Adam Maxwell's Fiction Lounge

For Day Three of my Hundred Days of Writing I got distracted from writing my latest story by the wonderful new analytics on Feedbooks and wound up checking stats on my currently published ebooks so I thought I would blog about that…

Now, I’m a latecomer to this party.  Another author recommended the idea to me but at the time I wasn’t really sure.  And then I did some research and realised that it wasn’t just an area where I could get my stories ‘out there’ but there were also communities of other writers to interact with.

There are others but the two I chose to concentrate on were Feedbooks and Smashwords and I’ve now put out 3 ebooks on each of these:

Dial M for Monkey was my first collection of short stories and flash fiction.
Dial M on Feedbooks has been downloaded almost 6000 times in just over 6 months which I am absolutely astounded by.
Dial M on Smashwords has done relatively well with 337 downloads which is still good in my book but in comparison with Feedbooks…

The Night Before The Christmas Before I Was Married & other festive tales was a much shorter collection of short stories and flash fiction I put out in December and, unsurprisingly, Christmas-themed.
Christmas on Feedbooks has been downloaded almost 3000 times and strangely has not tailed off as much as I would have expected post-Xmas.
Christmas on Smashwords has managed 339 downloads.

The Defective Detective : Murder on the Links which is a short novella/long short story and episode one of a series I’m working on (currently episode two is 50% done and is going to be a novella)
Murder on Feedbooks has been downloaded nearly 2500 times since mid-February.
Murder on Smashwords has only managed 66 downloads.

So what do I make of that?  Well, to take each in turn.

Feedbooks looks great, it’s easier to navigate, easier to publish and the end result that’s generated is far superior to those generated by Smashwords.  The recent addition of analytics meaning that authors can see how many downloads they’re receving and in what format is just amazing and when you put out an ebook you aren’t fighting for space on the website so you tend to get seen and people will try you out as a result.  Add this to the OPDS and mobile versions of the site and you wind up with a pretty impressive package for author and reader alike.

Smashwords doesn’t look great, you’re fighting for space on the site with an enormous number of other authors so your exposure is strictly limited (which probably goes some way to explaining the disparity between download numbers mention above).  Putting together the book itself can be something of a pain and the end result does not look as good as its Feedbooks counterpart.  Where Smashwords comes into its own is its ability to offer ebooks for sale (all of my ebooks were free except Murder on the Links on Smashwords which was ‘Pay What You Like’) and not only that but they have deals with:

Barnes & Noble – you can see all the books listed here.
Sony (apparently – mine still have yet to appear)
Kobo – see them here
Amazon – couldn’t find them, maybe you’ll have better luck.
Apple – erm… I guess you can access via your iPhone or iPad…

So who’s the winner?  To be perfectly honest I would recommend you put your writing on both.  They both have something to offer the ebook writer and my future releases will definitely be done on both but if you had to make me choose?

It would be Feedbooks.

What do you think?