So it’s been almost two weeks since my month of freebies over at Smashwords ended, and first off, let me just say wow! over how many free copies of my stories have been downloaded. In the past I’ve sort of brushed off Smashwords, mostly because I really dislike the fact that they won’t let you submit an .epub file to upload books, but instead have to use a Word document and their clunky meatgrinder. However, since almost everything I uploaded was a short story, the formatting wasn’t quite as much work as it would have been for a novel or a novella.
What I’m finding very interesting is that, although it was the last story uploaded (on December 30th, to be precise), my novella Welcome to Skullcrusher Mountain has outstripped every other thing I put up there, including “The Queen of Frost and Darkness,” which wasn’t even one of my December freebies and has actually been on the site since early November. I’m not sure if this is because there are a lot of Jonathan Coulton fans hanging out on Smashwords, or whether, when given the choice, people are going to download a longer work (the longest of my short stories is a little over 6,000 words, while Skullcrusher is almost 25K). Maybe it’s simply because it’s the only story up there that has anything remotely approaching a “clinch” cover — okay, they’re kissing, not lolling half-naked on a couch, but still.
I have no idea what to make of any of this, but I have to say that it’s interesting at least to see which items perform best, and which perform the least well. For example, my Snow White pastiche, “Hunter’s Heart,” has the lowest number of downloads on Smashwords. Is that because it’s the shortest story (barely 2,000 words), or because people aren’t interested in fairytale retellings? On the other hand, of my paid work Breath of Life sells the best, and that’s basically Beauty and the Beast set in space, so there goes my theory about fairytales.
If anyone has any theories about this, I’d love to hear them. 
