Since I put arrival up on Smashwords, several people have suggested I should look at Feedbooks: http://www.feedbooks.com
Similar to Smashwords, Feedbooks allows you to post short stories and novels in e-book format for download. However unlike Smashwords, all self-published books on it are free, making it useful for promotion or bonus content but less suitable for commercial use. I decided to put Arrival up, both to test out the system and to reach a wider audience. What follows are just my views.
To upload the story, you first set up metadata: name, description of story, and a few more details including choosing your licence. The licence options are interesting - No licence, public domain and a full range of Creative Commons. If you are trying to use Feedbooks for promotion the Creative Commons licence, allowing users to distribute and share but not alter the content, is a useful option.
Preparing the story for upload took some time, largely getting used to the Chapter/Section/Text setup. However, once you get a feel for this it is compatively easy to structure your work. Directly copying and pasting from Word produced some odd line breaks, and the edit HTML option in Feedbooks didn't work (I tried IE and Firefox, and both loaded a blank overlay screen, then hung.) To get the story formatted properly, I pasted it into Notepad, then the editor and then manually formatted it. This was fine for a short story like Arrival, but I could see it being time consuming for longer pieces of work.
Cover was an odd one. I tried to upload a few versions of my cover but the system hung every time I tried. No error message was given. As other users have covers on their stories, this could be a temporary glitch.
You can preview your book in any format while working on it, which is extremely useful. Once you are happy with it, a simple click of the Publish button will put it live.
The stats and anayltics are very well done, and extremely useful. Feedbooks shows downloads per day, but also shows the format and country of the downloads and the platform it was downloaded to. It also shows anyone who has favourited it or added it to their bookshelf.
I'm still new to Feedbooks, but it made a good initial impression and I will be interested to see how well the story does.
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