The heat of summer is a great time for the hottest savings. There are a couple of interesting sales going on, or about to go on soon.
Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale
For starters, Smashwords is holding a “Summer/Winter Sale” (because it’s summer in the northern hemisphere and winter in the southern) for the entire month of July, offering discounts of 25%, 50%, 75%, or free on thousands of its ebook titles.
From the email announcing the sale, here are direct links to specific categories of ebooks on sale:
Participating titles:
By discount levels:
By specific popular categories:
- Bestselling romance
- Bestselling women’s fiction
- Bestselling erotica
- Bestselling thrillers
- Bestselling mysteries
- Bestselling historical fiction
- Bestselling sci-fi
- Bestselling fantasy
- Bestselling young adult novels
The email notes that new titles will be added every day. Sounds like a pretty good deal if you can find any Smashwords titles you’re interested in reading.
Amazon Prime Day
Meanwhile, another sale is coming up for Amazon Prime customers, a week from today. Beginning at 12 a.m. Pacific Time (3 a.m. Eastern) on July 12, Amazon will hold its annual “Prime Day” one-day super-sale. The deals are open to Prime members only, but you’ll be eligible as long as you’ve signed up for Prime by then. (Remember, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial if you haven’t been a member yet.) The Wirecutter notes that, during last year’s sale, it evaluated over 3,200 Prime Day deals to find 35 worth posting. It promises to do the same thing again this year.
If you’re in the market for a Kindle, Fire, Echo, Fire TV, or other Amazon product, I imagine it would be a good idea to wait one more week and see if any of the Prime Day deals are worth getting excited about. Surely they’ll be putting some of their flagship products on sale on that day, if any.
Some deals have already been announced—for example, Kindle Unlimited will be 40% off that day—and it’s possible to track other deals via Amazon’s Prime app.
Amazon’s Prime Day sale last year also provoked competitors such as Wal-Mart and Target to launch their own online super sales. So even if you’re not a Prime member, it might still be worth keeping an eye on deal sites that day to see what’s on offer in other places.
teleread.org 
July must correspond in book sales to what in the UK is called the “silly season.” Or as Wikipedia puts it:
Typically, the latter half of the summer is slow in terms of newsworthy events. Newspapers as their primary means of income rely on advertisements, which rely on readers seeing them, but historically newspaper readership drops off during this time. In the United Kingdom, Parliament takes its summer recess, so that parliamentary debates and Prime Minister’s Questions, which generate much news coverage, do not happen. This period is also a summer school holiday, when many families with children choose to take holidays, and there is accordingly often a decline of business news, as many employers reduce their activity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silly_season
G. K. Chesterton once remarked that a typical news story during this period would be about the funding of cat food for lighthouse keepers.
At both Smashwords and Amazon, book sales are down, so there is this “silly season” of sales.
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