From Digital Book World:

Self-publishing platform Smashwords has now published 200,000 ebooks by indie authors, founder and CEO Mark Coker told Digital Book World.

Link to the rest at Digital Book World

Aaron Pogue, a regular visitor to The Passive Voice, has just opened a public beta of Draft2Digital, a digital publishing aggregator that provides some of the same services as Smashwords, formatting ebooks for indie authors and distributing them to Amazon, Kobo, iPad and Nook.

From the FAQ, some key differences between Draft2Digital and Smashwords:

Where’s your style guide?

We don’t have one. At Draft2Digital, our goal is to support your style guide.

If you don’t have a style guide, or if you’d like some direction on creating a simple one, do these things:

• Skip the title page and copyright page. Don’t even write them. Just give us the story, and let us do the technical parts.
• Mark your chapter breaks with something distinctive, and be consistent. Make it centered and bold, or larger font, or use a Heading style. Do something to set apart your chapter titles, and we’ll do our best to recognize them.

. . . .

Where can I sell my book?

Our current sales channels include:

• Kindle Direct Publishing
• iTunes
• PubIt!
• Kobo
• and CreateSpace!

CreateSpace gets a little complicated, but we’re pretty proud of that option. You can read a little more about it below.

Will you really turn my book into a paperback?

We can create paperbacks for any books generated through our conversion service (that is, everything except pre-formatted epub uploads). Simply choose CreateSpace as one of your sales channels at the publishing stage, and we’ll begin the process.

Paperbacks are more complicated than ebooks, so we’ll need additional information. Most importantly, we’ll need a larger cover image to wrap all the way around your book. We’ll contact you with a cover image template demonstrating the exact size requirements.

. . . .

How will Draft2Digital pay me?

After you’ve created an account, you’ll be able to choose a payment method:

• By check (we’ll need a mailing address)
• By Paypal (we’ll need an email address)
• By direct deposit (we’ll need your account routing information)

Since these payment methods all come with fees, we’ll hold your royalties until they add up to a minimum threshold ($25 for checks, $10 for digital payments), but otherwise we’ll deliver payments once a month.

More info at Draft2Digital

Passive Guy hasn’t tried Draft2Digital, but he’s been looking for an easy way into the world of iBooks that doesn’t involve Smashwords’ quirks and this sounds promising.

From the Smashwords Blog:

The revolution is now in full swing.  Indie authors know ebook self-publishing is the future of publishing.  Ebook retailers know this as well.  Traditional publishers, however, have been slow to grasp the transformative impact the self-publishing revolution is having on the industry.

We’re entering a golden age of publishing.  The ebook self-publishing revolution will lead to a more great books being published than ever before.  More books will touch the souls of more readers, because indie ebooks make books accessible, affordable and discoverable to more people.  These books, in all their diverse and controversial glory, are cultural treasures.

. . . .

Retailers earning millions of dollars from the sale of Smashwords books:  Our retail partners have made incredible investments to help list, maintain, promote, merchandise, and sell our books to their customers.  I’m pleased to say their investments are paying off.  We want our retail partners to do well with our books, because the value they provide to our authors and publishers far exceeds the sales commission they earn.

. . . .

Amazon:  Our relationship with Amazon has been frustrating.  Even though Smashwords authors have the freedom to bypass Smashwords and work directly with many of our retail partners, about 80% of our authors choose to distribute through Smashwords.  They appreciate the time-saving convenience and simplicity of centrally managing their books and metadata from the Smashwords Dashboard.  Unlike every other major retailer, Amazon has not yet provided us the ability to do large, automated distributions and metadata updates.  As a result, our authors who would prefer to reach Amazon through Smashwords are forced to upload direct to Amazon.  Although I remain hopeful Amazon will one day see fit to treat us as a partner rather than a competitor to be crushed, killed and destroyed, I’m not holding my breath.  We’ve built a healthy, profitable and fast-growing business without their help, and we’ve done this despite their attempts to harm us and our retail partners.  Unlike traditional publishers which would probably go bankrupt if they stopped distributing to Amazon, we face no such noose.  In the meantime, we focus our energy on helping our true retail partners succeed in the marketplace.

Link to the rest at Smashwords Blog

Finally.

From the Smashwords Blog:

This new capability allows our authors and publishers to upload their own professionally formatted EPUB files for sale at the Smashwords store, and for distribution to the Smashwords retail distribution network.

This first iteration of Smashwords Direct supports two methods of direct EPUB upload:

1. You can replace your Smashwords-generated EPUB with your own EPUB.  To do this, click to your Dashboard, then click “Upload New Version,” then upload your file.
2. If you’re preparing to publish a new book not yet at Smashwords, sign in to your Smashwords account, click the regular Publish link, then fill out the publish page as  you would normally, but upload your EPUB instead of a Word .doc.  Later, if you wish, you can add more ebook formats to your book page by uploading a Word .doc, formatted to the Style Guide.

EPUB files uploaded through this new Smashwords Direction option must still adhere to the formatting best practices listed in the Smashwords Style Guide.  Books will still be reviewed by our vetting team before shipping out to our retailers.

Link to the rest at Smashwords Blog and thanks to Antoine for the tip.

PG admits that he wasn’t particularly pleased that Smashwords would still use its Style Guide on files, but he’ll be interested to hear about indie author experiences with Epub file on Smashwords.

From Smashwords:

Smashwords Direct alpha testing underway.  We’re preparing to launch Smashwords Direct, our direct .epub upload option.  One year ago in my 2011 annual year-in-review over at the Smashwords Blog, we made a commitment to launch SWD in the second half of 2012.  We’re working to fulfill that commitment.  We’re nearing completion of a beta version of SWD.  The first iteration will enable those of you with professionally designed .epub files to replace your current Smashwords-generated .epub with another .epub.  It’ll also allow authors to upload .epub files instead of Word .doc files.

Link to the rest at Smashwords and thanks to Mary for the tip.

From the Smashwords Blog:

It’s that time of year when book people make their predictions for the year ahead.  I bring you, my dear reader, my epic predictions for 2013.

I say “epic” tongue in cheek, because I went a bit overboard this year. When I sat down to write this, I was thinking of maybe eight or ten predictions with short narratives.  I’m bringing you 21 predictions with expansive narratives.

. . . .

1.  In the US, ebooks sales will reach 45% of US trade book market

Ebook sales growth in the US is slowing, but we’ll still continue to see ebooks take eyeballs from print books.  Brick and mortar retailers will reduce shelf space for print as more readers turn to screens as their new paper of choice.  Ebooks as a percentage of overall trade book sales in the US should hit 45%, up from what I’m estimating will probably be 30% in 2012.  I might be underestimating both numbers.  It’s tough to find reliable market share data.

2.  Follow the eyeballs:  2013 will be the first year unit volume of ebooks exceeds print

The dollar sales growth of ebooks understates the profound shift to ebooks and screen reading.  2013 will be the first year more books are read on screens than on paper.  To really understand the seismic shift toward screens, follow the eyeballs.  Ebooks cost less than print books.  The price of ebooks is declining, which means that the dollar sales growth cited above understates the increase in unit sales volume, and unit download volume.  Furthermore, the data doesn’t measure free downloads.

Here’s a newsflash, and you’re reading it here first: Smashwords authors are generating about 3 million downloads at the Apple iBookstore each month, for books priced at FREE.  Annualized, that’s over 36 million downloads. I expect we’ll do more in 2013.  My 36 million number doesn’t include the millions of readers our authors are reaching each month across Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, the Diesel eBookstore, Page Foundry, Blio, the Smashwords.com store, and at public libraries. Our authors are building platforms and fan bases at a faster rate than many traditionally published authors.

. . . .

5.  Publishers, in search of Black Swans, will lose authors to self-publishing platforms

Publishers are in the business of selling books, not publishing books.

The dirty business of publishing is simply the means to the bookselling ends.  The publishing industry has always been built around a model of scarcity and exclusivity.  Publishers want to acquire and publish only those titles they think have the greatest commercial potential.  They reject all the rest as riff raff, and then they carefully meter out their chosen books in seasonal catalogs.

Publishers have built barriers – let’s call them dams and dykes and parapets – to protect against the hoards of aspiring writers seeking publication.  Publishers require writers to work through agents, who are charged with identifying titles publishers will want to publish.  Many top-tier agents reject 5,000 authors for every author they sign on.  Publishers still reject many of the agented books as well.

Big publishers see the great unwashed masses of aspiring authors as a problem, and these walls insulate them from the problem.  Publishers are simply unable to take a risk on every author.  They realize most of these books don’t have strong commercial potential, and on that count they’re correct.

Publishers devote tremendous energy and expense trying to build barriers to hold back the flood, but in the process of rejecting the riff raff they’re also rejecting the unrecognizable future breakouts.  These breakouts are the Black Swans of publishing, to borrow a term popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.  As described by Taleb, a Black Swan event is unexpected, unseen, unanticipated, improbable, and unpredictable.  When it hits, it turns everything upside down and changes the world forever.

Since most books fail, we can think of a true breakout book as a Black Swan event.  The newly hatched Black Swans are invisible to the publisher because they’re hiding in a sea of baby black geese.  By sheer luck, numbers and some skill, Publishers pick out a few of the swans, but miss the others.  Only the full marketplace of readers can reliably identify the black swans. In the dark ages of publishing, prior to five years ago, the baby swans were culled by publishers, denied any chance to reach readers.  How many great classics have been lost to humanity simply because publishers missed the black swans?

This philosophy and attitude among large publishers that “most authors are a problem” and are unworthy of publishing is deep-seated.  Yes, most authors don’t sell well.  Most authors published by big publishers don’t sell well either, and therefore are unprofitable to publishers.

. . . .

9.  Global will be the biggest story of 2013 for indie authors

The market for English-language ebooks outside the US will eclipse the US market in 2013.

As I predicted above, in the US, ebooks as a percentage of the overall trade book market will probably reach about 45% in 2013, up from approximately 30% in 2012, 19% in 2011, 8% in 2010, 3% in 2009, and 1% in 2008 (these are AAP numbers, with 2012 and 2013 my personal estimates).

This means that while the US market is still growing, the growth is slowing.  Ebooks broke out first in the US market.  Now they’re breaking out internationally as other countries enter the exponential phase of growth for their ebook markets.

Indie authors have a similar ground floor window of opportunity to become big fish in the small pond of these fast-growing markets, like the early indie ebook authors had in the US market in 2008 and 2009.  And like the market of 2008 and 2009, larger publishers were slow to enter the party.  Today on the global front, they’re struggling to overcome decades of legacy territory rights practices that have hamstrung their ability to distribute ebooks to all countries.  They’ll get there soon.

As an indie author, you can get there now.

The rise of global also means that authors should modify their marketing to become more world-aware.  Each store in each country has its own reviews and its own web page addresses.  A great review at Apple or Amazon in the US is invisible to customers shopping in their UK stores.  Each store in each country represents its own micro-market, and your opportunity is to build fans everywhere. On your blog and website, start providing direct hyperlinks to the different stores operated by each retailer in each of your primary countries. Outside the US, English-language authors will do best in Australia,  the UK, Canada, and New Zealand, but you’ll still sell into other countries.  Your social media marketing on Facebook, Twitter or on your blog will cross most international boundaries.

. . . .

17.  Stigma of Big 6 (or Big 4 or Big 3) publishers will increase as prior stigma of self-publishing evaporates

The stigma of self-publishing is disappearing.  Each week, indie authors are hitting the ebook bestseller lists at all the major ebook retailers, as well as lists maintained by the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, GalleyCat, and Digital Book World.  A year ago, this was rare.  A year from now, it’ll be commonplace.  The future bestsellers of tomorrow are the indie authors of today.  Indie authors are poised to take more market share in 2013 as the next generation of writers turns its back on traditional publishing.

Five years ago, back in the dark ages of publishing, self-publishing was seen as the option of last resort.  It was seen as the last refuge for failed authors.  Publishers controlled the printing press, the access to distribution, and the knowledge to professionally publish, which made authors entirely dependent upon publishing gatekeepers.  Today, these three elements of professional publishing are fully democratized.

Indie authors now have the tools to publish faster, smarter and more effectively than traditional publishers.  Many indies are publishing books of equal or greater quality than what’s put out by large publishers. Indies are pricing more aggressively, and as a result they’re building bigger platforms faster than many traditionally published authors who are now disadvantaged.  As ebooks continue to take market share, and as physical brick and mortar shelf space disappears, the allure of traditional publishers will fade further.

At the same time the stigma of self-publishing evaporates, the stigma of traditional publishing is increasing.  Authors are questioning what big publishers can do for them that they can’t already do on their own.  Authors are realizing, as mentioned earlier, that the traditional publisher business practices (high prices, slow release schedules, limited marketing support, etc) can actually harm a writer’s career.

Traditional publishers are also showing themselves skilled at adding their own self-inflicted injuries.  Traditional publishing’s cynical misadventure into vanity publishing will stain the reputation of all big NY publishers, even those that haven’t made the same mistakes.  That’s sad, because I think the world of books would be better off if we could maintain a healthy and vibrant ecosystem of large publishers in addition to smaller ones.

Link to the rest at Smashwords Blog and thanks to Maree for the tip.

From Mark Coker on The Smashwords Blog:

Will Amazon be the grinch who steals Christmas from thousands of indie authors this holiday season?

Last year, a mere three weeks before a record-breaking Christmas for ebook sales at the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony and other retailers, Amazon convinced thousands of indie authors to remove their books from the virtual shelves of all Amazon competitors.

The lure:  KDP Select, an opt-in program that requires authors to make their books exclusive to Amazon for a minimum of three months.

. . . .

I contended, and still contend, that exclusivity is a devil’s bargain.  When authors go exclusive with any retailer, they increase their dependence upon that single retailer, limit long-term platform building at other retailers, disappoint fans who shop at other stores, and hobble the development of a thriving and competitive ebook retailing ecosystem.

KDP Select places authors in a difficult position.  They must decide if the short term benefits of KDP Select outweigh the long term harm caused to their writing career.  The potential benefits are uncertain, and the harm is impossible to measure.  How does one measure a missed opportunity?  One thing is for certain:  When I look at the Smashwords bestsellers, they’re authors who maintain non-stop, uninterrupted distribution of all their books.  They’re the authors who are working to build their audiences at each retailer for the long term.

. . . .

Undoubtedly, some indie authors will reach for the carrot and immediately pull their books from distribution, and as a result will never know what they missed out on this holiday season.  It’s somewhat ironic that after decades of writers bowing subservient to traditional publishers who controlled the only path to retail distribution – and after so many traditionally published authors saw their books forced out of print when retailers dropped their books – that so many indie authors will now pull their books from distribution with their own hands.

What affect has KDP Select had on the growth of Smashwords?  Not as much as our detractors might think.  After Amazon announced KDP Select last year, some authors speculated it would put us out of business.  Quite the contrary.  We and our authors have enjoyed another record year this year, thanks to growth across the Smashwords distribution network.

Link to the rest at The Smashwords Blog and thanks to Jeanne for the tip.

Mark Coker makes a lot of his Silicon Valley background. PG has been involved with many tech companies large and small. The good ones never complained about their competition. Instead they focused on building better products and services than their competition offered.

Smashwords CEO Mark Coker on Digital Book World:

Jeremy Greenfield: Smashwords is now working with over 100,000 titles from about 40,000 authors and publishers. Yet you only have 13 employees right now. How is Smashwords going to expand?

Mark Coker: The level of [e-book] uploads has increased dramatically over the last year. In April, we had our first month of over 9,000 new titles added to Smashwords. We’ve been increasing every month. By the end of the year, we’ll be doing more than 10,000 new titles every single month, and that’s a super-conservative estimate. We now have four years experience doing this and our growth is organic, driven by word of mouth. We don’t do any marketing.

We’re expanding our vetting team. Our vetting team opens up and manually looks at every single book uploaded to Smashwords to check that the book meets formatting requirements of retailers, to make sure that it’s legal content and to make sure it’s original content. They’re looking to enforce all the requirements of the Smashwords style guide. We’re at three or four people currently.

We’ll continue to add to our vetting team, to our support team and to our technical team throughout the year.

JG: You said that you’ve been profitable for two years now. Can you give an indication of just how profitable?

MC: Growth has been fantastic. We’re selling millions of dollars worth of books every year. Our profitability is healthy and growing. We monitor our profitability very carefully because we’re completely self-funded.

We’re a private company, so we don’t disclose specific profitability or revenue numbers.

We are a corporation and I’m the majority shareholder. The other equity holders are employees. We’re preparing to do a stock option plan for all of our employees.

. . . .

JG: Speaking of your authors, what’s the biggest challenge facing indie authors who want to publish and distribute e-books today?

MC: The biggest challenge is self-restraint. Publishing tools, like Smashwords make it fast, free and easy for any writer anywhere in the world to publish. But we don’t make it easy to write a great book. Many writers, intoxicated by the freedom to self-publish, will often release their book before it’s ready to be released.

The biggest challenge faced by self-published authors, it’s not marketing, it’s not discoverability, it’s adopting the best practices of the very best publishers. It’s about becoming a professional publisher.

. . . .

JG: Should the established publishers be worried about this? At the Digital Book World Conference in January, we learned that indie authors took an estimated $100 million from publishers last year – sounds like a lot, but it’s a very small percentage of the overall trade book business.

MC: Authors are starting to ask two very dangerous questions from the standpoint of publishers:

What can the publisher do that I can’t do for myself? They’re saying, “I can publish myself and distribute myself and hire my own editors.” The distribution of e-books is now open to all.

And, will it actually harm my ability to reach readers if I work with a large publisher? They’re saying, “That large publisher is going to price my book too high, so they’re going to price me out of the market. If my publisher insists on pricing my book $9.99 and higher, I’m going to get beat by all the other authors who are priced lower.”

In publishers’ favor, every single book is a unique product, and price isn’t the only consideration for consumers.

But these questions set up publishers to be in a precarious situation.

The secret is now out on how to become a professional publisher. That knowledge is now freely available on main street.

Link to the rest at Digital Book World

From Smashwords CEO Mark Coker via How to Successfully Self-Publish:

Every indie should get their books distributed to as many retailers as possible. Every author should be at Amazon, but they should avoid the temptation to enroll in the KDP Select program because of its exclusivity requirements.

From a global market share perspective (and this is a global market!), Amazon’s share is declining over the last few years. Authors who go exclusive – even if only for three months at a time – are harming their ability to capture this global growth.

The other retailers are rising in importance. Keep an eye on the Apple iBookstore (already in 32 countries), Barnes & Noble (rumored to be going global soon) and Kobo (has always had a global focus).

Smashwords-distributed authors have seen impressive growth at these three retailers over the last 12 months, especially at Apple. Apple’s the dark horse in this race, and probably the biggest single threat to Amazon’s dominance.

Amazon is playing indie authors like pawns in its greater battle to harm other ebook retailers by getting authors to make their books exclusive to Amazon. Unlike Amazon, Apple doesn’t attempt exclusivity, and doesn’t do draconian price matching. Amazon’s the only retailer that threatens its authors with account termination if they don’t obey Amazon’s strict price-parity requirements.

. . . .

If KDP Select dropped the exclusivity requirement, I’d be a big supporter of the program.

Link to the rest at How to Successfully Self-Publish and thanks to Dan for the tip.

From Digital Book World:

Libraries and library networks can now offer their patrons large collections of ebooks published by Smashwords, the publisher/distributor announced today.

In the new program, called Library Direct, libraries that manage their own acquisitions and check-out can choose from collections of the top 10,000 (or larger) titles and custom filter them according to price and category. Titles included in the collections will be chosen based on aggregated sales data from Smashwords’ distribution network, making this a “crowdsourced” collection according to popularity.

. . . .

Smashwords is simultaneously launching a Pricing Manager tool for its authors that will enable them to create custom library pricing.

Link to the rest at Digital Book World