Smashwords e-books

Not only is Smashwords a nifty word, it's also a company/Web site where you can publish e-books in numerous formats. It's self-publishing, so using it for original works and then expecting anything to result from the effort is almost surely pointless. But it's one way to have your old novels in a more visible place than your own hard drive.

I've just put up my wife's novel, Apart from You:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/13715

And one my novels, Pit Planet:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/13760


I'll probably grind my way through all of my others, although the oldest ones exist only in hardcopy, not electronic form (because I wrote them on, gasp, typewriters!) and will therefore have to be scanned. Ugh.


(No, I'm not employed by them or paid for posting this. I thought it might be of interest to other authors on DU. I hope the mods won't consider this post to be advertising or soliciting for funds, but I realize that it might be viewed that way.)

Have been suggesting my mother do this with her book.

That's in addition to Kindle and various other formats.

I've been Googling about this for the last hour.

I'm in the midst of doing this now -- well, Kindle first, then smashwords. Do you, by any chance, have experience with a native PDF file, converted to Word, converted to html to upload to Kindle?

It's a friggin nightmare for me...:eyes:

If you do know how to do this, and have time and patience to help a fellow DUer, I'd be MOST grateful. :)


:hi:


On edit: I've been so focused on Kindle only, as we just got the release to do all digital publishing today, that I didn't realize I could upload to smashwords FIRST and it would go to Kindle. I need to do a lot more reading. The bottom line is that the manuscript being in PDF originally is causing a problem. I've converted it to Word, but still...the conversion process is a mess, I'm finding.

One of the nice things about Smashwords is that you feed them a Word file without any formatting. Their software takes it from there.

If you can get the file into Word, then you can upload it to Smashwords. PDF -> Word would be the tricky part, I'd think.

called Wordclay, so that you can also make a book available in printed form. I think that's also free, but I haven't investigated that end of it yet.

Books from both Smashwords and Wordclay show up on Amazon and BarnesAndNoble.com.

nice.

But since the space available on Smashwords for describing the book is limited (400 characters), I thought I should use that one. :)

Not only are my books at Smashwords, but I have been the editor of a book review site for several years. You can read more about my books at Nonfiction in a Fictional Style and my review site at PODBRAM. Thank you.

http://www.e-tabitha.com/

http://podbram.blogspot.com/

And welcome to DU.

that you can read the first half of each book for free, using those URLs.

Smashwords lets you choose how much of your book you want to make available as a free sample. They recommend at least 50%, which surprised me, but they claim that if someone actually reads 50% of a book for free, they're very likely to pay to read the whole thing. That makes sense, I guess. If you like a book enough to keep reading half of it, you'll probably want to read all of it.