PAUL SAMAEL

A rather terse email from Feedbooks confirming that - as I had suspected for a while - it is dead as a self-publishing platform.  Not very impressed that I had to contact them to ask what was going on - they didn't see fit to email any of the many hundreds of authors who have contributed to their platform, nor have they even bothered to put up a notice on their website about their decision.  And they could at least have provided an explanation.

The site had been going downhill for a few years, so it doesn't come as that much of a surprise.  But I am sad that they didn't see fit to continue with it as a self-publishing platform (they appear to be concentrating on paid-for books from conventional publishers only).   It had a nice clean interface and for a while, when I first started my little adventure in self-publishing, I got quite a few downloads through it.  Also, as Smashwords has demonstrated, it is perfectly possible for "free" and "paid for" books to coexist on the same platform - indeed, the free offer can help to attract users to the site in the first place. (By the way, for anyone who's anxious about whether Smashwords might be about to follow Feedbooks into the elephant's graveyard of defunct self-publishing platforms, my impression is that this is not the case - the site has just had a revamp and when I along with various other authors queried the lack of visibility given to free ebooks, they took action to correct this - which is very much to their credit in my view).

Feedbooks is by no means the first self-publishing site to go the way of all flesh - as can be seen from the fates of 2 other platforms that I tried out, Bookiejar and Bibliotastic.  I guess the lesson is that it's worth periodically reviewing whether you should put your work up on other platforms, with a view to making sure it remains accessible to readers.  If you're happy to make your work available for free, another site that may be worth looking at is Obooko (which, like Smashwords, has recently been revamped - so will hopefully outlive Feedbooks).  And maybe the time has come for me to have another crack at Wattpad, despite my past sniffiness about it....  I also really need to do something about drawing some attention to the existence of my novel on Amazon - the trouble is, it involves emailing lots of book promotion sites, and I just haven't found the time.