Smashwords ~ Friend to Readers and Writers

Publishing is a very competitive business.

Businesses have to make money in order to pay their staff, rent and other bills. You only have to watch the news to see how many big established businesses, like HMV & Jessops, are failing in these difficult financial times, to realise that the pressure to  make money never lets up.

Busy readers tend to buy authors they know or a quick bargain from the supermarket or a well-publicised ebook from Amazon. Fierce competition to sell books to these readers drives publishing houses to “play safe”. Playing safe makes it extremely difficult for unknown authors or unusual stories to find a place with these companies.

Image via CrunchBase

Enter Smashwords. Owner and visionary, Mark Coker has provided free tools and an easy to access platform for self-publishers and independent publishers to get these new writers and fresh stories out into the market.

For readers this is an opportunity to access exciting new books and, because they are inexpensive to produce, at very low prices. Sometimes they’re even free.

Writers are able to generate coupons on their books to provide incentives to readers, free copies for review and other promotional purposes.

And this competition encourages the big houses to keep their prices reasonable. So three cheers for Smashwords!

Today I was generating a coupon for my memoir, A Life Less Lost, and thought I’d share it with you all. It’s had great reviews but my favourite bit of feedback came from a friend of my son. She told me, “I couldn’t put it down and was up until 3am reading. At one point I was gripping the book so tightly my knuckles were white. I was thinking please be alright, please be alright, until I stopped and remembered that I knew what was going to happen.”

As a New Year’s treat, I’m offering the coupon to anyone who’d like to download a free copy before the 16th February. If you’d like to know more about the book, please point your cursor over My Books (above) and click on the A Life Less Lost page from the drop down menu.

Promotional price: $0.00  Coupon Code: XY74F   Expires: February 16, 2013

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