Those of you who have opted to publish with Smashwords will want to look at this. I have participated in these sales, which they also run in December, a few times with decent results. It’s about the easiest sale you can be part of. It literally takes only a couple of clicks and your books revert to their original prices automatically at the end of the sale period. Here’s a summary. Much of this is directly quoted from their recent email.
The Tenth Annual “Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale” Runs July 1-31
Enrollment is now open, and, for the first time ever, they allow you to enroll ALL your books at a single discount level – 25%-off, 50%-off, 75%-off and 100%-off (FREE).
They’ll promote the sale on the Smashwords home page and blog, and as a direct email to over 1.5 million registered Smashwords customers. A special section of Smashwords.com will let readers browse participating books.
“By promoting your great deals to your readers, you’re also helping to promote your fellow indie authors and publishers. And their promotion of their books helps your books be discovered by their readers.”
“Discounts will auto-apply without the need for you or your readers to remember coupon codes.”
You can enroll visit the “Manage site-wide promotions” section of your Dashboard. To use the bulk enrollment option, click the “Enroll All” button underneath each of the discount levels. It’s incredibly easy.
Smashwords Celebrates 10-Year Anniversary
Last month, Smashwords celebrated their ten-year anniversary. Mark Coker’s idea that all writers deserved the opportunity to publish eBooks at no cost, and that the author deserves to control how their books are priced, marketed and sold has flourished. “In ten years, the authors and publishers of Smashwords have sold over $100 million of eBooks at retail.”
Here are some recent enhancements they mentioned in their email.
Learn who “favorited” you.
When a reader favorites you on your author profile page, it creates a link that promotes you as one of their favorite authors. Now you can see a summary of that, along with their social media links. Look on your profile page or you Dashboard.
This is where you can create sales at any time for any book for any length of time. Now they’ve made it easier to use, though it was already easy before. I’ve used this feature a number of times.
Audiobook hyperlinks: This is new to me and I haven’t tried it – yet.
If your book is available as an audiobook, you may link to places where it can be bought. Look under “settings” via your dashboard. They also recently partnered with Findaway Voices to help you.
You can view the payment summary from your Account page, which now shows you where each payment went.
Series Manager update
If you write books in series the Series Manager lets you connect the books in the series together. I did this recently with my series. This allows buyers to see at a glance that a book is part of a series and how many books are in the series.
When a customer prepares to buy books or redeem coupons, Smashwords recommends other books you’ve written. If the book is in a series, any books from that same series will show up highlighted. Cool right?
Special Deals updates
“Special Deals” is where they highlight books that authors have put “on sale.” Customers browsing Special Deals now have access to a new filtering option: “Expiring Soon.” To create a “Special Deal” generate a coupon in the Coupon Manager and mark the coupon as “public.”
If this sounds like a good deal, it is. I have had a rise in sales with the ones I have enrolled in including sales of books in my series after the sale is over. In any case, you have nothing to lose.
