Amazon or Smashwords

When it comes down to deciding on which online outlet you want to use for your books you got two main players, Amazon and Smashwords.

There are distinct differences between the two and they both have benefits. Amazon is the biggest and has the most readers and the most books. But, that doesn’t mean Smashwords is bad, it’s just different.

Amazon: The world’s largest online book retailer.

The benefits going with Amazon are many, here are a few.

·         User friendly: Easy to upload books.

·         They have the KDP Select (more on that further down).

·         Various payment methods to receive your money.

The not so good things are:

·         You can’t get paid by PayPal.

·         You have to send them some paperwork before you can receive money. This is irritating if you live abroad.

·         If you use KDP Select you can’t have that book on Smashwords.

Smashwords

Benefits

·         Easy to sign up.

·         Get paid by PayPal.

·         Access to other online bookstores like iBook and Kobe.

·         You can put a book as permafree to attract new readers.

·         Multiple platforms. Apart from Smashwords site your books are being sold as a PDF, on iBook, Kobe and others.

Not so good.

·         Difficult to format your book to their format.

·         Less readers use them.

·         Harder to market.

KDP Select

This is Amazon’s way to help you publish and manage your book sales. After you have signed up for your Amazon account and uploaded your book you click on Enroll and you are in. You can earn between 35% to 70% profit on your sales, depending on in what regions you are selling. You get five days a month where you can offer your book for free to attract new readers. This has been discussed on many forums. Some writers like giving away books to get new readers, some don’t, it’s all up to you. After three months you have the option to get out of KDP if you want. If you don’t unclick the KDP option your book will reenroll automatically for another three months.

Formatting for Smashwords.

This is hard the first time and can be very frustrating. There are several great blogs on the subject so just make a Google search and you will get the help you need. Once you have done it, it’s easy.

What I like to do is, when I have a new book I enroll it in KDP and put it up for free. Hopefully this will get me some reviews. Once the three months have past, I put it up on Smashwords as well and there I add the good reviews in the book description. You can get reviews on Smashwords too, but it is a lot harder.

Both Amazon and Smashwords offer author pages where you can write something about yourself and link to your blog or website, and are easy to use. On Smashwords you can take the “Author Interview” where a set of questions are asked and you answer them. This way the readers learn more about you. If you write Erotica like I do, Smashwords and the partners seem to be a little more flexible about content. Amazon can be very touchy about covers and content.

In the end you have to decide what fits you the best. Read as much as you can about both sites and try to search for books, look at reviews to learn how the site interacts with the reader.