Thursday November 05, 2009

UPDATE: 5 e-book sites anecdotally compared

It’s been seven weeks since I first posted my unscientific findings about various e-book sites, gleaned from two and a half years of distributing Single. Now I have some updates, caveats, and one new experiment to relate. As mentioned before, I’ve been looking into this in order to determine where to release my new e-book, Cassingle, on November 16. It might also be useful to anyone else who is trying to choose among various sites when distributing their own work.

First of all, Single hasn’t generated many additional downloads on Manybooks or Wattpad in the last seven weeks. Wattpad had more, with 33 views (not downloads), so these two are out of the trials for good. Scribd, meanwhile, remains an odd animal. Its community is huge and if you put things there, people will see them. Single has tallied another 150 views in the last seven weeks, but I still think the best use of Scribd—for my purposes anyway—is as a public archive of freelance clips.

That leaves Feedbooks, Bookglutton, and Smashwords—a new (to me) contender. Single continues to rack up about 50 downloads a week on Feedbooks, certainly the fastest rate of any site I’ve used. Bookglutton, meanwhile, has delivered about 8 “viewloads” a week since then. I also found out from Travis Alber at Bookglutton that the book has been downloaded via the Stanza e-book reader 529 times, which brings the site’s total to 1348, close to Feedbooks’ total but over more time. Feedbooks has been averaging 170 downloads per month, and is accelerating, while Bookglutton has been averaging 100 or so per month, and has been slowing—in part because a recent redesign has given less prominence to the featured author section where my book is housed.

After my last round-up appeared, I also got a note from Mark Coker at Smashwords, who observed that I’d left his site off my unscientific list. I was aware of Smashwords, but I hadn’t gotten around to giving it a try. So, to give it at least a limited trial before making my decision about where to release Cassingle, I uploaded Single there last week. Ten days later, it’s been downloaded 25 times. Not a bad start, but I’ll have to see more to choose Smashwords over Feedbooks for the current project. (It’s worth noting that, while still very small, these numbers are astonishing compared to the non-activity Single was getting just a few years ago. If we are still in the single-digit days of e-book adoption, how steep this curve could get in the next five years is cause for excitement.)

So let’s make it official. I will release Cassingle—a collection of five stories that previously appeared in Fence, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere—on Feedbooks on Monday, November 16. I’ll also be blogging about the stories behind the stories, and I’ve got a fun collaboration planned with my friend James at Workbench Recordings. Stay tuned. (And if for some reason you’d like a copy a week or so in advance so you can write something about it, drop me a line.)