My books on Smashwords will probably be unpublished soon

Most of my books are on Amazon and they’re enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. This has been the case since 2019. Before that, I removed my books from Kindle Unlimited after six months and as well as selling them on Amazon, I made them available through Smashwords, which then distributed them to places like Barnes & Noble as well. Although there are people who advocate going ‘wide’, selling exclusively on Amazon and through Kindle Unlimited has been far more profitable for me. My earnings went up immediately in 2019 and quadrupled in 2020 compared to previous years (although it’s hard to disentagle the effect the pandemic had on my sales, and the popularity of the Seduced into Sharing series was a big help too). In 2019, I unpublished everything on Smashwords and since then, my books have been exclusive to Amazon. In terms of making money as a writer, it’s turned out to be the smart decision.

The exception is Penny Meets the Neighbors and the two short sequel books I published a few years ago. Although they’re about a group of married women who meet to have sex with each other, and occasionally invite their husbands to join them for swinging parties, they feature scenes where the main character, Penny, gets ‘intimate’ with her sister, Marina. This was at the request of the real-life Penny, who asked me to write the stories based on her fantasies. Amazon won’t publish this, but Smashwords will, so they’ve always been sold exclusively on Smashwords, even after I unpublished everything else. Because they’re niche, and because they’re hard to find, they don’t sell particularly well: I shift a handful of copies a year and their contribution to my writing income is tiny.

Now to the reason for this post. Smashwords was taken over by Draft2Digital a few years ago, and gradually, the conditions for publishing on Smashwords have deteriorated. The first change was that you have to have a minumum monthly income of $20 before Draft2Digital will pay you: if I sell a book or two a month on Smashwords, I don’t make that, and I have to wait a few months until the cumulative total is $20 before I receive the money I’ve earned from sales on Smashwords. It’s not a big deal by itself, but the next change is. This month Draft2Digital have announced an annual fee, only payable by writers who make less than $100 a year. As I just explained, my income from Smashwords is trivial, so I will most likely have to pay this fee, which will then eat most of the profit I make from selling on Smashwords. In a typical year I’ll be selling the books for a few cents each, while in a very bad year, if my earnings were less than the fee, it’s concievable that I’d make a loss by having the books available to buy on Smashwords. I’ve got four months before I’m due to pay the fee, so my books will be available on Smashwords until then. I’ll spend the next few months thinking about my options, but keeping them available will become a hassle, and as it stands, the most likely outcome is that I’ll remove Penny Meets the Neighbors and the sequel books from sale on Smashwords.