I'm back at Smashwords

 

 It's quite a few years since I gave up on Smashwords. I found loading books to Amazon was easy, simply using MS Word's structure for headings, paragraphs and the like. But to load a book to Smashwords, I basically had to start again, ditching all those lovely headings and replacing them with laboriously created hyperlinks. It was a time-consuming, frustrating pain in the posterior.

It's ironic, really, that Smashwords and Draft2Digital have kind of merged. Mark Coker's 'meatgrinder' – the software that massaged Word files into mobi, epub, pdf etc, was the reason the folks at D2D decided to produce a better product that took advantage of Word's structure. It recognized chapter headings and section breaks. When D2D arrived with a much, much easier alternative to Smashwords, like many others I gathered my gear and moved. I still publish all my books through D2D as well as Amazon. What's more, D2D produces a really good looking epub and mobi which we're then permitted to use on other platforms such as Google Play and Payhip.

Since Smashwords still has my email address, I received an email inviting me to participate in their July sale. I suck at marketing, so I figured I'd take a look. And I discovered that instead of submitting to the vagaries of the meatgrinder, I could simply upload an epub file.

The downside of that is if you load an epub, Smashwords does not create the other alternatives – the mobi, pdf, etc. That actually didn't bother me. Epub is the most widely used format for ebooks, so I was happy to stick with that. All my earlier books were still on my Smashwords account, albeit unpublished. I updated all of them with the latest epub and cover and reset the alternative formats so that only the epub was available. Then I uploaded the rest of my catalogue and put them into series. Using the Channel Manager, accessible from my Dashboard, for each book I switched off the distribution options that D2D already covered. I also added a link to the Smashwords version for each of my titles in D2D's Books2Read.

Then I added a few books to the July sale – notably my two permafree books, The Iron Admiral: Conspiracy and Black Tiger. 

It was a simple way of making my books available in more market places. The wider the better, don't you think? 

If you're interested in the Smashwords July sale, here's the link.

Cheers,

Greta