Yes, I’ve been busy! Expanding the distribution now: my latest ebook is now available from Smashwords, and therein lies a tale.
While you can now go buy TAOS SOUL in every conceivable ebook format from them, Smashwords is actually a distributor. The main reason I signed up with them (free) was to get into their Premium Catalog and sell through the Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, and Diesel ebook stores. The approval process is still underway on that, and those sellers require the Epub format with a dedicated ISBN number. The Kindle edition (.mobi format) is already available at Amazon.
Smashwords is a little odd, however. The only way to submit a book file is in Microsoft Word format, after you’ve followed pages of instructions on “how to make Word behave.” They then convert the file into .mobi, .epub, .pdf, .rtf, .lrf, .pdb, and .txt versions, all of which you can buy now. But the .mobi (Kindle) version at Smashwords has a minor bug or two, whereas the Kindle edition at Amazon, the one that I formatted by hand, is just fine. My own PDF edition [see sidebar] is a little nicer than the Smashwords conversion, too, although it works.
If all that sounds confusing, it is. But there may be people out there who can’t wait to get the Epub version from Apple, Barnes & Noble, etc. or don’t care about those vendors in the first place, in which case they’re all set at Smashwords. The rest of you should stick with the Kindle edition and my own PDF, or else wait for the Epub version to reach your device’s ebook store. Trust me, this will soon be much simpler. As soon as I’m in the Premium Catalog, I’ll scrap the dud formats at Smashwords. (Who would ever buy a plain text version of the book, anyway?)
I’m happy for the book to be available through them, of course, and the more websites that mention TAOS SOUL, the better.
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