The speed of Smashwords

[Dawson Vosburg]

XD

[VydorScope]

LOL sure feels like that... took over 3 weeks to get my latest book which had NO errors at all into the premium catalog and its still not "shipped" yet.... *sigh*

[micki]

I agree. I put mine up - after two weeks it was still pending approval. I hav subsequently taken it down - need to change the title. But in those two weeks - nothing happened.

[Abigail Lawrence]

It does take a lifetime. I don't know why either. I couldn't pass the criteria so I paid for someone to format it for me, it then went straight through..

[Dawson Vosburg]

I mean, seriously--they try to format a WORD document, the most incompatible format you can think of, into all of these different formats. Especially if you're not using Word itself, it's a real hassle doing anything.

And of course if you get one format to look good, the other ones look bad. I dunno why they chose that system. Especially when it takes that long to do the conversion just to find out you screwed something up.

[VydorScope]

Well the conversion happens pretty quick for me, while I wait even, but to get it in to the premium catalog takes weeks... almost a month on my last one.

[G J Lau]

And we pay Smashwords how much? Last time I looked, it was a free service. If you read and follow the Smashwords formatting guidelines, you will get premium distribution. I say that as someone who has had revisions rejected and knows how frustrating that can be. One nice benefit of all that work is you will be nicely set up to upload your work to Amazon's Kindle Distribution Program, which if my experience is any guide, is where the lion's share of your books will be purchased.

Bottom Line: Smashwords costs nothing, it distributes in all formats (try doing it yourself), and it gets you in better shape to upload to Amazon. That said, there are a couple of things I would tweak, but overall I can't complain.

[Ethan Holmes]

To all those fellow authors who have taken note of the significantly longer time it now takes to attain "premium catalog" distribution status; you should be aware the ebook industry is literally exploding. Unfortunately it has taken on an "american idol" like status where everyone now apparently believes they are an author. This is especially so if you can string more than three sentences together, preferably containing the words vampire and lesbian in them. (Tongue in cheek.) The result is the same as on the TV show; thousands of people jumping on the bandwagon in hopes of fame and fortune. There is no quality content control on the Internet save the ability of distributors such as Smashwords to control the format quality. Thus they are flooded with thousands of submissions a week now compared to a year ago when it took less than three days for the whole process on my first novel.
Lastly, Smashwords is most certainly not "FREE". They make a cut on each and every book in their catalog as is fair and proper.

[Dawson Vosburg]

And it being free is not reason enough to be slow and difficult--it's free. Great. There are other services that are free that are much faster and user-friendly. You're not competing with anyone who charges you up-front, so why would it being free be an excuse?

And, as Ethan says, they do indeed take money for each copy sold.

One of the things that bothers me to no end is that since you have to follow the style guide pretty much to the letter, you're REQUIRED to slog through twenty-two thousand words of formatting instructions in order to get through bug-free (even then there are no guarantees).

[Joonbug1]

LOL. Nice pic.