My short story collection is doing better than I thought it would on Smashwords, but I keeping hearing and reading about the superiority of Amazon. Sales there are said to far surpass ebook sales anywhere else, even though the Kindle application is very limited.
I admit, there's just something about Amazon. I needed a cable last week and went first to Radio Shack, who doesn't carry that cable. I then went to the company who sold the product years ago, but they longer carry the cable. So, I went to Amazon, the WalMart of the cyber world. Yep, there it was, cheap. For less than $10 including postage, I had my cable within a few days.
Therefore, today I saved my Word file as an HTML file using Open Office, opened a DTP account (Digital Text Platform), and uploaded my cover and text. It will take 48 hours for my book to appear for sale on Amazon, but that won't stop me from checking every couple of hours, I'm sure.
I asked a couple of people why they uploaded to Amazon separately when it would migrate there eventually from Smashwords. I never got a good answer--well, I never got any answers, maybe because they didn't quite know--so I just decided to follow the herd. Knowing Amazon, I'm sure they like it much better if you jump through their--I mean go through their channels.
After having already spent a little over two hours formatting my document for Smashwords, it took about an hour to completely fill out the DTP information and load my files up. And that's because I first loaded a file that claimed the publisher is Smashwords, so I took that out and loaded up a better one. Luckily, I noticed this in the preview option before I pushed the final button. I'll bet it would have been harder to take it down and start over than to just do another upload before I finalized and published.
I'll report back in to let the readers of this blog know if sales are good at Amazon. That would be nice!
