by Monique Martin

Created on: September 06, 2010   Last Updated: March 27, 2012

Whether you're a first-time novelist or an established writer, the lure of the ebook and independent publishing is one siren's call you shouldn't ignore. As an independent, you not only have complete control over your work, you also get to keep a much bigger piece of the royalty pie. You can make changes to your book, your cover, or pricing - all on the fly. It's all up to you. You actually have control. That's the beauty of self-publishing.

Smashwords and Amazon's Digital Text Platform (for Kindle) are the two heavy hitters in the field. Each has strengths and weaknesses. Here's a quick guide to help you choose which is right for your Great American Novel.

♦ Ease of Use

Both Smashwords and Amazon's DTP are fairly simple to use. Formatting your manuscript does require following some occasionally tedious steps, removing tabs, hard returns, etc. But, it's not rocket science either. Nothing extreme is required by either service. You can do it all yourself in a day. Smashwords does tend to be a tiny bit pickier than Amazon if you opt for the Premium Catalog (see below), but if your manuscript is rejected, you just adjust and resubmit.

The processing time for both is fairly fast, just a few days. Acceptance in the Smashwords Premium Catalog can take a weeks or so.

♦ Distribution

With Amazon you're part of one of the biggest retailers in the country. Amazon has managed not just to survive in a bad economy, but flourish. They are the number one purveyor of ebooks by far. And, they've just opened a UK Kindle Store, so your books will be for sale across the pond too.

Smashwords is still a relative unknown quantity to those outside of the ePub world, but they're coming on strong and they have a something special to offer authors. For no additional cost you can submit your book to their Premium Catalog which will distribute your book to the Apple iBookstore, Sony's eBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Amazon.

It seems like everyone has a Kindle these days. eBooks are so popular they recently outsold  hard covers on Amazon. In a depressed economy, Amazon has bucked the trends and keeps on growing. And, their Kindle and ebooks are at the head of the pack.

♦ Available Formats

The more formats your book is available in, the better. Amazon has worked hard to make their Kindle books more than just something to be read on the Kindle device. You can download and read them with a small app to your iPhone, iPad, Mac, PC, Droid and Blackberry.

Smashwords offers

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