SMASHWORDS hits 2,000,000,000 (that’s TWO BILLION) words on Friday, 6th May 2011. Over 300,000 words are mine, and there’s more to come. Crunching the numbers, I expect to see 50,000 titles available at Smashwords.com before the end of May.
When I first decided to publish multiple-format eBooks with Smashwords back in December of 2009, the total number of words had not yet reached 400 million, and from under 8,000 titles.
In early April of 2010, I was able to tweet that Smashwords had hit 10,000 titles and the number of downloads of my books was into the thousands. That was just barely four months since I started making some of my books available on Smashwords.
Smashwords hit ½ billion words on April 14th 2010, and one billion words on October 22nd 2010, so the torrent of words flowing to Smashwords is definitely picking up, rather dramatically.
So, why hook my eBook wagon to the Smashwords cart? Simply put, my books are now in the hands of many, many thousands of readers, through direct availability on Smashwords.com as well as through Barnes and Noble (I have 2 books in the top 1% with Playing the Baseball Card leading the way), Sony, Apple, and Kobo. Making my Young Adult fiction titles available as eBooks on Smashwords (and retail partners) has made them much more accessible and more discoverable by my readers. Given that eBook sales now exceed mass-market paperbook sales, I am more certain than ever that I made the right choice more than two years ago.
Two years from now? Smashwords at ten billion words, in 250,000 titles? Two or three more of my books available at Smashwords? Hmmm… let’s see.
For now, have a look at an eBook today, and
Happy Reading.
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