Smashwords Named among Top 10 E-Publishers in P&E Poll

Predators & Editors, a service dedicated to helping authors navigate the shark infested waters of book publishing, conducted a reader survey poll last month across a number of different categories, one of which was "Best E-Publisher."

Smashwords scored #6. Not bad. Next year, maybe we'll win. Special thanks to Smashwords author Rita Hestand for nominating us, Rebecca Vickery for telling me about it, and everyone who voted for us!

If you're not familiar with P&E, check out this post I wrote December, 2008 (boy, how time flies), Three Websites Help Indie Authors Stay out of Harm's Way, where I reviewed Predators & Editors, Piers Anthony's Internet Publishing Survey and Victoria Strauss' Writer Beware.

Untangling the eBook Supply Chain at Digital Book World

This coming week I'm in New York to moderate a panel at Digital Book World called, "Getting on Virtual Shelves - Untangling the eBook Supply Chain."

The panel explores the challenges publishers face as they navigate the complexities of digital book distribution.

For print books, the supply chain for large publishers is fairly straightforward. They ship books to distributors and wholesalers which then ship books to retailers and even direct to customers. The intricate, well-oiled machine of distributors, wholesalers, retailers and shippers ensure books are always in stock and available for customers.

The ebook supply chain isn't quite so mature. It's somewhere between diapers and gawky adolescence.

I think one of the biggest themes of the session will be trust. In the physical world of printed books, a publisher knows how many books they printed, and how many they shipped. Books are easily tracked and accounted for along every step of the supply chain.

With digital books, the publisher ships a single file to their distributor, digital warehouser or retailer, and then trusts the supply chain partners to make digital copies as needed. How do publishers know how many copies were sold? How do they know the retailer enforced the publisher's geographic sales restrictions? Who owns the customer data? How do you ensure accurate and timely sales reporting back to the publisher? How do you ensure that accurate and dynamic metadata attached to the book (pricing by geography, on-sale date, sampling rights, language, descriptions, and changes to all the above) is accurately conveyed downstream from one supply chain partner to the other?

Welcome to the brave new world of ebook supply chains.

My panel is packed with smart cookies representing three large book publishers and the largest book distributor. On the panel we've got Peter Balis of John Wiley & Sons, Neil De Young of Hachette Book Group, Leslie Hulse of HarperCollins and last but not least, Andrew Weinstein of Ingram Digital.

If you're attending the conference, stop by and say hi. The conference takes place January 26-27 (Tuesday and Wednesday) at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers. Our panel is Wednesday at 3:45pm.

Special thanks to Mike Shatzkin for inviting me to moderate this panel. Mike has organized an absolutely incredible program line-up featuring over 30 (!!) different sessions and dozens of speakers. I'm looking forward to attending the other sessions.

Register here.

Book View Café Partners with Smashwords

Book View Café, a digital publishing cooperative for professional authors, today announced it has partnered with Smashwords to distribute Book View’s growing ebook catalog, including titles by from such well known authors as Ursula K. LeGuin, Vonda N. McIntyre, Sarah Smith, Seanan McGuire and Laura Anne Gilman.

From the press release:

“Smashwords is taking a truly dynamic approach to ebooks,” said Book View Café Project Manager Sarah Zettel. “From the beginning, BVC has promised readers the books they want, when they want them. Smashwords’ commitment to delivering multi-format ebooks to a wide variety of major retail outlets and mobile smart phone platforms will help us keep that promise.”

The authors of Book View Café are all veterans of the publishing world, having worked with some of the largest print publishers including Penguin Books, St. Martin’s Press, Tor Books, and Simon & Schuster.

Book View Café is one of a growing number of book publishing collectives distributing their authors' works with Smashwords. Others include Backword Books, eXcessica, and Year Zero Writers. While each of the collectives differs in its organization and membership, they all share a common goal of writers joining together to pool resources, knowledge and marketing.

I think Book View is one of the first collectives to focus exclusively on authors that were previously published by mainstream publishers. Their mission is to help these authors bring their unpublished or out of print, reverted-rights works to life as ebooks.

I'm excited to welcome Book View Café and its well-respected authors to the Smashwords community. As I've been saying now for two years, I think the indie author tent will increasingly include authors such as Book View's who were previously published by large commercial publishers. These authors recognize that digital publishing empowers them to exercise greater control over how their books are published, priced, marketed and sold, to the benefit of authors and readers alike.

Check out Book View Café's books at Smashwords.

The Scam of Private Label Articles

Did you know for only $24.95 a month, you can subscribe to a service that gives you access to a database of thousands of articles you can turn into ebooks?

If you're too lazy or too clueless to write a real book, now you slap your name on another person's work and get rich in the process. Or, so parasitic "Private Label Article" services are leading an ever-growing number of fools to believe.

Tonight while reviewing Smashwords titles to add to the Premium Catalog, I ran across an ebook about a common childhood mental disorder. My first thought was that this was an important topic our customers would care about. But on second glance, something about the book didn't seem right. The cover image was a cheezy stock photograph of a parent and a child. No title or author name on the cover image. The book wasn't formatted properly. The author obviously hadn't bothered to read the Smashwords Style Guide.

I knew I had seen this breed of vermin before. A quick cut and paste of a random string of text into Google gave me another clue. The exact text string appeared word-for-word in multiple other places on the Internet in articles and blog posts under the names of different authors and publications. Did this author plagiarize the content? I suspected not. Another quick check and I confirmed the author learned about Smashwords from a Private Label Article company. Ugh.

I clicked the hyperlink and sure enough it led to a company that has created an ingenious application it licenses for $24.95/month that allows any dunce with a mouse to point and click and build a custom ebook. Users assemble random chunks from of a database of content to generate an ebook they can then sell on the Internet. And it's legal.

I've seen these ebooks and so-called authors at Smashwords before. They usually arrive with 3-D covers and sloppy cut and paste formatting. Many months ago, we updated our Terms of Service to deal with them by clearly prohibiting private label content on Smashwords.

I zapped the offender's account like I would unwelcome spam. Ordinarily, that would be the end of it and I'd move on to the next task.

What bugs me about this incident tonight is a video the company produced and posted to its website. The video demonstrates how the software generates the ebooks and then it explains how users can make money by publishing the books at Amazon's Digital Text Platform and... no it can't be... Smashwords (!!). So not only are they deceiving gullible suckers with inaccurate information, they're also sending these suckers our way, only to have their visions of sugarplums turned to vinegar when we zap them.

I contacted the proprietor and informed him of his video's factual inaccuracies, and asked him to immediately remove the video and stop telling his customers they can publish with us. We'll see what happens.

In the meantime, if you ever see this type of content sneak on to Smashwords and we don't see it first, let us know. The cut and paste trick with Google is an easy way to confirm your suspicion.

Image source: Wikipedia

MediaBistro Asks: Who's Got the Best Vision for the Future of Publishing

In the last week, MediaBistro interviewed me and several others smarter than me for our views on the future of book publishing.

Now, to make this orgy of crystal ball-gazing and unbridled punditry all the more titillating, they're asking readers to cast their vote for the person with the best vision for the future of publishing.

Vote for me!

Your choices include:

Seth Godin - Bestselling author
Richard Curtis - Literary agent
Mark Coker - Smashwords
Richard Nash - Publisher
Jane Dystel - Literary agent
Scott Steinberg - Digital Trends
Other - write in your own

These are all smart cookies, so you can't go wrong voting for anyone. Help me beat Seth Godin, only because that would just crack me up. He's possibly the smartest cookie of anyone.

Interestingly, I'm up against Jane Dystel. Jane heads Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, one of the most respected lit agencies in the business. Dystel & Goderich once repped Boob Tube, the novel my wife and I wrote.

As some of you know, without Boob Tube, there would never have been a Smashwords. As some of you may not know, it was our agent at DGLM, Jim McCarthy, who first suggested we self publish Boob Tube after they were unable to sell our book to a publisher. This was the spark that then led me to decide, "hey, why not create a publishing platform that would allow any author, anywhere in the world, to bypass publishers altogether and instantly publish their book online as an ebook?"

Funny how things come full circle. Hey, if you don't vote for me, vote for Jane for having the smarts to hire Jim!

Click here to vote for one of us.

Smashwords Blog Year in Review

For fun, I thought I'd do some bloggy naval gazing and share some Smashwords blog stats drawn from Feedburner, the cool Google-owned service that makes it easy for bloggers to understand readership trends.

First off, the ten most viewed posts of 2009:

1. Barnes & Noble to Distribute Smashwords Ebooks - This surprised just about everyone, and offered a hint of what was to come in the weeks that followed when we announced additional distribution deals with Sony, Kobo and Amazon
2. Smashwords Book Marketing Guide Updated - I think maybe this post was popular because I offered links to many of the other great book marketing titles published at Smashwords
3. Inside the Smashwords Community Filter - I wrote this post to explain how Smashwords harnesses the wisdom of readers to help other readers determine what's worth reading.
4. Win $500 in the Editor Unleashed/Smashwords Flash Fiction 40 Contest - We sponsored this great writing contest organized by Maria Schneider at Editor Unleashed. Over two hundred authors entered, and the best 40 were published in a the Flash Fiction 40 Anthology at Smashwords. There's still time to enter the next contest, "Why I Write."
5. Exploring the Outer Reaches of Literature with Author Mel Keegan - This was a fun interview. I was particularly interested to explore how ebooks might level the playing field for authors and genres typically shunned by traditional brick and mortar retailers.
6. Sramana Mitra Interview: How Authors Can Build their Personal Franchise - Sramana shared some of her wisdom on how authors can better promote their books and careers.
7. Ebooks as Vessels for Greater Cross-Cultural Understanding - I wrote this after speaking at the Oakland Rotary Club, where I tried to express why I thought books were so important to the future of mankind. My main point was that the world is getting smaller, and books can help us spread essential knowledge and understand one another.
8. Have Ebooks Already Gone Mainstream? - I wrote this all the way back in April. Even then, I don't think anyone anticipated how ebooks would take off like a rocket for the rest of 2009.
9. Smashwords 'Read an Ebook Week' Promotion - In support of Rita Toews' annual Read and Ebook Week celebration, Bill created a special promotional catalog for Smashwords authors. We now use that same technology to support other time-limited promotions. Hmmm... Maybe it's time for another promotion?
10. Do Authors Still Need Publishers? - Does Stephen King, or any other author, still need a publisher? For print books, maybe yes. For ebooks, maybe not. In 2009 we're going to see many more mainstream authors go indie, first with their reverted-rights backlists, then with unpublished works, and then with first releases. Wait, this has already happened.

Subscribers

I started this blog in April 2008, one month before Smashwords officially launched. It's fair to say nobody cared. By January 1, 2009 (noted by the red splotch), the blog had grown its RSS subscriber rolls to a whopping 20 readers.

I suppose it was a bit like the situation some of us feel when we realize our most loyal readers have whiskers and tails and are really just waiting to have their heads scratched.

For some reason, people started paying attention in 2009. We're now up to about 500 subscribers. That's seems like a lot to me. For those of you who stop by for a read every now and then, I appreciate your time and I thank you for your enlightening comments and feedback. I learn from you.

2009 promises to be an exiting year. I'll continue to share items here I think are of interest to the Smashwords author/publisher/reader/partner community. Happy new year!

Future of Publishing 2020

Tis the season of year-ahead prognostications from those of us crazy enough to believe our crystal balls speak to us.

I decided to partake in the annual holiday rite, but rather than look ahead one year, I'm looking ahead one decade. Why be wrong when I can be really wrong, right?

The idea for my ten year sagey oracleness came at the kind request of our friend Jeff Rivera over at GalleyCat.

GalleyCat is doing a series of "future of publishing" stories, gathering projections from different folks in publishing. For their first installment, they interviewed Seth Godin, and for their second they interviewed agent Richard Curtis (<-- click their names to read their insightful interviews!). They're both smart cookies.

For their third installment, published today, they ask me for my ten projections for 2020. Since we're working to build Smashwords for that future, it's something I think about quite often. And like all future projections, mine are not at all impartial so take them with a grain of salt and don't bet your business on them (you can leave that to me). Here are the first five:

1. 95% of all reading will be on screens
2. There will be fewer bookstores, though books will be more plentiful than ever before.
3. The entire book supply chain from author to customer will become atomized into its component bits. Value-adders will continue to find great success in publishing. Dinosaurs, leeches and parasites will be flushed out of new publishing ecosystems faster than ever before.
4. Most authors will be indie authors
5. Successful publishing companies will be those that put the most total profit in the author's pocket. No, not the highest per-unit royalty percentage.

For the next five predictions, gallivant on over to GalleyCat for their complete story, Smashwords: Book Publishing 10 Years in the Future

Thanks also to Jeff for not publishing my tongue-in-cheek prediction #11 which will most likely be proven completely delusional, though a nice dream nevertheless.

If you know of any other interesting publishing projections for the year ahead (even if you blogged them yourself), feel free to share a hyperlink in the comments section below. Join in the punditry.


Image source: Wikipedia

Smashwords Year in Review, Plans for 2010

Wow, what a fabulous year it has been for Smashwords. The two blurry charts at left show the monthly number of visitors to Smashwords since our launch in May, 2008, and the monthly number of page views.

Here are some other fun facts I can share:

As of today, Smashwords publishes 5,979 original ebooks.

We're now publishing and distributing the works of 2,700 authors and 100 small independent publishers.

The number of titles published at Smashwords has doubled in the last 90 days.

To put the numbers in further perspective, at this time last year, after eight full months of operation, we were publishing 100 authors and under 160 titles. And we thought that was great.

In the last four months, we've opened up new distribution channels for our indie authors and publishers with the world's largest ebook retailers. We're just getting started.

Salacious sidenote: Every once in a while, I'll receive an email (from my father or wife, for example) that all we publish at Smashwords is erotica. How much erotica do we really publish? See the chart at left. We publish a lot, but not as much as people might think. Only 14 percent of our content is categorized as erotica.

How do we break down across fiction and non-fiction? 74 percent of our titles are fiction, 25 percent are non-fiction, and under one percent are screenplays or plays.

We've had record traffic for each of the last 15 months.

Sales for December are already a record, handily beating November, another record. Despite the sales increases, our sales are still very low. Results don't include results from retail partners, of which B&N is the furthest along.

The average Smashwords author sells more now than they did last year, likely due to our increased traffic.

We're not profitable, yet. We could be profitable next month if, like other self-publishing services or distributors, we charged setup fees, sold packages, or charged for access to our distribution channel, but none of that is in our business model. Instead, we want our interests aligned with the authors, publishers, retailers and readers we serve. Because we only take 15-18.5% of the net, we'll grow our revenues as our authors, publishers and retail partners grow theirs.

What's next for Smashwords?

Here are the priorities I see:

Develop new distribution channels for our authors and publishers - We're building the distribution infrastructure to help authors and publishers get their ebooks out to readers. We'll continue adding new distribution partners in 2010. But first, we're going to focus on completing the technical integrations of our current retail partners. We're furthest along with Barnes & Noble, and we're moving forward with Amazon, Sony and Kobo, although we're behind schedule. This is our highest priority for the next couple months.

Improve customer service - We go out of our way to provide responsive customer service. Unlike most businesses, we make it easy for you to contact us by offering a customer support and feedback link at the top of every Smashwords page. We aim to answer support inquiries within 24 hours during normal business days, and when we can, we enjoy shaving that down to mere minutes. Going forward, as we continue to grow, we want to make Smashwords so intuitive that fewer authors, publishers and customers find it necessary to contact us with support questions. We want to help you find answers to your own questions faster than the time it takes you to email us. We want to make things so obvious there's no need to ask a question.

Improve ease of publishing - We think we provide the industry's easiest to use publishing and distribution platform, but we want to make it faster and easier.

Improve site performance - We know, we know, the Smashwords web site has been pretty slow lately. Several weeks back, we doubled the capacity of our servers, but it made absolutely no difference the next day.

Improve the quality of our ebook outputs - It's a huge challenge to take an author's single source file and convert it into nine reasonably good quality ebook formats. In order to accomplish this, we require authors and publishers to upload simpler files, and simple often means fewer features, like tables of contents that don't support internal links. In the coming year, working in partnership with our authors, publishers, technology providers and formatting partners, we plan to continue raising the quality of our ebook files so together, we can better serve our customers.

Build greater respect for indie authors and publishers - I've noticed a dramatic change among authors and industry watchers over last two years. Self-publishing, indie publishing or whatever you want to call it, is finally starting to earn the respect it deserves. We have a long way to go, however. There are still quite a few naysaying anklebiters and loud pundits who continue to diss and dismiss the the very idea of an independently published ebook. Join with me as we either help to open their eyes to the indie publishing revolution, or show them the path to the tar pits.

Bring reverted-rights books back to life at Smashwords - Several well-known authors, including some best-sellers such as Anne Frasier and Mark Sullivan, have published their reverted rights books on Smashwords. Each time a well-respected author - indie or traditionally published - publishes and distributes with Smashwords, it brings further legitimacy to the indie author movement.

Attract more authors and publishers to the Smashwords community - Every new author or publisher brings with them more readers which benefit all other Smashwords authors and publishers. I like virtuous cycles. Therefore, to best serve our current authors, publishers and readers, it's important we attract more authors, publishers and readers. This brings me to my next item...

Do a better job of getting the word out - The blogosphere has been incredibly supportive of Smashwords this year, and as a result we're fairly well known among the digerati of tech savvy authors and publishers (though just because people have heard about us, doesn't mean they understand us). Yet Smashwords is still relatively unknown to the vast majority of the world's authors and publishers. One reason, I suspect, is that we've received essentially no press coverage from the mainstream media. Smashwords has never been covered or even mentioned by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, Associated Press, Time Magazine or Newsweek. Why not? Simply put, we need to do a better job of getting the story out there. From my perspective, there's a massive yet quiet revolution taking place, driven by the simultaneous rise of indie publishing and the rise of ebooks. Smashwords is but one small piece of the story. We'll do our best to help the story break into the mainstream this year, for the benefit of our authors, publishers and readers.

Help publishing save itself? - When I first started Smashwords, I had this crazy idea that Smashwords could help large, established publishers survive and thrive in the coming ebook revolution. Based on continued missteps among large publishers, I'm beginning to question whether or not these publishers can be saved, or should be saved. It's sad, really, because I'm continually impressed by the smart, generous and passionate professionals I meet in publishing and I'd hate to see them working their next jobs as greeters at Walmart. But when the senior corporate executives of these publishers continue to handcuff their customers with DRM-infected ebooks; withhold ebook releases to protect hardcover sales; and continue to artificially inflate ebook prices above what customers want to pay; it makes me question whether or not publishing can right its wayward ship before it capsizes. I'm an eternal optimist, so I'm hopeful the big whigs in NY can turn course in 2010 before it's too late.

When we launched 19 months ago, a lot of people didn't know what to make of us. Because we initially focused exclusively on serving self-published authors, some doubters tried to tar us with the same brush as some of the other companies who came before us. I hope some of the initial skeptics are coming around now.

2009 was a great year for Smashwords. We launched our affiliate program, we expanded our platform to support publishers, and we opened up new retail distribution opportunities for our authors and publishers. But our work is just beginning. I'm looking ahead two, five and ten years, and I see much opportunity to better serve our authors, publishers and partners.

My warm thanks to Smashwords authors, publishers, retailers and other publishing industry friends who supported us this year and honored us with their faith and trust.

Last but not least, my sincere thanks to Bill Kendrick, our CTO. Bill is a magician, and we could not have accomplished everything in 2009 without his brilliant wizardry.

Happy new year, everyone!

Smashwords Author V.J. Chambers Shares 2009 Sales Results

Smashwords author V.J. Chambers published an interesting post at her blog yesterday in which she revealed her earnings from her self-publishing efforts.

I always have great admiration for any author willing to share such data, because it helps inform other indie authors about the true challenges that lie ahead. It also takes guts for any author to admit how little most authors really make from their hard work.

All told, Ms. Chambers, an author of young adult thrillers, brought in revenue of $637.00 since starting her indie publishing adventure in July, 2009. Due to expenses associated with purchasing ISBNs and paying for certain print book services, her net profit for the year was $142.48.

What caught my eye was how the sales were distributed. She sells her titles as print books via CreateSpace/Amazon for about $13.00, and as ebooks in the Amazon Kindle store for $7.00, and as as multi-format ebooks on Smashwords for $5.00.

Considering that ebooks account for only about 3 percent of overall book industry sales here in the U.S., I assumed 97 percent of her sales would be of the print book, and then the remaining 3 percent would be divided between the Kindle store and the Smashwords store, and of course since Amazon gets at least 10,000 times more traffic that Smashwords each month, I assumed they'd sell quite a few more ebooks that Smashwords. I was wrong.

Here's the breakdown:

Print (Createspace/Amazon): $273.62
Kindle store: $56.54
Smashwords store: $307.32

So in other words, the books at Smashwords outsold the other two. Like many indie authors, V.J. does her own marketing and operates her own website and blog. On her website, she gives all the different formats equal promotion and lets the customer decide if they want print, Kindle or Smashwords. Smart.

I asked V.J. to share her thoughts on the results above. To ensure I was viewing her results apples to apples, I also asked if all titles were available via the multiple outlets for the same period of time. Her response (excerpted):

Yes, most of the books have been available via smashwords, kindle, and amazon/createspace for the same amount of time. Only one has been available longer on createspace/amazon/kindle than it has on smashwords.

Overall, I LOVE smashwords, for several reasons. One of course is the bigger royalty I make from smashwords than I do anywhere else. This enables me to price my books cheaper, but make more money. I think the books sell better on smashwords because I sell them for cheaper. I sell kindle books for $7 and smashwords books for $5. I do this because (even at seven bucks) I only make like $2 royalty from Amazon.

Um...but your question was how do I account for the results. So...A) Smashwords books are more affordable. B) My audience clearly has no problem reading books on a computer screen, so they're willing to buy an inexpensive e-book before they'll buy a trade paperback. C) E-books trump print books in instant gratification. D) Smashwords trumps Kindle since it offers multiple ebooks formats.

I think V.J.'s results are fascinating for a number of reasons:

1. Lower cost books can actually help authors/publishers sell more books - Large NY publishers are fighting tooth and nail to protect higher prices for their ebooks, fearful they can't profitably run their businesses with lower cost ebooks. Many publishers are upset Amazon is helping to establish $9.99 as a price expectation among its customers for ebooks. V.J.'s experience provides one datapoint supporting my belief that publishers should consider offering some of their titles as lower cost ebooks, under $9.99. I blogged about this at Huffington Post a couple months back with my column, "Why We Need $4.00 Books."
2. Publishers can make more money with lower cost ebooks - Since Smashwords pays authors 85 percent of the net for sales at Smashwords.com, authors can price for less but still make more profit per copy sold. I've been talking about the virtuous economic dynamics behind low cost/high margin ebooks since we launched Smashwords 18 months ago, so I'm gratified to see the numbers play out in the real world.
3. It pays to offer customers choice - Any publisher, large and small, can follow V.J.'s lead by offering customers a choice of formats, prices and retailers. When customers have a choice of low cost ebooks vs. more expensive print books, the 3 percent ebook marketshare data above doesn't hold water. In the real world, if a publisher gives the consumer the choice, ebook sales represent a much higher percentage of sales than you'd expect. This actually confirms Amazon's own reported sales results: For books available in both print and Kindle format at Amazon, Amazon reports 48% of those sales go to the Kindle version. Amazing.
4. Ebooks can be more profitable than print books - If it weren't for her ebook sales at Amazon and Smashwords, V.J. would have lost money for the year. Print publishing can be more complicated, and more expensive, than ebook publishing.
5. Authors/publishers have the power to direct customers to favored retailers - As an indie author, V.J. is directly engaged with her readership, and as you can see in her web site's store, she offers links to where her customers can find her books.
6. Self-published books need never go out of print - At first glance, $637 in royalties may not seem like much, but annualized over a year they're closer to $1,200, and if you consider these books will never go out of print, it's quite possible she'll continue earning the same or greater income for many years to come, even if she never publishes another book. Yet she will write and publish more books, so it's more likely she'll see her earnings rise in the years ahead as she builds her readership.
   

I think all publishers, large and small, have a lot to learn from the indie author pioneers. The more I learn about publishing trends, the more I believe that the future of publishing truly lies in the hands of authors like V.J.

To learn more about V.J. Chambers (and buy her books!), check out her author profile on Smashwords, or visit her personal website or blog.

Are you an indie author or publisher? Feel free to share your own results below, even if you don't publish or distribute through Smashwords.

Developing an Ebook Strategy - Free IBPA Conference Call Monday 1pm Eastern

The Independent Book Publisher's Association has invited me to be the guest on a free 90-minute conference call Monday at 1pm Eastern titled, "How to Develop and Implement an Ebook Strategy."

We'll be giving away a free Sony Reader Pocket Edition to one lucky listener, courtesy of our good friends at Sony Electronics and the Reader Store from Sony.

The conference call will follow a Q&A format, moderated by Florrie Binford Kichler, president of the IBPA.

If you're new to ebooks (and who isn't??), I invite you to attend. We'll cover a lot of ground, including almost everything you need to know to produce, publish, distribute and market your ebooks. No, this is not a Smashwords advertorial, so even if you don't work with Smashwords you're welcome to attend and join the conversation with your questions.

Topics we'll address include:

* What’s the latest market data on ebooks?
* What’s driving the growth of ebooks?
* Overview of ebook reading devices
* How do ebooks fit within an overall publishing strategy?
* Which books work best as ebooks?
* Tips on ebook formatting
* Deciphering the alphabet soup of ebook formats
* How is the ebook supply chain evolving?
* What's DRM, and do customers really know or care?
* How do I price my ebooks?
* How do I market my ebooks?

Florrie has prepared dozens of questions to ask me, and we'll also take live questions from listeners on the conference call and from folks on Twitter who use the hashtag #IBPA.

This call is a follow-up to an online seminar I presented back in July for the IBPA's Publishing University Online series. Over 120 people paid up to $69 each to attend that class. There were so many great questions we couldn't get to them all. After some pondering, we decided to do a free conference call, open it up to everyone (even if you're not an IBPA member!), and make it 100 percent Q&A for 90 minutes!

Post-Call Update:
Great call. Thanks everyone for attending. Access the conference call replay at 712.432.1085 (free, but your long distance rate, if any, applies) with passcode 405513.

The Importance of Protecting Your Dreams

As any writer will appreciate, writing can be a grueling, solitary and thankless endeavor.

While most people fantasize about writing a book, few posses the determination to actually complete one.

There are many voices telling the author to never put pen to paper.

First there are the logical, sensible voices in your head that remind you your masterpiece is unlikely to ever get published by a big publisher, and even if you were lucky enough to earn that badge of honor, you're unlikely to ever earn enough to make the tax man care (see this anonymous post this morning that links to a 2003 story in Salon.com, written by an anonymous 'Jane Austen Doe' titled, "Confessions of a Semi-Successful Author" that reveals the ugly truth about writer compensation).

If the common sense voices in your head aren't enough to discourage you, you must also contend with the soul sucking voices of naysayers. They're the snarky or even well-intentioned unbelievers who kindly remind you: you're nuts to dream of writing a book, others already do it better than you, and hey, why don't you get a real job instead?

The prompt for my post today came indirectly from a question I was asked for a Q&A interview I did at AuthorShock.com.

Debbie Jenkins of AuthorShock asked me to name the single most important thing I wished I knew before I started out in business. To answer the question, I thought back to 20 years ago when I first cut my teeth working for my dad's software startup, and it reminded me of one of my all-time favorite lyrics:

"They say that life's a carousel, spinning fast you've got to ride it well. The world is full of kings and queens, who blind your eyes and steal your dreams..."

-Black Sabbath, Heaven and Hell

My short answer was that the entrepreneur (writers are entrepreneurs too!) must protect their dreams. No, I'm not talking about people stealing your ideas. Ideas are a dime a dozen. It's the execution that matters.

Don't let people stop you from dreaming your dreams, and don't let the skeptics derail you from executing on your dreams. Often, those naysayers are criticizing you because they're scared, or they can't see what you see.

Noone will understand your vision until you get out there and show them.

If all writers were fully equipped with a full contingent of common sense genes, most books would never get written and the world would be a poorer place for it.

What's my dream? To build an ebook publishing and distribution platform that helps any author, anywhere in the world, realize their dream of publishing. You can read the full interview at Authorshock.

What's your dream?


P.S. Don't forget to enter the free Editor Unleashed/Smashwords "Why I Write" essay contest. Win $500. Top 50 will be published in an anthology at Smashwords.

Should Publishers Abolish DRM and Trust Customers Instead?

My new column at Huffington Post suggests publishers should abolish DRM and trust their customers to do the right thing.

Most ebook customers don't know what DRM is. Many authors and small publishers don't understand it either. Yet if you're a reader, author or publisher, it's probably a good idea to roll up your sleeves and think about how DRM might impact you in the future.

All Smashwords books are published DRM-free. This means we don't apply copy-protection schemes that would prevent, for example, a customer from reading their ebook on any of the multiple ebook reading devices they may own today or in the future (e-readers, computer, cell phone, etc.).

Some of our retail partners apply DRM to our books in their own stores, and we're fine with this. It's up to the customer to decide if they care about DRM or not.

At Smashwords, we're strongly anti-piracy, though unlike publishers who infect their books with DRM, we instead work with our authors and publishers to help them educate customers to do the right thing. We think most customers are honest and honorable, and they understand the value of supporting the author or publisher who created the book for their enjoyment.

In the Smashwords Style Guide, we encourage our authors and publishers to add the following license statement to their books, which acts as a gentle reminder:

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The license statement also acts as a trojan horse. Should the book fall into the hands of readers who didn't pay for it, the license statement provides the honest reader a chance to make good on their obligation to support the author or publisher.

Obscurity is a bigger risk to authors than piracy. And while I'd never say piracy is a good thing, I've seen some folks argue it can actually provide indirect benefits to the creator. The idea isn't as outlandish as you might think. Imagine if somehow my novel was pirated, and fell into the hands of one million readers. What if the gentle reminder above prompted one percent of them to purchase the book? That's 10,000 paid customers.

In the column at HuffPo, I have a real world example of how one forward-looking software company (and folks, ebooks are software!) leveraged piracy in their early years - even encouraged it - and now they sell billions of dollars in software per year. There are many lessons to be learned by authors and publishers willing to experiment.

The column at HuffPo is actually a re-write of a previous column that first appeared here on the Smashwords blog. In that column, I tried to rationalize what I viewed as dichotomous thinking on the part of mainstream publishers. They sell books in print, and those books are shared, resold, resold again, again and again, and at each step the publisher receives nothing. If that book was an ebook, the publisher would call it piracy.

The same previous column was also republished over at Teleread. One commenter there called it, "marvelously imperfect," which is the highest praise I've ever received on a blog post. To me, the best blog posts provoke thought and serve as conversation-starters, not the last word.

What do you think is the last word (or the next word) on the DRM debate? Comment here, or click here to join the discussion at HuffPo.