to Smash or not to Smash?

Martha and I spent last weekend in NYC, catching up with college friends who convened from as far away as California and Maine.  The pretext was a milestone birthday for all the guys... one of those milestones that ends with a 0 and begins with a 5.  Yikes.  I swear that none of us look that old.  And I still have a few more weeks until the odometer clicks over.

This week I'm reformatting SWAIN'S LOCK based on the Smashwords style guide and pondering whether to upload it to the site and sell it for $3.  Smashwords lets readers download books in the electronic format of their choice, with zero DRM, which it claims unnecessarily frustrates and deters readers.  Yeah, maybe.  Some readers.

It also deters those who might choose on a whim to upload the novel as a .doc file to a panoply of pirate sites.  Once the cat is out of that bag, it's gone forever, right?  Anyone with a text editor could slice and dice or cherry-pick the novel however they please.  And with no control over its permutations in the ether, I'd have to forfeit any hope of selling it to a traditional publisher, no?  Or maybe that's just authorial vanity.

Part of me thinks I should stuff SL in a bottle and cast it out to sea, hoping it will generate interest in the sequel, or that maybe someone will want to buy adaptation rights someday.  Another part of me wants to keep querying agents, even though I realize that finding an agent and even a publisher guarantees nothing.  Given today's retail market, it's a relatively short three years for most debut novelists from launch to out-of-print.  A path which a few years from now leads right back to the Smashwords style guide...