The Day Smashwords Died. It's Off To KDP Select We Go

Mid-August. Height of summer. Something terrible happened.

Smashwords, my favourite publishing platform up until then did something devastating.

They stopped counting ebook downloads carried out by search engines and web-crawling robots.

So my sample downloads fell off a cliff. Shuddered to a halt. Hit a brick wall, the size of a very large brick wall/

I don't know what's worse - the realisation that many sample downloads of my titles were carried out by machines (with great taste in the written word, it has to be said) before the change, or the fact I was getting so few downloads after it.

Either way, it was the day Smashwords died for me.

Fair play to Smashwords, though. They've done this for the right reason, so authors can be more sure that downloads actually equal a human showing an interest, rather than a bot having a laugh. But if I was Smashwords, I'd have left it alone, and let authors like me think our books were doing OK.

But it's happened, and I've had to take action, delisting a lot of my titles and moving them over to Amazon for exclusivity on KDP Select. Let's hope the bots that love my work get busy, and Amazon counts their downloads of my work!


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