As I mentioned in a previous post, I took the plunge last year and self-published an Afrikaans romance novel on Amazon and Smashwords.com.
Like I promised, I now am in a position to provide feedback.
Although sales have not skyrocketed and I’m by no means a best-seller, the sales on Amazon were satisfactory. At least I made more than one sale a day for the past nine months and the reviews haven’t been all bad. So, will I self-publish on Amazon again? Definitely! In fact I have already. My second Afrikaans Romance novel, Katelknaap vir Carlien was published last week and like the first one, sales are slow in the beginning. But – there are some sales.
Now Smashwords.com is another matter. Although Gogga op ‘n Harley was included in the premium catalogue, I saw exactly three sales for the whole nine months. Will I publish there again? I doubt it. I’ll rather make up for the non-existent sales by selling the book directly from my website. That is once I’ve figured out how to do this.
Everyone has different experiences with these two sites, but publishing in a “foreign” language (other than English) seems to work best on Amazon. I haven’t published an English novel on Smashwords.com yet, but I’m in the process of revamping two titles that could work on Smashwords. When I’ve gone that route, I’ll let you know how it went.
I like Smashwords as publishing platform as it gives the potential buyer more options for use on different e-readers where Amazon limits usage to people with a Kindle or Kindle applications on their device. Their distribution channels seems vast, so maybe if you publish in English, sales would be better. Maybe we could get someone who has a book on Smashwords to give us some figures.
For those interested, here are the two books I have on Amazon.com, Amazon.uk and the other European sites.
