Is There An Alternative To Kindle Direct Publishing?

Big news - we have recently put some of our titles onto Draft2Digital.
 
We decided to do this because, by keeping them exclusive to Amazon, we were actually narrowing our sales channels when we should really be going wider. Not everyone uses Amazon to purchase their books, so we were losing quite a lot of opportunities to offer our titles to those people.
 
There was one advantage to using Amazon. That was their KindleUnlimted (KU) programme. We get a lot of downloads through KU and they account for a significant proportion of our revenue.
 
But if we put our ebook product onto other distribution platforms, we aren’t able to use KU, so we risk that income. And yes, Amazon do check the other retailers to make sure we aren’t cheating.* 

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So, we analysed our income by title and it didn’t take a lot of time to realise that many of our titles aren’t read using KU, though they are purchased in ebook or paperback format. For some reason those books don’t seem to attract KU readers.

Five of the titles are non-fiction and that may have something to do with it. The remainder do get the occasional KU download, but not enough to justify us making them exclusive to Amazon.
 
OK, back to basics; just who are Draft2Digital (hereafter referred to as D2D)?
 
Basically, they are similar to KDP in that they allow Indie authors and small publishers like ourselves to upload their books to them, which they then distribute to retail channels. They also offer formatting services, cover creation (not cover design as such) and a few other whistles and bells.
 
But their big selling point is that they distribute books through a wide range of on-line retailers.

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How many? Here’s the complete list (at time of writing): Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Scribd, Smashwords, Tolino, Overdrive, bibliotecha, Baker & Taylor, BorrowBox, Hoopla, Vivlio and Palace Marketplace.
 
They will also distribute via Amazon if your book isn’t already on there, so it really is a “one stop shop”.
 
Several of the companies listed above are aimed at the book borrowing market rather than the retail market, so in that respect they are similar to KU.
 
I’m not suggesting that is 100% of the on-line book market, but it is a lot more than Amazon by itself.
 
If you are considering distributing your book as an audio title, they also offer audiobook services, including helping you to find a narrator. This service may be cheaper than ACX.com, but only marginally (see previous blogs on the subject of audiobooks).

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​So, what is D2D like to work with?
 
First of all, using the files we had already uploaded to Amazon caused us problems. Any reference to Amazon in the MS caused it to be rejected, as did references to ebooks in paperback MS’s. As we often insert a preview for another book at the end of an MS, with a link to its Amazon sales page, this meant having to go back and remove those references and links.
 
You may also have to remove contents pages if you want D2D to insert a contents page complete with hyperlinks. The same applies to copyright pages, dedications etc. however, you can opt to use the ones that are already embedded in your files.

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If you already have a cover for your ebook then it will probably upload OK to D2D, but when we uploaded our paperback covers we had some rejected because the back cover blurb was “blurred”.

We had used shadowing behind the text and D2D’s quality bots couldn’t handle that. They also reserve more space for an ISBN than Amazon, so if any text encroaches into that space it will result in the cover being rejected.
 
Paperback covers also have to conform to the D2D standard trim size, which is 5.5 x 8.5 inches (14 cm x 21 cm). If your covers are bespoke, created for you by a designer, you may have to go back and get them to adjust the size.

However, ​if you created your own cover using packages such as BookBrush, you can alter the size yourself (don’t forget to adjust the positions of the text).
 
I guess that sort of thing is all part of the learning curve for a new app, but it was frustrating and continues to be so as we have to change our cover designs and edit our MS’s in order to overcome these issues.

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What about royalties?
 
As with Amazon, you can set your own price for your books, which means you have control over the amount of royalties you receive once D2D and its partners have taken their share of the sale price.

Unlike Amazon, which has two options for royalty percentages, D2D has only one, which is the sale price minus distribution charges. You also have the capability to run price promotions for ebooks and you can price your book to make it free, but not on Amazon. The price for Amazon will automatically be set to a minimum of 99c (99p).
 
What is worth noting is that the printing costs for paperbacks seem to be much higher on D2D, which makes them less competitive than Amazon. To reduce the price to what you may have set on Amazon, you would have to reduce the amount of royalties you earn. In some cases it may not be possible to price-match to Amazon and still earn any royalties at all.

​Conversely, you could increase your paperback prices on Amazon, but that may make them less competitive compared to works by other authors. If you aren’t as famous as J K Rowling, you can’t charge J K Rowling level prices.

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In terms of marketing tools, D2D has a partner site called Books2Read (hereafter referred to as B2R).

It's basically a resource for readers to use to find books they may like. When your book is published its details are automatically copied across to B2R along with a “universal book link” (UBL) that allows the reader to go direct to their preferred retailer in their preferred country to buy the book.
 
One of the tools B2R offers to authors is “new release notifications”. These are automated emails sent to readers who are registered on the site and who are signed up to your profile, so once you have uploaded your book, this tool helps your readers to find it.
 
This is something I think gives D2D a real edge over Amazon, because any marketing you do through them has to be paid for.

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OK, it’s a one shot deal, but one shot is better than no shot at all. It’s also fully automated, so you don’t have to do anything except register your book for the notification system and D2D has a pop-up for that which appears when you press the "publish" button..

​You’ll know when the email notification has been sent, because you’ll receive a copy.
 
Other than B2R there are no real marketing tools for you to use. They don’t have an equivalent to Amazon Ads, which is a shame. Somehow I think D2D is missing a trick here and is also limiting the ability of authors to market the books they have so painstakingly uploaded onto their site.
 
On the other hand, it does create a “level playing field” for all their authors, because you can’t “buy” success through advertising. Everyone has the same chance of being discovered if readers are looking for their genre of books.
 
Of course, you still have the option to advertise your books using other channels, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter et al. Make sure you include the UBL in your advert so that readers buy it through D2D rather than go looking on Amazon.

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So, has this switch resulted in thousands of new sales?
 
Well, it’s early days yet. What I can tell you is that we had sales within days of uploading our first book to the site. Not many, I’ll admit, but sales are sales and we hadn’t done any marketing work for the book. Readers found them for themselves and that rarely happens on Amazon.
 
We’ll let you know more when we start to get some results worth talking about. In the meantime, check out D2D for yourself and see what you think.
 
It costs nothing to look.
 
* We know Amazon (actually their bots) goes looking, because we got a “cease and desist” email from them for one of our books which was uploaded to Smashwords some years ago and we had forgotten to take it down when we enrolled the same title on KU. Amazon threatened to withdraw our earnings for the book if we didn’t unpublish it from Smashwords. They’d actually found the book on the Barnes & Noble website, who Smashwords were using as one of their distributers.
 
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