As a baseline, I will only consider DRM-compliant outlets.

I’ve been up on Kindle with 35 titles since May. January will close as my best month ever. In six months, my royalties from Kindle will double because of a unilateral move by Amazon. I have my problems with Amazon, but I’m essentially happy with their Kindle operation. I’ve been on their pay list for years. They always pay for what they tell you they sold.

I did a bunch of work to get five titles up on Mobi. It was a wasted effort. They sold one book to Amazon’s few hundred in the span of two months. I pulled my titles, except the one they insisted on keeping because one copy had been sold. They’ve made not one sale since though that title is popular on Kindle. They owe me $3.50 I’ll never see.

I uploaded ten articles to Scribd. They sold one once. I pulled my stuff down except for that one, which they want to keep to service the guy who spent $1 on it. Is Scribd even live now?

I just completed uoloading 35 titles to the Sony Reader store. It took five months for them to respond to my initial sign-up request, then they rushed me to sign a contract and begin uploading. I uploaded the first four titles on 1/15. They’re not live yet. Five minutes after I uploaded the last six titles, they called to rush me to finish. No one can tell me when my first titles will go live. Is anyone buying Sony Readers? I did the work, now I’m a skeptic. To put it mildly, I’ve run into no “book people” at Planet Sony.

Fortunately, six minutes after I uploaded the last files to Sony, Kobo sent me a contract and publisher questionaire. Took them only three days to get back to me. They’re in a rush too, but it looks like the ePubs I prepared for Sony can be recycled (without more work, I ask) to Kobo. I hold out way more hope for Kobo than Sony because Kobo is aimed at the smartphone zillions of people want to own anyway; there’s no danger of smartphones being eclipsed by anything on the horizon. Also, like Kindle, Kobo offers a standalong reader (Adobe Digital Editions, actually) that can be read on your desktop, notebook, netbook, etc. (Kindle eBook sales doubled when their proprietary Kindle for PC became available.)

B&N, which is in dead-man-walking mode anyway, snubbed me and my 35 titles as too small to matter. This is why B&N is dead meat anyway. Have these idiots begun shipping Nook? Have they sold any Nooks? Does anyone care? Do I have to keep a straight face whenever I think, write, or say “Nook?”

That’s as far as I’ve gone.

Any other reports from the trenches?

Smashwords. One upload. Many formats. Their store. Not sure of the traction there.

I couldn’t agree more. My experience (although far less in volume thanyours) has been the same. My second book will be released March 1 and I am making no efforts to distribute in any other e-book format but Kindle. My first book, Treachery In Turtle Bay has had constant sales via kindle since release July 27, 2009 an negligible activity via all other e-book formats I participated in.

I do not understand your comment “I have my problems with Amazon business ethics and competence as an Internet powerhouse…”

I like everythiong about Amazon and their subsidiary CreateSpace.

They have propelled me into a published author with sales in TPB and Kindle globally.

Hugh, I do have my problems with Amazon, but, now that I’m pressed, I’d rather not get into it. I therefore retract that part of my post.

Nathan, I tried to work with Smashwords and just plumb gave up. They made my head spin.

Eric, what part of Smashwords made you spin the worst? Maybe I can help you with that.

Hi Moriah,

I was wondering if you (or anyone else here) had any insight into converting a mobi book to epub (I can’t use smashwords because they don’t support html links).

My book is in the format of a choose-your-own-adventure, so each page has choices to go to different parts of the story, making html links and page breaks vital to the ebook reading experience. I did the Kindle version myself by creating a meticulous web of links in html, using the mobi creator and uploading that to amazon, but I understand that epub uses different code for links than mobi? Does it even support page breaks? Does anyone have any experience with this?

Matt, I think we emailed? If you have the original HTML you used to create the MOBI, go download this: http://code.google.com/p/sigil/

Open up your HTML in that, then re-save it. It should do what you need done.

Thanks Moriah! looks like I still hve a lot of cleanup to do from all the non-epub supported html tags I had (I found a nice online validator at http://www.threepress.org/document/epub-validate/ which is telling me my epub has issues), but Sigil got me most of the way there.

If you need to convert Word 2007 docs to ePub, use the free save-as module here:

http://www.aspose.com/community/files/69/free-microsoft-office-add-ins/aspose.words-for-microsoft-word/entry194468.aspx

It’s absolutely trouble-free.

It’s funny how things work out. A long search over many months led me to a non-device-dependent ebook scheme. My needs were simple–good DRM–but I couldn’t find anything that did the job until I tripped over the Drumlin Reader (http://www.drumlinsecurity.co.uk/), which adds really excellent security locks to ordinary Adobe Acrobat pdf files.

I created more than a dozen book-length pdf files from old Pagemaker files and posted them to my site. My marketing strategy was to appeal to readers who wanted ebooks without going to the expense of a Kindle or Sony Reader. Seemed reasonable; I know plenty of people who are willing to read books on their desktops, laptops, netbooks, and other hardware. A good reason for going this route was that I retain e-rights to several pictorials, which don’t work well on my Kindle DX, even in native pdf format (because the aspect ratio is fixed).

Nothing happened. No nibbles, no sales. I woke up this morning with the notion of pulling a failed test off my site. When I checked my email, a first-job-of-the-day effort, bang, there was my first order ever for a stand-alone ebook. I netted $7.30 on a $9.99 sale, counting a commission to Paypal and a fee to my son for helping with the website.

This is =not= a trend, and I am waiting on an opinion from my customer. His reason for buying the book is interesting. He’s in the UK and cannot get the Kindle for PC software, and he was tired of waiting for it. (I have Kindle for PC on my desktop, but I not sure if it’s available to people who don’t own a Kindle. Does anyone know?)

This isn’t much go on, and I’m not going to expend energy yet to convert the rest of my titles to pdf, but I am going to leave the Drumlin ebooks on my site and go back to work appealing to people who want ebooks but not expensive ebook readers.

The Kindle for PC software is free for anyone. I don’t own a Kindle, but I have the free software on my PC and on my iPhone.

Matt, how do you like reading on your iPhone? Anyone else?

I think the ability to read on smartphones is the big sleeping giant ebook publishers have going. My Kindle sales doubled as soon as the Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for PC were launched. No way of knowing which has the greatest impact, but I bet it’s the iPhone reader.

I read mobi formatted books on my blackberry. I have a kindle that reads them, too. Reading on the phone is extremely convenient when i’m stuck in line at the grocery or in low light situations where reading on my kindle doesn’t work well. I *do* read about 5x more on my actual kindle than on my phone and I rarely read books on the computer. I have too much other stuff to read when I’m at the keyboard.

If you have a choice between a Mobi purchase and a Kindle purchase, please buy the Kindle version. Mobi is owned by Kindle, but Mobi sales are few and far between and Mobi pays much slower than Kindle. If you want to support publishers and self-published authors, Kindle does it better than Mobi.

If you’re thinking about publishing to Mobi, skip it. Publish to Kindle and leave Mobi to itself, especially now that Kindle is available in Europe.

self publishing is the very good habit to that….
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sujatha
Outsourcing Projects