All my author friends spend sleepless nights agonizing over one question: how can I best promote my books? Well, Smashwords recently attempted to answer that question through a survey examining what works and what doesn’t in terms of ebook sales.  You can read the whole survey on the Smashwords blog, but, as always, I’ve made a helpful list of the most important (to me) points. So, here are the takeaways from the survey:

• A few titles sell really well, and many don’t sell that well. However, a lot of Smashwords authors earn a good income from their books. This agrees with Hugh Howev’s Author Earning surveys.

• It’s important to climb in sales ranks, as this leads to geometrically increased sales. This is what some people sometimes call reaching a critical mass of readers.

• Readers prefer longer books. A few days ago, a reader gave me 4 stars for The Power of…