I just put my novella, Club Blood, on Smashwords. Their formatting requirements are a little more stringent than Amazon Kindle’s, but that’s because they offer the books in several different formats. And it has to look good on all of them! The great thing about Smashwords? You get 85% of your sales. Amazon only gives you 35%. So it was kind of a “duh” moment for me when I realized I should have my book on Smashwords, too. I probably won’t get the volume of sales I’m getting on Amazon, but I’ll be getting a bigger percentage of them. The good thing is I don’t have to choose between them. I can publish on both. See the beauty of self-publishing? No one can tell you that you can’t put your book in two different places! Or three…or four….
Dear Miss Elliott,
Please get in touch. I critique E-books, and will review them at my site — http://eternityroad.info — but only if the book has something to offer, and only if author wants such a critique or a review.
No, I don’t want money, now or later. I, too, publish at Smashwords. I think the best service decent writers can do one another is to help one another along, and publicize one another’s works when they deserve it.
From the sample, your “See Me” appears to be above the Smashwords median, so if you’d like me to do a review, drop me a note and we can discuss it.
All my best,
Francis W. Porretto
fwp@eternityroad.info
I will contact you soon concerning your offer to critique. I’m new at being visible on e-book sites and was a little cautious when I first saw your offer, so that’s why I took so long to answer. You’ll be hearing from me soon.
Lauralynn
I’m having a lot of trouble with Smashwords. When i upload a Word file, Smashwords’s converter changes the layout of the pages, causing big blanks and things to appear on wrong pages. My eBook is not a novel and includes a lot of pictures, and I am good with Word. But for some reason, I keep getting all these errors, and having to wait hours to get through the queue to find out that one thing is off is extremely frustrating. Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated! For instance, should I be setting Word’s margins to a certain size?
I’ve never tried to upload a book that has pictures, so I’m not sure why you’re having problems. I wish I could be of more help, but I’m sure books with pictures are harder to format. What type of errors is it saying you have? Does the Style Guide not have any good information on how to format when you have pictures?