Rumors have been flying about the Apple event announced for later this month. It seems pretty obvious that it’s about time for a new iPad to make the rounds, of course, but Good eReader thinks that Apple is going to announce a new self-publishing platform. “Sources close to the matter have told us that they intend on launching a new digital self-publishing platform to get peoples content into the iBookstore,” writes Michelle Kozlowski. She notes that it’s currently possible for independent authors to get on the iBookstore through Smashwords, but the Apple program will be designed to give authors...

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...

When I started my “Cheap Reads” series, I expected I would be posting a number of entries. I never expected it to be limited to just two for all this time! Fortunately, I’ve found another inexpensive novel that is highly worthy of mention. In recent weeks I became aware of a small-press-published novel that looked very interesting by one of my Facebook friends, Sara M. Harvey. It is called Seven Times a Woman, and is a tempestuous romance set in ancient Japan involving a kitsune woman named Rei-Rei, the god Inari, and a dragon Rei-Rei has to...

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...

  Writing is a solitary craft, and many writers seem to be less outgoing than the norm. For such people, self-promotion is a nightmare. They see it as little more than boasting, which I suppose it is. Sometimes, in desperation, the writer crosses the line from boasting to begging, and then it’s even more painful to behold.In theory, especially in the past, the publisher relieved the writer of this unpleasant chore. The writer might have been expected to do the odd reading, or bookshop signing, or – if he or she were at least semi-famous already – make an appearance on...

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...

As all of An American Editor book reviews (which are listed at the end of this article) imply, the Internet has opened reading vistas for me that otherwise would never have happened. I find that as a result of the Internet and places like Smashwords, I am being exposed to authors and stories that would not otherwise have been available to me. This has been the blessing of the Internet for readers, especially with the advent of ebooks. The dark side remains the lack of gatekeeping and how finding worthwhile books to read is increasingly difficult. The easier it is for “authors” to...

From the press release: Smashwords, the leading distributor of indie ebooks, today introduced a new service for literary agents. The service provides literary agents simple but powerful tools to manage the publication and distribution of their clients’ indie ebooks. Service highlights include free ebook conversions, centralized metadata management, distribution to major worldwide ebook retailers, time-saving aggregated sales reporting across all retailers, and special merchandising at Smashwords.com. “Literary agents will write the next chapter of the indie ebook revolution,” said Mark Coker, founder and CEO of Smashwords. “Agents represent the most commercially successful...

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...

I somehow missed seeing this when it came out a week ago, but Smashwords founder Mark Coker announced that Smashwords is going to begin accepting more e-book formats in 2012. At the moment, the site uses an automated document converter called Meatgrinder that accepts DOC files and processes them into that multiple formats it sells. However, as with any automated conversion tool, the results can be inferior to what is possible for those who prefer to design these formats from scratch. Coker writes: To accommodate the books from these ebook design pros, we'll offer a...

The Copyright Clearance Center’s “Beyond the Book” podcast features an interview with CEO and founder of Smashwords, Mark Coker. In the interview, Coker discusses how self-publishing has become a first option for many authors because of the economic incentive, the immediacy and the control of distribution. He explains how the future of traditional print publishing is diminishing and more authors are turning to self-publishing with the rise of e-books.  The podcast is available here and the transcript is available here. ...

At FutureBook, “namenick” has a post explaining why he sees Kobo as being much better-suited than Amazon or Apple for international expansion. In short, Kobo has much better international content availability. Where Amazon has been opening separate stores for various different countries and languages (most recently a French store), Kobo makes all content for all languages available from the same store. One example which shows why Kobo is ahead of iBookstore or Kindle Store – Smashwords. Books from Smashwords are theoretically available at Kindle Store, Kobo and iBookstore. The deal with Amazon doesn’t seem...