Smashwords update

[julesjones]

Just a quick update on the short story, Naked, I uploaded to Smashwords 2 weeks ago, on 28 October 2012. So far it's been downloaded 169 times, and been added to 16 personal libraries. It's been reviewed 3 times, all in the first couple of days. For future reference, it's been free all of that time (and I don't intend to charge for it in the future, it's advertising), and the keywords I uploaded it with are: erotica, gay, bdsm, mm, ds, shaving, shaving erotica, bdsm shaving

It was approved for the Premium catalogue (i.e. third party distribution) on 31 October, and hadn't shown up anywhere else as far as I could see when I checked last Sunday (4 November). Today I can find it at

Barnes & Noble, where the cover is missing
Apple iTunes
Deisel (where I needed to use the advanced search to track it down).

I can't yet find it at Sony or Kobo.

It won't show up at Amazon, because Amazon isn't taking most of the Smashwords output. And I can't put it up myself, because it's free, and Amazon requires a minimum price of 99c or local equivalent.

Hope this is useful for any of you wondering about using Smashwords to distribute stuff. I'd planned to do "One Size Fits All" this weekend as a 99c short by way of comparison, but I've a) been sidetracked by Picowrimo, b) had a nasty outbreak of the RSI today. That amount of mousing would be a Really Bad Idea. Maybe next weekend, depending on how I feel.

Comments

[aquakitty1864.livejournal.com]

Wow! Congratulations! Are you sure you can't publish it on amazon? I've gotten a lot of free books from amazon.

[julesjones]

You can't put something up on Amazon as a free book. What you can do is put it up with a cover price at or above their minimum, and then enter it into Kindle Select, where you are allowed to drop the price to free as a promotion -- *if* you agree to completely remove it from all other distributors for at least three months.

The other thing that may be going on with the books you've seen is that the Amazon contract gives them the right to price-match to the lowest price anywhere else on the web, and they do this very aggressively. So if a book is listed for free anywhere else, Amazon will drop their price to free as soon as their bot notices. They can be fairly tardy about putting the price back up again, so a week-long promo somewhere else can result in a much longer free period on Amazon.