Draft2Digital Adds Google Play Distributor for Your Ebooks

This is a great addition by Draft2Digital for important retailers to work with. Google Play sells a lot of books for indie authors. Smashwords doesn’t have this distribution option, and Google closed the door to new authors several years ago. Nice update for D2D.

Their email highlights:

As of right now, Google Play Books is another option for you to offer your books to an ever-growing audience of readers worldwide! Reach out to more than seventy countries using a brand that everyone knows.

NOTE: This program is currently a public beta

When you opt-in, we’ll automatically add the Suggested Wholesale Price for your book. You can adjust this price after opt-in, if necessary.

HERE ARE SOME THINGS TO KNOW:
No minimum price—There is no minimum price at Google Play Books. You can list your book for free if you like! Otherwise, you’ll price at 99-cents or above.

Wholesale pricing—Google Play Books uses a wholesale pricing model, meaning that authors can set a recommended list price and Google may discount it at their discretion.

Price matching—Some retailers, such as Amazon, may choose to price-match against the Google Play price for your book.

Royalty—We pay you 44% of the wholesale price of your book made on Google Play, when you distribute through our service. If you use our Recommended Wholesale Price, this will generally be about the same as the royalty you’d expect with standard pricing.

No assetless preorders—Google Play will not accept assetless preorders. You’ll need your book’s manuscript and cover.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email at support@draft2digital.com.

Happy publishing,
The Draft2Digital Team

Draft2Digital current partner stores include:

Amazon
Apple Books
Barnes & Noble
Google Play Books
Kobo (including Kobo Plus)
Tolino
OverDrive
Bibliotheca
Scribd
24Symbols
Playster
Baker & Taylor

2nd Annual Smashwords End of Year Sale (Christmas-New Year’s Day)

For authors interested in participating, here are the details:

Welcome to the enrollment page for the 2nd annual Smashwords End of Year sale! For the these eight days only, thousands of Smashwords authors and publishers will offer readers exclusive discounts on their ebooks.

To enroll your books in the promotion, select from one of four promotion levels below: 25% off; 50% off; 75% off, or FREE.

If you manage a lot of books, you can use the bulk enrollment option which you’ll find in the pulldown menu directly underneath each of the enrollment levels.  This feature allows you to enroll all applicable books into a single promotion level.  Remember to click “Submit” after you make your selection.  You can modify your selections at any time.

Once you enroll, customers will obtain your books using one of the special discount levels below, which will automatically reflect in their shopping cart at checkout.

Benefits of Participation

Smashwords authors and publishers enrolled in the promotion will receive:

1. Placement in a special Smashwords home page catalog from December 25 through January 1
2. The sale will be promoted to over one million customers of the Smashwords Store (so be sure to enroll before December 25!)
3. Notation on your book page that the book is participating in the sale.
4. This is a collaborative sale.  The more authors and publishers participate, the more it amplifies results for all participants.
5. Readers love Smashwords sales because it’s a great opportunity to stuff their shopping devices chock full with deep-discounted ebooks from both new authors they haven’t tried yet as well as long-time favorites.  Have fun!

How to Participate (Scroll down the page to enroll your books):

1. Log in to your account. If you do not have an account, click here to join now for free. Books must be published at Smashwords to enroll in the Smashwords promotion.
2. If you’re logged into your account, below you’ll see a list of your published books. Simply select the book(s) you want to enroll, and at what level you want to enroll. Click “Submit” and you’re done.
3. If your book is already free, or you previously selected the “name your own price” pricing option, you’re already enrolled and you do nothing.
4. Offer your books at 25% off, 50% off, 75% off, or for FREE.
5. Your discounted price, after the coupon is applied, must be $.99 or higher, otherwise your book will default to free.
6. The catalog goes live at one minute past midnight on December 25 Pacific time, and expires 11:59pm on January 1.
7. You can opt out of the promotion at any time, or change your promotion settings at any time.
8. These deals are exclusive to the Smashwords Store and will not work anywhere else.
9. By participating in this promotion, it does not change your retail price at Smashwords or at Smashwords retailers.
10. You will receive an email confirming your participation.

Thanks,
The Smashwords Team

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Author Marketing Challenge: Online vs Real World (part 1)

Guest post written by Lynne M. Spreen (pictured right). Lynne writes coming-of-age stories about people who are age 50 and over, including her award-winning novel, Dakota Blues. Look for subsequent posts to follow as real world vs online marketing is a great idea for an author marketing challenge.

A month ago a friend and I decided to challenge ourselves to an amped-up marketing plan. She was going to implement certain strategies in real life, like looking for opportunities to speak and sell her books in person, and I was going to use Twitter and blog more vigorously. To make it fun, we decided to compete with each other, but the real goal was to see if any of our techniques were effective.

Now it’s September and the results are in. None of our methods were overwhelmingly effective, but they did boost our sales a bit and we learned something from all of it.

What we did

IRL (in real life): Judy Howard basically threw herself into selling and speaking. She got a few extra speaking gigs and book signings over what would normally happen. Every time she left her house, she brought books and was “on.” She also handed out postcards and bookmarks with her author page URL on them.

Online: I increased my use of Twitter and blogging. I would assume most of the increase in sales was from Twitter.

What we sold

It was quite a bit more than usual, but that’s relative. Also, my KENPC (Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count) went way up (again, relatively speaking). And I got about 700 more Twitter followers, up from 3,350.

Here’s what we learned

It was easier and more fun to market if you set up a challenge with a friend.

You get good at what you focus on: The more we thought about marketing, the more we did it. More ideas bubbled up, and it got easier. It became more like fishing than working.

I used Hootsuite to schedule over 400 Tweets, about a dozen a day. Of that, half were pushing my three books, and half were RTs (retweets). Would definitely recommend Hootsuite. This took me about 16 hours to set up because I made mistakes. Otherwise, I’d think it might take half that long.

I discovered it was better to make up marketing tweets on Canva than just uploading my book’s cover image, because the graphic wasn’t always uniform. Plus, with Canva, I could invent some come-on (like quoting a great review) to augment the book cover. It was a good skill to learn.

You get good at what you focus on, part 2: I found myself enjoying going on Twitter and finding out what was trending, and following new people. And since my sales increase was due to Twitter, it made sense. But was it the most effective way to increase sales? I don’t think so. Right after August ended, a friend told me she got many times the results I did from an Amazon ad.

You get good at…Part 3: because I was focusing on building up my blog frequency and using MailChimp better and more frequently, I learned more about that and improved the look of my website, my links, my newsletter (appearance and also I attached it to my RSS feed). I started thinking of more blog topics and writing them became easier. My blog subscriber numbers are going up, although it’s still miniscule.

So my bottom line is this: although improvements were good enough to make me think Twitter and more frequent blogging are good ideas, I think there must be more effective ways to sell. While this was useful and fun, it’s more of a baseline by which to measure other tools. And I think that’s good in itself.

Draft2Digital Adds Ebook Templates

Formatting ebooks has always been a challenge for self-publishers. Smashwords, the original ebook distributor, literally wrote the book on universal formatting with the Style Guide that teaches authors to do it in ways that will convert and be readable at any retailer. Their system is all about keeping things simple, using basic structure and avoiding fancy aesthetics for assured conversion. A functioning solution that was perhaps a bit plain, plus the instruction was difficult for many authors to follow.

Years later when Draft2Digital came out as an ebook distribution service, it distinguished itself from Smashwords by accepting virtually anything uploaded and made an ebook from that using the artificial intelligence of its automated system. Big surprise, a lot of crappy-looking indie ebooks got produced.

Now D2D has done a smart thing, adding ebook templates where authors can display more creativity in titles, chapters and more. Obvious question: does it work? Next one: what took so long? Final question: why doesn’t Smashwords do this? Let’s answer those.

With D2D’s templates you can have extras we thought we couldn’t have in ebooks. Dropcaps, headers, fancy scene dividers and more are now an option. It’s easy enough to do. Just upload your document and then check the Preview tab and choose a Style compatible with the new feature. Then check the Enable Drop Caps button and viola! It will convert the document and allow you to download it in epub, mobi or PDF format to inspect it.  You can use a free program like Calibre or Adobe Digital Editions to view it.

If you find it isn’t perfect, which is likely, you may want to play around with your font sizes and layout in your own document and try again. Or try one of D2D’s other styles: romance, sci-fi, mystery/thriller, etc.

It definitely does work but not flawlessly. In some cases of my experimenting, the drop cap letter overlapped with the 2nd or 3rd line of text beneath it. I had to play around with choices and options until settling on one which looked good instead of being able to use them all without issues. Clearly a work in progress.

Admittedly it’s a nice option and one that will hopefully see improvements in the following months. I doubt Smashwords will implement a similar thing since their model has always been based on teaching how-to-formatting for authors while D2D has always been about automation. In the long run, automation has plenty of advantages for those who are pressed to learn formatting or don’t want to.

For now, I’m sticking with self-formatting and using the basics I teach in my course on Formatting Ebooks.  However, this option from D2D isn’t a bad way to go. And for those who want to embrace the best of both worlds, there are ebook templates where you can copy and paste in titles headers and chapters one by one, even add drop caps one by one, although that is by far the longest way to get there.

Share any comments below.

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Draft2Digital now distributes to OverDrive

For authors using Draft2Digital to distribute ebooks to retailers, the outlets just got better. OverDrive has been added to their list of partners. OverDrive currently serves more than 38,000 libraries and schools in over 70 countries, including public, college, and corporate libraries.

If you already have ebooks listed with Draft2Digital, you’ll need to opt-in to get your books sent to OverDrive. Very simple to do, just follow the prompts at Draft2Digital.

The update list of partners looks like this:

• iBooks
• Barnes & Noble
• Kobo (including Kobo Plus)
• Inktera (formally Page Foundry)
• Scribd
• 24Symbols
• Tolino
• Playster
• OverDrive

It’s smaller than the list of partners for Smashwords, a common choice for essentially the same service, but the major players are there.

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