WALTER'S BLOG

PUBLISHING AN E-BOOK  PART  TWO

Everyone is familiar with Amazon and Kindle, but have you heard of Smashwords, and heard why should we use them?

Smashwords is a free service that converts your book to eleven different formats. These formats will fit on different e-readers. If you want to see which ones, go to the Smashwords Publishing web site and select any title. When you go to the book’s home page, scroll down and you will see the e-reader formats available.

TIME SAVER

You could go to all the different e-book readers, including the smart phones, and upload your book making sure it was formatted correctly for each reader--or you can let Smashwords do it. If Smashwords does it, they’ll charge a few cents per sold book. They will also check your formatting and distribute your book to all the different e-readers and sell it from their site. If you have no sales, you have no charges.

They also will supply an ISBN number which you need for Sony and Apple. Smashwords has a variety of ISBN payment plans including some that cost nothing. I picked one that costs just under ten dollars. And I pay for that number with the money received from the sale of my books.  

YOUR SALES TOOL

To publish on Smashwords you go to their site, choose PUBLISH at the top of the page and follow the directions. The only difference from Amazon is they ask for two summaries, one of 400 characters and another not to exceed 4000 characters. These summaries should be your sale tool for the book. I use the description on my query letter.  Again at the proper point they will ask you to both upload your cover and your manuscript.

In the next post we will talk about formatting