Hello, world!

I check my blog's stats every so often and a recent trend is that people are finding it by searching Google in other (non-US) countries. Recent hits have come from Bulgaria, Hong Kong and India, as well as the more expected UK, Canada and Australia.  My most popular posts are those that give Kindle tips, especially the ones on putting non-Amazon books on a Kindle, so I suspect that Kindles being sold in other countries are driving much of my blog traffic.

On the other hand, I actually see more diverse foreign sales from Apple iBooks (via Smashwords) than any other retailer. Between Kindle, Apple, and Sony, I have sold books in India, New Zealand, and Australia, as well as the UK, Canada, Austria, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands. The French don't seem to be interested in my books, but then, I'm not French and I write in English, so no surprise there.

It's totally cool to think of having readers around the world!

Free at last (on Sony)!

At long last Sony has made The Sixth Discipline free! It looks like it kept the one review it had there, which is nice. I was afraid that would disappear when I took it down and reloaded it with the new price of zero dollars.

And it only took six months. (*sarcasm alert*)

One more try

I'm still trying to get The Sixth Discipline to be free on Sony. Supposedly, Sony matches whatever price I set on Smashwords, but it has been months since I made the book free on Smashwords, and as of a few weeks ago, it was still 99¢ on Sony. After several attempts at reshipping it didn't work, I decided the only thing left to try was to actually take it down from Sony and then to re-ship it. It's supposed to be shipped again soon, so we will see if that works.

Fingers crossed!

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.

Sales figures from other retailers: slow is better than not at all

Like the KDP and PubIt platforms, Smashwords reports sales on their own platform very quickly. For all three of them, you see any and all sales within hours or even minutes.

For sales via Smashwords other retailers though, reporting time varies tremendously. I've copied the chart (below) that I see in the Smashwords Sales and Payment Report to show you what I mean. Note the second column in the table, which shows the date for which sales are reported for that retailer. Barnes & Noble is the quickest, followed by Sony and Kobo, but Apple and Diesel are way behind, with Amazon bringing up the rear (except of course I'll never see Amazon numbers in this table because I'm selling direct via KDP). The fourth column shows actual dollar amounts for any sales not already reflected in my Smashwords balance (i.e., money that will be due to me from Smashwords after they get it from the retailers).  All data is as of today, but I've zeroed out all the last column numbers.

When I looked at the sales and payment report in my Smashwords Dashboard, below this chart is a much longer and more detailed one showing sales by date and by vendor. It's actually pretty informative in terms of what titles are selling well, and in some cases, where.  Apple and Kobo show the country where the sale was made.and all of them give you the price paid and the date.

Smashwords pays quarterly, assuming you have enough royalty coming to you. If you're at all interested, you should check out their Payment and Royalties FAQ.