Quote:
Originally Posted by Smashwords
Hi Daffy, thanks for the post here. Our catalog is small, a little over 100+ books from 50+ authors, and we're adding new authors and titles each week. Our focus is publishing indie authors, a.k.a self-published authors. Several months back when we launched our beta I posted a note about Smashwords here on MobileRead and invited folks to provide feedback, and the suggestions were excellent. Feedback always welcome! We iterate the site every day. A few days ago we added epub and .lrf support, so we'd love for people to help us test our formats and report bugs.
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Hi, I've been to smashwords and expected a ton of authors in my subgenre that I could shop from in OPEN formats. I also wanted to buy some romance ebooks as gifts for my sister's birthday-she likes simple, teen-oriented romances.
What i found was 1 story from 1 author in my genre, never mind there were no subgenres.
Romance books make up a large %age of books readers read, esp. erotic romance and the various subgenres like paranormal, historical, regency, short stories, scifi, futuristic, mythological, ancient, time travel, etc. So why am i only finding 1 book from 1 author in romance and it's not even heterosexual?? I mean, I understand you're a startup, but I could find more books in more variety with good authors at small e-publishers like amberquill or silksvault or ellora's cave or liquid silver books or linden bay romance and they also let me download in html, one of the simplest OPEN formats that allow me to move/store my ebooks wherever I want. I even get FREE romance ebooks at allromanceebooks which have good authors, so I
THINK you have to step up gathering of authors/stories and your marketing and have more open formats and enticements like free ebooks.
In fact, because of its vast selection and open formats, most of my ebook buying is at fictionwise which is much more to my liking than any of the other BIG ebookstores like the hard-to-navigate "books on board". (Of course, simonsays is pretty good too for price and easy navigation, but fictionwise has the selection)
I hope i don't sound harsh, just advisorial. I really SUPPORT indie authors because I feel AUTHORS should be getting the bulk of the profits and not big distribution but when there's not much of any selection and the format is not to my liking, I don't feel like shopping there as a consumer. (And i'm not sorry to say i'm you're average lazy consumer.)
So, again, I hope I don't sound harsh, just helpful.