Publishing with Draft2Digital?
A compact review of my experience self-publishing my first book with D2D
I recently published my first book with Draft2Digital, one of the big names in self-publishing - and it was immediately apparent why it has the reputation it does. Upon listing your book, you are presented with the option for a free ISBN - about £80 saved - and a huge variety of online storefronts to choose from, (notable names of these include Barnes and Noble, Amazon and Waterstones) as a result of its status as an aggregator; meaning that it is a self-publishing service that also distributes to other retailers.
I had been searching for a way to self-publish my The Stoic Toolkit for quite a while until I was given a pointer by
of The Taoist Online, who had used it for his own two previous books.What was most remarkable about D2D was that for each version of the book - ebook and print paperback - setting up took perhaps ten minutes at most; setting up the title, keywords and other search details took perhaps five minutes, and the cover and interior files took another five.
The ebook was much the same, except even faster - it took somewhere in the region of five minutes to create the entire book. Setting up an ebook is slightly different to setting up a print book, as it takes your existing (in my case, print) manuscript and converts it for digital consumption. It did this in what I estimated to be just over thirty seconds and came with a variety of styles; classic academic, textbook, romantic, et cetera. Side note: both print and e-books also come with a pre-order feature.
D2D functions not by charging a set price per book, but by taking a small royalty for each unit sold on top of the royalty of the distributor (e.g. Amazon, B&N). This means it is in their best interests to help you sell your book, as opposed to being rather like a vanity publisher. As a result, they publish to a huge variety of online stores for both digital and tangible books.
Thanks to Patrick for his continued support, in a year since TTO began!
My book, should you wish to find it, can be found here: https://books2read.com/thestoictoolkit
