 and we'll just welcome everybody slowly as they trickle in. We have a large audience today, folks, so please turn off your cameras and your audio. We will have a robust Q&A session at the end that will be moderated by Barbara Santos and myself. And so we're gonna have everyone put their questions in the chat space. And I'm gonna go ahead and open that up. Are you in the South Bay, Jim? I am, I'm in San Jose, where it's going to be close to 100 degrees today, they said. That's what I was wondering. We'll see. I had my overhead fan on before I joined the call and it was blowing right into my eyes and I was sitting here in front of the camera constantly blinking, so I turned that off. So I'm gonna sit here and bake with all of you. It's gonna be great. I'm baking in San Leandro in the East Bay. Nice. Oh, you're probably warmer than us. It hasn't gotten really hot yet, but it will. It always does in the late afternoon, and that's what really ramps up. Yeah. So. Hey, people are coming in. It's good to see all these smiling faces out there. It's good to see people. Right? Hi, people. I love you, people. Oh, hugs. It's funny when out walking my dogs. I see other people walking and it's like we all look at each other. I see you. Yeah. I've noticed bigger smiles when you're out walking the dog. It's kinda nice. It's sad and it's nice at the same time. It's true. Hopefully they will all... Hopefully. Hi, guys. Hi. Hi. Hello. Hi, John Burns. Hi, John. You know, we have a large audience today. So I'm gonna turn your camera off because we're just about ready to get started. We have over 100 people reserved today, so it's gonna get... I'm very excited to know what Jim's gonna tell us. So I'm ready to rock and roll. So, yeah. All right. What happened? Oh my God, did I? What happened to him? There he is. Okay. So let's just wait one more minute. And then I will introduce everybody. I'm gonna mute you, Barbara. All right, why don't we go ahead and get started? Here comes everybody. All right, so hi. Welcome everyone to this discussion about e-book publishing with Jim Azevedo. My name is Taryn Edwards and I am one of the librarians at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. There I manage the writer's activities. And what else do I do? I guess I'm a librarian there too. We also have with us today, we have Barbara Santos, who is marketing director of the San Francisco Writers Conference. Hi. Hi, Barbara. Hi. I just wanted to alert everybody that this meeting will be recorded for future viewing. It will be posted on the Mechanics Institute's YouTube channel. And Barbara, I haven't told you this, but I got in. Yes. Past videos will slowly trickle on to the Mechanics Institute's social media and YouTube channel and to the San Francisco Writers Conference and to the Women's National Book Associations social media channels. So we have a lot of stored content that you can review at your leisure. So anyway, we will be recording and I just wanted to alert you that by attending this program, your name or your image might show up in the film. So if you have a problem with that, please change your name or turn off your camera. And that way, that way you're not in the recording. Meanwhile, this event and all the other ones that we have hosted in the past and will continue to do so in the future has been produced in partnership with the San Francisco Writers Conference and the San Francisco chapter of the Women's National Book Association. Now these two entities I work closely with at the Mechanics Institute to provide writing classes as well as other learning experiences usually related to writing that are relevant to the San Francisco Bay Area. Now I'd like to introduce our speaker today who is Jim Azevedo, who is the Marketing Director at Smashwords. Who is the Smashwords is the largest distributor of self-published e-books. So if you are thinking of writing your book now and publishing it, it's worth it to poke around on their website and take a look at their best practices. So since 2008 Smashwords has helped nearly 150,000 authors, publishers and literary agents around the world releasing over half a million titles. And they also distribute globally. So to e-book retailers, subscription services and most importantly, libraries. So Jim personally is a convert from the Silicon Valley tech industry. He earned his indie cred from 18 years of drumming, recording and touring with an indie punk rock metal band. So maybe he'll bust out a few riffs later today. Meanwhile, he's also a certified nutrition consultant and a really cool guy. We will put his Twitter and contact information in the chat space once we get started. The way the event will work today is Jim will give us a short presentation and then we'll start the Q&A. And someone is, we are viewing someone's screen. I'm gonna stop that. There we go. How did he? Sorry about that. Meanwhile, like I said, we have a large audience. If you want to ask a question, please post it in the chat room and we after Jim's conversation, Barbara and I will fold those questions into what I hope is a dynamic conversation with Jim. Meanwhile, thank you very much and let's get started. Take it away Jim. All right. Well, thanks, Taryn and thank you, Barbara. I'm going to share my screen real quickly here and I have to tell you as I'm getting the screen sharing ready that I'm really excited about the discussion part of this. So right now, this part will take about 15 to 20 minutes and then we'll open it up for the fun part. Real quickly, I just wanted to say thank you so much to the San Francisco Writers' Conference and Mechanics Institute and the Women's National Book Association for the invitation in the first place. I really appreciate it. But also thank all of you, all of the attendees because I know that you have a million other things you could be doing right now but you're trusting me with your time so I really, really appreciate it. Welcome to ebook publishing in a post COVID-19 world. In the next several minutes here, I'll share with you some of what we're experiencing from Smashwood's perspective in terms of how the pandemic has been impacting our global ebook retail partners. From there, I'll talk about some of the challenges that we're all currently facing and that we may continue to face for perhaps the short term but at least the next several months or maybe a year or longer. Then I'll talk about some other things that you can do right now to help you navigate through these troubled times and maybe just maybe help you come out stronger on the other end. Now quickly, I must humbly submit to you that when news of the pandemic first came across my awareness, my newsfeed at the end of last year I perhaps didn't take it as seriously as I should have. I thought, you know, we've seen cases like this before and my first thought was, well, how bad is this gonna get? As a matter of fact, I really didn't think twice about buying some concert tickets for some friends of mine and I. Actually, they're my bandmates. Our 20 year anniversary is coming up and to put it frankly, I've been working from home since 2011. I have a five year old daughter at home. I don't get out very often. So when I heard about this band coming to town I figured I'll buy these guys, my bandmates some tickets to this show, essentially forcing them to go out with me. The concert was scheduled for March 7th and leading up to that date, obviously the news of the pandemic was getting, it was becoming more and more of a daily news item. My guitarist who has some health issues decided to bow out wisely. He's got a couple of small children at home. He felt it's probably the best idea if I don't go. But I and my three friends, three other friends, we found a replacement for my guitarist. So I and three others went and I was somewhere down there front row center with about 1,000 plus of my closest, sweatiest friends. And again, that was March 7th. Nine days later, seven counties in the San Francisco Bay Area went on official lockdown. They say I was a wee bit nervous for the next couple of weeks is an understatement. So how bad could it get? Worse than I ever imagined possible. I've watched as all of you have, I'm sure, but shock and horror and despair as now millions and millions of people around the world have become infected with the virus. A couple of million people here in the US alone and well over 100,000 lives lost here in the US. Just like all of you, every day life has changed. Going to the park, I have to explain to my little girl that I'm sorry. The playground still shut down, honey, not yet. You can't have play dates just yet. And I'm also stuck with telling her that kindergarten that we've all been looking forward to this year may not happen as we expect it to happen. I'm curious as to what's this going to do to our collective psyche, not just as individuals, but as consumers if we're avoiding playgrounds, if we're giving our neighbors wide birth as we're taking our evening strolls or walking the dogs forced to wave to them from across the street. I'm also curious what it's going to do to our collective psyche as consumers where we have to put on masks and gloves to simply go grocery shopping, grocery shopping. I'm also curious how this is going to impact our readers as counties, countries start to slowly emerge from the pandemic because if we're wearing masks and gloves to grow grocery shopping, how is that going to impact how we feel if grocery shopping is a perceived risk? How is that going to feel if I just want to go down and visit my corner bookstore to pick up a book, a book that's possibly been touched by lots and lots of other people? Who knows, are they infected? Maybe they are, maybe they're not. Today there are some bookish headlines coming out that are also saying things like the book business is going to or is already encountering some of the same struggles that are impacting other industries around the world. These struggles of course being closed stores, consumers who now have less disposable income as global economies are entering a recession but there is a silver lining and that silver lining is this. As an author, if you are publishing e-books, you will probably see higher sales for your e-books in 2020 than you did in 2019 and possibly in 2021 as well. What we're seeing happening out there is a surge in e-book sales. We believe that there are readers who are discovering e-books for the first time or maybe re-deserving the joys of e-books, the joys of e-book reading, the convenience and rip free experience of e-book shopping but also e-books are typically priced less than their print counterparts. If as an author, if you're a self-published author and if you are investigating e-books while publishing for the first time, go for it because some of those bookish headlines that I alluded to before are saying things like readers are not buying books in the usual places. The usual places meaning brick and mortar bookstores but stories like that play into your hands as self-published authors because as a self-published e-book author, when you self-publish an e-book and distribute that book to global e-book retailers through services like ours, like Smashwords or if you decide to directly upload yourself, your e-books aren't just landing on those store shelves here in the US, your e-books are landing on those virtual store shelves within every country that those global e-book retailers are operating their dedicated e-book stores. So with that, let me share with you some of what we've been seeing as far as the pandemic's impact on some of our e-book retail partners. Here's what's happened in March of this year versus the same period one year ago. Now remember, March was the first month where economies around the world, not whole countries but different regions, different areas of the world and our country, of course, started going into lockdown mode. These areas started going into shelter in place for the first time. Here's how the numbers for our top six retail channels performed in March 2020 versus March 2019. This includes more than 475,000 e-book titles in our catalog. So Scribd has been going like gangbusters. If you're not familiar with Scribd, Scribd is an e-book subscription model where readers go to Scribd, they pay a low monthly fee and then they get access to as many books as they can consume for that period. Scribd is nice because for readers who are price conscious now, it's a way to consume a lot of books without spending a lot of money. But Scribd is different than Amazon's Kindle Unlimited and that Scribd pays authors based on their retail list price. Overdrive, as you may or may not know is the largest library aggregator that sends books, even self-published e-books to public libraries via Overdrive's catalog. It even smash words. So as you all know now, smash words is primarily an e-book distributor. However, since day one, going back to 2008, smash words has operated a dedicated e-book store at smashwords.com. Even prior to the pandemic, smash words at our little e-book store at smashwords.com has been bucking an overall industry trend where e-book sales for the past five or six years have been relatively flat, but sales at our little store have been growing year over year over year for the past four years. And in March, our sales were 17% higher than they were in March, 2019. At Kobo, sales dipped a little bit in March. At Apple, the world's second largest e-book retailer behind Amazon, we were surprised that their numbers in March were down a bit too. And Barnes and Nobles numbers weren't very good at all, as you can see. So that was March. And again, countries, municipalities, different areas were just starting to go in lockdown. It wasn't widespread. April, however, was the first month from beginning to end where lockdowns were in place. Take a look at what happened in April. Scribd just exploded. They had record-setting sales for the month. It was their highest performing months since we've been partnering with them. Overdrive continues to show strong results. Smashwords continues to show strong results. Kobo's numbers ramped up significantly, as did Apple's. Unfortunately, Barnes and Nobles' April 2020 numbers were still down versus April 2019. This is telling because if it hadn't been for the pandemic, Barnes and Nobles' e-book numbers may have been even worse. Let's take a look at what happened in May. So in May, trying to advance my slide, in May, some areas started coming out of lockdown for the first time, but as you can see, numbers were still quite high. E-book sales were still surging fairly significantly. Now, this begs the question. Do we expect this to continue? Do we expect it to continue forever? No, in a word. We don't expect it to continue forever. However, we do expect it to continue, at least for the short term. The short term meaning at least for the next several months and maybe for the next year or year and a half. As the world has been thrust into a global recession, no one really knows when we're going to come out of that recession. So consumers are paying close attention to their disposable income. And consumers aren't necessarily very comfortable venturing out yet and going into physical brick and mortar bookstores. We expect that E-book surge to continue for a bit. However, it's worth noting that, let's take a look back at history for a moment because back circa 2008, there were some voices in the publishing industry who had predicted that E-books would take over print books, that print books were going to go away. Thankfully, that never happened. But what did happen is that between 2008 and late 2012, early 2013, E-books here in the US exploded. They were growing by double and triple percentage points year over year over year. Until late 2012, early 2013, where the market for E-books in the US, consumer books, both fiction and non-fiction, just started to level off. They reached an equilibrium where E-book sales here in the US represented about 25% of dollar sales and print accounted for 75 to 80% of dollar sales. So while we expect the surge to continue for a little while here, we do expect it to level off once again, probably going back to the levels that we saw prior to the pandemic. So with that said, what are some of the things that you can do to navigate through these challenging times and potentially come out stronger? On the other end, do these three things. First, put your books everywhere because as authors and especially as self-published authors, and especially to those of you who are investigating E-books self-publishing for the first time, you have a couple of major hurdles that you must overcome. Hurdle number one is to write that super awesome book that goes straight to your reader's hearts, that moves your readers to emotionally satisfying extremes, whether it's fiction or non-fiction. But your second hurdle is to make your books as discoverable or as findable as you possibly can. And the best, easiest way to make your books as findable as you possibly can is to put your books everywhere where readers go to find the books. That means having your books on those virtual store shelves at all the E-book retailers and on the shelves of public libraries via services like Overdrive. If you decide to go exclusive at one retailer, say Amazon, for example, keep in mind that there are still millions and millions of shoppers who are shopping at other E-book retailers. To those readers, you are invisible. You don't even exist. And if you don't exist, you're not purchasable. If you decide to go exclusive at a single retailer, you also miss opportunities when the other retailers experience breakout performance months like what we've seen has happened with Scribd. Next, price your books lower. As self-published E-book authors, you have an opportunity. Because you're self-publishing, you're in business for yourself. You have much, much lower expenses than say what a large traditional publisher would have. Your lower expenses enable you to offer your E-books for significantly lower prices. And with those lower prices, you can reach more readers. But even with those lower prices, you can still earn more per book sold. Typically, here's what's happening with self-published E-book authors. Indie E-book authors are earning between 60 to 80% of their E-book's list price as their royalty. Now compare that with a traditionally published E-book author who's earning just 12 to 17% of the list price as their royalty. That means if I'm a newer author and I'm getting ready to release my debut novel and I priced it at $2.99, my cake home is going to be about two bucks. For a traditionally published E-book author to earn that same two bucks, they'd have to price somewhere in the neighborhood of $12.99. So with that, put yourself in the shoes of your readers, consumers, consumers who are a bit more price conscious now. If you had a choice between two E-books of seemingly equal quality and once priced at $2.99 and once priced at $12.99, which one would you purchase? That's one of your greatest advantages of being a self-published E-book author. Next, build a platform you can control. I would assume that all of you have heard the term platform ad nauseam. So what is platform? Platform is think about like a measure of your fame, but more importantly, think of platform as a measure of your ability to reach your readers. Chances are you know of an author who has thousands or maybe even tens of thousands of Twitter followers or Facebook followers or maybe you yourself have tens of thousands of Facebook followers. Chances are that if you've dealt with Facebook for say longer than a year or two, you may have experienced, you may have had a time when you experienced publishing some news that you wanted all your fans to see. And these fans, these are people who have opted in to receive your news on their news feed. They've given permission to hear from you. And earlier, a couple of years ago, you may have put out that news and they all received it and that was fine and well. But then one day may have come along with you if you haven't experienced this where you made a Facebook post, perhaps you were giving some news that you're going to have an author signing event or that your book release was coming up. But to your dismay, it looked like only a tiny fraction of people even saw it. What happened? Facebook started charging for ads so that authors could expand their reach. So no longer could you reach all of these people who had already given their permission to hear from you. You had to pay for that. So the best way to build a platform you can control is through your private author newsletters, email newsletters. Your email newsletter is ironclad. It will stay with you as you grow your author career. Your email newsletter won't be subject to the whims of social media platforms. It's not susceptible to algorithm changes at any of the retailers. Even if you're hosting provider for your website or blog goes down, you still keep your email newsletter and you control it. You control the timing of when your messages go out. You control the content of those messages. So as a company, when we began thinking about email newsletters, we were thinking about ways in which we could help our authors and publishers build upon their email newsletter lists. And we started tossing around some ideas. We thought, what if we could build a tool that helped our authors turbocharge their newsletter science? What if we could build a tool that enables our authors and our publishers to give their readers and fans early access to new books ahead of its general public release date? Sort of as a loyalty of reward for those who've signed up for their email newsletters. And wouldn't it be cool, we thought, if our authors and publishers could capture reader emails at checkout? In other words, if we gave readers the option to sign up on the spot for the email newsletters for the authors that they just purchased their books from. And we thought, wouldn't it be even better if our authors and publishers could provide instant discount incentives at checkout? So when a reader checks out a book that's on pre-sell, they're presented with 25, 50, 75, even 100% off of that book that they're purchasing in exchange for providing their email to the author of that book. And then we decided to go one step further and we thought, what if we made this new tool compatible with multiple publishing strategies? Because we know our authors and publishers have multiple publishing strategies. Some like to release their books exclusively at Amazon through KDP Select or via Kindle Unlimited. Still others like to distribute widely using services like Smashwords. And others prefer to directly upload their books to the retailers one by one by one. So we took all these ideas and we created a tool. It's called Smashwords Pre-Sales. We delivered it in December of 2019. And we are probably more excited about Smashwords Pre-Sales than we were about Smashwords accompanying when we launched in 2008. So it's a new tool for all of you and it's ready now. Before we get into our interactive discussion, I just wanna leave you with one final thought. And that thought is your books and your words are possibly more important now than they ever, ever have been. These three strategies that I just shared with you, these are not flash in the pan marketing schemes that are going to last a couple of weeks or a month. These are tried and true evergreen best practices that you can leverage going forward to build upon and sustain your author careers. So putting your books everywhere, pricing lower and building a platform that you can control will help you sustain, nurture and grow your author careers beyond the pandemic. And with that, let me stop sharing so that I can talk to all of you. Okay, can we open it up? Yeah, Taryn, I think you're unmuted. I'm unmuted now. You know, I did have a question from Deborah. Yes. Deborah Gish who emailed me before the event and she is curious about whether or not back cover copy is something one needs to consider or even have when publishing an ebook. That's a good question. And the answer is no, you don't have to worry about your back cover copy nor do you have to worry about a spine. With an ebook, all you need is the cover. But with that said, you will have the opportunity to provide your book's description as you go through the ebook publishing process, which is about to will serve like your back copy. Great. I've noticed that sometimes at the end of a book, there is something that either leads one to your website or to the author's website or leads one to the next book or can you comment anything, comment about it? Yes, absolutely. So all of you should update the back matter of all of your ebooks today and add these four sections. Number one, add and about the author section in the back matter of your book because chances are if a reader has just discovered your book for the first time, they wanna know what makes that mind of yours ticks and about the author section will help humanize the author behind the story. This doesn't have to be an epic tale, a paragraph or two will do, that gives them a sense of who you are as a person. Maybe where you're from, what area of the country you reside in now, whether or not you have any hobbies, that sort of thing. Number two, list out all of your existing books that you have and then you can hyperlink those books back to your website or blog so that those readers can learn more about those other titles. Don't just add titles that you have that are existing, also include titles on that list for books that are upcoming that haven't even been released yet, books that you may have on pre-order to help you accumulate those pre-orders as well. And again, hyperlink those back to your website or blogs so that your readers can learn even more. That was the second thing. The third thing to add to your back matter is a free sample chapter or an excerpt from one of your other books because there is no better time to hook a reader or to keep a reader on your train than at the very moment they finished one of your current books. If it's a new reader and you're talented enough to guide that reader along and hold their hand from chapter one on through to the end of your book, chances are they're delighted that they've discovered you and they're delighted they just read this fantastic book of yours but they also might have that little tinge of sadness, that little bit of a let down because something that they really enjoyed has just ended. So hook them right then and there by giving them a taste of one of your other books, especially if one of your other books is another book in a series. Where are we? Number four, the fourth thing to add to your back matter is a section that says connect with the author. Add that section and then provide several different options for how your readers can connect with you so that your readers can connect with you in whichever way is the most comfortable for them. So these could be linked to your Facebook page or to Twitter or to Instagram or to your email newsletter, definitely do that or link them back to your website or to your blog. I should also note that when you update your back matter and especially when you provide these opportunities for your readers to get in touch with you, having these connections with readers, it's kind of like the holy grail of the book publishing industry. I feel like the largest publishers have been trying to figure out how to do it forever, but nobody has a better opportunity to have these interactions to build these relationships with readers than you, the authors. That's great advice. So really your first book is the opportunity to really drive your platform growth and just it's really like a springboard for your career as an author. Yes. And I love that the author is the one that's in the driver's seat as far as driving growth and sales of your book. Absolutely you are. Let's see, Philip Thorne has a question or at least a comment about Kindle Unlimited, how it blocks your ability to publish on other sites. Is there a way to get around that? Can you publish your book on other sites and then publish to Kindle Unlimited? Sure, so let me define Kindle Unlimited. So Kindle Unlimited is Amazon's subscription service. So for a low monthly amount, I think it's still 9.99 a month, readers have access to essentially an unlimited amount of eBooks and Kindle Unlimited is powered by Amazon's exclusivity option, which is called KDP Select or Kindle Direct Publishing Select. So to answer the question, you can still have your books listed for sale at Amazon without being exclusive to Amazon. I would never tell anybody not to have their books at Amazon. All of you should have your books listed for sale at Amazon. They're the largest eBook store in the world, but you don't have to go exclusive there. If you are enrolled in KDP Select or Kindle Unlimited, their exclusivity periods last for periods of 90 days at a time. But as an author or publisher, you have to manually go in to turn off that exclusivity period at the end of that 90 days. Amazon will not give you notice that it's ending. They'll just sign you up again and have it rolled to the next 90 day period. So if you want to end that exclusivity period, pay attention to when your exclusivity period ends, and only then can you list your books at all of the other retailers. I hope that answers the question. I think so, and it's great advice. I'm writing it down. Well, I just want to underscore or maybe restate that Kindle Unlimited is a part of their exclusivity program. Linda has a question. She is debuting her book in a month and she's wondering if it's too late to get it populated on all of these sites, the book sales sites that you recommended. Oh, in a month? No, absolutely not. So this was Linda? Yeah, I mean, this question from Linda. Yes. Linda, here's what you're gonna do. Get your ebook listed as an ebook pre-order, okay? Smashwords has been offering ebook pre-orders since June of 2013 and by far, without question, ebook pre-orders have become the best book launch marketing tool we've seen since the launch of Smashwords back in 2008. With an ebook pre-order, if you're not familiar with what an ebook pre-order is, an ebook pre-order allows readers to reserve a copy of your book ahead of its public release day. So if you're listening today, today's the 18th. So if you're, for example, releasing your book on July 18th and you could put your book up as an ebook pre-order today and start accumulating orders before your book is even released, here's how it works. When a reader goes to a retailer and we are distributing ebook pre-orders to Kobo, Apple, and Barnes & Noble, the way it works is when a reader goes to reserve the copy of that book, they put down their credit cards, yet that credit card isn't charged until your book's release date. Now, this gets really interesting, especially at Apple Books because Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo, they'll enable you to accumulate pre-orders for up to 12 months. But Apple is unique because Apple counts every ebook pre-order as a full sale, okay? So hold that thought because ebook pre-orders, based on our data, sell better than books that are simply uploaded on release date. Now, let's talk about sales rankings and best seller lists for a moment here. Everybody essentially knows how best seller lists work. The more sales value you have, the more units you sell, the higher your chances to go up in sales ranking and the better your chances to end up on best seller lists. But here's the thing, the most recent sales way more heavily than sales that have occurred in the more distant past. In other words, sales that have occurred in the last 12 to 24 hours are going to weigh much more heavily in best seller rankings than sales that have occurred in the last two weeks or two months. When it comes to ebook pre-orders, especially at Apple, if you have a month's worth of pre-orders, it's like you can have this concentration of months and months worth of sales all hitting on day one of your book being released. And that is what can cause a pop in your sales rankings and possibly get you onto a best seller list when your book is released. Does that all sink in? And let me know if you have a follow-up question to that, Linda. So yes, you should upload your book now and start accumulating orders ahead of time. And if you have a pre-order, then your book is eligible to also do a pre-sale. Wow, it's clear you have a lot of content in your brain. You're amazing. I've given a lot of presentations over the years. And you know, the funny thing is, let me tell you, how long have I been doing public speaking? Probably since 2012, because Mark Hooker, our founder, was stretched so thin and he asked me if I could take on some of the public speaking duties. And even though every sell in my body screamed no, I was just scared to death of public speaking. I said yes, and it's been a joy, but eventually these things start to sink into your brain. And even if I'm angst ridden every time before I get up in front of a crowd, happily that data is still there somewhere. I think you gave a team talk at Mechanics Institute in 2012 because that's when I started hosting writer's stuff. Okay. Mr. Siddique has a question. Would you recommend, is there an e-book authoring tool that you recommend? An e-book authoring tool? Like e-book design or some sort of software that helps authors package their e-book. I think, to state it humbly, I think you're better served asking some of your author friends because I hear about different tools all the time and I really don't have the experience with one in particular to recommend one in particular. So I feel more comfortable suggesting that you ask author friends or authors that you respect and whose work that you love, what kind of tool that they used. And I just wanted to point out that I did post the Smashwords style guide. It's a free e-book that's available on Smashwords' website. I put a link to that in the chat which I haven't looked at it in detail, but that might provide some guidance as to the things that you need to think of when publishing your e-book. It will. Actually, will there be a follow-up email that you send to all the attendees, Taryn? Because there are more links I could add. There could be? Yeah, I remember I should have had all the links ready, but if there could be to attendees of this event, I could add some links to that for the formatting guide. The style guide is our formatting guide and that's what can walk you through the step-by-step process if you're considering publishing an e-book for the first time. That will help you get there. We also have our book marketing guide that has 65 tips and tricks to help you reach more readers. And then we have our free best practices guide that has, I think it's 30 best practices from the best-selling self-published e-book authors to give you even more things to consider on how to do things right. That's great. We can certainly send out another email and we can also post, when we post the video on our YouTube channel, we can include that material in the comments. Let's see, Julie has a question about royalties. KU royalties are exceeding her e-book sales and she'd love to be less dependent on Amazon. Can Smashwords help with this? Yeah, gosh, we were hearing this for more and more authors who are dependent on Amazon because if you're exclusive to a single retailer, think about what a financial advisor, I'm saying this for people who are not familiar with Kindle Unlimited or Amazon's exclusivity options. A financial advisor would advise you or would plead with you not to put all of your eggs in one basket because if the market changes, you essentially are out of luck. And the same holds true with exclusivity options at the retailer and at Amazon in particular because if the rules change there, all the algorithms there, sales can suddenly take a dive. I would also caution authors who are all in at Amazon, if you're getting 80 to 90% of your revenue or even more than that from a single retailer, you're no longer an independent author, you are a dependent author on that single retailer. So to answer your question, I'm sorry for babbling, but I just wanna put that word of caution out there too. We could help you absolutely, but when you leave Amazon and just start to go wide for the first time, going wide means putting your books everywhere at all of the other retailers, expect there to be a little bit of time before you start to gain traction for your books at these other retailers. Give it a little bit of time for the readers to find your books at those other retailers and help those readers find your books. So on your website, when you're linking two books at Amazon, link to books that you have for sale at Apple and at Barnes Noble and at Kobo and at Scribd and everywhere so that you're making it ridiculously simple for your readers to click away from your website or blog and to click into the exact page where your book exists at each one of those retailers. I hope that helps. That does help. There's another question from Ronald back to back matter. Is it possible to change back matter in a book that's been published for a couple of years now? Yes, it is. Yep, yep. As the author of your book, if you're self publishing and if you control the rights to that book, you can update the back matter. You can update your manuscript. You can update all of that metadata, your price, your description, everything as often as you like or free. You know, I just wanted to point out something that you said about being an independent writer versus a dependent writer or author. And I really think that in these changing times, you have to constantly think about that and not let yourself become dependent or complacent on the tools that maybe are the easiest tools or services that are perhaps the easiest for you to use because things change so rapidly and you might make more money, sell more books, get more readers if you roll with the times. Yeah, you wanna think long-term. Short-term gain, it's very enticing. Everybody wants it, especially when you hear about author friends who have done it. But if you play the long game, if you think about this more as a marathon instead of a sprint, you can weather some of the storms as they will inevitably come along. And to put some historical perspective on it, if I may, just remember it wasn't very long ago when the book publishing industry was a print-centric industry and the largest traditional publishers controlled it. They determined which books they felt were good enough or rather commercially viable enough to be turned into published books, which meant that they determined which writers they felt were good enough to become published authors. And they also controlled distribution into different areas of the globe and to specific regions of the country. And they determined which books would land into which physical brick-and-mortar bookstores, which meant that they also kind of determined what books readers had the opportunity to see. But then with the advent of e-books and digital publishing tools, suddenly any author anywhere in the world who had access to a computer and the internet could self-publish and distribute an e-book. And suddenly authors were free. They celebrated their nookbound liberation and independence. Unfortunately, what we're seeing now is authors kind of putting the shackles back on and going all in to a single retailer. There's a question here. We get asked a lot at the writers conference. And I think if I'm interpreting Ruth's question right, is it better to put your book up on, let's say, Smashwords or any of the e-book retailers and then go to Big Five Publisher? Are there even Big Five's left anymore? There's probably big two left. Big four. That's a personal decision. If you self-publish an e-book and it performs very well, then you have the validation to take to an agent or to a traditional publisher later and say, look at this book. I self-published it six months ago or a year ago. It has X amount of sales. Can we talk? Versus if you self-publish a book and it has a couple of dozen sales. So if you're going to consider self-publishing, you have to put in the work. Self-publishing does have its advantages. It's faster. So if your book is completed, I mean that you've had it professionally edited and revised and it's formatted and it's really ready to be published as an e-book, you can publish in a matter of minutes. Literally minutes versus the months and months it may take you to go the traditional publishing route. You have higher royalties. You have access to a global distribution and that sort of thing. So self-publishing does have its advantages. But with that said, I would also caution you that self-publishing perhaps isn't for everyone. It takes a lot of work and it's going to take some entrepreneurial spirit. But if you're willing and if you're determined you can be a successful self-published author. You have to go through the best practices. Don't follow the get rich quick schemes or the flash in the pants marketing schemes that you may come across as an author. Play the long game, nurture your career, build traction with those readers and you will grow your readership over the years. I love that you've always been honest about you've got to do the work and you've got to have a good product. You just don't put anything up and think you've done your job. You haven't as an author, you've got to put up your best product. And someone had a question, Marcia, about she tried self-publishing at Smashwords but she couldn't get the formatting right. Is there someone at Smashwords who can help you with that? Yeah, if you get stuck, Marcia, send an email to our service department. You can find them by clicking on the little question mark button at the top of any Smashwords page or on the support link on the bottom of any Smashwords page. If you're really, really stuck they can help you through that. If you're, I'm assuming that you've already tried our formatting guide, that's the style guide. That turn was talking about earlier. That will help walk you through that step-by-step process. But if you find yourself either with zero time or if you find yourself pulling your hair out and you just don't wanna format yourself anymore, we maintain a list of low-cost formatters at Smashwords. So if you go to smashwords.com slash list, L-I-S-T, you'll find a list of low-cost formatters and even cover designers who, they're not Smashwords employees and we don't receive a kickback from them. They're just formatters and cover designers who have been recommended by other Smashwords authors through the years. It's pretty inexpensive and it may be the best way for you to go about it. That's amazingly helpful, that's great information. Okay. I put that in the chat space. Okay. Well, the formatter wasn't able to do it. I think it's harder, maybe it's just harder to publish a kind of a step-by-step self-help book that has picture images in it and a lot of subtitles. Is that harder on Smashwords than a, say a fiction book or book of essays? If it's just text and some images, that's relatively easy. Like, say if it was a memoir type of book, where it gets a little more challenging is a book that has lots of tables, graphs, and charts. Okay, or like a children's book where the text itself is embedded into the image. In that respect, if you could liberate the text from the image or if you can make the image a full page in itself, that's something that some authors of children's books, another fixed format books will do. But if you're saying that it is, it's roughly text with pictures with some captions, that's not too difficult, that's doable. Can you explain it a little bit more? I'm curious to see what the genre is and the types of problems that your formatter was encountering. The genre is self-help and looks both marriage meetings for lasting love, which is a step-by-step guide to hold a weekly marriage meeting. And the format, there was someone who was recommended to me to format for Smashwords and she ended up giving up. It just didn't seem to have the ability or Smashwords for whatever reason, it didn't work. And I did end up getting traditionally published and including the e-book and the print book. And so that's what happened, but I might wanna do a future book on my own. And I'd like to know if I should stick to something like a very simple format. We generally recommend the simpler, the better when it comes to e-books because to really explain, if you think about a book that's in print, print is a fixed format. And what I mean by a fixed format is that the designer of that book could, the designer of the book basically knows where every word is going to appear on every page. But when it comes to e-books, your readers are going to change the look and feel of your book. And the devices themselves are going to change the look and feel of your book as those words, their readers are gonna have the opportunity to increase or decrease the font size. And those words are going to have to kind of morph down for smaller screens and they're going to have to go from portrait mode into landscape mode and so forth. So the simpler, the better when it comes to e-books. But even with what that said, your book doesn't sound overly complicated. If you have a copy of it in Microsoft Word, for example, and you wanna talk through it and discuss some options, I'm happy to work with you outside of this if you wanna shoot me an email. All right, well, thank you maybe for my next book. Okay, thank you for your question. Appreciate your answer. All right, Maria has a question. She has a, it sounds like a traditionally published book that is negotiated with Amazon and Barnes and Noble to sell the book. But she noticed that her book is also being sold through other online sites, especially in the UK and in France. However, she hasn't received any notification of these sales and she's just wondering how she can track her own book sales statistics. Well, sometimes it depends on the retailers. At Smash where we give our authors a dashboard so they can see how their books are performing at each of the different retailers to whom we distribute. Sometimes the retailers are a little bit slow in reporting back. Some of them enabled daily sales reports. But I've heard of instances where some of the retailers are taking days and sometimes weeks to report back when authors are seeing sales come in. So I don't have a clear cut super concise answer for you, other than to say probably what you've already done and that is going to the retailers themselves and trying to identify yourself as the author or working with your publisher to go directly to the retailers and ask them, what's up? When are you going to report these figures to us? So when someone publishes with Smash words they're automatically uploaded to all these e-tailers? They're not automatically uploaded. When someone publishes to Smash words they have the option of getting their book distributed beyond Smash words. So and you can pick and choose which retailers you want your book distributed to. You can choose to go everywhere or if you're an author who says, well I'm going to upload directly to Barnes and Noble and Apple myself but I wanna use Smash words to go to everybody else then you can do that too. It's completely, it's up to you. It's flexible, we're flexible. We're nice people. You are nice people there. Let's take one more question. Julie Brown has asked kind of a technical question because I have no idea what she's referring to but can we use vellum format with SWDs? Yes, you should be able to use vellum. Some of our, a lot of our authors are using vellum and then what they'll do is they'll export an EPUB and then they'll directly upload that EPUB instead of a Microsoft Word doc to our platform. And from what I've heard, that seems to work just fine. I would just say vellum is a fabulous, I've used it quite a few times and I love it, beautiful. Yeah, I've heard really good things about vellum. Kind of and pretty intuitive, not a big learning curve on it. Is vellum, I just wanna ask, is vellum still only for the Mac platform or? No, I use, I have Mac, I use it on my Mac but I believe they make a version for the PC. PC? Oh, okay, good. For desktop, yeah, for non-Mac products. Gotcha. And the prices stayed, the prices around 250, 250, and it stayed pretty consistent over the, since I last looked. Okay, that's good to know. Yeah. All right, well, I think we have covered all of our questions. I do wanna announce that we, I think we've decided we'll go ahead and send a follow-up email to everyone who's registered with some additional links and content from Smashwords is pre-made service guides that might help people when planning their e-book publication journey. Gotta plan first before you actually go, right? Yes, planning is good. And I'd love to thank you, Jim. People are just saying how wonderful everything was and every time I hear you, I've probably heard you four or five times over the years. For a thing. You have great content. And you're nice to boot, so. Well, I, again, I seriously wanna thank everybody who's joined today. I really, really appreciate it. I'm so happy that so many people showed up. If any of you didn't get a chance to ask your question or if a question pops into your head later, feel free to shoot me an email. I'm at Jim at smashwords.com and Smashwords doesn't sell anything. So I'm not gonna try to sell you some $20,000 publishing package, but I will answer your questions to the best of my ability. If you have questions tonight, tomorrow, two weeks from now, feel free to shoot me an email. Thank you. Most of you who don't know that Jim and Smashwords have been great supporters of the San Francisco Writers Conference since the beginning. We are partners in crime. They provide the lovely badges that you wear. Oh, I should have had one here. I probably have one. You probably have about four or five of them. Anyway, next week, we're gonna have John Shea who's going to talk about his book about Willie Mace. It's 24 Life Stories from the Say Hey Kid. And then, just gonna announce this, July 10th, we're gonna have Catherine Sands who's an incredible literary agent who, here's one of those badges. Who's gonna talk about traditional publishing. So we're trying to hit all bases, but boy, you hit it out of the park today, Jim. Aw, I bet you say that to all the speakers. Yeah, just some of them. Yeah, we are looking forward to next Thursday's talk with John Shea because it's rare that we have non-fiction writers come, at least at Mechanics Institute. It seems like we always have fiction, but I think John Shea's book is kind of amazing because it was written in tandem with Willie Mace himself and the means of folding in John Shea's writing and Willie Mace's writing, I think is really great. And anyway, thank you all for coming and I hope you all stay cool on this warm day. Thank you everybody, really appreciate it. All right, thanks, Jim. Bye-bye. Bye.