Smashwords

When I read the reviews here and elsewhere about Draft2Digital, although it might be sad that such things are still happening in 2023, reading these reviews gave me a bit of a smile and made me realize I'm not the only one in this situation. Because you can't understand the anger one can feel when subjected to such mistreatment and lack of consideration. My friends, Draft2Digital only earns 10%, which might not be sufficient, so they shut down people's accounts without valid reason and without respecting their own rules. They do this mostly to non-American authors (I'm from France), but they are thieves. Okay, you don't want to work with an author anymore, you don't steal their money. Draft2Digital was supposed to pay me $360; they earned $60 in commission, so more than $400 in their pocket. Now imagine if they do this to thousands of accounts; that's hundreds of millions unjustly stolen. Trusting these thieves is wasting your time and money.

I've recently published an e-book on the site and surely found it as a wonderful platform for self-publishing. The tools are easier except for some specific styles to be overlooked. It does have a better marketing ways but, I suggest to market yourself through other platforms, social sites, etc. as well. It's a more vulnerable site for the ones who wish to spread their work for free to reach the readers at a greater verge, an easy self-publishing forum. It has a good network for itunes, Barnes libraries too.
Overall, a good second option to self-publishing after Amazon. Easier one rather just, reach more readers by yourself. I'm giving this review even if I haven't tried Amazon for myself but, according to what I've seen, slight improvements can make it awesome.

I have published with Smashwords for many years, but I have found that Smashwords almost always rejects my work from their Premium Catalog because of my formatting. I have worked for many, many hours, following Smashwords guidelines for formatting, but I still fail.

As an author with an account on several ebook retailers, I would rate Smashwords as the most difficult platform to use. Their ebook file creation process is clunky and their review process is overzealous. Looking at time spent vrs amount of sales you can make, it's simply not a good option. See below for some numbers.

Sales are very low on the platform. (6 million reported revenue with 250k authors = $24 average per author, yearly) For context, Kobo, a very small ebook retailer, does 97 million in sales. Amazon and B&N are in the billions of dollars of sales. From those numbers, taken from a quick google search, the book-purchasing public is clearly not at Smashwords.

Overall the ROI is not impressive, especially since their payment system for authors is clunky and slow. They cut paper checks with a threshold of $ in your account before you can be paid.

I don't find their "Premium Catalog" to be of value. You are better off creating separate author accounts for major retailers and using those to publish your book directly. Once you have created a book that satisfied Amazon's requirements, you are 95%+ of the way there with other retailers. There's no need to let Smashwords take a cut of your sales on other platforms, especially Amazon.

I would only use Smashwords if you are a completist about platforms for your book, or if you're publishing some kind of niche content that already has an audience on that site. Avoid otherwise.

I wrote a book explaining what happened to me, as I had a very horrible experience with Draft 2 Digital which I also wrote a review of already, but since the merger and with my experience with D2D my accounts were banned due to what the lies that D2D said about me, as such if the reasons why I had a bad experience were so true then why is the book being sold on Amazon who if what D2D and later Smashwords claims it to be then Amazon should have also blocked me and banned me as well?

Like I said before, I would either look into publishing your work at each store site, or create your own website that you can control and have what you like there without any fear of being banned etc., I would cation you like I have before with my review with D2D I would not publish with Smashwords/D2D as like I said with my review of D2D before.

Becarefull draft2digital and smashwords are scammer. Dont pay the royalties at the authors. Bad service too.