Both Draft2Digital and Smashwords offer authors the opportunity of “going wide,” i.e. distributing their ebooks to many online retailers in the US and worldwide, and even library and lending services. Why use them? It’s simple: the more retail places an ebook appears, the more chances there are that a reader will purchase it! When you consider B&N has a network of brick-and-mortar stores and Kobo in turn distributes ebooks via its deal with Walmart, there are multiplier effects going on too. Also, many libraries now offer ebooks to their borrowers, and several online services lend them out too. An author’s principal motivation should be to increase readership, and these two aggregators, which allow an author to go wide, offer that opportunity.

I decided quite a while ago that being exclusive on Amazon was a stupid choice for exactly the reasons mentioned above and this hard fact: Amazon thinks it’s the only book retailer and distributes to no one! Apple, B&N, Kobo, and many others sell many ebooks, and readers use those lending services too, including their public libraries. Amazon, by ignoring these other sales outlets, does no favor for authors. They still live in the 20^th century; authors, if only for the competitive state of this business now, must come into the 21^st.

Almost all of my ebooks are available on Smashwords and are therefore available in many places. In fact, I don’t sell many ebooks on Amazon anymore! However, due mostly to circumstances beyond my control (see last week’s article “Orphans”), I decided to try out a new book aggregator for me, Draft2Digital. I’d heard its software was easier than Smashwords’s meatgrinder (an MSWord file is input to software, and out pops various ebook files), so I thought it would at least offer a backup to Smashwords.

The scientist in me made me experiment with a short story collection. I usually give away my short fiction now (see the free PDFs listed on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page), but Sleuthing, British-Style, a collection of three murder cases, allowed me to test D2D’s services. That test was successful after a few snafus corresponding to hurdles Amazon has erected (they use “quality control” as an excuse to erect them because they like to exploit authors maximally by forcing them to be exclusive). That behind me, I was ready to try a full novel.

The Last Humans: A New Dawn is the sequel to The Last Humans; the first book was traditionally published by Black Opal Books, and the second I self-published using Draft2Digital (some of the sequel’s publishing story is contained in last week’s article). With what I learned in my experiment, I was able to publish the sequel without a hitch. Moreover, I was pleased with the result.

How do these two aggregating services compare once authors have published their ebooks? It’s impossible to say precisely because I can’t publish the same ebook twice; I’m forced to compare apples and oranges. Upfront costs are about the same (editing and cover art). Death on the Danube, my last ebook published via Smashwords, is about the same length, though. (I paid for its formatting, so I won’t consider that cost—that’s one way to avoid their meatgrinder.) Book-launch marketing costs are the same too. So cost-wise, it’s six of one and a half-dozen of the other.

There’s a lot of overlap between the two lists of retailers each aggregating service distributes to (Apple, B&N, Kobo, etc.) as well as lending services, so there’s no reason to suspect that sales numbers would be very different. And, with Smashwords, I have to distribute to Amazon separately via their KDP; D2D did that for me. Of course, Smashwords and D2D take their part of the royalties—the latter’s seems a bit more, but again comparisons are difficult—and this bleed-off is nothing like the percentage of royalties a traditional publisher takes.

My conclusion: Both D2D and Smashwords offer an easy way for authors to go wide, so they really have no excuse: If you’re an author, you should do exactly that and forget about exclusivity with Amazon. You’ll reach a lot more readers that way! Period.

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Comments are always welcome.

The Last Humans: A New Dawn. In The Last Humans, Penny Castro survived the biowarfare apocalypse and created a family. In this new novel, her post-apocalyptic idyll on their citrus ranch is interrupted by the US government’s plan to stop another attack…and get some revenge. Penny and husband Alex, along with others, are drafted to carry out the plan—in their case, forced to do so by the government’s kidnapping of their young children. But the enemy has surprises awaiting them when a submarine delivers them to that foreign shore. Available wherever fine ebooks are sold.

Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!

 

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