Smashwords – Cashback, Rebates & Rewards

"Tell me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are!" ...Smashwords joined Draft2Digital - racist criminals and thieves that robbed me and are robbing many other authors, closing accounts, stealing money from authors, and continue to profit from their books for years, while not allowing the same authors to access their own accounts. Stay away from the criminals of Smashwords!

wish I'd read these reviews first. Almost impossible to get a book passed the meatgrinder, the software which looks at how your book is formatted, spent hours doing exactly what they said only to get it rejected again and again, waste of time, never had an experience like this with any other publisher. I'm done, unpublished it just now, feel like a weight has been lifted off me.

I published 32 books signed by me on smashwords. Without even being notified, they closed my account due to a vague answer to my messages, that I violated PLR even for books that were published in 2018 yet we are in 2022. I objected , then they told me that i plagiarized, without a clear answer and that their decision is final and there is nothing that I can do. Ebook sales at their site was only 1 ebook but almost 100 from external sales in the premium catalog. Mostly in library sales. Their ebook review process is tedious and over ambitious compared to other aggregators with over ambitious rules. Publish with them at your own peril and be ready for irrelevant cautions from them. At the moment I will work with other aggregators who understand how to review and publish a book.

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.

Never had a problem with Smashwords. Their book uploading setup could be adjusted to allow for larger file uploads, but this will probably eventually happen.