No More Smashwords for Me

I’m typing this using one eye only, so if there are any typos, please direct your ire towards the massive bug that connected with my eyeball at speed this week, scratched said eyeball, and gave said eyeball one of those rotten burning infections that means a constantly runny nose and tears also. It’s my favourite eyeball too. This one doesn’t seem to work as well as the injured party, and looking at the computer screen is painful too. Anyway. This is the actual bug – I got a picture before I realised that he had an agenda, and still thought he was cute.

So far I’m very happy to say that Echoes of Narcissus isn’t available on any of the free download troll sites, and right now whether I’m right or wrong, I’m convinced that this is because I haven’t published it on Smashwords. I’ve unpublished my other books there now, and as soon as they’re taken down from all the other platforms that they distribute to, I’m going to enrol them into Amazon Kindle Select. I won’t ever be using the free days option for any books other than short stories or the first in a series, but at least they’ll be available for KU downloads. For the foreseeable future I’ll be sticking with only Amazon and Createspace. I might go with Lightning Source at some later point, but that won’t affect the book’s KU status.

This probably won’t happen for a couple of months though, because I’ve been reading loads and loads of posts around and about, from authors struggling to get their books unpublished on the premium sites that Smashwords distributes them to. It seems that it takes upwards of seven weeks, even though they’re taken down pretty fast from Smashwords itself, and sometimes back and forth emails before they’re removed everywhere and eligible for AKS. That in itself would make me wary of publishing with them again. As an Indie I like to think that I have total control of where my books are sold at any given time. I know that the damage is already done with the pirating of my books that were there, but from now on they’re not going to be legally downloadable in any format other than from Amazon or my own sites, and I’ll be very careful about who I send copies to in formats other than Mobi as email attachments.

Now I’m going to try zoom through as much of blogland as I can with this eyeball – which is now also sending out many tears.