Randolph Lalonde Takes Sci-Fi Space Opera to a New Level

Science Fiction author Randolph Lalonde has been with Smashwords since July, 2009. Smashwords distributes him to Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and Diesel.


His first year at Smashwords, as is the case with most authors, started out slowly, and he earned a few hundred dollars. But then, in 2010 he had a breakout year, and he's been selling very well ever since.

Lalonde’s newest book, The Expendable Few, is the latest in his popular Spinward Fringe series of science fiction space opera novels. He released it February 28 at Smashwords, where it is exclusively available for the first 30 days (it will appear soon at Smashwords retailers). As of this writing, it's the number one bestseller in the Smashwords store. A synopsis of the book appears at the end of our interview below.



[David Weir] Did you first explore the world of traditional publishing before turning to self-publishing, and if so, what was your experience?

[Randolph Lalonde] I tried to secure agency representation and publishing deals until I self-published in 2004. The submissions always came in spurts, every few years I'd send several dozen query letters out, and submit to open slush piles in several English-speaking countries. I even teamed up with an artist in an effort to break into the comic book market. Less than a quarter of my queries and submissions received a reply, and while a couple small publishers were interested in seeing more work from me in the future, they weren't interested in what I was offering at the time.

I didn't talk to anyone about the rejections or my efforts in getting published because I'd often get pretty negative responses from people I knew. It was a pipe dream, I may as well have been trying to be the next Brad Pitt, or Angelina Jolie for that matter, judging from people's responses. There were a few exceptions, but most people were pretty cynical about my dream as a writer, so I stopped talking about submissions for a long time. In 2004 I stopped submitting, and went the self publishing route for the first time.

[DW] Did people start taking you seriously after you self published in 2004?

[RL] People started to take me more seriously, but I was going about it the wrong way, even back then. I invested money in getting copies printed and flogging the book at signing and book launch events. While I broke even, it wasn't the way to go about things, and there were a lot of people who saw their cynicism proven right. I'm glad I didn't listen to them back then, because I learned a lot from that experience. Flogging a print book is generally the worst option a fiction author can take these days. I've seen several authors try that route in the last couple years, and they still see results that are similar or worse than the experience I had in 2004.

I didn't gain any respect from people I actually knew until around 2009, when I had been writing full time for several months. By then I had stopped paying attention to anyone who wasn't in my corner, and remembered everyone who was supportive all along. They are the ones who I make sure share in my dream these days, and I don't really pay attention to anyone else.

[DW] How did you find Smashwords and how was your early experience? How quickly did you books take off?

[RL] I was offering my books through Mobipocket, Kindle and several other small retailers, and saw that Mobipocket in particular was winding down fast. While looking for another distribution channel I found Smashwords. They offered a simple, DRM free platform that appealed to me because I was watching a lot of my early readers get frustrated because they weren't able to take their locked Mobipocket books with them to other platforms. Some of these customers had libraries worth hundreds of dollars, and the DRM didn't allow for portability or conversion. On July 31, 2009, I joined Smashwords, and it has been an important part of my distribution network ever since.

[DW] When did you realize that your first book was resonating with readers and how did that feel?

[RL] In early 2008 I published an optimistic space opera novella called Freeground on Mobipocket.com and was surprised to see a couple emails and reviews within the first month. I self published it because several co-workers had read it on a lark, and said it was really entertaining. It was initially written as a warm up for the Spinward Fringe series, a grittier Sci-Fi series I really wanted to pen. I was overjoyed when Mobipocket customers, not knowing me at all, mirrored my co-worker's enjoyment. By the time the third and final book in the First Light Chronicles series came out I wasn't just writing for myself anymore, and the fact that the Spinward Fringe series would have an audience drove me to work harder. (The First Light Trilogy is available for free as Spinward Fringe Broadcast 0: Origins).

[DW] What's been the hardest part of self-publishing, and what has been the best part?

[RL] The hardest part of self publishing is knowing how much of the situation you have to control and monitor. Once the book is done you are left with the business end of things, and that includes formatting, distribution, publicity, intellectual property protection, checking reviews for spoilers, answering emails, and other things. A control freak like myself can spend most of the day trying to firmly grip all those aspects. It took me a long time to figure out the priority list, and when it's time to just leave the business end alone while I get back to the pleasure of story telling.

I'm using 52 Novels formatting company 
for all my books now, both as a time-saving measure and to ensure that
 my books come out with a professional polish -- formatting wise at 
least.

The best part of self-publishing is the freedom I have as a storyteller, and the freedom I have in how that work is presented. Almost half the my latest book, The Expendable Few, was revealed for free on the reader forums, just because it had been a long time since anyone had seen any of my work, and I wanted some early reader feedback. Everyone got a juicy preview, and I got a lot of valuable feedback. I can't say I'd have that kind of freedom if I were with a mainstream publishing house.

[DW] When did you start writing and did you always want to be a writer?

[RL] I started writing short stories around the age of eleven, and completed my first full sized novel by the time I was seventeen. Since then I moved from one career to the next, using call centers as fall-back jobs when something more interesting wasn't available. I've worked as a Black Jack and Poker dealer in a traveling casino, played weekend gigs with a few bands as a drummer, managed a computer store, been a consumer technology trainer, and I've owned a design and print business. I think I've been in a lot of situations and met a lot of people that inform my writing. Through all of it I kept writing when I had time until I gave up in 2006. I didn't start writing again until 2008, after deciding to take a crack at science fiction with a story and setting that had been percolating for over twenty years.

[DW] Was Sci-Fi your first love as a writer? How did you come to it?

[RL] I've always enjoyed science fiction as a fan. My parents took me to see "Star Wars" when I was three years old in 1977, and I think the love affair began there. I wrote horror, suspense, military fiction, and a lot of fantasy before sitting down and trying science fiction for the first time on January 1, 2008.

The closest I came to writing science fiction before then was designing a role-playing system and universe when I was a teenager. We played that for years before I returned to other gaming systems as a storyteller. I believe that dipping into many genres as a writer and as a game master for over twenty years helped me find my story telling style, and helped make me the writer I am now.

[DW] What is the Space Opera genre, for those who are unfamiliar with it?

[RL] The Space Opera genre normally refers to futuristic adventures set in space, featuring ships, high technology, and dramatic situations between characters. Larger than life villains also tend to be a staple, but less so these days. There are more novels featuring more realistic heroes and anti-heroes who struggle with day to day challenges coming out now, instead of epic 'save the galaxy' stories. The grand examples of Space Opera that people would recognize are "Star Wars," "Star Trek," "Battlestar Galactica" and "Firefly."

[DW] What is your writing process -- how often, how long, and do you set goals for a certain number of words per session or per day?

[RL] Word counting never worked for me, I always seemed to start high and taper off over time. What works these days is looking at chapters of a novel like a puzzle, and trying to find the most interesting way to put the pieces together. I try to write every day, and focus on one novel at a time unless the muse descends like a bag of hammers and I have to spend a short stint on another project. I usually get my first writing session in before 9 a.m. and then take care of some of the daily business. If I'm in the middle of a project and I've already figured out the next few chapters, I'll have another writing session or two later that day or evening. My writing sessions are typically two to four hours long.

[DW] How your characters and stories come to you? For example, are they pretty much set before you begin writing, or do they develop during the writing process?

[RL] I normally have a couple main characters developed before I start. These are the initial point of view characters. I often have certain scenes in mind for them before I begin, so I have a feeling for how they behave, and what their tendencies are. Other characters develop during the writing, and I usually know them pretty well by the time I've finished writing a chapter in which they've stolen the scene. Some of these have become reader favorites, even central to the series itself.

[DW] Where are you headed over the next five years as a writer? Will you continue the highly successful Spinward Fringe series and if so, how many more books in it are to come?

[RL] I approach the Spinward Fringe series as I would a television series in a few important respects. That series has seasons, wherein story arcs begin and end. The current arc started in Broadcast 0, and is ending in Broadcast 7. After that I'll be starting a new 'season' with Broadcast 8, which will feature a couple stand-alone books that aren't as tightly connected to future novels as Broadcasts 0-7 were. Having a story arc that threaded through eight books was just too long, so I want to tell stories that are a little more compact, but just as entertaining. As long as there are stories left to tell in the Spinward Fringe universe, I'll keep adding to it.

[DW] Do you envision attempting books in other genres in the future?

[RL] Other than the Spinward Fringe series, I'll be finishing work on a Fantasy Adventure novella and continuing work on a Horror Adventure novel this year. I also have a few ideas for one-shot books that range from comedy to straight up horror, so if I stop having new ideas tomorrow, there's enough material scrawled in notebooks to last me at least the next five years. I'm sure I'll have more ideas though, that muse is always up there somewhere, ready to dive-bomb my brain.

[DW] If you had one tip for an aspiring author who's having trouble taking the plunge, what would it be?

[RL] Write, keep writing, and finish everything you can. Sometimes it'll feel like you're just punching a clock and putting in a couple hundred words because you should, other times you won't be able to get to your word processor fast enough. What's important is that you do it, and you complete as many projects as you can. When you find a story you love, with characters you can't forget for long, and people you trust have told you it's entertaining, then you should find someone with the right education to copy edit your work. Once you're confident you've done the best job you can on the polish your baby deserves, release it out into the world. If you love the novel you've written there's definitely a few like-minded people out there who have been waiting to love it too.

[DW] And, what is the best thing about being a writer, for you?

[RL] I enjoy exploring worlds with characters I'd like to know, or love to despise. Writing is a way of doing that without looking absolutely crazy. Without my writing habit I'm sure I'd be that guy you see who talks to himself in public and carries on with imaginary people.

[DW] Thanks, Randy!

***

Here's a synopsis of Randolph Lalonde’s latest book, The Expendable Few:



Commander Clark Patterson and several other officers in the Freeground 
Military are ejected from regular service when a desire to look beyond
 Freeground Nation’s borders is proven by an oppressive government.
 They are assigned dangerous missions by a special Intelligence
 Oversight Group.

 If Commander Patterson and his people complete these missions, they’ll
 gain their freedom from Oversight and have the opportunity to start
over in a tumultuous galaxy. Patterson’s fascination with another crew
 who left Freeground years before and managed to survive serves as a
destination, but will they survive to reach it?

Where to find Randolph Lalonde and his books:

Website: http://www.randolphlalonde.com
Twitter: @randolphlalonde
Facebook: Randolph Lalonde Facebook profile
MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/randolphlalonde
Blog: http://randolphlalonde.blogspot.com/


Smashwords distributes Randolph Lalonde ebooks to the following retailers:

Randolph Lalonde at Smashwords

Randolph Lalonde at Apple

Randolph Lalonde at Barnes & Noble

Randolph Lalonde at Sony

Randolph Lalonde at Kobo

Randolph Lalonde at Diesel

David Weir is a veteran journalist who has published three books and hundreds of articles in various publications, including The Economist, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. He currently covers technology for 7x7.com.

Smashwords to Distribute to Blio and Public Libraries Via New Distribution Agreement with Baker & Taylor

Smashwords today announced a distribution agreement with Baker & Taylor, one of the world's largest distributors of physical and digital books.

The agreement will expand distribution for nearly 100,000 Smashwords books to new devices and markets.

There are two components of the agreement. The first is distribution into the Blio online store and e-reading app. The second part of the agreement gains Smashwords authors and publishers distribution into the library market through Baker & Taylor's Axis360 service.

If you're not familiar with Blio, it's an online store (Blio.com) and also a popular e-reading application that has been pre-loaded on over millions of computers and devices. It powers the e-reading experience for laptops, desktops and tablets produced by Dell Computer, HP, Toshiba and T-Mobile, among others. Blio is also available in the Android store.

The agreement will also bring Smashwords ebooks to public libraries that subscribe to Baker & Taylor’s new Axis360 digital media platform. Axis360, which was launched last year, has been deployed by several top public library systems in the U.S. Dozens more libraries are converting to the platform.

Like all new Smashwords distribution channels, all Premium Catalog-approved Smashwords titles will gain automatic distribution to Blio and Axis360. As standard practice, we give authors and publishers at least 48 hours to opt out new distribution outlets if they wish, though I don't recommend opting out. This agreement will give authors and publishers important, incremental exposure for their books.

Smashwords authors and publishers will earn 60% of the list price for books sold through Blio, and 45% of the list price for books sold to libraries. The libraries are authorized to check out one purchased copy at a time. The books are DRM'd so they time out after the checkout period has expired.

Read the full press release in the Smashwords Press Room.

Please join me in welcoming Baker & Taylor to the Smashwords distribution network!

Smashwords Author Profile: Shayne Parkinson

(Mark's note: This is the first in an ongoing series of Smashwords author profiles. The interviews are conducted by David Weir, a veteran journalist who has written previously for The Economist, Rolling Stone and The New York Times. We'll profile a diverse range of authors who are achieving success distributing ebooks with Smashwords. Even if we manage to do 52 interviews in the next year [a goal], it means we'll barely touch 1 in 1,000 Smashwords authors. Do you have a favorite Smashwords author? If so, consider interviewing them for your blog and support your fellow indie authors.)


When we caught up with Shayne Parkinson recently, she was just about to go outside her countryside home and tend to her sheep.

Shayne writes historical fiction set in her native New Zealand, a genre traditional publishers in her country considered too niche to take seriously. So she started to self-published with Smashwords starting in March 2009. Ever since, people all over the world have been discovering her books -- one reader at a time.

And once they do, they became fans, often quite insistently (as she explains below) awaiting the next book in her series. These days, her books attract a truly significant global audience, and she sells more in a day now than she did in her first full year back at the start.

Smashwords distributes Shayne's work to Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Sony, Diesel and Amazon. And Shayne's husband, Roger, also publishes on Smashwords.

[David Weir] We know your first year on Smashwords was one of slow growth as people began to discover your work. Can you describe what it was like "meeting" your first readers and fans?

[Shayne Parkinson] Delightful and astonishing and wonderful. To hear from someone halfway around the world telling me that my stories have touched the reader in some way, perhaps by a reminder of something in his or her own experience, even though they're set in such a different time and place, is hugely rewarding.

I now get quite a bit of mail from readers, and answering it is one of my pleasantest daily tasks. A while ago I got a lovely letter from a group of co-workers who've read my books. They attached a photograph showing them all in their office, holding up a mix of paperback versions and e-reader displays of the books' covers. That had me smiling for days. More recently a lady informed me that she has most of the people in her little town reading the books, and if I don't hurry up with the next one they'll all move to New Zealand and camp outside my gate. And I should be worried, she tells me, "because we're Texans". I wouldn't dare stop writing with readers like these!

[DW] How did interest in your work grow after that slow beginning? Was there a "tipping point?"

[SP] I think there was a tipping point around the middle of 2011, about two and a half years after I joined Smashwords. I've never done much marketing, instead relying on word-of-mouth. A reader enjoys the books and recommends them to a friend or two. Sometimes one of those friends likes them enough to recommend them in turn. It might take a while, as it did for me, but reader recommendations are like gold.

[DW] Are you surprised that you've emerged as a successful author, or did you expect this would happen?

[SP] I'm genuinely and utterly astonished. I hoped I'd get some readers, and perhaps make my hobby self-sustaining by earning enough to pay my research expenses, but I wouldn't have dared dream I'd be hearing from hundreds of readers and earning a living (meaning I now have much more time to devote to writing) from something I love doing. I sometimes wonder when I'm going to wake up!

[DW] What do you like most about indie self-publishing?

[SP] Having the freedom to work at my own pace, and being responsible only to my readers and to myself.

[DW] You've told us that about 20 years ago, you had "all of these stories running around in my head" so you started writing them down. How long had those stories been taking form for you and where do you suppose they came from?

[SP] The original inspiration was a place: a farming valley a few miles from my childhood home. My husband grew up in this valley, on a farm that had been in his family for generations. Much of the land had been cleared for pasture, but the steeper hills were still covered in forest—bush, as we call it in New Zealand. 

I was captivated by this lovely place (and by the farm boy who eventually became my husband); later, after the farm had passed out of family ownership and there was somehow more time to talk, I was captivated by the memories of those who had lived there, particularly my late father-in-law, who was almost 90 when he died, and who had his own father's and grandfather's recollections to share. Tales were told of the days before electricity or engines had reached the valley; when milking was done by hand, and machinery was drawn by horses. A weekly buggy trip to town was an adventure in its own right, dependent on the state of the track and on tides. The valley was isolated, and family all-important.

I never quite forgot the valley, even when we'd moved far away. I didn't think of myself as a writer back then, beyond the few short stories and articles that I'd produced, but that place and those times somehow called to me. Over the years characters took shape in my imagination, set in my imagined vision of the valley long before my time; my own inventions but surprisingly real to me. And as I thought about these people, how they might have lived and what they might have been like, stories took shape and grew, to the point where I conceived the outrageous idea of writing a novel.

[DW] How long were you writing down your stories before you showed them to others, and who did you show them to?

[SP] I showed them to my husband from early on, when they were still very much works in progress. Once the first book was complete, a few friends and workmates asked to borrow it, then word spread among friends and acquaintances who wanted to borrow the books (or rather folders of print-outs, as they were back then).

[DW] When did you approach traditional publishers and what happened?

[SP] It was a fairly casual approach. I've never had any real interest in trying out traditional publishing, but several readers encouraged me to make an attempt. I wrote a brief query to three (I think) publishers; two said they wouldn't consider fiction from an unknown author, and the third said there would be no interest at all in long books of New Zealand historical fiction.

[DW] How did you discover Smashwords and what drove you to try it out?

[SP] After leaving my manuscripts gathering dust on a shelf for some time (my fund of interested friends and acquaintances had dried up by now), I began to wonder if there was a way of making them available to more readers. I saw Smashwords mentioned on a site called Authonomy, and when I visited the site I liked what I saw there in terms of what was being offered and the vibe I got from the people running it.




[DW] Your love of history and of New Zealand's history, particularly in the late 1800s, is evident in your work. When and how did you first develop this specific passion?

[SP] While I've had an interest in history for as far back as I can remember, this particular passion grew with the process of discovering my characters and the world they inhabit. I wanted to find out more about how they lived, and the more I learned the more fascinated I became. 

The late Victorian era saw some significant changes in New Zealand, particularly relating to women. The Married Women's Property Act of 1884 allowed married women to own property in their own right. Changes to divorce law meant that women could file for divorce on the same grounds as men. In 1893 New Zealand women gained the vote, the first in the world to do so. The attitude where a woman was seen as the property of first her father, later her husband, with only the most minimal of rights to her own person, was being undermined. 

I hadn't originally intended to write a sequel, let alone a series, but when I finished "Settling the Account" I found that I missed the characters too much to leave them behind. That meant taking them further into the early 20th century. The book I'm currently editing covers the years of the Great War, 1914-1918. Finding out what it might have been like for those left at home during the war to try and cope when sons, husbands and brothers were taken from them is proving just as fascinating to me as the earlier periods were.

While the historic period has shaped the attitudes of my characters and the events of their lives, and the period details are as accurate as I can make them, the books aren't about those details. I believe that in some ways people are the same across the ages. We all have dreams and disappointments, loves and losses, joy and sorrow. For me, historical fiction can show us something of how our forbears lived—such different lives from ours—and can help us feel a kinship with them.

I find it easier to identify with ordinary people than the great and powerful, and although mine are imaginary they're as real as I can make them. I'd like to think that my characters give something of a voice to those who lived obscure lives of quiet struggle and small triumphs, wanting the best for their children, even though their idea of "the best" might be very different from ours.

[DW] Did anyone ever encourage you to become a writer?

[SP] Not really, although once I *did* start writing my husband was and continues to be my most supportive and encouraging reader. I was lucky enough to have some very good English teachers who gave me a good grounding in the basics of using language.

My late father was a great reader, and he was the person who first taught me to love books. That love of reading contributed to a desire to write.



[DW] You've said that you enjoy getting to know your characters. Can you explain how they come to you and how they develop once they arrive?

[SP] Yes, getting to know my characters is for me one of the great delights of writing. 

When I'm going to introduce new characters, I spend some time just letting them take shape in my imagination: putting them in different settings, "listening" to them talking, finding out their likes and dislikes. It's like sitting quietly in a room listening to the conversations of others, occasionally nudging conversation in a certain direction, and then recording what I’ve learned about these people. I think about their back-stories, their childhoods, the sorts of families they came from. 

I find out more about them when writing, especially as they interact with other characters. It's sometimes a matter of writing my way into a character, maybe devoting pages to the process, knowing that much of what I've written will be discarded. Characters and story each grow with the telling—for events shape character, and characters shape events.

While I like to think I'm in charge, sometimes a character will surprise me by insisting on acting in a certain way when I'd planned something different, or perhaps saying something I really didn't expect. I've learned that it's best to let them have their own way when this happens.




[DW] Do you create detailed back-stories for each character, like screenwriters do, perhaps including material that doesn't make it into the book?

[SP] Yes, I do, and the back-stories grow ever more detailed as I get to know the characters better and better. I put several chapters worth of extra material from the first book on my web site, rather as DVDs sometimes include deleted scenes, as that extra material gives further insight into the main character but would slow the narrative too much if I included it in the published book.

[DW] When you've finished a book, do you miss the daily interactions with your characters? Or, perhaps a better question would be, do those interactions end?

[SP] No, those interactions never do end. Even when I'm not actively writing about them, I'm thinking about what they might be up to in "book time", and how particular historical events might affect them. Sometimes I imagine what-if scenarios: what would have happened if a particular event had gone in a different direction. I have files of notes for future books that I'm constantly updating, and that's part of keeping in touch with the characters.

Another way those interactions stay fresh is through correspondence with readers. My characters do feel very real to me, and discussing them with readers who've had a strong response to a character adds extra layers to my own experience of them.

I find I'm now writing about the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of some of my original characters. Because the readers and I have known these people for so much of their lives, there's a sort of shared history. When something happens in a character's present, we're aware of the past experiences that are shaping that character's reaction.

[DW] How do you work? Do you write according to a regular schedule every day and how much rewriting, and editing do you do?

[SP] It would be fair to say I'm not the most organized person in the world when it comes to working at set times. I do devote time to writing almost every day, and I don't allow myself the possibility of writer's block. On days when the words simply refuse to flow, I work out plot details or write up character descriptions. I also research more or less constantly. 

I do several editing passes, some involving fairly substantial amounts of rewriting, moving things around, or removing sections, then further passes to polish the work.




[DW] Where do you think you will be as a writer, five years from now?

[SP] I expect to have more books out, still using historical New Zealand as my main setting, but exploring new aspects of that setting. I hope to grow as a writer, learning from every book and from the response of readers.

I've a head full of plots, and a bulging file of research notes and ideas for the future. My next book will be released some time in the next few months, and I have at least half a dozen more in various stages of plotting, including some that will feature characters who have secondary roles in the main series.

[DW] Finally, do you have any advice for others who may be hesitating before taking the plunge to self-publish their first book?

[SP] Self-publishing can provide a wonderful opportunity to reach readers, and with luck it may also mean commercial success. I'm very grateful for the success I've had, but I think it's important not to lose sight of why I write: for the joy of the writing itself, and for interacting with readers. Those are the most important things of all. 

Every writer's experience will be different, but here are some things that have helped me:

1. Making the books as good as I possibly can, from the broader issues of story and characterization through to careful proof-reading.
2. Writing what I'm inspired to write, without worrying if it will be commercially successful.
3. Being accessible: the books are in a variety of outlets; I’ve a web site and a blog, and an easy-to-find email address.
4. Patience.
5. A healthy dose of luck.

[DW] Thanks Shayne!

Smashwords distributes Shayne Parkinson to the following retail outlets:

Apple iBookstore

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Diesel

Kobo

Smashwords

Sony

Follow Shayne Parkinson:

Blog: http://shayneparkinson.blogspot.com/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ShayneParkinson

David Weir is a veteran journalist who has published three books and hundreds of articles in various publications, including The Economist, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. He currently covers technology for 7x7.com.

Smashwords Surpasses 100,000 Indie Ebooks

Today we announced an important Smashwords milestone. Over 100,000 ebooks are now published and live in the Smashwords catalog, thanks to the efforts of over 36,000 Smashwords authors and publishers around the world.

This month also marks our fourth birthday. Four years ago we unveiled Smashwords at the Tools of Change conference in New York. It's fun to read our original Smashwords launch press release. Back then, ebooks accounted for about two-tenths of one percent of the U.S. book market. Self published authors were considered black sheep.

What a wild ride it's been the last four years. Millions of books sold. Millions of readers touched by your words. Lives changed.

My favorite emails are from complete strangers who contact me and write, "Because of Smashwords, I'm writing again." Those emails make this all worth it, and inspire me to do more and do better for our authors.

Four years in, it still feels like we're just getting started. The next couple years will be exciting. New global markets are opening up. Billions of new, potential readers will be equipped with ebook-ready smart phones, tablets, computers and yes, even e-readers.

These potential readers will all be a few clicks away from discovering, sampling and purchasing books previously unknown and unavailable to them. Maybe some child growing up at the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro will enjoy your book some day. Maybe your words will inspire them to write. Maybe it's already happening.

Ebooks transcend geography and make your words accessible to vast audiences. The secret to reaching your audience (beyond of course publishing and distributing with Smashwords!) is to write words worth reading. If you honor your reader with quality work, your reader will honor you back by reading more of your words, and by recommending you to their friends.

Read today's press release in the Smashwords Press Room.

On behalf of all 13 of us at Smashwords, thank you for joining us on this journey to change the world of publishing one indie ebook at a time.

Charlotte Sometimes and The Cure

So often, the discussion about copyright centers around how authors can retain total control over their intellectual property and prevent others from borrowing it, copying it or stealing it.

I won't attempt to weigh in on all sides of the moral or ethical debates surrounding this contentious issue. Instead, I'm going to share a story about how a great novel inspired a great song.

The story illustrates the unintended consequences of what, at first glance, might strike the author as theft, but upon reflection is revealed as a gift.

Back in 1981, the gothic rock band The Cure released a single titled, Charlotte Sometimes. It's an amazing song (listen below). It tells the story of a young girl who at night mysteriously travels back in time 40 years to switch places with another girl.

The song was inspired by a childrens novel of the same name published by British author Penelope Farmer in 1969.

The Cure's lyrics for Charlotte Sometimes lift direct passages from the novel. The band wrote and released the song without clearing the rights with the author or her publisher.

When the author and her agent first learned about the song, they were livid. After all, here was a writer of limited financial means watching a megaband profit from her story, her title and her words. Was this theft or fair use? Read the links below, then you decide.

In 2007, Penelope Farmer shared her side of the story in two blog posts. The posts are poignant, and might surprise you. Read them here:

#1: http://grannyp.blogspot.com/2007/06/cured.html
#2: http://grannyp.blogspot.com/2007/06/cured-climaxed.html

Here's The Cure performing Charlotte Sometimes in Brazil the same year (1996) Ms. Farmer came face to face with Robert Smith. Enjoy.

I don't know about you, but I'm curious to read the book.

Robert Smith (or any other songwriter), you have my permission to take my novel, Boob Tube, and immortalize it into song. Extra credit for turning The Smashwords Style Guide into song.

Smashwords Author Darcie Chan Hits #1 in Apple iBookstore

Congrats to Smashwords author Darcie Chan, who today rose to become the #1 bestseller at the Apple iBookstore with her ebook, The Mill River Recluse.

This weekend, Apple promoted the book in an email blast to its customers, recommending it as one of their "Buzz Books."

In a further sign that self-published titles are gaining cachet with customers, Apple's promo celebrated the title's self-published background, stating, "The self-published phenomenon is dazzling readers everywhere."

If you're looking for a great read, check it out at the Apple iBookstore. It's also distributed by Smashwords to Barnes & Noble, Sony, Diesel and Kobo.

The description:

Disfigured by the blow of an abusive husband, and suffering her entire life with severe social anxiety disorder, the widow Mary McAllister hasn't been seen by the people of Mill River, Vermont, in almost sixty years. Only Father Michael O'Brien, the town's elderly priest, knows Mary and the secret she keeps -- one that, once revealed, will change all of their lives forever.

For More on Darcie Chan, visit her Smashwords Author Page or her personal website. Also check out the feature on her in the Wall Street Journal from a few weeks back.

Smashwords Year in Review 2011

Welcome to my annual Smashwords year in review.

2011 was another strong year for Smashwords and our authors.

We're ending the year with over 92,000 titles published, up from 28,800 at the end of last year.

In my 2010 year in review post, 75,000 was my stretch goal for this year, so we beat it by a good margin.

Smashwords today supports over 34,000 authors and small publishers around the world, up from 12,000 a year ago.

I launched Smashwords four years ago with a crazy idea to change the way books were published, marketed and sold. I believed authors should have the freedom to publish directly to their readers without the interference of publishing gatekeepers. My ideas were not unique. The great Dan Poynter has been evangelizing the virtues of self-publishing for over 30 years.

I’d like to think we’ve helped bring Dan’s vision to life. Smashwords married self-publishing with ebooks, and we did it with a free platform that enabled any writer, anywhere in the world, to easily publish an ebook using nothing more than a word processor. We took the printing press – once under the sole dominion of the publisher – and put it in the cloud for all to use.

Unlike publishing services that earn their income by selling paid services to authors, Smashwords doesn’t sell services. Smashwords earns income only if we help sell books. We earn a small commission on sales equal to 10% of the list price for distributed books, and 15% of the net for books sold at our Smashwords.com retail operation. We think our approach aligns our interests with the interests of authors. The more we help you sell your book, the better we all do.

What started as crazy dream has become a reality. We've created a business that empowers authors to reach readers with their words. Smashwords authors collectively earned millions of dollars in 2011. More importantly, we've helped tens of thousands of authors enjoy the freedom to publish and get read.

When we launched in early 2008, many writers viewed self-publishing as the option of last resort. Self-pubbed authors were often ridiculed as "vanity" authors, and much of the most vitriolic criticism came from fellow writers. We don’t hear much of that anymore. Self-publishing is finally earning the respect it deserves.

Today, self publishing is the option of first choice for many first-time authors. Previously published authors - the backbone of Big Publishing, are also wading into the indie waters. Most start with their reverted-rights works. Then they catch the indie bug and release unsold works, and then they move on to original first releases. You might think of it as a graduated progression toward enlightenment that starts with baby steps before the big leap. More will take those first steps in 2012, inspired by other successful indies, possibly inspired by you.

I think few people in the traditional publishing industry comprehend how this indie author revolution will transform their business in the next few years. Their world is about to be turned upside down.

Unfortunately, when faced with simultaneous convergence of multiple big trends (the rise of ebooks, the rise of the indie authors, the shift of bookselling from brick and mortar to online), most big publishers have taken actions counterproductive to their own self-preservation. They're trying to grab author rights they don't deserve. They're trying to the hold the line at 25% net royalties for ebooks, which works out to a paltry 12-17.5% of list. That line can't hold when authors can earn 60-80% list by self-publishing, and enjoy better distribution.

The power of publishing is shifting from large publishers to authors. It's what I’ve predicted for four years, and now the trend is plain as day for anyone who chooses to see it. What happens when authors lose faith in Big Publishing? This was the subject of my blog post earlier this year, Nietzsche and the Downfall of Big Publishing, inspired by what I thought were interesting parallels with the Arab Spring.

2011 was the year indies proved they can out-publish, out-compete, out-distribute and out-sell the large publishers. Look no further than the bestseller lists at major retailers to see how the indie insurgents are scaling the lists. A few have even landed in the NY Times ebook bestseller list. We’ll see more of this in 2012.

The Indie Movement Reaches Adolescence

Indie authors, free of the legacy business practices and expense structures of the large publishers, are beginning to feel their oats.

If the indie author movement was a person, it would just now be entering puberty. It's in that gawky awkward pimply stage of life. The participants are filled with unbridled optimism for the future, confident they're writing the new rules for the future (and they are!).

Visit any writers message board and you’ll find writers plotting the future of publishing. Sure, the skeptical observer will find petty internecine squabbles reminiscent of high school, and copious uniformed opinions dripping with unfounded speculation, fear, greed, envy and aspiration. But dig deeper and you'll see something profound is happening. These newly fledged indie ebook authors (old timers are the ones with two or three years of experience) are piecing together the secrets of successful modern day publishing.

They’re sharing information, debating, arguing and leading the revolution that is upon us. We're witnessing the rise of the indie author collective, and the collective - warts and all – is giving rise to an intelligence and sophistication that will redefine publishing for the better.

The practice and professionalism of self-publishing grew by leaps and bounds in 2011 as indie authors collaborated. The best indie authors and small presses are publishing books of equal or higher quality than traditional publishers, and they're doing it faster, smarter and less expensively. Because the indies are earning 60-80% of the list price as their royalty, they're earning higher profits while producing a product that is more affordable and more accessible to more readers around the globe than ever before.

As some lucky indies strike gold (and let’s be realistic, most indies do not sell well, just as most traditionally published books don't sell well), they share their secrets in real time and inspire all authors to raise their game.

We're witnessing a publishing renaissance that will lead to more readers, more reading, greater literacy, and greater and more amazing published works than could ever have been realized under the old gatekeeping system.

As I've often stated here and elsewhere, traditional publishers are in the business of selling books, not publishing books. They acquire books they think they can sell. Nothing wrong with that, unless you’re an author whose work is not perceived as commercial, or you lack the fame of an established platform, or you’re a reader who appreciates more choice at less cost.

Writers write for reasons different than publishers publish, and it's at the nexus of these opposing motivations that the indie author revolution took root.

Today’s indie ebook author is at the right place at the right time. Print is in decline as reading moves to screens, brick and mortar fades, and book buying moves online.

The Free Printing Press Helps Shift Publishing Power to Authors

In the old world of two or three years ago, publishers controlled the printing press and access to distribution. Today, thanks to free ebook publishing and distribution tools like Smashwords, the printing press is free and available to any author, and distribution is open to all.

Retailers such as Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Diesel and Amazon deserve a lot of credit for welcoming indies to their virtual shelves. These ebook retailers are hungry to carry the books of indie authors because these books satisfy their customers (they sell). Retailers also understand that readers could care less about the name of the publisher on the book’s virtual spine.

The implications of this revolution are profound. Writers are now in charge. The writer decides when their manuscript graduates to published book. Readers decide which books are read.

Along with this power shift also comes the responsibility for authors to honor the best-practices of the best traditional publishers. Readers have little tolerance for anything less, and this is how it should be.

In this age of abundance where consumers have unlimited access to myriad high-quality sources of entertainment and knowledge - much of it accessible for free - writers need to up their game. Those who honor the reader by publishing great books will reach the most readers.

Book marketing has always been a word of mouth business. If you write a book that touches your reader’s soul, or inspires them with passion or knowledge, your readers will market your book for you.

There's never been a better time to be a writer. The opportunity to reach readers with words has never been greater.

Against this backdrop, you might understand why I’m so excited about the future I see for Smashwords authors and publishers. Our business is dedicated to helping authors stake their rightful claim to this bright future.

So let's turn the page to Smashwords...

If I were to sum up our focus in 2011 in one word, that word would be infrastructure.

Smashwords has been profitable for 15 months. We're reinvesting these profits to build a solid foundation upon which we’ll deliver continuous service enhances to our authors, publishers and retailers for many years to come.

Our development roadmap calls for over 500 minor and major service enhancements. Some are so minor you might not notice them. Others we think will knock your socks off. The Smashwords you see today barely scratches the surface of what we think is possible.

The bulk of our development effort this year focused on building a scalable technology infrastructure that can support one million or more published and distributed books (or, about 10X our current size). To enable this future, we invested heavily in infrastructure. Much of this infrastructure build-out is invisible to users, and if we do our job right it remains invisible. You don’t care how we build it, you just want what we build to work for you, whether you're an author, publisher, retailer or reader.

Notable Smashwords Milestones 2011

Before I review the plans for 2012, let’s summarize some of the notable business, technology and competitive highlights for 2011:

1. People - There are real people behind Smashwords. 12 months ago, we were barely three employees. Today we're 13. We've got a great team here in California, all of whom are dedicated to serving our authors, publishers, retailers and customers. We value every client.

2. Platform infrastructure - We completely rearchitected the underlying Smashwords platform this year to improve scalability, reliability, performance and security. As one of the Twitter founders once said, developing a fast-growing web service is akin to rebuilding a rocket ship in mid-flight. I grok that. The Smashwords platform has a lot of complex moving parts. Most of our last six months of development work has been focused on this infrastructure under the hood; the nuts, bolts, gears, glue and magic that hold our systems together. Most people never think about infrastructure except for when it fails. The proof in our pudding: Our infrastructure improvements have led to fewer website outages and faster page load times at the same time our catalog of books and traffic have exploded.

3. Distribution - We revamped our technical integrations with our retail partners so our books can flow to them faster and more accurately than ever before. Most of our retail partners also upped their games to accommodate our incredible increase in title volume. This is not to say everything is perfect. It is not. We view distribution as a never-ending work in progress, and we will continue to work in a constructive manner with all our retail partners to explore how we can improve our mutual performance.

4. Meatgrinder - We completed multiple updates to our Meatgrinder conversion engine, both in terms of scalability and also capability. On the scalability front, earlier in the year Meatgrinder was taking up to 30 hours to convert a single ebook. We tripled conversion capacity and now complete most conversions within three minutes. On the capability front, we improved Meatgrinder's ability to produce higher-quality books by adding greater styling control, automatically generated NCXes, and automatic error correction for some common formatting problems.

5. Categorization - We're in the final stages of a complete remapping of our categorization system to provide complete support for the latest BISAC categorization specifications. We're now supporting more categories than ever. Good categorization is a foundational element of what comes next in 2012.

6. Discovery - Multiple items here. Books aren’t purchasable unless they’re findable (or tripped over or stumbled upon or recommended by a friend or promoted), and that's where discovery comes in. We kicked off 2011 by adding support for long book descriptions (4,000 characters). We updated the shopping cart so it recommends up to 12 other books by the same author. In March, we launched the official Smashwords Facebook page which now gets thousands of visitors each week (thanks to the great volunteer efforts of Smashwords author John Low!) including many readers looking to discover new authors. In June, we acquired a block of 50,000 ISBNs from Bowker so we could give them away for free (ISBNs enable distribution to Apple, Sony and Kobo).

7. Reporting – We increased the frequency of our aggregated sales reporting from retail partners. We introduced a new downloadable spreadsheet that maps each quarterly payment to the sales behind that payment, and we made the data easy to query by author, retailer or title. For sales at Smashwords.com, we improved our email notifications so authors can more easily monitor more information about about their sales as they happen. Customers, too, now receive more complete purchase confirmations to help them access their books faster and easier.

8. Literary Agents – We updated our publishing platform so literary agents can now upload and manage the indie ebook efforts of their clients.

9. Globalization – On a percentage basis, most countries outside the US are just now entering the exponential growth phase. Their markets are where the US market was two, three or four years ago. Within a few years, the market for ebooks outside the US will dwarf the US market. We took a number of steps in 2011 to expand the global footprint of Smashwords ebooks. We signed an expanded distribution deal with Apple which increased our international coverage to Apple iBookstores in 32 different countries. Today, nearly half of our Apple sales come from outside the U.S (I’m surprised the media hasn’t picked up more on Apple’s impressive international success in 2011). We updated our payment and reporting systems to track VAT, which is handled differently by different retailers. Thanks to the volunteer efforts of Smashwords authors around the world, we released translated Smashwords Style Guides in German, French, Spanish, Italian (also the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide in Italian) and Dutch. A Bengali version is completed and a Danish version is in the works.

10. Smashwords Gifting - Our final big feature of the year launched on Christmas eve. We now make it easy for customers (and authors too, if they choose) to purchase ebooks as gifts. We think this is a nice complement to our popular Smashwords Coupon tool.

11. Competition - Many new ebook distribution competitors came on the scene in 2011. Back in 2008, we were the only game in town when we became the first ebook distributor to focus exclusively on self-published authors. Now you have choices. We feel honored that so many authors, small publishers and agents continue to choose Smashwords over the competition.

The ebook market remains in an exponential growth phase. 2011 will probably show ebooks at 20% of the US book market, up from 8.3% the year before and 3% the year before that. Based on preliminary post-Christmas sales results I’ve seen for Smashwords books at Apple, B&N and Sony, I think 2012 could see ebook market share in the US rise to between 40 and 50%. I expect many more competitors will come online in 2012 and 2013. I've been in technology for the last 20 years, so I'm intimately familiar with the inevitable boom and bust cycles of things touched by tech (and I have the old scars to prove it). Ebooks are in the boom phase now, but they cannot continue the torrid pace of growth. The new competitors and the noise they create will draw more authors, books and readers into the market, and will act as a growth catalyst for a couple years. When the exponential growth ends and the bust comes (and yes, it will come), some of these new competitors will disappear. Any one of us could disappear if we fail to build profitable businesses that add measurable value to those we serve.

In 2011, the most formidable competition came from Amazon, which has been on a multi-year rampage to disintermediate anyone or anything that stands between Amazon and their target customer. Three weeks ago Amazon launched KDP Select, a new opt-in service that represents their boldest broadside yet aimed at competing ebook retailers. KDP Select requires participating authors to remove their books from all retailers except for Amazon. I blogged why I think KDP Select is bad for authors (here and here). While most Smashwords authors share my view that exclusivity is a dangerously slippery slope to trod, thousands of authors enrolled titles in the Amazon program before Christmas. Of the approximate 65,000 or so books enrolled in KDP Select, nearly 6,000 books came from - and disappeared from - Smashwords as a result.

Despite the punch in the gut from Amazon, we still managed to grow our title count during the month of December (now over 92,000 titles), albeit at a lower rate of growth than we’re accustomed. Preliminary holiday sales results indicate our remaining authors enjoyed an impressive sales bump in the first few days following Christmas at Apple (up over 70%), Barnes & Noble (up over 100%) and Sony (up 30%). I don’t yet have results from Kobo and Diesel. If the record-breaking post-Christmas bump follows the same pattern as last year, sales will moderate a little in the next two weeks and then stabilize and begin growing again at a new normal that’s measurably higher than the pre-Christmas sales levels. These strong holiday sales, and the tremendous growth we’ve seen this year both in the US and internationally only solidify my conviction of the importance of authors maintaining broad and diversified distribution. Every retailer – even the smallest – works to introduce authors to new readers they wouldn’t reach otherwise. Yes, distribution is our business so my view is biased. I believe in the value of retailers and the distributors who serve them.

Someday, if the Amazon powers see fit, we’ll distribute more of our titles to them as well (we’re currently distributing about 200 titles to them). We’d much prefer to engage with Amazon as a partner rather than as adversary. We think we and our authors can help make their business more successful, just as we’ve helped our existing retailer partners grow their businesses. A good distributor helps retailers ingest and list more titles more efficiently and at less cost than operating their own self-pub platforms.

What's Coming to Smashwords in 2012?

Smashwords is an ebook distributor, so our priorities will be guided by this focus. Service enhancements will concentrate on making our books more available and more discoverable by readers.

In 2012 we’ll shift more of our attention from backend infrastructure to customer-facing user experience. The new features and service offerings will leverage the new infrastructure foundation we built in 2011.

Here’s a brief sampling of what you can expect from Smashwords in 2012:

Discovery – We’ll complete the BISAC recategorization mentioned above very soon, and from there we’ll turn our attention to our Smashwords.com retail operation and give it some much overdue love and attention on the discovery front. We’ll add more search options to the Smashwords home page, more alternative discovery paths to help readers find books they'd enjoy reading, and we’ll revamp the algorithms driving our best-seller lists so they more accurately reflect the collective intelligence and reading preferences of our customers. Once that initial stage is completed, we’ll leverage some of these new features on a couple secret projects that might surprise some folks, one of which will help our retail partners identify Smashwords books that deserve extra promotion.

More Distribution - We'll add more distribution outlets in 2012, the first of which we'll probably announce in the next two months (working on the technical integration now).

Faster Distribution – We currently ship to retailers once a week. In 2012, we’ll phase in more frequent shipments to those retailers that can support it so books appear faster and metadata changes reflect faster. This will give authors greater control over their distribution.

Faster Reporting - Some Smashwords authors have already noticed that we've increased the speed and frequency of retailer sales reporting over the last two months. We will continue to make incremental progress here for the retailers that can support it.

Faster Premium Catalog Approvals - There are two variables influencing Premium Catalog approval times. The first variable rests with the author or publisher, and that's the responsibility to upload a book that's formatted to the Smashwords Style Guide. A well-formatted book gets approved on the first review. We'll continue to improve the Smashwords Style Guide and other resources to help make it faster and easier for authors to format their books. The second variable is on our side, and that's the vetting process where we manually review each title for adherence to the Style Guide and the Smashwords Terms of Service. We've added two new recent hires to the vetting team and will add additional staff in the new year as required. The goal is to get approvals down to under three days. The faster the approval, the faster we can distribute you to retailers. In addition to throwing people at the challenge, we'll also continue to develop new automated tools to accelerate the process.

More Control - There are several planned features related to providing authors greater control over more aspects of their publishing, distribution and metadata. One such feature planned for the second half of 2012 is Smashwords Direct, which will give authors the option to upload their own pre-formatted .epub files (and other formats) if they choose. Also look for greater control over foreign currency pricing.

My thanks to you

As another fabulous year draws to a close, I want to express my sincere appreciation to every Smashwords author, publisher, reader, retailer and service provider partner (shout out to the awesome pros on my “Mark’s List” who help their fellow indies with low-cost formatting and cover design services). We created this for you.

With your trust, confidence and support, we will continue to serve you. When you utilize our distribution services, you’re directly supporting our mission to reshape book publishing for the benefit of authors and readers everywhere.

Happy New Year, and safe holidays. Peace all.

Smashwords Authors Experience Blowout Christmas at Barnes & Noble

It looks like it was a blowout Christmas for Smashwords authors at Barnes & Noble.

I'm looking at the early sales results for December 25 and December 26 for the titles Smashwords distributes to Barnes & Noble. For these first two days, sales are running about 225% (125% higher) of the daily sales average for November through mid-December (12/29 update: sales are remaining strong. 12/28 sales, three days after Christmas, were 260% of previous 30 day rate, or up 160%).

While it's too early to draw definitive conclusions, I think the numbers speak well for B&N headed into January.

FREE Smashwords books were also popular with B&N customers, racking up hundreds of thousands of downloads in two days. At the current download rate, our authors with free books will yield close to 10 million downloads in the next 30 days from B&N alone.

In the next couple days I should have sales results from the Apple iBookstore, where Smashwords authors were already enjoying a surge in sales over the last two months. Early reports of iOS activations (the operating system for the Apple iPhone and iPad) indicate Santa stuffed a lot of stockings with iPhones and iPads too.

The numbers also speak well for the importance of authors maintaining broad, uninterrupted distribution to multiple ebook retailers. Earlier this month, Amazon played the Grinch who stole Christmas when it convinced thousands of authors to remove approximately 65,000 books from Amazon's competing retailers two weeks before Christmas. Thankfully, only about 5,000 of those books came from Smashwords authors, with most Smashwords authors heeding my warnings (here at the Smashwords blog and also at the Huffington Post) and their own gut instinct that exclusivity is generally a dangerous idea. I wonder how many of these authors will feel duped? I imagine some will do well by their decision, but I suspect most will have shot themselves in the foot.

If the patterns we observed last year hold true again, we'll see a massive stepping up of the sales rates across all retailers in the first few days following Christmas, followed by a week or so of moderation, and then a new normal going forward that is significantly higher than the sales rate for the weeks and months immediately preceding Christmas.

Here are the top 20 Smashwords bestsellers at Barnes and Noble for the two day period of December 25 and 26:

Smashwords Top 20 at B&N (total dollars), December 25-26

1. Demon Dark - Penelope Fletcher
2. Fate (My Blood Approves Series #2) - Amanda Hocking
3. Wisdom (My Blood Approves Series #4) - Amanda Hocking
4. Arousing Love - M. H. Strom
5. My Blood Approves (My Blood Approves Series #1) - Amanda Hocking
6. Mud and Gold - Shayne Parkinson
7. Voodoo Kiss (Ancient Legends) - Jayde Scott
8. Shotgun Groom - Ruth Ann Nordin
9. Fires of Prophecy: The Morcyth Saga Book Two - Brian S. Pratt
10. The Witch's Ladder - Dana Donovan
11. A Job From Hell (Ancient Legends) - Jayde Scott
12. The Queen's Blade II - Sacrifice - T C Southwell
13. Immortal - Lauren Burd
14. Demon Day - Penelope Fletcher
15. Settling the Account - Shayne Parkinson
16. Doomed (Ancient Legends) - Jayde Scott
17. A Second Chance - Shayne Parkinson
18. Warrior Priest of Dmon-Li: The Morcyth Saga Book Three - Brian S. Pratt
19. The Mists of Sorrow: The Morcyth Saga Book Seven - Brian S. Pratt
20. The Queen's Blade III - Invisible Assassin - T C Southwell

Congrats authors, and a warm welcome to the millions of readers who will discover and enjoy Smashwords books this holiday season.

Smashwords Introduces New Ebook Gifting Feature

Smashwords yesterday released a new ebook gifting feature.

Because Smashwords books are available in multiple ebook formats, our books are readable on any e-reading device.

Simply click to the book you want to gift, and click the "give as gift" button. The shopping cart will ask you for their name and email address. The lucky recipient will receive an email with a hyperlink that allows them to claim their gift. If they're already logged in to their Smashwords account, the book will appear in their Smashwords Library. If they don't have a Smashwords account, they'll be prompted to register.

Prior to this new feature, authors were unable to purchase their own books. One advantage of the gifting option over Smashwords Coupons is that the recipient, assuming they're already a Smashwords member, can simply click the hyperlink in the email and the book is loaded into their Smashwords Library. No purchase or checkout process necessary.

In the next few weeks, we'll add new features based on your feedback. We'll also integrate prompts into purchase confirmation emails and review reminders so your fans are encouraged to purchase your book as a gift for their friends.

We've created a temporary email address where you can send your beta testing feedback and bug reports. Email gift at smashwords dot com

Happy holidays!

Amazon Shows Predatory Spots with KDP Select

Amazon today announced a new service offering for authors and publishers who upload to their KDP platform: KDP Select. Writer beware.

At first glance, the program looks enticing. Amazon has created a $500,000 monthly pool of cash they'll distribute to participating authors based on the number of times your book is borrowed from their new lending library.

As they note in their FAQ, if your book accounts for 1.5% of the downloads during the monthly lending period, you'll earn 1.5% of the pot, or in this case $7,500.

But there's a catch. Actually, multiple catches, which are outlined in their Terms and Conditions:

1. For the time your book is enrolled in the program, you cannot distribute or sell your book anywhere else. Not Apple, not Barnes & Noble, not Smashwords, not Kobo, not Sony, not even your own personal blog or web site. Your title must be 100% exclusive to Amazon.
2. If you violate their exclusivity terms at any point during the three-month enrollment period, or you unpublish your book to remove it from the program so you can distribute your book elsewhere, you risk forfeited earnings, delayed payments, a lien on future earnings, or you may get kicked out of the Kindle Direct Publishing program altogether.
3. Your enrollment, and thus your liability to Amazon, automatically renews every three months if you neglect to opt out.

Amazon has also modified the Kindle Direct Platform's user interface with the effect of making it almost difficult not to enroll your books. Where they once placed their pull down menu for managing your book's settings, they've now placed the enrollment link. The pull down settings menu is moved to the bottom of their dashboard.

Let's examine the implications for this new program, not only for authors but for the nascent ebook industry as well.

When authors enroll a title in the program, they're contractually obligated to remove their books from all other distribution channels.

Wow. Most indie authors appreciate their independence. This rule is quite restrictive.

Impact on authors:

• Forces the author to remove the book from sale from the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Smashwords and others, thereby causing the author to lose out on sales from competing retailers.
• By unpublishing a title from any retailer, the author destroys any accrued sales rank, making their book less visible and less discoverable when and if they reactivate distribution to competing retailers
  
• Makes the author more dependent upon Amazon for sales. Do you want to become a tenant farmer, 100% dependent upon a single retailer? As some of you history buffs may know, tenant farming, and the abuses of power by landlords, was a primary contributor behind the great Irish potato famine.
  

Impact on competing retailers:

• Harms other retailers by denying them access to your book.
• Many authors will permanently stop distributing to Amazon's competitors once they become fully dependent upon Amazon for the lion's share of their earnings
  
• Motivates more customers to purchase at Amazon since Amazon has this exclusive content.
• Discourages formation of new ebook retailers around the world
  

The new Amazon KDP Select program strikes me as a startling example of a predatory business practice. Amazon has the opportunity to leverage their dominance as the world's largest ebook retailer (and world's largest payer to indie authors) to attain monopolistic advantage by effectively denying its competing retailers (Apple, B&N, Kobo, Sony, etc) access to the books from indie authors.

The move will also make it more difficult for new retailers operating outside the US to gain footholds in their respective markets if they lose fair access to the content readers want to read.

Amazon might argue that indie ebooks today only account for a fraction of overall book industry sales. True, but that fraction is growing quickly as indies scale all the best-seller charts. This trend will continue as more and more professional authors turn their back on traditional book publishers in favor of self-publishing. Amazon is smart. They understand indies are the future of book publishing.

European Commission and US Department of Justice Unwittingly Working to Create Amazon Monopoly

Amazon's new service offering comes at a time when the European Commission and even the US Department of Justice are scrutinizing the legality of agency ebook pricing. Agency ebook pricing, as you'll recall (see my blog post last year on our move to agency pricing) allows authors and publishers to set their own price and receive higher royalty rates. Amazon is a long time foe of agency, and as a result is probably enjoying a virtual wet dream as they savor the implications of potential restrictions against the agency model.

If agency pricing is limited or overturned, it would allow Amazon to price ebooks at below cost and effectively eliminate the profitability of all its competing retailers. This would also discourage the formation of new competitors. It's ironic that the EC and US DOJ are pursuing these ill-advised campaigns that could lead to less competition in the ebook market, not more.

What the EC and US DOJ fail to realize is that big publishers (the target of these investigations), which (I agree) price their books too high, are becoming less relevant to the future of book publishing as authors lose faith in the myth of big publishing. The problem of high prices from big publishers is not an agency issue, it's big publishers pricing their books too high.

Agency Pricing Enables Indie Authors and Small Publishers to Lower Prices

Despite fears to the contrary, we see evidence at Smashwords that agency pricing might actually encourage lower book prices. Indies, which are enjoying great benefits from the agency model (Smashwords only distributes to agency retailers), are using agency to offer customers lower prices, not higher prices. The average ebook at Smashwords is priced under $5.00, and we have over 15,000 books priced at FREE. Why do indies price their books lower when they have the freedom to charge anything they want? The reason is that indies realize that consumers value fair prices, and as a result these lower prices give indies a competitive advantage over the large publishers.

When an indie author can earn 60-70% of list with agency pricing, they can set a lower price yet still earn more per unit than if the book was sold under a wholesale pricing model (where the royalty would equal 43-50% of list). As an example, if an author wants to earn $2.00 from each book they sell, at a 70% agency rate they'd price the book at $2.85. Under the wholesale model (50% discount off list), they'd need to price the same book at $4.00.

The agency model puts profits in the pockets of the author or publisher, where it belongs, while allowing the retailer to earn a fair profit. Agency pricing relieves retailers from the pressure of competing on price and instead forces them to compete on customer experience, such as developing discovery tools and recommendation systems that help match readers with the books they'd enjoy reading.

How should indie authors respond? Horror might be a good start. Recognize that your long term interests are best served by enabling a vibrant and competitive global ebook retailing ecosystem to develop. Distribute your book to as many retailers as possible. A world of many ebook retailers, all working to attract readers to your books, is much preferable to a world where a single retailer dictates all the terms.

Obviously, I have a horse in this game. Smashwords is probably the world's largest distributor of indie ebooks. We publish and distribute over 90,000 ebooks from 33,000 indie authors and small presses around the world. We exist to serve our authors and publishers. We supply Amazon's competitors. We'd love to supply Amazon as well, but they're unwilling to provide us agency terms.


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