Smashwords

I had to download some review copy books from here today and then spent hours exploring and downloading free books, short stories and samples.  Not everything is free of course.  On most things it is possible to read online or download a sample that tends to be 30% of the complete book even if it is a 300 page novel.  The theory behind that is that most people investing in a hundred pages of a story will pay to see how it ends.

I joined as I am thinking about putting some of the stories  I've already posted on Joystory in snippets on here as free ebooks to make it easier for anyone interested to read them beginning to end.  It might also serve as promotion for future novels once finished which I could sell via Smashwords. Based on what I've seen today, I like the atmosphere and attitude at Smashwords better than Amazon.

It is free for authors to publish ebooks and they get over 80% of every sale.

I'll just drop the info direct from their FAQ:

What does Smashwords offer authors?Over 30,000 authors around the world collectively publish and distribute over 78,000 ebooks with Smashwords.  Smashwords makes it fast, free and easy to publish and distribute your ebook to the world's largest ebook retailers and mobile phone apps. Authors control the pricing, sampling and marketing of their books, and receive 85% of the net sales proceeds from their works (70.5% for affiliate sales) for sales at our Smashwords.com retail operation, and authors earn 60% of the list price for sales though our distribution network of retailers including the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and the Diesel eBook Store.

I have got to get control of my obsessive collecting of free ebooks that started in late October.  I've now got over 2000 which is ridiculous as even at the improved speed that reading ebooks gives me I couldn't read them all in under a decade as it is unlikely I'd be able to maintain a book a day pace which would still take at least 6 years!  I'm a hopeless hoarder.

In the case of the classics tho, I just like knowing they are there for the whim that may take me.  Many of them I have read tho decades ago.  And then there is the nostalgia factor for those children's classics I read as a child or YA.

Ah, well I might as well accept I am who I am.  Collecting ebooks seems one of the less malignant of my hoarding proclivities.