Smashwords

Today we’re going to talk about Smashwords, an e-book store and distributor that is growing rapidly but is still relatively unknown in Germany.

Smashwords is an e-book publishing and distribution platform based in the US and used mostly by small publishers and indie authors. Smashwords was founded by Mark Coker in 2008 and now offers more than 130,000 e-books by over 45,000 authors. So far, only a few of those books are in German, but we hope Smashwords will become well-known beyond the US, because it offers a lot of advantages to readers from all over the world:

• You can sample twenty percent of the book before deciding whether to buy the book.
• Smashwords books are DRM-Free, so you can read your e-book on multiple e-reading devices.
• Smashwords offers multiple formats. If you buy a book on Smashwords, you can get it in any format it’s available in. For books from Ylva Publishing, this means that you get the mobi, the epub, and the pdf at the price of one. If you get a different e-reader in the future, you won’t have to buy the book again.
• Unlike platforms such as Amazon, Smashwords allows authors to offer free books and short stories. Alison Grey’s For the First Time is available for free on our Smashwords site. We’ll also offer one of our new short stories for free on Valentine’s Day.
  
• Smashwords coupons allow authors to offer their books at a discounted price (or even for free) for a certain time or for certain customers. Ylva Publishing will use that system to give away free copies of our e-books in the future.

Check out Ylva Publishing’s Smashwords site: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/YlvaPublishing