#D2D Services

[d2d-solutions]

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[d2dengineers]

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[queerromancerecs]

Non Amazon book resources

Look, I know Amazon is a sensitive topic. It has been allowed to dominate the market, and for indie writers, it is a huge (if not their main) source of income. Personally, as an indie writer, I have tried to always keep my work available elsewhere (because you can't trust Amazon not to screw you over, I mean just look at Audible. For those who don't know, Audible royally fucks over authors, and the narrators don't do that great either). But even for me, the loss of Amazon sales would highly affect my ability to keep going without getting another job or three. So I get it. Nonetheless, they cannot be trusted not to drop queer writers and readers, so it's best to have alternatives now.

If you are a reader or an indie author looking for different platforms to buy and/or sell books, even if only to start branching out a little, here is a list.

I doubt it's comprehensive. Feel free to reblog with more.

Kobo and Kobo Plus -Kobo is the biggest online 'Zon alternative. Kobo Plus is sort of like KU. On either one, you get points for buying books and can use the points to get more books. Works for ebook and audiobooks. (And, if you have a non-Kindle ereader, it works for Kobo but it also works for like, fanfiction. I'm just saying. I got a refurbished Kobo a while ago and it's lovely.)

Bookshop.org -print as well as ebooks

Smashwords/Draft2Digital - mostly ebooks but D2D does have a print option

Itch.io - ebook only (but gives a larger chunk of profits to authors than 'Zon does. Authors take note.)

Gumroad

Rainbow Crate -special edition print queer books. (I know there was some controversy with them but I am out of touch and don't know what it was, and most people who use them seem happy with them??? but if you know other queer/romance book crate services, lemme know)

The Ripped Bodice -brick and mortar stores but you can also shop online

Check out your local bookstores---many will order print copies for you if you request them

The authors' websites if they do direct sales

Barnes & Noble- yeah, it's a corporation and they are not great either, but it's not Amazon and sometimes a well-meaning relative gets you a gift card. And, for the moment, they do in fact sell queer romance. I know because I just used a gift card to get a paperback of The Prince and the Assassin. lol

Powell's Books- Portland's famous book store sells new and used books (and you can browse the stock online) --print only. They sell queer romance as well. I got a copy of Drag Me Up by RM Virtues there. That's not super relevant, but I was pleased :)

New link: Queer Books Weekly-- free and affordable books with queer protagonists

Also consider library books!

And for those in America--you can use library apps to read books. Yes, the authors still get paid! Libby is a big one. You can get audiobooks too, AND it can connect you with the Queer Liberation Library.

Also there is Hoopla - digital content

In Europe, I know there is Vivlio, which is French and I believe sells ereaders and also ebooks.

[thebibliosphere]

My apologies if you have talked about this recently, but, as an aspiring author-if-i-ever-manage-to-finish-something-haha-can-you-imagine, I have a question! I discovered Draft2Digital thanks to one of your old posts and it caught my attention very fast because it looked very promising, but lately (as much as I've been able to consult with Tumblr's search, magnificent and very functional as it famously is) you've been mentioning IngramSpark more, so if I may ask! Is D2D still an acceptable platform nowadays, or is it better to go look for other alternatives? Thanks!

Oh, Ingram Spark used to be one of the only options for paperbacks other than Amazon in the US and I am moving AWAY from them because they’re such assholes.

They’re responsible for the price hike in my books and I’m 99.9% certain they’re skimming profit off my retailer discount. They also put the ability to call customer service behind a paywall ($25 per 30 minutes). You can still email them but good luck ever getting a reply. Which is an issue when they send you a box of hardback books covered in binding glue with pages falling out that they still maintain are in sellable condition and won’t issue a refund for 🙃 (yes to anyone who has been paying attention it’s been 2+ years and I’m still fighting with them over that)

Yeah, no. I’ll be a d2d author going forward. They’ve got the same global market reach as Ingram, as well as recently merged with Gardners in the UK (a big distributor)

Plus it means I can do my ebook, paperback and audio all from one place. (Findaway is partnered with d2d)

I’ll still keep Amazon separate, but that's because Amazon pays better royalties for direct uploads. Everything else I’m using d2d.

Fuck Ingram. They’re never getting another direct penny from me 😅

[copperbadge]

Every time, you guys. Every time I look into alternatives to Lulu.com for self-publishing I come up with “Wow Lulu really is the best of a bad set of options, huh?” 

Recently, Draft2Digital bought Smashwords in order to bring a print book company under their aegis; they’d formerly only done ebooks. I thought I might investigate them as an alternative to Lulu, which I’ve used for about twelve years now. For ebooks I would venture D2D is probably top of the line. For print books they are....not. 

I’m writing this out half so other folks can see it but half so that in the future I can look this up and remind myself of why I’m still with Lulu. 

TLDR: Not only does Draft2Digital want 60% of my print book royalties where Lulu takes 0%, and $30 for a proof that costs me $11 at Lulu, but I also appear to have solved the problem of why Lulu was making me price my books so goddamn artificially high. Which is like. Honestly the best anti-anxiety drug I’ve experienced this week. 

Basically there are a number of elements that go into self-publishing with a print-on-demand service. For some publishers, there’s a “setup fee” which doesn’t really set anything up, it’s just there to be a fee, everything is done by computer on the back end. Traditionally, Lulu has not charged a setup fee. Smashwords used to charge $50, but Draft2Digital currently waives it. I was heartened by that because the setup fee was keeping me from migrating, since I can afford $50 but I balk at knowing I’m paying them $50 for nothing. 

Next is the cost of printing -- what it costs the company in paper, ink, machinery, labor, etc, to just make a book with no profit. Lulu’s price calculus isn’t super clear and I’ve never bothered looking at what the breakdown is, because they’re pretty up-front -- they tell you in the process of setting the book up how much it’ll cost. In this case, a 140-page 6x9 trade paperback, no frills, which is how all my books are printed, is $5. Draft2Digital doesn’t tell you the flat price anywhere but they do offer the breakdown information; it costs $1.22 flat plus $0.0133 per page. So, for a 140 page book, the at-cost is $3.08. So far so good. 

Now, if you’re going to sell through Lulu, the “at cost” is the minimum price. You won’t make any money but you CAN charge just $5 for a $5 book. Any pricing above that is your cut. So -- let’s price this 140 page trade paperback at $13-$15. That’s a bit high to be honest but let’s just see. At Lulu, your take is roughly $6-$8 based on those prices, because you’re just dropping out the cost of printing from the retail price. 

At Draft2Digital, the same 140-page trade paperback, which remember is quoted as costing roughly $1.20 less to print than Lulu charges, gets you $2.75-$3.50 in royalties per book.

....wait, what? 

So now we need to sidetrack a little but I promise it’s for a reason. One of the motivations for looking into a change to Draft2Digital is that I didn’t like that Lulu was setting higher “minimum prices” than I was accustomed to -- they would tell me the book only cost $5 to print but require me to sell it for $12 or similar, and I couldn’t work out why. I’m an idiot but the penny did finally drop: it’s because when you distribute them outside of Lulu (say, on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or similar) your royalties drop like a stone. $7 in royalties purchased through Lulu comes out to like twenty-five cents purchased through Amazon. So Lulu forces you to price the book at a point where you even GET royalties and don’t end up weirdly owing Amazon money. The “global distribution” is what’s driving that minimum up. 

So in price-quoting a competitor I actually solved the problem with Lulu. 

Which is good, because the fun doesn’t stop there. If you want a proof copy of a book from Lulu, it’s the at-cost of the book, plus tax, plus postage. Buying a proof copy of this book from Lulu would cost me $11. Lulu makes you order a new proof copy every time you make a change, which is shady, but usually I only need to make 1-2 changes across the life of a book, so at most the cost will probably be $35 and for that I’ll get three copies of the book. Draft2Digital doesn’t give you an option. If you want a proof pre-publication, it’s $30 flat. If you want to publish and then buy a copy you can, but you can only make one change to the book every 90 days once it’s published. If you want to make more than one change, it’s $25 every time you upload a new version of the manuscript within that 90 day period.

So Draft2Digital’s books cost less to print but they take a massive cut of your royalties out of the retail cost of the book. If the book costs $3 to print, and I price it at $15, that’s $12 in profit on the book. Of that $12, however, I only receive $4. Draft2Digital literally wants 2/3 of my royalties per book. They want $20 more than Lulu to send me a proof copy. If I need to correct the proof, the correction is free, but I’m assuming the second proof will also cost me $30. Any changes after that, within 90 days, will cost $25 plus $30 for a new proof.

Which means my upfront costs at Lulu are about $35 per published book; to do the same thing at Draft2Digital is between $60 and $105 depending on whether I need to make changes after the second proof copy. And even after that, my royalties at Lulu are just about twice what they would be at Draft2Digital per purchase. 

So, well, Lulu it is. And the problem I was having with Lulu is solved if I decide to just retail through Lulu rather than selling globally. Which...selling globally has done two things that I’m aware of:

1. Fucked up my author page so badly on Amazon that one of my books is still attributed to Kathleen Starbuck, and one of her books is for sale on my author page. 

2. Raised the minimum price I’m allowed to set my books at by like, 40%. 

So I think probably what’s going to happen is going forward my books will be for sale only on Lulu. I can still assign them ISBNs and they still will ship worldwide, and the prices will fall significantly. My deepest apologies to those of you who have paid an artificially inflated price for the last few books; I’m going to fix that going forward, I’m going to go in and try to fix it retroactively in the books that are already on Lulu, and if it’s any consolation at least the cash came to me, and TWO THIRDS OF IT didn’t go to Lulu. 

It’s gonna take me a little time, untangling Lulu’s relationship to other retailers is tricky, but eventually the Shivadh Omnibus and Twelve Points should come down significantly in price, and there ought to be a dollar or two drop for the older books as well. 

This is why it always pays to do the math, even if like me you are dreadful at it. 

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

One of the things I noticed poking around on bookshop's author FAQ is that IngramSpark has a distribution fee of 20%, so if you set your wholesale discount to less than 40%, they'd actually lose money on every order and so will raise the price of the book until that's no longer the case.

I don't know if that's the program you're using, a setting you have access to, or if Amazon has a similar policy, but I thought I'd mention it in case it's helpful. I also saw some stuff on Reddit about Amazon just being generally awful about IngramSpark stuff because they want you using KDP instead, but I dunno.

Dunno if any of that helps, but you've successfully nerdsniped me.

I print through d2d, not ingram spark, but they do also use the Ingram network so I don't know what their deal is re: distribution fees, it might be the same. D2D are very ebook focused and their print service is just kind of an add-on for them so they don't give me nearly as much information or control over the print distribution.

Amazon price gouging in order to secure their own monopoly is unsurprising but I refuse to stand quietly by in a world of seventy dollar paperbacks. My readers have bills, they don't need to tolerate that shit. Though I guess they can charge what they like so long as buyers also have lower cost options; because I make my income via patreon and ko-fi, not direct sales, I'm not at the mercy of Amazon like a lot of authors are. If nobody buys my books through Amazon (and at that price you shouldn't!), I don't starve. So so long as nobody's actually buying their stupid version I guess it doesn't matter what they charge.

[duckprintspress]

hey, i'd like to just throw this out to you, since you're a press so i have a feeling you might know. if i was seeking to publish a book but i didn't want it to ever be sold through amazon, what would my options be?

Hiya!

I'm assuming you mean you're interested in self-publishing? If yes, then yeah, I can give you at least some information about your options. :D

If you don't want to use Amazon, you definitely still have some options for self-publishing a book. I can sympathize with this sentiment; we hate Amazon and I've done what I can to keep our works off there (and, ultimately, failed, but still kept it to a minimum).

There's two overarching questions you'll need to consider when deciding how to proceed:

What formats are you selling? Are you doing e-book only or e-book + print or print book only? What about audiobooks? Which will influence your choices.

Are you mostly interested in direct sales (as in, you personally sell the book to the customer) or sales-through-an-intermediary (as in, a bookstore sells your book to a customer) or distribution (as in, you list the book with someone who acts as an intermediary between you and other vendors)?

As briefly as I can, first, here's what Duck Prints Press uses:

Ingram - e-book (and, once we have one - we're working on our first! - audiobook) distribution. Ingram is the biggest book distributor in the US and has a virtual monopoly on distribution. Even places that aren't technically Ingram, such as draft2digital, usually use Ingram. Because they're a near-monopoly, Ingram has a lot of ability to, well, screw people, and one way they've tried to screw people is they keep making it harder to get into their better services, pushing people to their much-less-supported service IngramSpark. I managed to get the Press grand-fathered in to Coresource, which is their e-book and audiobook distribution system, even tho we don't meet the current minimums for number of titles for that product. I CAN'T get into Lightning Source, which is their better-supported print book distribution service, because we don't have enough titles (we'd need 30, we currently have 10ish). If I wanted to use IngramSpark, I'd have to ditch Coresource, and I don't want to do that because Coresource works great and has good customer support, and so I had to settle on a compromise I don't love until we meet the minimums for Lightning Source - I use Coresource through Ingram for e-book distribution (and don't distribute to Amazon), which is...

draft2digital - print book distribution. This was my work around for not losing Coresource in the name of getting Ingram print on demand (pod), and it came with a price: d2d doesn't let me opt out of Amazon, much to my irritation. So the three titles we currently have pod on ARE on Amazon.

our webstore - e-book and print books, directly sold to the public. Our website lets people download e-books; I package print book orders made through the webstore myself and mail them myself.

in-person sales - I started vending at events last year; this year I'll be doing about a dozen.

All of which goes to show, even trying to publish while avoiding the most evil places is really hard and a source of frustration. If anyone knows a good option for ethical publishing distribution, I'm honestly all ears. Competing with Ingram is extremely David vs. Goliath (see also the recent death of Small Press Distribution).

So: remembering that Amazon is easily the worst but that there's still basically no ethical consumption or production under capitalism...

Ingram

Of the places I'm familiar with, the best-known option with the widest reach for self-publishing distribution is IngramSpark. As mentioned, I don't use Spark, but Coresource lets me completely customize which of Ingram's partners (vendors, wholesalers, libraries, etc.) I actually distribute with, and I've assumed that other Ingram products are the same. I believe IngramSpark is currently free per title; they get paid by charging fees per sale and because they get better listing deals with partners than an individual would get (like, Ingram might get charged x per title they list with, idk, Barnes and Noble, whereas you as an individual would get charged y, where y is larger than x, and Ingram pockets the difference).

I know a lot of people who use IngramSpark and my impression is that when it works, it works really well, but when it doesn't, getting help/customer service can be a nightmare. Virtually everyone I know who has used them has stories about late titles, support taking a week+ to reply, that kind of thing. I believe they have an option to pay for better/more rapid responses from customer support, which I feel kinda tells you everything you need to know about IngramSpark.

Draft2Digital

Another option is draft2digital. They use the Ingram distribution network, but again they can do so cheaper than an individual can because of their bulk sales through Ingram. They also offer e-book, audiobook, and print distribution. I use draft2digital for print and I've been quite satisfied with their customer support, but their print distribution doesn't allow opt-out of Amazon. HOWEVER, I believe their e-book distribution does. At minimum, there's a checklist on d2d about "steps you have to take to distribute e-books through d2d" and I'm assuming if you just. didn't do that checklist. then you obviously wouldn't get your books distributed through them. The other big thing I don't like about d2d (which may also be true of IngramSpark, idk) is that they charge after the first revision. Which is to say: you put together your book, you upload your book, you get it all set... and you notice a mistake. Okay, fine. You fix the mistake and re-upload. Re-uploading uses a "change token." You only get one free change token per title per six months. So, you notice another mistake you feel you have to fix a few days after that first? That'll cost $25. I've personally just kinda... tried to find all my mistakes right off and fix them, and anything I spot after that, I keep a log and will update all of them at the six month point. (I understand why they do this, btw - they have actual humans doing set-up on their end, so if you revise eight times in a week, that's a lot for an actual human, and charging for the tokens forces people to be careful, helps ensure people submit books that are actually ready in good faith, and helps keep costs low. That doesn't mean it's not annoying, though.)

Bookvault

Bookvault is a UK-based print-on-demand option (so NO e-book distribution, just print) that has recently started offerings in the US too. They currently have a relatively limited distribution network, but they're growing, and especially for UK-based people they're a strong alternative. I've heard a lot of positive reports about their printing in a FB group I'm in (Kickstarter for Authors - do recommend, lots of great info there), but I'll own my personal experiences weren't great and I've decided not to keep using them for now. However, if what you primarily want is print books as print-on-demand, and some limited distribution choices, they're a good choice, and they can help with option five below.

Do It Yourself Lite

A fourth option that's a LOT of work is...you add it everywhere yourself. Most places will let you. For example, here's how to sell on Barnes and Noble.com. When I self-pubbed a book a few years back, before I ran the Press, I submitted my work by hand to several different options (B&N, Kobo, Amazon because I still used them then, Smashwords, to name a few). However, doing this isn't the same as distribution - it only will sell through that specific vendor - and as far as I know there are no options for doing print-on-demand those ways (I THINK, tho I'm not sure, that Amazon is the only place you can set up both e-book and pod through a single vendor - it's not something I've researched tho, cause with the Press, doing single-title-at-a-time entry across so many different vendors is simply not realistic).

Side note on this: I don't believe there's a way to list self-pub books on Bookshop.org, but don't quote me on that.

This method also doesn't work well if you want to get your title in with libraries. I researched this a bit well over a year ago now, so I don't recall all the details, but before we signed up for Ingram I DID try to see if there was a way for us to publish and get in libraries especially without involving them, but there...wasn't really. Places like Overdrive that handle e-book-to-library distribution don't really have a way for individuals to submit; I have this vague memory I found a way to do it that involved paying per title but tbh I can't even find that now (though while I was looking I did find this decent-looking article about how to get your self-published book out in the world, echoing a lot of what I say here).

Do It Yourself Difficult Mode

Your fifth major option, and what we originally did as a press, is: do it all yourself. You can get your own storefront (ours is through Woocommerce + Wordpress). You can do your own crowdfunding. You can run your own newsletter (I use Mailerlite), do your own advertising, etc. You can do your own printing (we currently use Booklogix and I'm quite happy with them, their customer service is A+++). You can vend at events, you can market to local bookstores, sell through bookstores that do consignment, etc. You can learn to format your own e-books (I use a combination of Affinity software and Calibre, with an assist from Daisy to improve the accessibility of our e-books). You can get access to stock images and vector art to make things look nice (I use vecteezy). There's a LOT you can do entirely on your own. And that's what I did for myself before I ran the Press, and what I did for the Press for the first couple years we operated.

The reason I changed how the Press handles things? I hate to say this but the sad truth of publishing is that not using Amazon is utterly crippling to a publisher. As of 2 years ago, Amazon represented 67% of all book sales in the United States. Not selling through Amazon means accepting you'll simply be completely unable to reach more than half of the people reading works in English all around the world (works not in English may be different, I don't know that market since I publish in English). And for myself, alone - for my works? I could make that choice. But the Press currently works with well over 100 authors, and I ultimately felt I couldn't make the same choice to them. I tried so so hard not to compromise this, but refusing all distribution, when we were also avoiding Amazon, meant completely hamstringing the ability of authors we work with to market and sell their books. It meant, to work with us, people would have to sacrifice so much of their ability to earn money from their words, and it just didn't feel right to continue in that avenue as we grew. So, I was forced to compromise: first to use Ingram, which I did on the condition that I'd be able to reject Amazon specifically, and then by having to use draft2digital, including their goddamn Amazon print-on-demand, at least until I qualify for a better option, which as soon as I can do? You bet your butt I'll be switching and opting out of Amazon again.

The current climate makes these choices really hard, and I didn't make them lightly, nor did I make them alone - there's about 20 people on the DPP staff, and they all contributed opinions and voted on the final decisions I implemented for the Press in these regards.

(and sorry, I know "what DPP does and why" is a bit to the left of your actual question, but I felt like it'd be weird to make a list of recommendations without including the decisions I've personally made and why - like, why would I recommend you something I don't do myself with the books I publish? So sorry for the info dump.)

The TL:DR of all this is, as far as I know, and as I've been forced to accept as part of the realities of running a small press in the modern world of publishing, is that avoiding one Big Evil (Amazon) with any hope of achieving even a modicum of success basically requires partnering with at least one other Big Evil (Ingram especially). It's a very hard game to win.

HOWEVER, you are doing this FOR YOURSELF, NOT for all the people involved in a business larger than just you. If you're willing to put in the extra work to figure out a lot on your own and manage your own marketing, you can theoretically build enough of an audience to go it alone without Amazon OR Ingram OR places like Kobo/B&N/etc. You'll have to outlay more out of pocket - things like webhosting cost money - and you'll have to be a lot more careful - if you're running your own website instead of using someone elses, you gotta go above and beyond making you're in compliance with privacy rules and such - but it can be done.

And if you don't want to go that route, and your only real "to avoid" is Amazon specifically... use IngramSpark.

Sorry I'm long-winded. I hope this helps! Good luck with your publishing goals!

(and if others reading this have some other advice and resources, things I may not know about, please do weigh in! I bet the asker would like to know, and I'm always eager to learn about new options too.)

[praeobscura]

Cross-posting from my mention of this on Pillowfort.

Yesterday, Draft2Digital (which now includes Smashwords) sent out an email with a, frankly, very insulting survey. It would be such a shame if a link to that survey without the link trackers were to circulate around Tumblr dot Com.

The survey has eight multiple choice questions and (more importantly) two long-form text response boxes.

The survey is being run from August 27th, 2024 to September 3rd, 2024. If you use Draft2Digital or Smashwords, and have not already seen this in your associated email, you may want to read through it and send them your thoughts.

Plain text for the image below the cut:

D2D AI Rights Licensing Survey:

This survey is going to all authors and publishers of Draft2Digital and Smashwords. We seek feedback from our community regarding potential rights licensing opportunities.

This survey is anonymous and should take only about five minutes to complete. Survey responses will be accepted until Tuesday, September 3, 2024.

Introduction:

In recent months, a growing number of AI developers have begun approaching large publishers, seeking to license books for the purpose of training Large Language Models (LLMs).

Books – both fiction and non-fiction – are highly prized for LLM training due to their long form narrative structures which teach Natural Language Processing.

Common uses for these LLMs include powering personal productivity applications such as customer service chatbots, virtual assistants, and the drafting of written communications for marketing, customer service, and internal communications.

What are your AI training rights worth? There’s no hard and fast rule to answer this question because each licensing deal is different.

Some early compensation models for news publishers suggest the equivalent of about $100 per license for LLM training rights for a 75,000-word novel, which works out to a little over 1/10th of a cent per word.

Some experts believe training rights for long-form book content justifies higher compensation for training rights than news content.

[physalian]

Yet another IngramSpark debacle

Mini rant time. I just found out that I am *stuck* with Ingram, and these smug fuckers probably know it.

So what happened was. Last year, Draft2Digital launched their paperbacks. At the time, I did not use them, because their print quality and whole system was still very much under construction and needed revising. Great. Awesome. Ingram has been, for many years, a necessary evil, for one big reason:

You can use Ingram in tandem with other companies as an indie author. Meaning I can list directly on Amazon and reap those benefits while Ingram handles the distribution to everywhere else.

Amazon will almost always give you the highest royalties for one reason: They are not a third party, so you are not splitting profits between the printer and the vendor, if the printer is the vendor. Their whole UI is also fantastic with an incredibly thorough help database and customer service that trounces Ingram in every possible way.

Unfortunately, Ingram is... awful. On every front. And expensive.

Re-enter D2D.

They have this wonderful feature for their expanded distribution that lets you pick and choose your vendors. So, if I'm listed on Amazon already, to avoid a double listing, I can deselect them on D2D's platform and not sell there.

Problem is.

That option only exists for their ebooks. And nowhere either in the FAQ or during the print set-up process does it warn you that this is not a feature for print (yet?). In fact, it states quite clearly that so long as you're not using Amazon's expanded distribution, you're good to go. Thus, I thought they were now a perfect replacement for Ingram.

It's only after I got to the end of the process, after having to painstakingly resize my cover because D2D's print would be slightly off using their printer, did I find out that all of that work is moot. Turns out, they are not quite ready to compete with Ingram, and it only cost me several hours worth of work to discover this. They are so close and I am so excited to see Ingram crumble. But they're not there yet.

To be clear. I knew well ahead of time, and that's why I chose the KDP and Ingram combo, of the risk of a double listing. These two together cover the most area while KDP's market is cheaper for the buyer (if you choose to list it lower) and has extremely high traffic.

My issue is the lack of clear verbiage that this feature, that already exists for D2D's ebooks, is not available for their print books.

The issue at large then being: Ingram retains their monopoly as the standard for distributors, and I hate them. It's hard enough getting exposure as an indie author and I do appreciate what D2D is doing to shake up the market.

I had to purge my entire author instagram and start completely from scratch due to a scammer infestation and tiktok... is what it is. So to be able to reach as many marketplaces as possible without the backing of a publishing house is huge for finding your audience.

And yet, Ingram is what we have.

My upcoming ebook will have no issues using KDP and D2D and the ebook of Eternal Night should also be fine. By the time ENNS's sequel is ready, they might have the vendor selection feature, who knows?

For now, I am actively reminding myself: No one element is the cure-all for a sudden boom in popularity. I could do absolutely everything right, have my book available in every possible marketplace, and still find that people just don't want to read it.

But having that reach sure would eliminate one thing holding me back.

[d2dengineers]

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[juleskelleybooks]

For science! I got author copies of Welcome to the Show from D2D's print service today and thought I would show you the difference between it and Amazon's.

I used the same interior and graphic files for both, but I did choose different finishes. AMZ is matte while D2D is glossy.

Covers - AMZ on the left, D2D on the right. D2D is noticeably more saturated, which I think looks great except on my author photo lol.

Interior files I didn't really notice a difference, but here they are anyway.

AMZ:

D2D:

The paper seems like it might be slightly thicker in the AMZ version, just enough to alter the spine width very slightly.

AMZ on the left, D2D on the right.

Anyway! Thought some people might be interested since there are a few discernible differences.

[rubyjones]

This is highly misleading to add. It's really not true.

Look, I hate Amazon's monopoly, but here are some truths to bear in mind:

The vast majority of people still want to buy there; it sucks, but it's true, and choosing not to have an Amazon presence is severely limiting for an indie writer.

What IS true is that if you OPT IN to selling your book through Kindle Unlimited, Amazon will want exclusivity for the first 3 months. But you don't have to opt into that and after the 3 months you can sell it somewhere else as well. You'll also need a different ISBN, but I believe D2D and other publishers want you to use their own anyway.

I currently sell my books through KDP and Draft2Digital, both of which I mention in the blog post. I originally opted into the Unlimited programme, because it was easier and I'm pretty disabled, but folks on Mastodon really wanted to buy from Smashwords, so eventually I found the spoons to switch it up - please bear in mind when you're critiquing indies on how we publish from the very limited options we have that things like disability, childcare, a day job, and having to do all the work and marketing yourself, play a big factor in the choices we make. I also don't think Barnes and Noble sell the kinds of books I write anyway.

The post is not about where you can publish. It is very specifically about making your own cover for free or cheap without 'AI'. I am expanding this into a series and I may eventually address that, but there was no intention to cover all the options and their pluses and minuses.

I'm given to understand Kobo has an non-exclusive publishing service similar to Kindle Unlimited, but a) this didn't exist when I first started publishing; and b) as mentioned before, I am pretty damn disabled; it took me a year to prepare my last (already written) novella for publication using the systems I am already familiar with. Had I been writing an article on how and where to self-publish, I would have researched that, but again, that is not what this article is about. And I would not have written that article. Because I am too damn sick to write articles about things I have not already researched right now.

To be honest, I would appreciate it if Barnes and Nobel would consider making their catty comments about Amazon somewhere else than on a post by a disabled indie creator having their first viral moment.* especially as I know for a fact you won't be stocking Ruinous Attraction or Oviposition any time soon anyway, and that has nothing to do with Amazon.

*Under this name. But I never made any money from the others either.

Too many writers are using generative 'AI' to make their book covers, so I've written a guide on how to make your own cover for free or cheap without turning to a machine.

If you can't afford to pay an artist, you CAN make your own!

I hope this is a helpful overview that covers the basics and points to some free resources.

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[duckprintspress]

Draft2Digital, a large book distributor used by many indie authors and small presses (including my small press!) has announced they will not be partnering with LLM/Generative AI companies at this time!

From Kris Austin, CEO of Draft2Digital:

I know a lot of authors are eager to learn if D2D conducting an AI training survey meant that such a service was imminent. At this time, Draft2Digital will not offer AI rights licensing opportunities.

Draft2Digital has always been dedicated to providing opportunities for authors. We also know that each of these opportunities need to be vetted properly. From the beginning, we’ve structured our Terms of Service to only grant the rights we need to distribute your works and nothing more. We cannot, and will not, make choices about your works for you.

The stakes are high enough around Al Licensing that we felt it was imperative to include the community as much as possible in our decisions to offer these options or not.

I sincerely thank you for your honest responses. I personally read thousands of them. Please read the below post for lots of great information on what authors are thinking.

-

From the blog post:

At Draft2Digital, we believe:

It’s a positive development that AI developers are seeking to pay for licenses

Better protections are needed before D2D or its publishers can entertain such licenses

AI training rights are an exclusive, valuable subsidiary right under the sole control of the author or publisher

The rights-holder deserves full control over decisions related to if, when, and how their books are used or licensed for AI training purposes.

Authors and publishers should refuse AI rights licensing contracts that are opaque, or that provide inadequate protections for author concerns

AI developers must stop training upon books obtained without the rights-holder’s permission; otherwise, they will face continued reputational harm in the eyes of their customers and the creative community

LLMs previously trained upon unlicensed content, and the applications built upon them, should either negotiate retroactive licensing settlements with rights holders, or scrap their LLMs and rebuild them from scratch by training upon licensed content only

-

They didn't put any information about free responses but I know I said that if they tried to sell our data I would leave the platform. I wonder how many other people said similar? 45% of respondees said that under no circumstances would we be willing to sell AI training rights. That's. A LOT of people, especially considering another 25% only said "maybe."

Anyway. there are some cool charts and good raw data on the page. Only thing I wish was they said how many people completed it - if that number was there, I didn't see it.