One of the things I’ve very quickly come to discover with releasing an e-novel is that you need maximum exposure. Gone are the days when the niche was in its infancy and a new book appeared on the ‘recently published’ screen for days. Now, with the ease of publishing, you will find that your book very quickly disappears off that first page and is lost amongst a sea of other authors also trying have the words noticed. If you’re waiting to sit back and see the book sales come in, then don’t have high expectations, because the chance of readers actually finding your novel are slim.

One of the best ways to maximise your novel in the first few days of publishing is by spreading across many platforms. Amazon’s Kindle is obviously a leading device in the area of e-novels, and you should look to use it as a number one resource. You should create author pages so that customers can more easily browse your work. Annoyingly,  you’ll need to create an author page for each of Kindle’s markets including .com, .co.uk, .de etc, but it’s well worth the effort. Amazon also have their Kindle Library which offers you the chance the lend your book, for free, to customers whilst taking a cut of a sizeable authors fund. However, if you’re looking for maximum exposure as quickly as possible, I’d suggest not taking this route.

The Amazon Kindle Library (KDP Select) requires you to make your novel exclusive to Amazon for 90 days. In return, you’ll get a cut of the $600,000 author fund in relation to how many times your book is borrowed. However, if you’re not expecting to make a splash with your publication, you very unlikely to get a large cut of the fund.

Instead, it’s worthwhile heading to Smashwords, a website very similar to Amazon in that you can publish your novel there. From here, Smashwords allows you to spread your e-novel to iBooks, the Nook, Sony Reader and multiple other platforms. Royalty rates are high and the spread of your novel is vast. Formatting, whilst slightly different to Amazon, is very easy, especially if you’ve already gone through the process with Amazon, and you can be completed in mere hours.

Rather than publishing only on Amazon and thinking as Smashwords as an additional option, you should look to both platforms as having equal pegging on the priority ladder. And, though you may miss out on KDP Select payments, the opportunity to maximise sales on other platforms is well worth it.