Friday, March 2, 2012

A new retail outlet for self-published authors

It looks like Smashwords must have been working on the deal with Baker & Taylor for some time. I say that because I noticed that not only does my Smashwords Sales & Payment Report now hold a line for Baker & Taylor sales (mine says 0, naturally), but the Distribution Channel Manager (also accessible from the left panel of the Dashboard) shows that my three novels have already shipped to Baker & Taylor.

Baker & Taylor are the distributors for Blio, free ereader software that runs on many devices and supports many aspects of the typography of the printed page without locking in page layout, like PDF. A search for my name in the Blio ebookstore yields no results, however, so it might be a while yet before that zero changes to something more positive. I had never visited the Blio bookstore before.  Interestingly enough, it does not allow you to sort by price, only by popularity, title, author, and date. It does offer a genre filter, though, which is nice for those of use who read and/or write in a specific genre.

A related feature of the Baker & Taylor deal is that it will also make Smashwords books available to libraries. I think that's totally cool!  Kudos to Mark Coker for making it happen!

2 comments:

  1. well this is interesting I will definetly have to check it out1 on another note the cover art for sixh dicipline and no safe haven is awesome!

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  2. On behalf of the cover artist, thanks for the compliment! Monica Jorgensen is doing my next novel cover, too. I will post it soon.

    I do think the Baker & Taylor deal looks like it has a lot of potential, especially as so many big publishers are either refusing to sell ebooks to libraries or charging incredible amounts of money for them.

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