us indie authors choosing to distribute our e-books via Smashwords can now reach 30,000 public and academic libraries across the globe.
Many libraries today lack the funds to buy print books. E-books are a cheaper option and can offer a way into the library system for indie authors. Unfortunately e-books do not qualify for PLR payments so writers only receive their standard royalty on the e-book sale. But being in the library catalogue generates exposure that may lead a reader to purchase other books (print or digital) by the same author.
The biggest factor in the indie author’s decision about whether to take advantage of Smashwords wide distribution channels is the abandonment of Amazon KDP exclusivity and the potential benefits that scheme can bring.
Smashwords Coupons
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Promotion, Self-publishing on October 18, 2016
Self-publishers who have opted out of Amazon’s KDP Select are free to distribute their e-books via other platforms, as well as Amazon.
As I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, Smashwords offers an easy way to make your e-book available through many retailers such as Apple, Barnes & Noble and the library supplier, OverDrive.
Individuals can also purchase e-books directly from Smashwords, from where they can choose to receive the e-book in a variety of formats, for example .mobi for Kindle and epub for Kobo, Nook and tablets.
In order to encourage these individual purchases, Smashwords lets authors create money-off coupons to distribute directly to selected readers (such as book reviewers, competition winners etc.) or more generally via social media. The author selects the discount percentage (up to 100%, thus making the book free), the expiry date and the number of redemptions (for example only the first 100 customers using the coupon will get the discount). Smashwords then generates a discount code for the author to distribute as he chooses.
I’ve been playing around with the Smashwords Coupon Manager and have created a 50% off coupon code VZ95D for Bedsit Three. It’s valid until 31/10/2016 or for the first 50 people – whichever comes soonest.
So, if you’re fed up of Amazon’s supremacy, try buying your Kindle e-book from Smashwords and save some money too!
Catching Up
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Promotion, Self-publishing, Writing on June 30, 2016
Over the past couple of months I’ve mentioned a few of my writing-related activities and I thought it was time to give an update.
At the beginning of April, I announced that I was going to use April as a ‘private’ NaNoWriMo and try to write a rough first draft of my next novel. This actually took longer than planned. Partway through I realised that one of my minor characters had much more potential than one of my main protagonists. So I had to re-work much of what I’d done. I killed off the boring main protagonist (when he was only a baby!) and brought the minor character to the fore. I now have 58,000 words and a LOT of work to do.
At the beginning of June, I wrote that I’d uploaded Bedsit Three to Smashwords in order to get it into the Overdrive store, from which many public libraries purchase e-books. Once I could see it available in Overdrive, I went to my local library to ask for the contact details of Birmingham’s e-book buyer so that I could make myself known as a local author. Unfortunately, I was told that there was no budget at all for new books – not even e-books. On the plus side, they were receptive to the idea of an author event and (fingers crossed) will be contacting me in September when all the school holiday activities are over.
A couple of weeks ago, I launched a price promotion on Kindle for Bedsit Three. I reduced it from £2.25 to 99p for 2 weeks. I calculated that I needed to sell 4.5 times as many books at 99p as at £2.25 to make it a viable long-term price point. That number of sales hasn’t materialised so, barring a sudden surge today (30th June 2016) the price will rise again tomorrow.
And finally, I was pleased to receive a gift from Iain Pattison this week – a paperback copy of That’s Why The Lady is a Vamp. It’s a collection of off-beat comedy tales, full of unexpected twists and lots of humour. Plus, the high spot is a guest appearance by yours truly! If you’d like a free e-copy of one of Iain’s books pop along to his website now.
So that’s me. Anyone else got any news?
Publishing on Smashwords
Posted by Sally Jenkins in Computers & Technical, Promotion, Self-publishing on June 2, 2016
This week I spent a few hours uploading the psychological thriller Bedsit Three to Smashwords.
Smashwords is the world’s largest distributor of independently-published e-books. It also sells directly to the public in a variety of e-book formats. I decided to use Smashwords in order to make Bedsit Three available for libraries to add to their e-book collections. Many libraries worldwide use Overdrive to source their e-books and the only way for an indie author to make a book available on Overdrive is to go through Smashwords (as I mentioned before in my post about the 2016 Self-publishing Conference).
Smashwords accepts a Word document which it then puts through its ‘meatgrinder’ to change into .epub format – so no great technical knowledge is needed on the author’s part. However, I hit a couple of snags during the uploading process.
Firstly I tried uploading a .docx document, this was rejected because Smashwords only accepts .doc documents i.e. those created by older editions of Word. So I had to use the ‘Save As’ function to save my document and change it from .docx to .doc.
Secondly, when I previewed the .epub produced via the ‘meatgrinder’ there was a blank page between every chapter. It took me a bit of fiddling and Googling to solve this one. I had to remove the page breaks between chapters (which Amazon and Kobo had seemed quite happy with) and replace with a few carriage returns. I think this is because Smashwords automatically inserts its own page break when it comes to a chapter heading.
The Overdrive catalogue is updated from Smashwords each Tuesday, so Bedsit Three should appear there by the middle of next week. If you’d like to read Bedsit Three for free please ask your library to add it to their e-book collection.
Incidentally, authors don’t receive PLR on borrowed e-books, they only get the one-off royalty for a single sale.
Click to preview
A girl has been buried in a shallow grave. Rain starts to wash away the earth covering her.
A used pregnancy test and a scrap book about a suicide are abandoned in a bedsit.
Every mother tries to do her best for her child. But sometimes that ‘best’ creates a monster.
Bedsit Three is a tale of murder, mystery and love. It won the inaugural Wordplay Publishing/Ian Govan Award and was shortlisted for both the Silverwood-Kobo-Berforts Open Day Competition and the Writing Magazine/McCrit Competition.
Available on Amazon, Kobo and Smashwords.
Sally Jenkins 