BookBaby vs Smashwords
February 26, 2026
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BookBaby makes self-publishing easy: from cover design, book printing, eBook conversions, distribution, website creation, and more. It offers a large ebook distribution network, including Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Sony, and many other popular retailers in over 170 countries around the globe. It’s now possible for you to reach a worldwide audience, keep 100% of your book’s net earnings, retain the rights to your work, and maintain total creative control. BookBaby provides everything you need to professionally publish and distribute your book, without ever having to sell-out to ‘big publishing.’
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Smashwords is the world's largest distributor of indie ebooks. We make it fast, free and easy for any author or publisher, anywhere in the world, to publish and distribute ebooks to the major retailers. We provide free tools for marketing, distribution, metadata management and sales reporting. At Smashwords, our authors and publishers have complete control over the sampling, pricing and marketing of their written works.
BookBaby vs Smashwords in our news:
2015. Smashwords allows authors to offer preorders without final ebook files
Popular self-publishing platform Smashwords now allows authors to start offering preorders for their titles up to one year before uploading the final assets—a completed manuscript and cover image—to its system. Smashwords has provided preorder capabilities for over two years, but until now only for titles with finalized files. Smashwords reports that 67% of its top 200 best-selling titles began as preorders on the platform, yet less than a tenth of Smashwords’s more than 100,000 authors and indie publishers utilize preorders, mainly because the final files were not available until shortly before the titles were ready for sale. The change aims to help more Smashwords users start generating revenue from their titles sooner. The company describes the new feature as the most ambitious feature ever.
