Showing Tag: " smashwords" (Show all posts)

What does the Draft2Digital / Smashwords merger mean for authors?

Posted by Paul Samael on Sunday, February 13, 2022, In : Self-publishing

What are we to make of the recent announcement that Draft2Digital is acquiring competing self-publishing outfit Smashwords? Initially, I was a bit concerned because as an author, Smashwords has been the best performing platform for me over the years - and I wouldn't want to see it go the way of others which have closed down (like Feedbooks, BookieJar and Bibliotastic).

But as I understand it, Draft2Digital primarily competes with Smashwords when it comes to helping authors create ebooks and d...
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Taking stock

Posted by Paul Samael on Sunday, January 6, 2013, In : Self-publishing

It’s now more than 18 months since I set up this website and over a year since my first attempt at self-publishing. So I thought now might be a good point to consider whether it’s been a worthwhile exercise so far.

Downloads are a fairly crude measure of success/failure – but for what it’s worth, here are my numbers as at 6 January 2013:

UPDATE 8.2014: I have now discovered that the stats from Scribd are pretty unreliable, so in the interests of accuracy, you should ignore the totals...
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A review - at last!

Posted by Paul Samael on Monday, June 18, 2012, In : Writing fiction

My thanks to Bernard Fancher for his generous review of "Agricultural Production in the Sudan" on Smashwords (I would thank him in person but don't have a contact email for him). Sites like Smashwords depend on people like Bernard taking the time to submit reviews in order to help readers work out what might interest them and what's worth downloading in amongst the ever-increasing mass of self-published material. I hope he will not mind me quoting the review in full here:

"I just finished re...
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Feedbooks - better than Smashwords?

Posted by Paul Samael on Thursday, May 17, 2012, In : Self-publishing

UPDATE 5.2019: Sadly, Feedbooks has recently closed down its self-publishing platform - see this post. Which is a shame because, in its heyday, Feedbooks performed quite well in terms of downloads (see below). If you are looking at this because you are interested in self-publishing platforms generally, I would still recommend Smashwords - and for some other suggestions, take a look at my guide to self-publishing.

Just uploaded couple of short stories to F eedbooks, to see how they do - and w...
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BookieJar.com - worth a shot?

Posted by Paul Samael on Saturday, December 17, 2011, In : Self-publishing

UPDATE 8.2016: Bookiejar no longer seems to be operating, so you might not want to bother reading what follows.

Just published "The Hardest Word" on another platform, BookieJar.com, which seems to be offering itself as a rival to Smashwords (although there's nothing to stop you publishing on both, which is exactly what I've done). Click here to view.

The publishing process was very straightforward - I was able to take the version I'd used for uploading to Smashwords, change the front materi...
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Bringing bankers to book

Posted by Paul Samael on Tuesday, December 13, 2011, In : Random thoughts

The UK Financial Services Authority has just published its report into what went wrong at Royal Bank of Scotland (and what went wrong at the FSA too). I was interested to see that in the foreword to the report - which is quite a short read - FSA Chairman Adair Turner argues that we need to look at ways of ensuring that in future bankers can be brought to book for this kind of economic disaster (because as he acknowledges, hardly any of them have been held to account this time around). The ...
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The Hardest Word

Posted by Paul Samael on Friday, November 25, 2011, In : Writing fiction

Just published a short story, “The Hardest Word” on smashwords.com. Very impressed with how straightforward the whole process was – you just need to be prepared to put in some time formatting the book correctly in MS Word (the smashwords guidelines explain what you need to do and are extremely clear). This was a dry run for making my novel available as an ebook, also via smashwords (the key advantage being that it makes the book available in almost all major ebook formats). If you...
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My self-publishing "masterplan" (hmmm...we'll see)

Posted by Paul Samael on Monday, October 3, 2011, In : Self-publishing

So, how do I propose to self-publish my work and avoid sinking without a trace beneath the mind-bogglingly vast number of other books which are published every year? Well, here - for what it’s worth - is my masterplan (or, if you prefer, the pitifully deluded ravings of a sociopath determined to inflict his mindless drivel on the rest of us):

1. Get some reviews: if you’re an unknown author, I don’t think you can expect people to read your stuff unless you have some decent reviews fro...

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Paul Samael

Welcome to my blog, "Publishing Waste" which will either (a) chronicle my heroic efforts to self-publish my own fiction; or (b) demonstrate beyond a scintilla of doubt the utter futility of (a). And along the way, I will also be doing some reviews of other people's books and occasionally blogging about other stuff.

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