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...

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...

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% higher than the daily sales average for November through mid-December. 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...

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...

The Smashwords Style Guide is now available in an Italian translation, Guida allo Stile Smashwords. The Italian translation is thanks to the generous volunteer effort of Giuseppe Meligrana, an Italian publisher at Smashwords. Giuseppe is also planning to translate the Smashwords Book Marketing Guide. The new Style Guide will make ebook publishing and distribution more accessible to thousands of Italian-language authors. As one of a handful of authorized global Apple aggregators, we're pleased to distribute Italian authors not only to their home country's Apple iBookstore, but worldwide as well. As we announced October 24, Italy is among the 26 new iBookstore countries now...

Ebook publishing is now more accessible to more writers around the world thanks to new French and German translations of the Smashwords Style Guide.Guide des Styles Smashwords and Der Smashwords Formatierungleitfaden are now available for free download at Smashwords, and will soon be available at Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Diesel and Amazon. Translations for Spanish, Italian and Portuguese are in the works (Update: Dutch and Bengali translations are now in process as well). My thanks to Anne-Sophie Gomez in France for translating the French version, and Annemarie Nikolaus in Germany for the German version. Both of these authors volunteered their time and...

Most writers write to get read, so how do readers discover ebooks?To discover clues to the answer, I posted a survey over at Mobileread, the online forum popular with many ebook readers.I challenged readers to select the single most common criteria they follow to discover their next read.The results provide some interesting data points Smashwords authors and publishers might consider in their marketing efforts. To capture a broad range of usable data, I suggested 12 answers, one of which was "Other." Respondents were allowed to select one answer only since I wanted to identify...

Smashwords reached another milestone yesterday. One of our authors published the three billionth word.We reached two billion words four months ago, and one billion 11 months ago.To put this in further context, in the last four months we averaged 8.3 million words a day. This works out to about 350,000 words per hour, 5,700 words per minute or almost 100 words per second. Can you hear the keyboards clicking?Smashwords is an ebook publishing and distribution platform. We're simply a tool that enables the efficient publication, distribution and management...

Smashwords today added an adult filter to the Smashwords.com website.The filter prevents first time visitors and others from viewing content rated adult by the author/publisher unless the visitor specifically asks to see such content. It filters out such content from the home page, search results, category listings and tag queries.The adult filter was inspired by Google's "Moderate Safe Search" option, which is the default option for all users of the Google search engine.A clearly visible "ON/OFF" toggle link appears in the upper right portion of the visitor's home page screen so they can easily set their preference. Click the ON or OFF...

Backlist eBooks, a coalition of previously print-published authors, has orchestrated a sale this week at Smashwords that starts today and runs through May 22nd. Below you'll find a complete list of participating titles and coupon codes provided by the authors. The Backlist eBooks Merry May Sale features more than 51 working authors and nearly 200 books. The books were previously published by all the major publishers. It includes a half a dozen NY Times bestsellers and about the same number of USA Today bestsellers. As you might expect, some of the titles have earned major literary awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, RITA,...

Have you ever wondered where the most voracious ebook readers live? Probably not. It's a fun question, though, and for the the first time ever I present the data to you. I set out to determine which states ebook buyers live in, and then I wanted to know how the states stack up against one another. The numbers are surprising, especially when you look at per capita consumption. Here's how I pulled together the numbers below. Smashwords distributes over 20,000 ebooks to Barnes & Noble. They report to us a breakdown of sales by state. ...

Artist Nina Paley has created a cool collection of images for those ready to rail against DRM. She created versions for Readers Against DRM, Authors Against DRM, and Librarians Against DRM. If you share these sentiments, go to the ReadersBillofRights.info site, download the images and sprinkle them on your blog or web site. The images can be freely distributed, though please cite http://readersbillofrights.info as the source of the images. DRM stands for "Digital Rights Management." It's a copy protection scheme designed to prevent piracy. While few would disagree that authors deserve compensation for their hard work, the problem with DRM...