Category Archives: Uncategorized

— Mark Paxson

As I wrap up a couple of months of publishing two books through Draft2Digital, I’ve learned a few more things about this whole process. Not all are related to Amazon sucking, but … wait for it.

First, patience is a virtue, particularly when it comes to publishing books. Unfortunately, it is a virtue that I lack at times. When it comes to publishing books, by the time I get to the publication part, I’m ready for the thing to be over. I want my book out there. And I don’t want to go through some things I know I desperately need to do.

So, with my collection of short stories, I put the stories together, formatted the whole thing correctly. Did everything I was supposed to and uploaded the content and the cover. Pushed publish on the e-book. Waited for a proof copy of the paperback and barely skimmed it to make sure it looked right and then approved the paperback.

And so … days later, I was flipping through it to read a portion for my podcast and I discovered a typo in the table of contents. Damn! I went a little deeper and found a few more typos and then I discovered … formatting issues. A couple of the stories were in 12 pt font instead of 11 pt. font and there were a couple of paragraphs in one story that were lighter and a different font altogether. That last one in particular is something that I know that I did not do. But there it was.

I went back to the source document on my computer and all of those problems were in it. Ugh!!!

Here’s the thing about D2D. They only allow one free content correction every three months and apparently my original upload counted as my first one. I had to wait three months before I could correct the content. Or pay $25 for the privilege of doing so. I thought about it for a day and paid the $25.

The corrected content, however, does not update immediately. Oh, it did for the ebook within a day or two, but the paperback? 10-14 days.

The other problem was that, once I approved the proof (foolishly), I ordered 50 author copies (even more foolish). So, I had 50 copies coming with those typos and formatting issues and I didn’t want anything to do with them. But it was too late.

Until D2D screwed up on the shipping. the order was split into two separate shipments. One with 42 books and one with 8 books. The shipment with 42 books has never showed up. But I did get two shipments of 8 books. (Yes, you can’t make this up.) I’ve now asked for the remaining copies to be cancelled and for a refund because they failed to deliver them in a timely fashion and I don’t want them. And now, I’m waiting patiently for confirmation that the corrected content has made its way through their system.

But, back to the title of this post … why does Amazon suck? Until now, I’ve published everything through KDP. It’s quick. It’s easy. Books are available on Amazon’s website almost immediately, but they don’t tell you a thing about availability on other platforms even if you choose the expanded distribution network.

I recently discovered a couple of my KDP-published books were available on the websites for Powell’s and Books-A-Million. I have absolutely no idea if I ever sold any of those books on those platforms because Amazon simply does not tell the author anything like that.

And there’s more. They won’t publish the ebook for the short story collection because some of the content appears for free on my blog. But! They will publish the paperback.

And there is still more. Publishing a paperback on D2D as easy as with KDP, but Amazon does not make the book available as quickly as it does for KDP books. Other platforms like Barnes & Noble had my paperbacks for these two books available within a couple of days of my D2D publication date. Amazon? 10-14 days.

You know there’s more, right? Here’s what they did with my novella after they published it. For at least two weeks, the price went all over the price, but always above my list price, which was $9.99. For a few days, Amazon’s price for the novella was $13.40. For a couple of days, it was around $12.50. this from the company that won’t retail an ebook if it’s available cheaper elsewhere on the internet. They were intentionally pricing the paper above the price other platforms were selling it for.

And then there is this. Amazon delivers a KDP book within two days of order. On my short story collection, they alert purchasers that it may take one to two months for the book to ship. On some level, I get this since it’s coming from a POD entity that isn’t theirs, that they have no control over. But come on.

It is very clear that Amazon does everything it can to put up road blocks for independently published authors who choose to use a different publishing platform. Which is disgusting and why monopolies are bad, bad, bad, bad.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in learning about publishing wide (which is what this is called) and you’re on Facebook, there is a group there called Wide for the Win. It has lots and lots of writers on it and there are daily posts with information about how all of this works.

Is fame. Become a celebrity and you are almost guaranteed to sell books – indeed you don’t even have to write them. That’s what ghost writers are for. Ah, I can hear you muttering, if I were rich and famous, I wouldn’t have to try to sell books. Which is true. And you might also be muttering, getting famous is harder than selling books. Now there you might be wrong. For we live in the age of social media. Anyone can become famous if you own a smartphone.

Of course it takes work. But fame in social media is obtainable, you just need to build a large enough audience. I know that some of you are already on YouTube, so let’s start with a YouTuber, Daniel Greene.

Greene talks about and reviews fantasy books. His channel currently has 463,000 subscribers. It has taken him six years and over 460 videos to reach that total, so I think it is safe to say that Daniel Green has put the time and effort to earn his fame. So how does that translate into book sales?

In March of 2021 he self published his first book – a fantasy novella, Breach of Peace. I don’t know his sales numbers, but it currently has 7,402 ratings and 1,458 reviews on GoodReads with a 3.58* rating, plus 2,209 on Amazon with a 4.2* rating. It is currently #333,589 in the Kindle Store, i.e. while it no doubt was a bestseller, it is selling only a few copies today. Compare that to the average debut author offering only a novella, and I think that you can attribute its success to his fame. This is especially evident when you look at his next book.

On October 29^th he published the second book in the series, Rebel’s Creed. I gather that he decided to combine the next two novellas together into a novel based on his feedback for the first one. It has 1,215 ratings and 178 reviews with a 3.58* rating, and 458 ratings and a 4.3* rating on Amazon. Its current sales rank is 431,994. All of which suggests that fame can sell only so many books. While Greene’s first book was considered an okay first effort, it was clearly not strong enough to bring anywhere near all the readers of the first book along for the second. Still, 1,204 ratings on Goodreads is nothing to sneer at.

Now let’s look at a new Austrian fantasy author Stacy McEwan, who released her first book, Ledge: The Glacian Trilogy, Book 1 on 13 September 2022. It currently has 1,199 ratings on GoodReads with a 495 reviews and a 4.19* rating and 310 ratings on Amazon with a 4.5* rating. As of this writing the Kindle book is ranked 8,633 which my handy dandy sales estimator says that book is selling on Amazon.com at a rate of 30 books a day, 449 copies a month. The hardcover book is ranked 15,680 which translates to about 17 books a day, 256 a month. These numbers bounce around daily, and reflect the sales on Amazon in the US only. Amazon sales outside of the US and all bookshop sales are not included, and no doubt add significantly to the grand total.

So why have I chosen her? Well, I happened to watch an interview with her, which is the only reason why I am aware of her. But in this interview she told her story. She happens to be a TikTok star, a “Booktok” person, which I gather are people on TikTok who do whatever they do there around a book theme. She happens to be very good at it, and has some 321,500 followers. I’m not on TikTok, but what I gather is that she does short comedy skits about books. So, when she wrote her first fantasy novel, Ledge, and talked about it on TikTok, not only did several publishing companies request to see her story, but something like five agents offered to represent her.

Interestingly enough, she had planned to release her book as a self-published book. She had it all set to go, with a cover done and a release date set when these publishers and agents contacted her, and bid for her book. She had to cancel her publication and at the same time, let all the people that pre-ordered it know that it was going to be published by Angry Robot instead, at a different date.

Now, as it happens, I happen to know of another debut fantasy author, Shauna Lawless, from Ireland who published her first fantasy book just two weeks before McEwan did, on the 1^st of September 2022. This book, The Children of Gods and Fighting Men, was also traditionally published, this time by the Head of Zeus. It is a historical fantasy set in Ireland. It currently has 189 ratings and 114 reviews on GoodReads with a 4.51* rating and on Amazon it has 26 global ratings with a 4.7* rating. As of this writing the ebook sits at #118,647 on Amazon.com which translates to 2 copies a day and 29 a month with the hardcover book selling at 4 copies a day, 54 books a month. Again, these numbers reflect only Amazon sales in the US. Amazon sales outside of the US and bookshop sales everywhere will add significantly to the total sales.

Both of these books were traditionally published, so sales are not directly comparable to self-published books. And as always, we are comparing apples to oranges when comparing the two books. Still, I think that it is clear that being famous on social media contributes significantly to sales. The numbers tell the tale: McEwan’s 1.199 GoodReads ratings to Lawless’s 189 (with a 2 week lead).

I also know of a booktuber, Bookborn, who’s husband, Zack Argyle’s self published debut fantasy series the first book which was published in March 2020 has sold petty well, with his first book having 624 ratings and 263 reviews with a 3.94*. Now, I really don’t know if it was even promoted on his wife’s YouTube channel, but all these people have Twitter accounts as well that can be used to get the word out to followers.

All in all, while it is quite obvious that fame will often lead to fortune, and books sales, it is perhaps less obvious that in this day of age, fame is not out of the reach of ordinary writers. It may well pay, especially if you are only starting your writing career, to develop social media channels to your potential readers.

Oh, and blogs are too 2012. They don’t make you famous. Just say’n.

In my last piece I profiled the sales experience of two indie authors, a part-time writer like most of us, and a full time writer. The Department of Justice vs Penguin Random House/S&S trial has generated a great deal of buzz in the book world and a great deal of numbers, statistics, and headlines, mostly out of context. In a blog post, Lincoln Michel put some context to the numbers being bandied about. If you have any interest in the business of bookselling, you should read his post, which can be found here:

https://countercraft.substack.com/p/no-most-books-dont-sell-only-a-dozen

And in the comments on this blog post, Kristen McLean, the lead industry analyst from NPD BookScan, gives us some concrete numbers. BookScan is the company that tracks about 76% of the sales of paper books in the US. She provides some specific numbers for the sales of paper books by the 10 largest publishers in the US for a period of 52 weeks ending on August 24^th 2022. BookScan uses ISBNs to track sales, and this data set tracks 45,571 frontlist titles from Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Scholastic, Disney, Macmilan, Abrams, Soucebooks and John Wiley.

It should be noted that the numbers below are the sales of paper books reported by about 76% of the US retail outlets, (including Amazon) so they do not include all paper book sales. Nor do they include the sales of ebooks and audiobooks, nor sales to libraries, or sales via an author’s website or at conventions or trade shows. Thus actual numbers will be somewhat higher.

Here are the numbers from this group of publishers:

>>>0.4% or 163 books sold 100,000 copies or more

>>>0.7% or 320 books sold between 50,000-99,999 copies

>>>2.2% or 1,015 books sold between 20,000-49,999 copies

>>>3.4% or 1,572 books sold between 10,000-19,999 copies

>>>5.5% or 2,518 books sold between 5,000-9,999 copies

>>>21.6% or 9,863 books sold between 1,000-4,999 copies

>>>51.4% or 23,419 sold between 12-999 copies

>>>14.7% or 6,701 books sold under 12 copies

The first takeaway is that almost 15% of the books published by these 10 publishing houses sell less than 12 copies. And mind you, this data set only include frontlist books, not books from their backlist catalogs. Nor do these numbers include indie published paper books. These are books that were purchased by the 10 largest publishers in the US. The upside is that the authors of these books were paid an advance independent of sales. They made money on those 12 books, which is more than an indie publisher that sells 12 books is likely able to claim.

The second major takeaway is that 66% of these frontlist books published by these big publishers sell less than 1,000 copies over the 52 week period. They will continue to sell for the next couple of years, so these may not be their total sales. Still, in a nation of about 330 million people, a thousand copies would seem to be a low bar to surpass.

Somewhere in the upper range of the 21.6% of books in the 1,000 – 5,000 range the publisher starts making a profit on the book, and the authors can begin to rest a little easier about getting another book deal. And to put it in perspective, if you have sold 5,000 copies of your book in the last 52 weeks, you are in the top 13% of all authors. You are a successful author with 5,000 books sold.

All in all, the bottom line is that if you are writing books to make money, you need to be very, very lucky to have any financial success at all, and very, very, very lucky to have that success to last for any length of time. For most authors, writing books pays about as much as writing a blog.

— Mark Paxson

This morning I woke to another email from D2D. Today’s issue is this. My short story collection consists mostly of stories I’ve published on one of my blogs. I note that in the front matter of the book.

Amazon will not publish anything that is available for free elsewhere on the web, so … Amazon won’t be making my book available. Oh well.

The thing is that D2D asks this question before publishing and warns that Amazon won’t publish anything that is freely available elsewhere, or even available at a lower cost. I just didn’t figure Amazon will catch it. Lesson learned — they did. But again … oh well.

As I journey through the adventure of publishing with a new platform, I learned something new this weekend. First, the good news. My novella is done. Ebook available everywhere. The paperback is done and available … well, some places.

I set a publication date of August 29, thinking that meant the book would be available at on-line retailers that day. Nope. That just means that’s the day the Draft2Digital makes it available to retailers and those retailers can take up to a couple of weeks to put it up on their websites. So … the novella is up on one, waiting on another, and who knows on the smaller retailers that I don’t even know about.

With that done and out of the way, I moved to finalizing a collection of short stories I decided to publish as well. The process went so much more smoothly the second time around. Until it didn’t.

Here’s what I learned. Kobo and Apple will not accept any books that include reference to their “competitors.” So, when I uploaded the ebook and pushed publish, I got an email a couple of hours later letting me know that Kobo and Apple had rejected it.

Why?

Because on the “Also by” page, I include my social media references and I also mentioned that I now have a podcast and I described the podcast as being available on Spotify, Apple and other podcast platforms. I also mention at the very end of the collection a story I included that had previously been published as an ebook only for Kindle.

So … I deleted those offensive references and have pushed publish again. For both the ebook and paperback. I have to laugh at Kobo and Apple’s policies. Like it’s going to hurt their business if a book includes a reference to Amazon or Kindle or Spotify. Just kind of ridiculous.

Numbers are hard to come by in publishing. However, I have come across two indie authors who have put their numbers out for everyone to see, in the hope that their their experiences will help other indie authors succeed. Neither of the authors are at the extreme limits of either pole, success or failure, but they represent good examples of the common experience towards either of those poles.

Let’s start with Ron Vital. I’ve updated this post with a link to his 2022 blog post. He has a full time job and writes on the side. Ron has been an indie author since 2011. He writes fairy tale and adventure fantasy with female leads. To date I believe he has 14 works of fiction and 5 non-fiction books. Each year since 2013 (save for 2019) he has posted on his blog, his experiences in self-publishing during that year. You can find his 2022 blog post here: https://www.ronvitale.com/blog/2022/12/22/what-i-learned-about-indie-publishing-in-2022-full-sales-figures It includes links to his other year end reports, all of which are well worth reading since he is an author who has tried all the different strategies that have been proposed to sell books over the years – mailing lists, advertising, free promotions, perma-free first books, you name it. He goes over how each of them worked, or didn’t work for him. He also reports his sales numbers, which I have collected below.

However, here are the numbers he has reported;

2011 – sales $295 expenses $200 3 fiction book

2012 – sales $295 expenses $500 lost $205 4 fiction

2013 – sales $295 expenses $500 lost $205 4 fiction

2014 – sales $607 expenses $1,055 lost $448 6 fiction

2015 – sales $1,002 expenses $1,729 lost $727 8 fiction

2016 – sales $1,188 expenses $2,842 lost $1,654 9 fiction 1 non-fiction

2017 – sales $854 expenses $4,856 lost $4,002 10 fiction 2 non-fiction

2018 – sales $611 expenses $3,121 lost $2,510 12 fiction 2 non-fiction

2019 – sales $1,047 expenses $2,542 lost $1,495 13 fiction 2 non-fiction

2020 – sales $1,596 expenses $2,173 lost $577 13 fiction 4 non-fiction

2021 – sales $2,258 expenses $4,256 lost $1,998 14 fiction 5 non-fiction

To sum them up, he has lost $13,494 in 10 years of self publishing.

As a business, losing $13,494 in ten years is not the type of result you’d want to see. But that’s looking at the glass half empty. Looking at it half full, as he does, he would argue that he’s in it for the long term. He’s building his intellectual property and learning skills that are laying the groundwork for a long career. To put that loss in perspective, someone might be able to pick up a second hand pop-up camper for that amount – and spend several weekends a year using it – it’s matter of priorities.

If we look a little closer at his numbers for 2021, he gave away 24,819 books as perma-free first books in his various series, advertising them in Book Barbarian, Fussy Librarian, and Freebooksy. But even giving away these first books for free only resulted in 523 books sold at full price. Plus, in his early indie publishing years, he’s given away at least 30,000 copies of his books as well via various promotions.

Given all the effort he has put into his publishing venture, I have to say that it seems that the stories he wants to write are not the stories an economically viable group of Amazon readers want to read. There are readers for every type of book. But if you are writing to make money, you need to focus your efforts on bestselling genres, and write books that deliver what those readers expect. And then spend a ton of money promoting them.

Speaking of a ton of money, we now turn to the indie author of science fiction, space fantasy, and writing advice non-fiction, Chris Fox. Chris Fox has been a full time indie publisher since at last 2016. Since 2016 he has posted an annual video on YouTube showing his results and analyzing them. You can find all these year end videos here: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChrisFoxWrites/videos For most years, he reports his sales numbers plus his expense. From his gross sales he pays himself a salary, and charges his healthcare costs and various book related expenses, like editing, advertising, covers, taxes etc. against his gross income, with any balance going into savings or into future projects. Below are his gross sales numbers on Amazon – on which he sells exclusively.

2016 – $170,000 9 fiction 5 non-fiction books on writing and marketing books.

2017 – $180,050 14 fiction 6 non-fiction

2018 – $194,900 17 fiction 7 non-fiction

2019 – $354,620 20 fiction 8 non-fiction

2020 – $272,288 29 fiction 8 non-fiction

2021 – $189,978 35 fiction 8 non-fiction

To achieve and maintain this level of sales, Chris spends upwards of $20,000 a year on advertising. He has written books on how to advertise, as well as how to write 5,000 words a day, and on various other aspects of indie publishing. They are in fact, some of his best selling books. In addition to spending a great deal of money promoting his books, he spends a great deal of time writing and managing his sales – the 12 to 15 hours per day type of time. However, in the last two years he’s had a young child in the house and not only has had to cut back a little, but hasn’t had 8 hours of sleep since his son was born.

Long story short, this type of sales involves spending both a lot of money and a lot of time to build and maintain the business. And even so, you will note the decline in sales over the last two years. despite the fact that he released 15 new books in that period, as well as a number of boxed sets that I didn’t include in my book total numbers.

He has responded to this downturn like all businesses, by cutting expenses. He now does things that he used to farm out to others. He claims he’s doing better than ever, but, like Ron Vital, he’s a glass is half full sort of person, so I take that with a grain of salt.

In 2021 he started releasing to books in his 10 volume fantasy series, in which he writes longer books, but fewer of them. He spent something like $15,000 on the first book to launch this new series, and it hadn’t earned back that investment in March 2022. However he launched two sequels with almost no advertising, so that the series as a whole was in the black to the tune of some $8,000 plus, in March, with more sequels on the way.

However, what I think what we’re seeing here is what happens when you burnout your readers with too many books released in too short of time – which paradoxically you have to do in the fast lane of indie-publishing just to stay on the radar of the avid, book or two a week (or more) readers. Such a pace may well burn out authors as well. Indeed, Chris, in his 2021 report talks about cutting back to two, and perhaps even one book a year going forward, as well as the need to develop other income streams.

Pick your poison. Be careful what you wish for. Be happy with what you are doing.

— Mark Paxson

My journey through new publishing platforms has produced a winner. To recap … I’ve used KDP (and the old CreateSpace) for everything I’ve published until now. But I wanted to give expanded distribution a try and get away from Amazon’s dominance.

Because Draft2Digital (D2D) is completely free to set up, while IngramSpark (IS) charges a fee for set up (unless they’re running a special, which they are this summer), I started with D2D. The e-book set up went remarkably easy, but it does over at KDP as well. For whatever reason, it is easy to accept a Word version of a manuscript, a PDF for the cover, and produce an e-book.

The advantage of D2D over Smashwords, is that D2D does all of the necessary formatting to be able to publish it in all of the different e-book formats. Just upload a Word document and it’s basically done. My e-book is now available on seven different e-book platforms with three more to come.

Which brings me to the paperback. Just as with KDP, it simply is not as easy to upload a manuscript and get to a suitable document for either D2D or IS.

When I went to the print book page for my book, D2D disclosed that their print book platform is in beta and that you have to send an email asking to be included. I’m not thrilled with a beta project, but sent the email anyway.

While waiting for a response, I started the paperback process over at IS. I did all the account set up stuff and arrived at a page that said my account setup was 100% complete and I could start the book process. So, I did, but it wouldn’t let me upload anything because my account set-up wasn’t complete! I tried it a couple of times without success so I sent an email to customer service. They responded and asked if I was sure the account setup page said 100% complete. I assured them it did and was told my issue required a higher level of customer support. So, I waited.

While I waited I got the email from D2D that I could do my paperback there. Ignoring my qualms about the beta aspect of it, I went over to D2D and started their process. I was able to get to the point of uploading the interior. And well…

D2D allows you to upload in several different formats. I started with Word. When I was able to review it on their digital viewer, there were a number of problems, including the page numbering was screwed up and they had monkeyed with the paging of the front matter, leaving the first page of the story on the left-hand page. There are some editing tools they have to address these kinds of problems, but none of those tools worked to change anything.

I tried uploading the PDF instead, thinking that a PDF is pretty much frozen in place, so the issues that cropped up with the Word version shouldn’t be there. Nope. Exact same issues.

So … another email to customer service with D2D.

And I waited. I sent an email to IS asking when I would hear something. I got no response for four days. Meanwhile, D2D got back to me and encouraged me to try the editing tools, which I already had tried. And while I waited, I finally heard back from IS that my account issue had been resolved.

So … with D2D blocked, I went back to IS. I uploaded the interior. I got an error message that there were embedded fonts that needed to be unembedded. I have no idea how to do that, even looking at Google. I sent it to my sister who unembedded them. I uploaded it again and got an error message that all fonts have to be embedded. Sigh. I mean, really … sighin’ sigh.

Back to D2D … I had an two day conversation with several writers on Twitter. Each of whom have used D2D and/or IS. Yesterday, I decided to strip out all of the page and section breaks from the Word document and put them back in only where they were really needed. I converted that new version to PDF and uploaded to D2D and … bingo!!! It went through. The page numbering is correct. The first page of the story is on the righthand page.

But now I needed my cover re-sized. I just got that new cover and uploaded it today. Everything was accepted and the proof copy is on its way to me.

Why does this have to be so hard? What publishing horror stories do you have? What do you do to try to avoid this pitfalls?

Oh, and one other thing. At the same price point, my royalty on the paperback from D2D is $1.00 more than from IS.

Great minds think alike. I was planning on posting this later this week, but since Mark has posted about his experiences with Draft2Digital in the post below, I’ll post mine now as a companion piece to his.

Ebook publisher Draft2Digital purchased Smashwords earlier this year. While the merger won’t be completed for something like another year, I was curious to see what D2D was all about, especially their beta program for print on demand books. I’d like to not only change the size of my paperback books, but offer them to selected bookshops. And since I know that bookshops don’t look favorably on Amazon, I’m looking for a (cheap) alternative POD service.

However, before I get to print books, I’ll give you an overview of D2D’s ebook process. They offer a series of videos on how to do things on their platform. I watched most of one, but being an old hand at ebook production, I figured I knew what I was doing. And mostly, I did. If you have set up your book with either Amazon or Smashwords the process will be familiar – up to a point. You start by supplying all the usual information about your book. All that is different here is the graphics, and the fact that they accept a wider variety of formats, including LibreOffice, which is the free program I use to write my books, so that I don’t have to convert them to Word like I do on Smashwords and Amazon.

But when it comes to downloading your manuscript, things change. You should only download the body of your book – chapter one to the end – because D2D will give you the option to add a title page, a copyright page, a dedication page, an “also by” page, an email signup page, a teaser page, and a bio pager and a publisher pages. You choose what extra pages you want, and add the necessary data, like the text of the dedication, your bio, etc. The “also by” page automatically includes the books published by D2D – but not others.

One issue I had was that the copyright page defaults for new books, so that if you bring an older book into the system it will show that it was copyrighted in 2022, with no option to change it. It is my understanding that you cannot copyright a work again unless there are very significant changes to it. While I doubt that the copyright police will pounce on you for this, it is an issue. The work around is fairly simple, do not include a dedicated copyright page, but add the copyright info to the dedication page.

As for the look of ebooks, they offer various artwork for chapter headings, that are related to the type of story the book is, if that’s your jam. The preview showed the text ragged right, but I believe that is handled by the ebook reader software, so it would probably appear justified on the reader.

As for distribution – they offer the usual suspects, plus a German and a French ebook store. They also offer expanded service to libraries. They did not let me price my books for free, at least on pre-order. I only signed up for those two stores that Smashwords doesn’t serve, and have zero expectations. I assume Smashwords titles will just seamlessly merge into D2D’s system when the time comes.

Now, on to paper books. Their system works much the same way as the ebook version. There are two ways to make a paper book; you can download your formatted book as a document or a PDF or you can use your ebook text and cover for the print on demand paper book.

I tried the first way, using both the LibreOffice and PDF versions of a paperback book that I worked up for Amazon in the new size. In both cases, the program messed up the title pages, which in turn, threw off the interior, so that the book started on the left hand page. I could find no way to fix the problem.

Next, I tried their ebook to paperback method. It worked as advertised. The default look is that the spine and back cover are a solid color, with your blurb on the top of the back cover. You can then add more stuff to fill it up. Stuff like your photo, bio, or some other images. You can also arrange the spine as you like; with either your name on the top of the spine or the title of the book, Plus you can add a publisher’s icon to the spine as well. They also allow you to use your own wrap-around cover. I tried this method using the cover I had made according to Amazon’s requirements, and it worked, even though the page count was different.

There are several drawbacks to this method, however. The first is simply a matter of personal preference. Using the ebook version of your story, the title page is page one. I don’t know how this strikes you, but for me it screams self-published/vanity press. A title page should be page 3 or page 5, if you have a frontispiece. The first page should be some type of blurb, the second; a “other books by this author” page, the third page, the title page, the fourth; the copyright page, the fifth; the dedication page, and the sixth, a map or a blank page facing the start of the story. That said, if you don’t mind opening the book to the title page, you’re good to go.

The second issue in using the ebook text for your paper version is that I believe it uses the font size of your ebook text. I use 12 pt text on the screen, and for a 5.25×8” book 12 pt seems a bit large. Because of this, my 2D2 version of my test book came in at 416 pages compared to 362 pages for the one I formatted myself with a slightly smaller font size.

The third concern I had was that D2D’s default price for this book was $19.99 which would pay you a royalty of about $2.35, compared to the book’s current Amazon price of $12.00. You can adjust the price, but cheapest I could price this book at was $14.99, yielding a $.20 royalty. Now, I don’t know how much I would make if my Amazon book was sold elsewhere, probably not much more than that. But I can certainly make a lot more money selling it on Amazon, where it is far more likely to sell. My other concern is how much an author’s copy would cost using this service, and how that system works. I didn’t dare to go that far into the system to find out.

Bottom line; if you are comfortable with a title page on page one, I think you could add enough info on the back cover to make it look halfway decent. Better yet would be creating your own wrap around cover if you’re comfortable doing that. I wonder if using a slightly smaller text for your ebook version would reduce the page count of the paper version. Ebook readers control the type size on their devices, so it shouldn’t matter.

I also explored their audiobook options. Basically, they have partnered with another company that will waive their usual set-up fees. It looks to be a company that will match your book with a narrator, but you can use your own existing audiobook as well. I can’t say too much more about this, as I didn’t go very deeply into it, as I didn’t feel like signing up for yet another service. But it is something I may look into at a later date.

So that’s my experience with D2D. They offer a lot of benefits and tie-ins with other companies that you might find helpful. But all in all, I don’ t think anyone with books on Smashwords is missing anything too important. Everything will come to those who wait.

— Mark Paxson

Last year, I put up a few posts about my efforts to get an agent for a novel I published last year. None of those efforts were successful and I tired of the process rather quickly and went with self-publishing. I used the KDP platform for the e-book and paperback, like I’ve done with everything I published (except for one book I’ll discuss more below).

Chalk me up as one of those writers who isn’t happy with the Amazon monopoly. While it’s great that Amazon provides such access to indie authors, it comes at a price. Almost complete exclusivity. Whatever it is that their expanded distribution network does, it’s never produced any sales for me. And their exclusivity doesn’t do much for my bottom line.

Yes, I’ve had some page reads through the Kindle Unlimited program, which I believe you can only access as a writer if you commit to Amazon’s exclusivity. But it’s never been enough to make a huge difference.

I recently finished a novella and I’m also putting together a collection of short stories that will be published shortly after the novella. The platforms I’ve considered using to break out of the Amazon rut were Smashwords, Draft2Digital (which is merging with Smashwords in a few months), and IngramSpark.

I know writers who use Smashwords exclusively. I tried it once with one of my early books and found the process of formatting a manuscript to be able to feed it into their program that produces an e-book in all the different e-book variations to be mind-numbing and complicated. I didn’t really want to go through that again. But … I did think about it.

Audrey Driscoll recommended Draft2Digital, or at least suggested looking into it. So, I did. I liked what I saw. No charge to setup and they produce both e-books and paperbacks and even have an audiobook option (sort of). Added bonus — they take less than Amazon does for e-books.

Smashwords promises wide distribution of e-books across the various platforms. So, too does Draft2Digital. And IngramSpark. Here are the platforms Draft2Digital can send an e-book to:

BorrowBox, Vivlio, Baker & Taylor, Tolino, Scribd, Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Hoopla, Bibliotheca, and OverDrive.

You can select whichever of these you want your e-book to be marketed on. I selected all of them. Preparing the manuscript and uploading it along with the cover was remarkably easy. Even easier than KDP, which is ridiculously easy when it comes to an e-book. And 1000% easier than Smashwords (unless they’ve improved their process since I tried it around ten years ago).

Within a few hours, the book became available for pre-order on half of those platforms. The interesting thing is that Amazon requires documentation and information that none of the other platforms do. I hade to answer several questions, describe my previous publishing experience on Amazon (in terms of publishing there) and indicate that this book was not already available on Amazon. And then, eventually send an email to Draft2Digital that confirms everything I said in response to the questions asked on their website.

Once I submitted all of that, the approval from Amazon came pretty quickly, but the book still doesn’t show up there. So … we will see.

The easy part was over. I switched to the paperback and … learned that Draft2Digital’s paperback publishing is still in beta and you had to send an email asking to be let in to the beta. I sent the email, but then decided I wasn’t sure I wanted to publish during the beta.

I switched over to IngramSpark to publish the paperback. They have an equally wide distribution for paperbacks and one advantage to both Draft2Digital and IngramSpark is that bookstores are more willing to take paperbacks from them. Some bookstores refuse to take paperbacks from Amazon. So … I started the process.

I went through all the account set up and got to the page where the site confirmed my account set up was 100% complete and I could go to My Dashboard and start working on the book. I did that, went through a couple of screens that are similar to KDP’s and Draft2Digital’s and just before I got to the point where I could upload the manuscript and cover, I got a popup. “Thou shalt go no further until you complete Account Setup.” Okay, it wasn’t quite that biblical, but it was close. I clicked on the link to complete setup and it took me to the page that says my account setup is 100% complete.

And that’s where my paperback resides at the moment. I got a response back from Draft2Digital that I can enter the hallowed halls of their paperback beta and I have communicated to IngramSpark’s customer service to find out what’s going on over there. The first response asked me if the Account Setup page really told me that it was 100% complete. I went back and looked and said, “yes!” The next response was that this would require a higher level of customer care than he could reply. That was 24 hours ago. Here I wait.

I may start the Draft2Digital Beta and see how that works for me.

I’ll provide an update as things progress, but for now, even with the complication over the paperback, I’m cautiously optimistic about this path I’ve opted for with this book. Wider distribution (hard as it may be to believe, not everybody has a Kindle), ease of publication.