I’m always thrilled to report on publishing industry happenings that help bring writers closer to readers. Great news on that front today. I just spoke with Mark Coker of the epublishing platform Smashwords who told me that Smashwords is partnering with Sony to provide writers and independent publishers one-stop epublishing and distribution.
The Sony Reader has become a primary outlet for the fast-growing ebook market, but until today, that outlet was effectively closed to small and independent publishers.
Now reaching the Sony Reader market is open to writers who want to pursue epublishing. Publishing on Smashwords is free. Writers simply upload a Word document and choose one or more epublishing options, now including Sony Reader format.
Check it out for yourself: Here’s the link to the Sony ebook store publishing portal. And you can go here to learn more about epublishing with Smashwords.
If you have any questions about Smashwords, leave them here and I’ll do my best to get you an answer.
-Maria Schneider
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
That’s fantastic news, Maria. At Year Zero Writers, we’ve made our free ebooks with smashwords one of the cornerstones of our freemium platform, and our manifesto pledge to bring fresh contemporary fiction direct from keyboard to reader. We WERE, along with several others, extremely worried by Sunday’s majot outage of the whole smashwords site (twice) – our downloads graph for the past 7 days paints an interesting picture. But we were absolutely delighted by the way Mark not only fixed the problem, but kept us informed throughout. He’s doing great things.
Best,
Dan (@agnieszkasshoes)
Hi Dan,
Agreed it is wonderful news. I’d like to offer you the opportunity to guest post about what you’re doing with Year Zero Writers. Please email me if you’re interested.
Maria, thank you. I just sent you an e-mail.
Why won’t Smashwords accept submissions in ePub format?
@Joseph, I’ve sent Mark an email and he’ll either chime in here or let me know so I can get you the answer.
Gradually the E-Reader industry and E-Publishing platforms are moving towards open standards. Meaning one format for all Readers and one-time publication. This however will take another decade as we will see the market for E-Readers, E-Books and E-Publishing platforms progress towards maturation. Sony teaming with Smashwords is the first babystep.
Oh and a note to the editor: Great stuff!!! However, i think some topics from Q&A’s could go a little deeper. Maybe an in-depth interview would do but ofcourse that would not be appropriate for the web. :(
@ Joseph – Thanks for the question. Currently we only accept Microsoft Word files as source files. When you upload the file, we instantly convert into multiple ebook formats, of which EPUB is one. By restricting our intake to Word files, and by requiring our authors to format their books per our Smashwords Style Guide, we’re able to help you produce good quality ebooks across multiple formats with minimal effort on your part. In the next couple months, we plan to allow authors to bypass our conversion engine and upload their own perfectly formatted files. This will allow authors who are more technically sophisticated – or who have invested the money to hire a professional ebook designer – to publish EPUB files that take full advantage of the standard. If an author is publishing fiction, or other straight narrative, I wouldn’t recommend an author go to the trouble to create their own file. But for some books, especially some non-fiction books for which complex layout or hyperlinked Tables of Contents are a requirement, such an option might make sense.
@Eurvin, thanks for the comment. I have been thinking about letting the posts here go a bit longer and deeper so I appreciate your remark.
Interesting, as always.
@Mark – Thank you for your clear and thorough answer. There were two reasons for my question.
1. For The Snow Cow itself, which is a straightforward piece of narrative fiction (13 short stories), our preference for EPUB is a preference but not an absolute deal-breaker. We prefer to be able to control how our EPUB looks directly without having to hope that the Word styles we use will end up giving the EPUB results we want.
2. For Universalis, the work is an EPUB generated by a program (this link gives an example) and no DOC file has ever existed. The work is long (it would probably be 12 times as long as the example) and has complex formatting. In this case bypassing the conversion engine is the only reasonable option.
What is the best way of finding out when you have started accepting EPUB input? Is there an RSS feed I could subscribe to, or could you email me?