I’ve offered free promotions for my books before and have always used Smashwords.com because it’s so easy to do. The results, however, have been less than stellar and I’m wondering if Smashwords.com is one of the problems.
Do you have a preference about which site you download from?
It would also be helpful if you left a comment to let me know why you prefer one site over the other.
Thanks for the feedback!
© Copyright 2013 by Kevin Fraleigh.
Just thought I’d let you know, I much prefer Amazon to anything else. I’m a Kindle owner, so obviously Amazon is the easiest thing for me to use. I don’t actually visit any other eBook sites unless I know there’s something there I desperately want that I can’t get on Amazon.
I prefer Smashwords because I just buy and download direct to my PC. Much easier. As a Linux user, my ONLY option with Amazon is the web reader (no downloads unless you have their proprietary app installed or a Kindle).
So with Amazon, I can’t take my ebooks with me.
Plus, with Smashwords, you can sell anywhere in the world, the author gets a higher royalty on ALL sales, even 99 cent ones (Amazon is still 35% in many stores and also only 35% if your price is below $2.99 or above $9.99). On Smashwords, you can buy in whatever format you want (PDF, epub, mobi, plain text if you want it)…
Smashwords has coupons authors can use for promotions without permanent price changes and the affiliate program means affiliates earn at least 11% on affiliate sales — authors can increase affiliate percentage as high as they want to generate more sales and promotion through other sites (Amazon pays 4% I think and eliminates your affiliate earnings if “too many” free books are downloaded through your referrals).
I really believe Smashwords does A LOT of things right and has potential to be a huge outlet…I think many authors overlook the marketing potential of coupons, affiliate codes and worldwide sales with Smashwords.
— Bill Smith
http://www.BillSmithBooks.com