Using Draft2Digital…
Draft2Digital (D2D) is the best way to self-publish because a lot can be DIY and they distribute your ebooks for you. I’ve done five ebooks with them now (the last, The Klimt Connection, Book Eight in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, was published March 18, maybe with the added motivation from two red ales on draft to celebrate St. Paddy’s Day?). I learn a bit each time I use D2D, so I’d like to pass on some advice I’ve developed while doing this.
First, let me state that I saw no references to the D2D-Smashwords merger when I published The Klimt Connection. I expected to see something, but the whole process was the same, and it’s easy. About Smashwords, nada, rien, zilch. (I suspect they’re still in beta-testing. They’ve been beta-testing a print option forever (so don’t use D2D if you want print!).
How smoothly the process goes depends a lot on how well you prepare and what choices you make, though. So…let me offer some free advice:
Cover. Yeah, I know, it’s the last thing authors usually think about. (I doubt the Big Five publishing conglomerates think enough about covers—some of the worst covers I’ve seen recently, not much more than PowerPoint slides, are on their books.) I’ve found it’s best to get into the writing a bit and take breathers once and a while to think about a cover. Even if you purchase a ready-made, inexpensive, but unique cover (bookcoverdesigner.com is a good source), getting a good cover takes some thought. That can be stimulated by sorting through samples. There are many prices to choose from, but don’t assume a higher price implies a better cover, because frankly many covers are over-priced (it’s a buyers’ market!). An ebook cover is just one .jpeg file from a graphics artist hungry to make some extra bucks, after all. The artist will put your title, subtitle (if any), and author’s name in suitable fonts and suitable colors for the background. Take the final result and store it in the same folder as your manuscript (MS).
Manuscript prep. Your MS must be tailored to D2D’s formatting engine. This isn’t hard to do, but your MS file won’t look like anything you might release as a free PDF either (which I do a lot). Don’t use page breaks; use four or five carriage returns instead. Don’t use tabs; set your overall indenting to automatic on the first line of a paragraph, and kill that indenting only for chapter headings and so forth, centering the latter after the four or five page returns, if appropriate (chapter breaks but not section breaks). You don’t need a title page or copyright page—the formatting software can do that for you—but you can also include your own instead. Same for front and end material. I pay special attention to the latter—mine’s complicated, and I try to make all my ebooks look similar. (I only let D2D do the title page, if that. After all, the title’s on the cover.)
Begin the formatting process. First, upload your cover, then upload your MS.
D2D formats your ebook. That begins with the previous uploads. You’ll see a preview appear in the D2D preview window. Now you have some choices to make. I just choose their standard ebook formatting. That’s fine for me, and I suspect some of the fancy options can cause problems because I won’t like the look. (A book is a book, so why all that genre-specific crap?) There are some options you might consider, though: Do you want a title page? Copyright page? Clickable table of contents? In The Klimt Connection, I ignored the title page, put in my own copyright page, and ignored the contents page.
Maybe the last choice needs some explaining. In an .epub reader, the contents appear on the left; in a .mobi reader, they take up several pages at the beginning of the book for a long novel with many chapters and ancillary material. In either case, they’re annoying, and I don’t see the need of adding extra baggage. My Kindle reads the D2D .mobi file just fine. (It’s annoying that Amazon makes you store any .mobi file without their DRM in the “Files” folder on your Kindle, but that’s Bezos and his bots for you.) And now on your Kindle, just to the right of the arrow to close the file is a drop-down menu with the table of contents. So, in both types of standard ebook files, .epub and .mobi, an additional table of contents just isn’t needed. By the way, external links are active if your ereader is connected to WiFi. (I put in a link to the YouTube promo video for Death on the Danube in my new book, and it worked just fine.)
Proofing. Always essential! This isn’t looking for editing errors—you should have already done that ad nauseum. (By the way, MS Word’s new editor, for spelling and grammar, is pretty damn good now, although it can still get confused.) Proofing is looking for formatting errors. Using the software’s preview screen, first page through the “sections” with the double arrows (you’ve indicated these with your four or five carriage returns, remember?); in other words, you can confirm that they’ve become page breaks as you intended, chapter headings are in larger font, etc. Again, I pay special attention to front and end material, making sure it appears just the way I want. (For some reason, my dedication to the Ukraine people in The Klimt Connection got lost in the .epub or .mobi version, and I couldn’t fix it. The problem was putting it on a single page in larger font. No software formatting tool is perfect.) After this first pass, then go page by page like you were a speed reader, using the single arrows—remember, you’re looking only for formatting errors, which generally jump right out for me.
Let’s assume that there are some formatting errors and that you unintentionally caused them in your MS. (I checked that for the dedication mentioned above. No, the MS was okay.) Maybe you forgot those four or five carriage returns somewhere? I go back and fix the MS and start the whole process again because it’s so easy. Maybe D2D offers ways to make on-site changes, but why bother? Don’t you want to keep a final copy of what you fed into that software engine? Maybe for a second edition?
Get your ebooks. When you’re satisfied with your proofing, download your free PDF, .epub, and .mobi ebook files. You might need them for PR and marketing (or—horrors!—if you want to retail your book on your own).
Continue. I can’t remember the name, so let’s just call it clicking on an “all done” button. That takes you to the final two steps…so you’re not quite done, but almost!
Choose where your ebook will be sold or borrowed. D2D has a cadre of affiliated ebook retailers and lending services (maybe a lot more when the merger with Smashwords is finished?). I use them all except Amazon. Amazon adds a bunch of bureaucracy to this simple distribution process, making you fill out their special forms because—well, they’re Amazon and their job is to annoy authors. I find their conditions onerous…and frankly I’m boycotting them. (I tried them with Sleuthing, British-Style, my first book published with D2D, and vowed to never distribute to Amazon again—yet another reason for my boycott!) Otherwise, why all? Because the more places our ebooks are sold or borrowed, the better off we are…and D2D does all that distribution for you!
Publish. This is the final step. D2D will email you as their affiliated retailers and lending services start offering your ebook, or you can check out that progress on your “My Books” web page. By the way, when you created your account with D2D, you chose how royalties are paid and other settings. Those settings cover all the ebooks you publish with D2D.
Note: D2D gloms the above steps altogether into just four—that means most of those four D2D steps have multiple steps embedded in them, so I’ve tried to make your life easier.
This is only a short lesson for using D2D. There are bells and whistles I avoid because these steps are good enough for me…and frankly all I have patience for. You might be more motivated to try the bells and whistles, but one thing is certain: If I can do the above, you can too. Again, the prep is the key, and that includes having a wonderful, entertaining story people might want to read, of course.
My only problem with D2D? It’s so easy to use, authors will flock to it, especially after the D2D-Smashwords merger gets going full steam. You can bet the Big Five and their associated sycophants eye D2D with loathing, though. [laughter]
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The Klimt Connection. Book Eight in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series finds Esther and husband hustled to an MI5 safehouse after their flat in London is bombed. They cope, along with others who are threatened by the bomber and his accomplices, and the hunt for the domestic terrorists is UK- and EU-wide. It leads to the discovery of a nationwide conspiracy, all financed by the far right and designed to purge the UK of perceived invaders, migrants and refugees who are accused of wanting to “replace” the white majority. This novel is now available at all quality ebook retailers and lending services affiliated with Draft2Digital (but not on Amazon). You will enjoy this book about Esther’s new adventures, hopefully as much as I did writing it.
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
