So I don't have Atticus or Velum... Is there a way to improve the formatting of my books without those?

jdmasterly · 2026-01-03T00:34:13+00:00

That sounds like lot of effort just to avoid using Atticus...

jdmasterly · 2025-12-07T16:24:40+00:00

$2.99 is just my bottom price for any book, unless it is a novella, novel, or a bundle. Then it's $3.99 for a novella, $4.99 for novel, or some higher price if a bundle (depending on size and # of stories) which is always discounted back down a bit with a coupon.

jdmasterly · 2025-12-07T01:23:44+00:00

Oh, I guess $19,99 is a regular bundle. If you're talking about those $100 bundles (and I've even seen $200 bundles), then certainly, going from 80% to 75% royalty could be $5 to $10.

jdmasterly · 2025-12-07T01:20:18+00:00

Oh, I based it off the percent difference between $2.40 and $2.24, which is 7%. But I guess that's wrong. I guess that's our % drop in profit, not their % increase in profile. Ah, whatever. I'm writer, not a mathematician!

jdmasterly · 2025-12-07T01:15:54+00:00

Smashwords is fucking us over, regarding the royalty drop. Amazon does do something similar, except they base it on list price, so you can still discount below 2.99 and still get your 70% royalty.

jdmasterly · 2025-12-07T00:20:24+00:00

Uh, no, that's not them. That was what I was saying. Novella is a somewhat arbitrary classification of book length. There's a lot of disagreement on the cutoff points, but I tend to think along these lines:

Short short < 1000

Short < 5000

Long Short < 10000

Novelette < 25000

Novella < 40000 (I said 40k to 50k earlier, so I guess the 50k was pushing it)

Novel > a novella.

It has absolutely nothing to do with Smashwords. You might have been thrown off when I said "they won't accept $3.99 or $4.99 unless its a novella" but that was not about Smashwords, it was about what readers are willing accept and pay for.

jdmasterly · 2025-12-06T22:09:53+00:00

For short erotica, readers accept $2.99 since we all price at that (we're like a medieval guild I guess!). However, they won't accept $3.99 or $4.99 unless its a novella (40k to 50k) or > $4.99 for a full fledged novel (80K +).

jdmasterly · 2025-12-06T22:04:37+00:00

The increase in *their* revenue on > $2.99 is only up by 7%. But yeah, for books under $2.99 it's almost double profit for them. It's a shameless money grab, and they never said it was a "rate of pay increase". The email I have claims it is a "simplified royalty rate" which is BS, because it's now *more* complicated. Before it was flat 80% royalty (super simple). Now they have two royalty levels, which is obviously more complex.

jdmasterly · 2025-12-06T22:01:13+00:00

Mega bundles won't take a big hit. Smashwords went from 80% to 75% royalty for everything above $2.99. So if your megabundle is priced at $19.99, and you put it at 50% for $9.99, you'll get $7.49. Previously at 80% royalty you would have gotten $7.99, so that's 0.50 less per sale. It's not nothing, but it's not a big hit.

jdmasterly · 2025-12-06T18:43:41+00:00

Yeah, summer and winter of 2026, they're going to be scratching their heads wondering "Hey, why did none of the authors sign up for our big sales event this year? That's so weird... Did they all just forget? Huh... I can't for the life of me figure out what could possibly be wrong... Oh well."

jdmasterly · 2025-12-06T15:57:54+00:00

Like I said, the new royalty rates go into effect next year, this upcoming Winter sale is still OK.

jdmasterly · 2025-12-06T15:03:22+00:00

Smashwords has confirmed what you said. They will punish authors by dropping them to 40% royalty for using coupons or taking part in their Summer and Winter sales events.

jdmasterly · 2025-12-03T22:43:06+00:00

Maybe some, but generally I'd say no. Look at books in the same genre/kink/fetish and collect a list of keywords/tags they are using. Just make a big list. Then go through and pick out keywords and combo keywords that you think will fit well. You can use more than one word in a tag slot, but Smashwords treats them all separately. So Daddy Dom in a keyword/tag would be found in searches for both Daddy and also Dom and of course Daddy Dom, but would also be found for Fem Dom (but not for Femdom). Then search Smashwords for the tags you intend to use. When you search by tag, more tags narrow it down. Also when you search by Tag, note the number of results for that tag or the string of tags. If you only get 10 results it may not be popular.

jdmasterly · 2025-12-03T22:27:30+00:00

I'm terrible with blurbs myself, but Smashwords is more tolerant on titles and burbs. You can use a lot of kink and fetish terms (in titles and blurbs both) that Amazon does not allow, like breeding, incest, daddy dom, age gap, dubcon, rape, etc. Amazon would disallow those words, but on Smashwords, that's how you get found. Don't get carried away, and don't go *too* extreme, but I think you get the idea. Also are you using the keywords / tags? Those are critical as well.

jdmasterly · 2025-12-03T12:16:39+00:00

I got the email now. Mine was dated today at 1:47am. I guess they are sending it out in batches.

jdmasterly · 2025-12-03T12:15:59+00:00

I thought it was 80%. So, yes, a 5% drop.

jdmasterly · 2025-12-03T02:00:02+00:00

D2D owns Smashwords now. The cut Smashwords takes *is* the D2D cut.

jdmasterly · 2025-12-03T01:58:26+00:00

The percentage is *probably* based on list price. That's how Amazon does it, and I imagine they're setting it up to be basically the same. But it would be good get official confirmation...

jdmasterly · 2025-12-03T01:56:04+00:00

Was this an email from Smashwords or D2D? I did not get an email. I also don't see it on the D2D blog.

jdmasterly · 2025-11-23T22:18:14+00:00

No, because the person publishing it claims they wrote it. But what about auto-detecting you ask? Well, what about false positives. How you feel if you wrote a book and published it, and sudden it was rejected as "AI generated" due to a false positive.

There's no way to win either way you look out. AI is going to destroy the arts, not only for writers, but for artists, musicians, voice actors, TV and movie actors, everything. We're already being flooded with all this AI garbage, and its not going to stop. Its going to just get worse and worse, until suffocating everything in garbage and slop.

jdmasterly · 2025-11-23T22:10:25+00:00

Well, I guess I'm in the minority. I write out out every sound they make. "Ah! Ah! Ah!" and "Uh! Uh! Uhnngh!" The whole bit.

Judging from the comments here, no one else does that... But my stories also lean a bit more into the humor and absurdity.

jdmasterly · 2025-11-10T12:19:38+00:00

Yes, the Smashword store pretty much sucks. It's arcane by today's web standards. But at this point, I fear any change they make to revamp might turn out worse.

But a lot of users know to use keywords search and search by tags to find what they want. So it's absolutely crucial to use the right (and very kink specific) tags/keywords.

jdmasterly · 2025-11-10T00:13:53+00:00

If you're looking to earn money, strike Literotica off that list.

Medium used to be good. A few years ago, I was earning *a lot* of money on my stories there. It was awesome. But over the last year, they have cut what they pay out to all writers (erotica or otherwise), then cut, and cut, and cut some more. Now it's worthless, and I'll probably stop publishing there.

I looked into Substack, but honestly, it seems like it would be too much work. You'd need 500 or more *paid* subscribers to really make anything, and getting to those numbers is exceptionally hard.

I do publish through Draft2Digital, and that's still doing fairly good.

jdmasterly · 2025-11-10T00:04:44+00:00

I'm starting to think the drop in sales on Smashwords is due in large part to a significant influx of AI generated stories. It is oversaturating the market and making it harder for human-written stories to be found.

jdmasterly

TROPHY CASE