A year ago I discovered that all e-books published via Smashwords were being treated differently by certain e-book vendors, like iBooks and Barnes & Noble.
An identical short story would have higher ratings if it came out from Draft 2 Digital. The difference would be between 10k and 20k points, depending on the e-book vendor.
I attributed it to the fact that most of Smashwords content was x-rated 'romance' and most vendors didn't want those stories to be all a person could see when they browsed for other content. (Yes, Erotica tends to dominate the lists like a skinny Dom b!tch in a leather cat-suit.)
So I published my mother's short stories on Draft 2 Digital and removed them from any cross-over sites.
At this time, Kindle Direct made some steep changes in their payment policy and I un-enrolled any short stories that remained in Kindle Unlimited.
Today, a year later, after Smashwords added some sites and a few sites either closed to changed their allowed content I found that there were only 6 'sales' across all of Smashwords vendor sites. That's 6 sales for an entire year. OUCH!
The thing is that there were only about 6 'sales' of I. C. Talbot short stories anywhere, and two of those were sales of the collection, for full price. The year before, while they were in Kindle Unlimited, there were more sales and hundreds of freebies.
I'm not doing a 'leap before you look' move. I'm going to pull all of the I. C. Talbot short stories from Draft 2 Digital and move them back to Kindle Unlimited.
So this month will be the 'take down' month. During this time I will update the backmatter and covers. Then each book will go to it's new home. Even at the paltry .001 per page, the odds of finding these books in Kindle Shorts is much better than scattered over a dozen vendors.
