Smashwords Sale!

It's July, which means Smashwords summer sale is on. All my books for sale through Smashwords are either half price or free!

Check it out!

Turnabout is now in other ebook stores!

I always launch new ebooks in KDP Select, which means they're only available on Amazon, but eventually, I let that enrollment expire and launch in other stores.  That has happened with my newest novel Turnabout, now available as follows:

Buy links

US Kindle store (also available in every other Kindle store)
iBooks

B&N Nook, 

Kobo

Smashwords

Google Books  

And as a paperback: Amazon, Barnes & Noble

Updated: Finally got Google Books to accept my file; or rather, their tech staff did. I have to say both B&N and Google Books could make their interface easier to use.

From the first Amazon review:

"This is a fascinating story, looking at a lot of society’s issues from a different view point, but still exploring them in a very interesting way. Buxton creates some wonderful characters to tell this story. Marjani and Esi are two that stand out amongst a cast of exceptionally well written characters that don’t just tell this story, but through their portrayals give us a true understanding of what it is like to live in this alternate universe.
Buxton has also done an interesting job of creating Makoro, building this alternate universe and timeline, and how it has evolved under such different circumstances."

And, as a bonus, I dropped the ebook price to $2.99, at least for now.

Smashwords Summer sale is on!

Smashwords is an ebook retailer and distributor. Authors and small press publishers use Smashwords to sell their books on that site, and to push them out to retail partners, like iBooks, B&N Nook store, Kobo, and others. The summer sale lasts through the end of July and applies only to sales directly from Smashwords. However, since they provide ebooks in both epub and Kindle formats, it's not limiting to buy from them. Their FAQ has lots of info on how to get the ebook file to your Kindle or other ereader.

All my books on Smashwords (which is all my titles except for Turnabout) are either free or half price ($1.50 instead of $2.99) during this sale. Check out my Smashwords author page to see my books or browse the catalog of sale books. Use the special coupon code (e.g., SSW50 for half price books) when you check out.

Please post a comment here if you have any questions on or problems with the sale.

And have a happy 4th of July!

E-Book Sale!

Read an eBook Week starts Sunday, March 5, 2017, and in honor of that Smashwords is running a huge promotion. A lot of ebooks are on sale, including mine.

 If you're not familiar with Smashwords, it's a site that allows authors to publish and sell their ebooks globally.  Authors can opt to also push their books out to iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and a bunch of  other more well known book vendors, but those sites are not where the sale is happening. Smashwords itself sells directly to readers, allowing a choice of non-DRM'd books in a wide variety of formats, and that's where the sale is.

To promote ereading, Smashwords makes it easy for authors to put their books on sale, as they offer the use f coupon codes at checkout, and I've taken advantage of that. If you use the promotional coupon, you can buy any of my books this week only for half price (except for The Sixth Discipline, which is always free, and my fantasy novella Where Magic Rules, which is free this week only). .

Once you buy a book from Smashwords, you can download it, and read it on pretty much any device. If you have a Kindle, be sure to select that format (Mobi/Kindle), and download the file to a location on your PC where you can find it again. I have directions for putting Mobi files onto your Kindle here and here.

You can browse the sale page by genre to see what all they've got. Some books will be free and others really cheap.

Remember, all mine are either free or only $1.50, but you have to use the coupon code RAE50 for the non-free titles..

eBook Self-publishing Platforms: go wide or go narrow?

Barnes & Noble has not done that well with their Nook ereader and tablet sales, certainly not compared to Kindle sales. Of course, like Amazon, they offer an app version for reading on other devices, like PCs, iPads, Android tablets, and phones. The Windows 8 version I have on my laptop is actually pretty nice, once you figure out that you have to right-click to get to the menus.  Interestingly, Nook sales of my books have crept up lately, and they're now about the same (or sometimes better) than my Kindle sales, which was surprising in light of the reported recent bad Nook news.

Barnes & Noble now offers a nice direct-to-Nook self-publishing platform in Nook Press.  One thing it offers is the ability to edit the epub file, and republish a corrected version if you need to. Amazon offers something similar, but only if you uploaded an HTML file, not if you uploaded a Kindle-formatted *.azw file. Some of my B&N books are actually coming from Smashwords, because before Nook Press, the B&N platform didn't offer much of an advantage. Ergo, only No Safe Haven, Tribes, and King of Trees are on the Nook Press platform itself; the others are being published  to the Nook store via Smashwords, which lets you push your books to many vendors. And of course, The Sixth Discipline has to stay as a Smashwords book because that's why it can be free.  Like Amazon's KDP platform, B&N's Nook Press won't let you make a book free forever. Smashwords does, and B&N and most other retailers make their price whatever the Smashwords price is, even if that price is zero cents.  

The one self-publishing platform I have not tried is Kobo's Writing Life. My Kobo sales via Smashwords have never encouraged me to make the effort to check them out. But whether you use individual retailers' platforms or Smashwords, I would urge all self-published authors to consider carefully before sticking with any one platform exclusively, even Kindle. The more outlets you have, the better your chances are of finding readers, and that's why we're all in this game.  

Finally! The Nostalgia Gambit is now available in iBooks!

Such a time I have had, getting my sixth book into the iBooks store! Finally, it's there! And it only took me over two months of trying.

That was sarcasm, by the way. My experience with this book was a good illustration of the difficulties in dealing with one retailer via another retailer. The folks at Apple don't make self-publishing easy, so I use Smashwords to get my books into the iBooks store.

In the past, Smashwords only accepted MS Word documents formatted with their specific styles. They had a program called the meat grinder that they used to create all the various formats they support (epub, Kindle, PDF, txt, etc). You uploaded your cover image and the Word file, and it took it from there. The books came out kind of vanilla, as far as style, but you got a valid epub file, and that was what made it possible to sell that book on the other retailer platforms. All the major online bookstores except Kindle rely on epub format.

If the epub book had an ISBN and made it into the Smashwords premium catalog (which meant it was well formatted) then it could be sent to iBooks. It sometimes took a week or two to show up but it arrived. Smashwords tries to be responsive to their authors, and when people asked to be able to upload epub directly, they made that possible as of the last day of of 2012.  You can now upload an epub copy and an MS Word copy to Smashwords, and they will use the epub for all the non-Amazon online vendors. The book still has to say “Smashwords Edition” in the front matter, but otherwise it doesn't need to be different from any standard epub file.

Now iBooks has gotten pickier about their book covers. The cover image appears inside the book, as part of the epub file, and it gets uploaded as a separate file for use as on the store's web pages. Apple appears to have changed the rules about what resolution the image can be; too low or too high a resolution, and iBooks won't accept it. Smashwords must have realized this because when I uploaded an epub copy of my seventh book King of Trees, it told me right away that the cover image with the file was too low res. I got that cover artist to supply a different version and the book was delivered soon after and showed up in the iBooks store in a few days.

With  TNG, though, it had passed epub review and gotten into the premium catalog with no trouble, and had shipped to Apple right away, but it never showed up in the iBooks store. I tried emailing Smashwords and they just tried to redeliver it for me.  Still no TNG in iBooks. Eventually, I clicked the link to pull it from Apple, which makes Smashwords send a takedown notice, and once that was sent, I clicked Distribute again, but it would not ship to Apple!  I emailed again, and this time the person investigated and told me the problem was the cover image inside the book was too high a resolution! I got the artist (different artist from KoT) to give me a lower res image and then had that re-inserted into the epub file. Once it was all straight, the book was there in a matter of days.

Victory at last!

Update on my books

Smashwords status for The Nostalgia Gambit:

My sixth book The Nostalgia Gambit is still for sale in the Kindle store, but it's no longer in the KDP Select program. I have therefore uploaded it to Smashwords, where it is now for sale. Smashwords is an ebook-only retailer that's a great venue for self-published authors, not so much because people buy books there (although some do), but because Smashwords allows authors to selectively sell their books through the iBooks, Nook, Sony, Deisel, and Blio ebookstores, too, just by clicking a few buttons. Smashwords handles the delivery, paperwork, and collection of royalties (they get a very small percentage).

Of course, the ebook has to be well-formatted for this to happen; Smashwords will not send an ebook to a retailer/partner site if it has crappy formatting. They review each book, and TNG is now in the review stage. Smashwords has gotten much faster about that; it used to take a week or two, but now it's usually a few days. The ebook also has to have an ISBN to be sold in other stores, but Smashwords will provide one if the author doesn't have one.

Smashwords used to accept only an MS Word file, formatted to their specific guidelines; their upload program (commonly known as “the meat grinder”) would take the Word file and convert it to Mobi/Kindle format, epub (used by almost all ereaders except Kindle), PDF, and even RTF. The meat grinder produced clean, readable ebooks, but every Smashwords ebook had the same (rather boring) style. On the very last day of 2012, Smashwords began accepting epub; if you upload an epub file that meets their standards, they will use that copy to send to all the vendor partners you select. Of course, if you also want folks to be able to get a Kindle, RTF, or PDF version of the book from Smashwords, you still need to upload a Word file with the proper formatting.

I had a delay of several days in getting my epub file uploaded to Smashwords, because in addition to proper epub coding they wanted specific text (“Smashwords edition”) on the copyright page. That's all taken care of now, and I'm hoping the review process goes smoothly and swiftly! Note added:  TNG made it to the premium catalog in only 3 days! It should be "shipped" to the B&N, iBooks, Sony and other ebookstores very soon.

Status for King of Trees"

I need to keep King of Trees (ebook #7) in KDP select until about the first week in May. After that, I plan to also load it to Smashwords, and push it out to Nook, iBooks, Sony, and all the available vendors. Until then, it is for sale on in the Kindle store, but if you have a Kindle, or a Kindle Fire, and you have Amazon Prime, you can borrow it for free!

Did Smashwords update all the big retailers at once?

I haven't been checking sales reports on Smashwords lately, so I don't know if they did them all on one day or three days in a row, but there are now new sales reported for Sony, Apple iBooks, and Barnes & Noble. I did best on iBooks as usual, with Barnes & Noble next and Sony last.

As on Amazon. No Safe Haven is selling the best, but Shades of Empire isn't that far behind it. Also, I have more sales in the US than anywhere else. I wish I knew how The Sixth Discipline (free book!) was doing on all those platforms but B&N is the only one that lists numbers for free books (except maybe Sony, and I haven't got a free book with them yet).

Not again! Smashwords problems

Smashwords is a small company compared to Amazon or Barnes & Noble, and sometimes it shows. Right now they appear to be having some server issues. I was trying to look at my sales numbers and I got a Server Overloaded error. After several minutes I tried and got in okay, but when I tried to see my dashboard (where free and sample downloads are reported), I got a weird, badly formatted version of that page.

Well, with any luck it just means they're updating their retailer info.  Here's hoping!

Shades of Empire now in more outlets!

Apple has won the race again. My newest title Shades of Empire is now available in iBooks as well as  Kindle and Smashwords. No sign of it on the Nook yet, or Sony or Kobo, but that's not a surprise as they don't even have Where Magic Rules yet, and it has been out for a few weeks more than Shades.

The Survivors

A friend of mine is a science fiction fan from way back. She has read most of my novels, and she gives me grief whenever I kill off a character. And yet, she once recommended the Tom Godwin sci-fi classic (1958!) novel The Survivors to me.  In spite of the name, the kill rate in that book is worthy of Stephen King.

The story didn't work for me mostly because from the vantage point of a few extra decades I could see the Cold War polemic nature of the story— no matter how hard you try, you can't kill us off! But it did provide an illustration of the point that when you are threatened by a radical shift in your environment, you have to act fast to survive; whining does no good at all.

Smashwords is a good illustration of the fact that forward-thinking actions work better than backward-looking wailing about change. Smashwords is a self-publishing platform for ebooks that started as something of a shoestring operation in 2008 with 140 titles. In fact, it started because Mark Coker, the founder and CEO, had had no luck getting a nonfiction book (written by him and his wife) published, and that made him assess the state of publishing. Smashwords managed to make a profit after only two years in operation because Coker realized that he (and his authors) could make more money selling ebooks through more established retail outlets like iBooks, Sony, and Barnes and Noble than by expecting readers to find his site. According to an article in Forbes, Smashwords expects to pull in $12 million in revenue this year and make a pretax profit of near $1 million. That's rapid growth!

And Smashwords is so not standing still! They're up to 127,000 titles, and they keep adding retail outlets. Recently they added a channel to sell ebooks to libraries. They do all this and still manage to review every book that is loaded to their platform to make sure the formatting isn't garbage; a book can't go into the premium catalog (and thus to retail outlets) if it looks bad. As I posted about earlier, they can get a book that has passed review onto iBooks in just over a week, and my latest title took only three days to make the premium catalog! The only problem they have (aside from slow sales reports back from retailers) is they need to redesign their distribution channel screen.  It's getting crowded!

Amazon is one of their outlets, but that company has not yet developed a bulk load process for Smashwords so the only Smashwords books on Amazon are the big sellers. Most authors are better off using KDP to publish in the Kindle store and using Smashwords for the other retailers.

In short, a tiny start-up has become a success by looking around, realizing publishing had changed, and taking advantage of the changes. Smashwords is a survivor!

Where Magic Rules made the Premium Catalog!

That was pretty quick! Maybe it was because it was only a novella, but Where Magic Rules is already in the Premium Catalog on Smashwords, which means now it can be “shipped” to retailers like Barnes & Noble, Sony, and Apple iBooks. Smashwords is very good about maintaining quality formatting in their ebooks; they review every book that is loaded and they won't ship it (it sounds odd to talk about shipping a digital file) unless the formatting is clean.

The book was loaded to Smashwords only 8 days ago. I'll be curious to see how long the next step takes.

The dragon in Where Magic Rules has taken flight!

My fantasy novella Where Magic Rules is now available in the Smashwords ebookstore as well as in the Kindle store. It will take a while to load to all the affiliated retailers.  I'll post when it shows up. And because it's a novella, it's only 99¢.

Retailer Update

Looks like Smashwords updated their Apple iBooks numbers last night. That's just over a month since the last time, which is pretty much what Smashwords advertises as their retailer update schedule.

iBooks does not show a count for free books, though, so I can't see how many copies of The Sixth Discipline I have given away in iBooks. It's over 1,000 now in the Kindle store, and a few hundred on the Nook, but the Barnes & Noble numbers are out of date by a month or so. Smashwords lists free downloads in with the sample downloads, so it's hard to get a total count, but the book is free there, too!

No news is not good news

I just checked Sony, Kobo, and Blio ebookstores, and The Sixth Discipline is still not free on any of them. I can find plenty of free Smashwords book in the Sony store, so I think they are just slow to make the change. The Kobo store doesn't seem to have any Smashwords books below 99¢, so I think they simply don't support price matching to $0.00. Blio doesn't have a good way to search or sort for free Smashwords books, and they are very new, so I have no clue what their policy is.

I guess time will tell.

There is no grass growing under Mark Coker's feet!

Mark Coker is the founder and head of Smashwords. He recently cut a deal with Baker & Taylor to provide Smashwords content to them for distribution to libraries and for the Blio platform, and now I see that another vendor has appear in the Distribution Channel Manager screen:  Page Foundry. It doesn't look like my books have shipped yet, but unless I opt out, they will.

I never heard of Page Foundry, but more places to sell books has to be a good thing!

Addendeum: Smashwords has posted more info about this new (Android) platform on their blog.

Diesel catches up!

The Sixth Discipline is now free in the Diesel bookstore, too! That puts them in third place in the price-matching race, behind iBooks and Nook (only one day later than Nook). No change yet on Kobo, Sony or Blio.  Blio is so new, I don't know if they will price match if the book is free on Smashwords. Sony will, but they seem to take a while to make changes.  But considering I made the book free on Smashwords on June 11, I think this is a vast improvement over what response time was last year.  I don't know if it was Smashwords or the vendors who made the changes, but it is definitely faster now.

The Sixth Discipline is free on the Nook!

I just checked Barnes & Noble, and The Sixth Discipline is now free in the Nook store! That means Nook came in second to iBooks in the race to match the Smashwords price change. Also, it means you can make a book free on Nook if you use Smashwords to publish. You cannot do that via the Pub-It platform, which, like KDP, sets 99¢ as the lowest level price authors can charge.

Any Nook users out there, head on over and pick it up now!

Sibling rivalry

In some ways, my books are like my children. I decided I was spending too much time on my Amazon offspring and not giving enough attention to their other-platform siblings. Ergo, I made The Sixth Disciple free on Smashwords. The new "price" takes effect right away on Smashwords but it can takes days or weeks for the change to filter out to their affiliated retail sites.

I'll monitor the other platforms and report when TSD shows up as free on any of them. It will be interesting to see what happens on Blio. I don't know if they allow authors to make books free or not.  I guess we'll find out!

Finally!

Smashwords has updated their Apple sales figures. For the first time, my US iBooks sales beat my Commonwealth (Canadian, UK, and Australian) sales. Oh, and Smashwords updated Barnes & Noble sales figures a while ago, but I never have as many sales there, so I don't stress about that.