Hi there! I’m Dale Beaumont and welcome to another episode of Get Published TV. This is the only dedicated show on the internet to help you to write, publish and market your own best selling book.
Now, just recently, we’re talking about how to hit a home run when it comes to publishing your book and we spoke about the different stages that you can go through to eventually get signed by a major publisher. We spoke about first base being through getting your book published through digital means, and then second base being print-on-demand, third base being the self-published of course, the home run was to get signed with a major publisher.
But what I want to do now is I want to focus on one of the most exciting areas in the book world right now and that is digital publishing because there’s this huge transformation taking place and it’s really important that you’re aware of it so you can take full advantage of it. Now what you to think, imagine what the iPod or the MP3 did for the music industry. Well, that’s exactly what’s happening now with these amazing e-reading devices such as the Amazon, Kindle and more and that’s why I want to talk to you about a fantastic website that really brings it all together and makes it possible and it’s called Smashwords.
Now, before I tell you about the site, I want to just give a bit of a shout out to my friend Joanna Penn for putting me in touch with this great website, so thanks very much Joanna. And now, I’m going to tell you a bit about Smashwords itself. Basically what it is that it’s an online publishing platform. It’s an online bookstore and it’s also a book sort of a distribution warehouse for all things, writer to digital books which means that nothing is actually physically printed. It’s all just basically electronic files and they really specializes in helping both independent authors, self publishers but it’s also now working with the one of mainstream book publishers as well.
Now, if that didn’t make much sense to you, let me explain it from two points of view. In this video now, I’m going to explain it from the point of view of an actual book reader or a book lover. And then, I probably want to create a second video where I’m going to talk about why it actually is such a cool site for people like me that are self published authors or independent authors or indie authors as they are sometimes called or maybe some publishers out there that are watching as well because there’s a huge opportunity. But basically, it’s like if you can imagine that it’s an online bookstore where you can place orders for books but of course none of them are shipped to you. They are orders downloaded to your computer, electronically and what’s great is you can search literally; you can search through thousands and thousands of books. And a lot of the books on this website unlike maybe what you’d find on Amazon.com, a lot of them are rare books, or hard to find books and a lot of them are by upcoming authors or independent authors that are kind of looking to get their start that haven’t actually being signed by a major book publisher.
They maybe even don’t want to be signed by a major publisher. They’re just more interested in getting their ideas and getting their words out there, so you can go there or you can actually search for heaps of books and you can either search by fiction, non-fiction and you can still search for bestsellers, most reviewed top 100. There’s a whole lot of different ways in which you can search for the books and you’ll find heaps of them there. What’s really great is that a lot of the books from the website are actually free and so authors and even publishers would give their books away openly for free under the hope that somebody likes it and they maybe visit the author’s or publisher’s website, want to know more and maybe purchase other books down the track. Or there are actually other people out there that purely write for passion and purely write for pleasure and they are just happy to give away their content for free to their audience so just they can touch the lives of other people. Then there are a lot of books on there that are very low cost. We’re talking about maybe $2.00, $3.00, $4.00, $5.00, very, very inexpensive.
Those saying books if you want to get them in a bookshop would be three to four times that amount and there are other ones which are priced I suppose equivalent to other e-book resellers. So you might find a bundle there for $10.00, $15.00, $20.00 or maybe even more but many of the books are actually free or very low cost and what’s also exciting is even some of the more expensive books, and again we’re not talking about a lot of money, you can actually download up to 50% of the books for free and then if you like the book and you want the rest, then you can of course pay us more fee and then you can access the rest of the book. So from a reader’s perspective, it really is amazing because you can search for thousands of books, many of these books are undiscovered and you can access them for literally just a couple of bucks. It’s really is very cool.
But what’s also really amazing is that the thing that’s so special about Smashwords is that unlike let’s just say Amazon.com, when you’re one there, they will sell their books in their preferred format which is the mobi format, so if you have some other type of reader or you want to just read it on your computer, then you really don’t want to have to download it in the format that they’re actually giving it to you and you may want to get it in a different format. So what Smashwords does is that it actually gives you about ten different formats in which you can download that document. So the good thing is that they don’t discriminate. They don’t say, unless you have one of our readers or unless you can handle this format then we’re not giving you the book.
You can get it in any format virtually that’s available and of course, I’m sure, when they add formats, that they’ll add those to Smashwords as well. And so if you go there and just start searching for some of the free books and you go to the page that will say which format would you like to download it in. So of course, you can download it in just a basic html format which means that you can read it online or on your computer if you wish. You can also download it another free standard format, which is known as the pdf format, and that means that you again can read it on your computer screen. But this offline instead of having to be online or you can print out the entire book if you like and then you can read it as if you would in a normal book on paper. But then you also got the mobi format which is kind of synonymous with the Amazon Kindle and many people out there have an Amazon Kindle so that really works. Then there’s also the e-pub format as well which is used for lots of other different e-reading devices such as the stanza, which also is available on the iPhone and iTouch as well. So you’re tapping into a huge market there. There’s also the lrf format, which is used for the Sony reader, and there’s also the pdf format, which is for radio and palm devices, plus there’s a bunch of other ones there as well.
In fact, I’m still getting my head round all of these different formats myself. But from a book reader’s point of view, it’s a fabulous service because you can go there and again like I said pay a few dollars and you can access any of the books which you’re interested in for low dollars in whatever format that you like. So very, very, very cool.
But where Smashwords really kind of comes in to its own is by allowing independent authors or self publishers like myself to add a content and to tap into that huge audience of people that are visiting that website everyday, that are looking for new materials.
So in the next video, I’m actually going to take this a little bit further and I’m going to explain how it works now from an author or publisher’s point of view. So again, check out the website, it’s called Smashwords.com and you’ll see that there are fabulous servers that the got going there and it’s started by a guy called Mark Coker. Great website. Check it out and make sure you keep tuned in to Get Published TV because I’m going to explain to you how it works and why you should have your materials on Smashwords.
This is Dale Beaumont from Get Published TV. Thanks for watching. See you next time.
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