Which retail sites sell your books?

The main sites we currently distribute through are:

Amazon’s Kindle Store (USA & UK) which is great for though Kindle (though currently Amazon won’t distribute our stories for any less than 99 cents – if you want a free story for your Kindle, you will need to download from Smashwords and transfer the file to your Kindle using the Kindle USB cable). If you are not resident in the UK or USA, you can still get Kindle ebooks via amazon.com See this page for country-specific information.

Smashwords. This is a small but excellent site that is not tied to any one device. Smashwords distribute our stories to other retail sites such as the Sony, Diesel, NookBook Store, Apple iBookstore. However, it can take over a month between a book being published at Smashwords and appearing at these other sites.

So which retail site should you choose? If you have a Kindle, I would recommend the Kindle Store (it’s what I use myself) unless Smashwords is supplying the same book at a cheaper price.

Smashwords is excellent but some eReader devices are like the Kindle in that they have a link between the device and a specific retail store. For example iPADs and iPhones with the iBooks app which links to the iBookstore. But even with iPhone/ iPADs, the Stanza app was a very popular book reader app, and you can get Kindle book apps for the iPhone and iPAD! Now that is neat because you can read your book on your Kindle device on the train to work, take a sneaky read of the same book from where you left off on your iPhone during the day, read on your Mac at lunchtime, and read on your iPAD on the sofa at night – and each device knows where you read up to on the others!

If you feel the choice can be a little bewildering, you’re not alone. Fear not! There is something to help you out with that too: the Calibre e-book management system is a free tool that lets you put all your book files in one place, irrespective of where you downloaded from and in which file format. Life saver! Even if you only use Calibre as a backup system in case you lose your device, I still recommend it.