Increase Your Momentum: Use Draft2Digital to Publish Faster

Writing, publishing, and promoting spin the author’s flywheel, building momentum. If you’re thinking about self-publishing, check out how Draft2Digital can save you time, spinning the author’s flywheel faster toward your breakthrough!

What Is Draft2Digital?

Draft2Digital (https://draft2digital.com) tackles the labor-intensive task of publishing and distributing your book wide to multiple retailers. Instead of going directly to Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and many more retailers, send your book to D2D and let them handle the publishing and distribution.

Draft2Digital Benefits

As compared to you doing all the work, D2D offers several major benefits.

• Saves time because you upload once and D2D takes care of the rest.
• Shortens your learning curve with easy-to-use templates.
• Gives writers a way to go wide with no out-of-pocket expense.
• Offers both ebook and print-on-demand.
• Tracks sales across multi-retailers to simplify bookkeeping and tax filing.
• Helps you promote your book through Books2Read.

Where Does Draft2Digital Publish?

D2D gives you the option to publish books to several retailers. For example:

• Amazon
• Apple Books
• Barnes & Noble
• Kobo (including Kobo Plus)
• Tolino
• OverDrive
• Bibliotheca
• Scribd
• Baker & Taylor
• Hoopla
• Vivlio
• BorrowBox

You choose which retailers through an easy opt-in or opt-out checklist, and when D2D adds a new store, you keep control over whether to publish through that outlet.

Pricing and Print Options

➨Pricing

D2D provides the tools to cost and price your book, including offering ebooks for free to every store except Amazon.

For Amazon, D2D will submit your free book at $0.99 (99-cents USD). Amazon may choose to price-match to bring prices in line with other vendors at their discretion.

Amazon has file size limitations. Books priced at or below $0.99 may upload a file that is up to 3MB, those priced between $1.00 and $1.99 may upload a file that is 10MB or less, and if you upload a file that is 10MB or greater, you must price at $2.99 or more.

Also, you can set the price in other currencies by clicking the D2D’s button “Manage Territorial Prices” under the Book Price field.

➨Print

D2D cannot offer print books for free as there is a cost for the materials to produce a physical book. D2D provides a handy Print Copy Calculator so you can find your lowest possible sales price. The trim-size options (e.g., 5” x 8”, 5.25” x 8.5”, 5.5” x 8.5”, 6” x9”, 7.5” x 9.25”, and 8.5” x 11”) influence your cost.

Taxes, Payments, and Reports

➨Taxes

The initial tax setup is straightforward. You fill out the tax form and choose a payment method.

➨Payments

You have several payment options.

• PayPal ($0 USD minimum)
• Direct deposit ($0 USD minimum)
• International Direct Deposit ($20 USD minimum)
• Payoneer ($20 USD minimum)
• Check ($100 USD minimum)

Draft2Digital delivers payments once a month, after meeting the threshold (shown in parentheses above).

➨Reports

You can download a detailed sales report. As an example, here’s the sales information for a book priced on one retailer at $4.99:

• Distributor: Apple Books
• Units Sold: 1
• Units Returned: 0
• Net Unit Sales: 1
• List Price Per Unit: $4.99 USD
• Offer Price Per Unit: $4.99
• Royalty Percent: 70%
• Sales Channel Fee/Taxes Per Unit: $0.00
• Sales Channel Revenue Per Unit: $3.50
• Extended Sales Channel Revenue: $3.50
• Sales Channel Share: $1.49
• D2D Share: $0.52
• Publisher Share (i.e., the author’s net before taxes): $2.98

For a $4.99 sale, it’s a joy to see $2.98 magically appear via direct deposit into your account!

Book Cover Requirements

D2D accepts the most common image formats and they automatically handle resizing as needed for the requirements of each retailer. For example, you can use a JPEG at 1600×2400 pixels or even higher resolution.

Also, for print, Draft2Digital will auto-generate a wraparound cover based on your ebook art (aka front cover art) and they provide some basic customization options like spine text and back cover text editing.

➨Ebook Cover Example

➨Print Cover Example

If you prefer having a professional make your print cover, download D2D’s print cover template, custom sized to fit your trim and paper choices. Once you’ve got your print cover back from your professional, upload the print wraparound book cover and Draft2Digital will place your barcode for you.

Book and Author Presentation

To see how D2D helps writers by showing their work and making their books available across multiple channels, follow these Universal Book Link (i.e., D2D’s “UBL”).

➨Book Retailers Example

https://books2read.com/finding-peace-devotional

➨Book Description & Author Bio Example

https://books2read.com/b/finding-peace-devotional

Draft2Digital Supplies Free ISBN

Unless you supply your own ISBN, Draft2Digital automatically assigns a free ISBN to any book published through their system.

The ISBN recording agency denotes D2D as the “vendor of record” on their website for any ISBN D2D purchases, but that label does not give them any rights to your work, nor will it show publicly.

All the digital retailers will continue to show the publisher’s name you choose (e.g., Tame Your Book Media). If you leave the publisher’s name blank, your author’s name will show.

How Does Draft2Digital Work?

➨Free Sign Up

Sign up is fast and no credit card is required.

➨New Book

Once you’ve established your account, you’ll begin the process to add a new book.

The steps to creating a new book project are straightforward. D2D will guide you with prompts and help screens. Before you publish, you can edit all your responses, including changes to your cover art and manuscript file.

Here’s an example.

You’ll continue to add details based on D2D’s on-screen prompts.

If interrupted by life’s events, no problem! You can always pick up where you left off even if that takes days or weeks before you’re ready to publish.

You decide whether to have D2D insert essential information (e.g., the Title Page and Copyright). In this next example, the essential information was already in my uploaded manuscript file (i.e., a Word docx file).

Now the fun begins as you preview the contents of your uploaded file and experiment with the D2D page decorations. I chose the Classy Mystery Style, which inserted art around the chapter, and also a small magnifying glass between each of the scene breaks.

To preview your book, download either a MOBI, EPUB, and PDF file. I choose the EPUB.

Use Amazon’s Kindle Previewer to check the EPUB file’s quality and layout. The free app is available for both Windows and Apple computers. Visit Amazon to download the app.

Here’s a screenshot of my EPUB file loaded into Kindle Previewer 3.

Note: Editing a book is an iterative process that requires updating your manuscript file, uploading it to D2D, downloading the updated EPUB file, and reviewing the book in your favorite previewer app. You soon get practiced at repeating the steps until you achieve the desired look and quality.

Conclusion

I’ve given you a brief overview of signing up for Draft2Digital (https://draft2digital.com), inputting your essential information, uploading your manuscript file, and checking for the desired quality.

Once you’re ready to publish, you’ll set the price and go through the final quality checklist.

High-quality digital and print books depend on excellent input. Plan time to check input and layout issues before you publish.

For a $4.99 priced ebook, you’ll share $.52 of the gross revenue with D2D. I believe that’s a fair trade for saving time and not having to learn the processes and policies of the retailers.

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