Quote:
Originally Posted by caleb72
I'm definitely not a professional ebook creator so bear with me a little. I am interested in what you're talking about with Smashwords from an academic point of view.
If you make a Smashwords edition - fitting all their criteria, do they pass on that work automatically for B&N and iTunes? Would that make it so you'd only need one ePub?
I hope that's not an extraordinarily stupid question, but I thought that was meant to be one of the advantages of submitting to Smashwords. If it's not that simple, then I wonder what the advantage of Smashwords actually is for content creators. I always thought Meatgrinder looked a bit painful for someone unless they were going to get the advantage of all distribution channels (iTunes, B&N, Amazon etc..)
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Arguably, it would, except that most of my clients are sophisticated enough in that they know that they're already paying 50% to Apple and 30% to B&N, and don't want to pay another 14% to Smashwords, so they upload themselves directly to B&N and those who can (Mac owners), upload directly to Apple. What most of my clients want is distro to the much smaller retailers like Diesel, etc., that they can't get to without distro or an Aggregator.
I have a few that can't upload to Apple directly, so they want distro there (at least, until they've got a year with iBooks under their belt and have seen what type of sales it garners), and yes, those folks would then ONLY need two; one for B&N and one for SW.
The "advantage" of SW has been, over the past few years, primarily that people with books on Amazon use it as a tool to force Amazon to price-match to a free book. Most of the clients that we have who've asked us to make Word files from their final ePUB files to create SW books (prior to the great SW experiment) tell us that they're simply using the ability to set (mobi-formatted via Calibre) books to free on SW as a way to leverage Amazon into price-matching. {shrug}. That's all I really know, other than, what I see is not less than two ePUBs and now maybe three. I would expect very few of my clientele to actually use SW for distro to those outlets that they can do themselves, since this is, after all, business, and 14.25% is a good-sized chunk of cash.
Hitch