Can an AI be a useful tool for authors, or a crutch that prevents an author from using their own judgement and enhancing their writing skills. Can AI give us agency, or rob us of it? No doubt the answer is both or either. Independent author expert Joanne Penn raises this interesting topic, with the assistance of Grok, the resident AI on X. I suspect the main problem will be (or already is) the absolute tidal wave of AI enabled and initiated content that will wash through the publishing world, much of which will be complete forgettable rubbish. The desire of most readers to read stories about humans for humans may be a difficult one to satisfy. Amplifying the already near-infinite supply of content will not assist with the long-term problem of declining readership. With many people welded to their phones and compulsively watching extremely short-form videos, the sight of a person reading an actual book or even an e-reader is rare enough to be remarkable.
Draft2Digital: a good idea for independent authors?
Draft2Digital offers a very cost-effective distribution route for ebooks (print on demand also, but that service is still in beta, for various reasons). Its sale channels cover all of the large ebook retailers. It has a very simple and attractive service proposition:
We are Self-Publishing with Support. Your book is your priority. Our priority is you. We build tools and services that let you focus on writing while we take care of layout, publishing, distribution, print-on-demand paperbacks, and more. Keep writing. We’re here for the rest.
In a long and very informative blog post, author services firm Reedsy describes them as “The gold standard for self-publishing aggregators, Draft2Digital distinguishes itself with excellent customer service and a user-friendly interface. They’re the best way to sell your book with dozens of retailers without tearing your hair out.”
Kindlepreneur also has a largely positive review that dives into the details of uploading a new title and how the royalty payments and update fees work.
Users discuss vcry specific pros and cons of the service on a reddit thread. Important note: the 10% Draft2Digital fee is charged on retail price, not on profit, and comes on top of the share taken by the end seller.
Writers Weekly has published a number of very negative user reviews that indicate some administrative problems.
Plenty of users had complaints about the non-payment of royalties.
Draft2Digital books cannot access Amazon advertising or other Amazon sales tools.
In summary, a service that will be useful to many authors, but go in with your eyes open and aware of the moderate drawbacks, especially the Amazon advertising issue.
K-Lytics
If you are serious about optimising your online presence as an author, K-Lytics is worth checking out. Their site asks the following rhetorical question:
“Do you want to sell more books, face less competition, and achieve a higher return on your publishing investments?”
Their paid market reports burrow into the details of hundreds of genres and micro-genres. Seeing the maths underneath the book markets is a bit disconcerting, but in a world governed by algorithms and visibility, these insights are essential. The specificity of some of the genres and sub-genres is almost comic: Scottish Romance (what about Scottish Time Travelling Romance?); Cosy Mystery; Urban Fantasy, etc.
“You do not have to be afraid of numbers. We will help you to understand and use them to your advantage.”
Get Your Title Onto Borrowbox via IngramSpark
Bolinda Audio produces a book-borrowing app (Borrowbox) used widely by Australian libraries. An author client contacted them recently to see if there was a way of including their ebook title on the platform. They responded promptly with the following:
“We would be happy to distribute your titles to libraries via our digital lending solution BorrowBox, but we simply don't have the resources to deal direct with individual authors. If your titles are available from a digital distributor such as Gardners, Ingrams, IPG, or Faber Factory, then we could make them available via BorrowBox.”
Borrowbox is an excellent app with a very wide variety of audiobook and ebook titles, and represents an great opportunity for independent authors to get in front of new readers.
A New Series for Peter Ralph
Writer of financial thrillers Peter Ralph is embarking on a new series featuring Josh Kennelly, a character first introduced in Fog City Fraud. The first book, Deadly Bequests is “set in New Orleans and is a scam about the elderly getting fleeced via their wills.”. The second book is The Guardians . Josh “receives a crazy call from a veteran of the Afghanistan war claiming that his father has been kidnapped by a guardian. Reluctantly, Josh gets involved and discovers the guardianship industry where judges, guardians, lawyers, and doctors, look after themselves, but not their wards. The forces that he’s trying to expose are all-powerful. Has he bitten off more than he can chew?”
We designed all three books to have a consistent identity and repeated elements.
Fatal Path Cover — More Iterations
An update on an earlier post — two more iterations on this cover. Sometimes it is a long and winding road to a final cover…
Bookbub Speaks, Advises
An author client recently got in touch with ebook promotional giant Bookbub to discuss the disappointing performance of a paid ad posted on that platform. He received the following interesting response, worth reading in full for anyone considering using the service or applying for the oly grail of a featured deal (as with so many areas of the Internet, Bookbub is overwhelmingly dominant in its space):
Thanks for reaching out! I'm sorry to hear your recent ad campaign didn't produce the results you were hoping for. I'll note that it does require quite a bit of testing and tweaking to develop ad campaigns that get the results you're looking for. When getting started with ads, we recommend that partners spend some time committed to testing ads with small budgets of $5-$10. Generally, you're unlikely to see a positive return immediately out of the gate with no testing.
I'd encourage you to read through some of our blog posts to get more familiar with BookBub Ads. I've gone ahead and listed a few that I think you'll find helpful below:
- First, you can find a blog post on increasing your click-through rate here: https://insights.bookbub.com/increase-click-through-rate-bookbub-ads-campaign/
- Next, you can read about how marketing goals affect BookBub ad campaigns here: https://insights.bookbub.com/how-marketing-goals-affect-bookbub-ad-campaigns-infographic/
- Finally, you can view our ultimate guide to BookBub Ads here: https://insights.bookbub.com/ultimate-guide-bookbub-ads/#getting-started
If you want to learn more about BookBub Ads, I'd suggest that you read through some other posts in the BookBub Ads section of our blog here for more tutorials, campaign ideas, and best practices.
I'm happy to answer any questions your have around Featured Deals:
1.) Currently, we rarely feature new releases in our daily emails. We’ve found that books that have had a chance to build up their platform perform best and, therefore, make for the most successful promotions for our partners.
2.) Your promotion's length is completely up to you and your marketing goals. You're welcome to discount your book for just a day, or a whole week or more if you'd like. We happen to have a blog post that discusses what promotion lengths work best for different marketing goals here. I hope you find that post helpful!
3.) Critical reviews play a role in our editor's selection process, so it would certainly be helpful for your title to have some reviews associated with it. You're absolutely welcome to submit this book for consideration, but please note that, as mentioned above, we tend to feature books that have built up their platform. If you're interested, you can learn more about the editorial team's selection process here.
Bookbub is not for Babies
Many authors have never heard of Bookbub. The service is essentially a regular email offering selected discounted ebooks to a massive subscriber list. Most of the titles promoted therein are from major publishers, but a significant fraction are from independent authors and small publishers. Publishers and authors pay over $600 per title just to be considered for inclusion in their featured deals. They are extremely powerful in the world of ebook sales and massively profitable.
Peter Ralph has done a stellar job analysing the performance of bookbub and advising authors how to get one of the sought after featured deals. Other bloggers have useful posts about setting up effective ads for Bookbub, Others point out that while the sales spike created by bookbub is real and substantial, it can be rather short lived. This author suggests that the real benefit of being featured on bookbub is exposing the rest of your published work to a new audience.
In a world where bookstores, though gamely hanging on, represent a decreasing fraction of overall print sales (not to mention ebooks and audibooks), authors have to come to terms with the necessary techniques for online sales success, and letting the market know they even exist.
Inside Kindle — Analysing Sales and Market Data
An interesting webinar staged by Reedsy on the dynamics/underlying principles of the Kindle webstore. With an astonishing 70,000 titles published per month (!) independent authors really need to understand the platforms to which they are uploading their titles. While it may be dispiriting to see one’s book chunked into tiny little categories and subject to algorithmic vagaries, there is also power in exploiting this really quite remarkable flood of sales data.
“With 70,000+ books being published each month, you need tools and strategies to help you and your book stand out from the crowd. Knowing your market is the essential first step.”
Why Vary Ebook Pricing?
One of the distinctive aspects of ebook publishing is the willingness of authors and publishers to vary book pricing. Some of this may be an attempt to find the ideal price for a given book, but others are following a more sophisticated playbook, a little like the strategies employed by airlines with ticket sales. Kindle itself has Kindle Countdown Deals, though there are built in limits to the use of this particular tool. PublishDrive makes the following observation:
“Writing an ebook is hard. Pricing it should not be harder. Ebook pricing, however, can often feel like a maze without exits. It is easy to get lost or confused. With the following ebook pricing guide we would like to help beginners and seasoned publishers to find their way out.”
And WriteHacked has a long post on the topic spelling out all of the options and reasoning behind them
Smashwords versus Draft 2 Digital
The ebook landscape is dominated by Amazon Kindle, but there is a world of ebook consumption beyond Jeff Bezos’ realm. Smashwords aggregates together a number of ebook selling services as does its newer competitor Draft2Digital. Kindlepreneur has done yeoman’s work in comparing the two services in detail, even going to the trouble of contacting their respective CEOs. Spoiler alert: Draft2Digital wins!
The Rise of the Independent Author
The book of the future was supposed to be an amazing digital, virtual thing, anticipated eagerly by every second futurist, but it hasn’t quite worked out that way. An interesting article in Wired about how we got to the current ebook landscape (hint: involves an all conquering behemoth named after a big river). And print books are still a thing, thank goodness. And here’s an interesting quote for all the independent authors out there:
“Almost half of author earnings now come from independently published books. Independent books don’t outsell big-five books, but they offer higher royalty rates—roughly 70 percent versus 25 percent.”
When a Box is not a Box
Peter Ralph writes fast-moving financial thrillers. Recently he wanted to bundle together three of his ebooks to sell as one unit. Though the books are packets of digital information, they are promoted online as physical objects, as if they were an actual ‘box’ set. So we created a graphic showing the three cased books in all their virtual/physical glory.
Bookbub Explained
Bestselling author Peter J. Ralph has turned his considerable research skills to the secrets behind the most successful promoter of ebooks, Bookbub. Our cover was intended to illustrate the dramatic effect that being selected for the Bookbub newsletter can have on the sales of a particular title. Typefaces used are League Gothic and Marianina.
Four Minimalist Covers — Book Design
Four covers for the same publisher, each under the same imprint. All yellow backgrounds, strong, simple typography, minimal image content. There is much to be said for paring design back to its absolute essentials. Less clutter, less distraction, more emphasis on the content and the beauty of typography. Typefaces used include League Gothic, Clarendon Bold Condensed and Bell Gothic Black.
You Go, Books!
Printed books seem have unexpected staying power. The growth of the ebook segment of the market has slowed dramatically, and independent bookstores have experienced a modest expansion, both in terms of the number of stores and overall sales. Readers cite the tactile aspect of the printed word, along with the aesthetics of a good bookshelf. Not that the digital revolution hasn't changed the book trade — at least 40% of all book sales are now online.
Free Scholarly ebooks
From the ever-active folk at Open Culture, a very long list of free ebooks, many of them the greats of world literature and intellectual endeavour. From Wittgenstein to David Foster Wallace — a lifetime's reading awaits...
An Unlikely Hero — Cover Design
Dudley Sims is an unassuming man catapulted into a key role in resisting a rapacious land developer. His escapades and love interests are chronicled in The Confessions of Dudley Sims by Brian Smith. We wanted to capture the feel of the riverine landscape he defends in the story – the murky but beautiful Yarra River. Along the base of the cover parades a low-key protest, complete with dog.
First Aid for Parents — Book Cover
Keeping small children safe is a full-time occupation for parents. The ability of a toddler to get into trouble involving sharp objects, flights of stairs, hot water, bookshelves, food, animals and so on is genuinely amazing. Michelle Fiddian has written a very helpful introductory guide outlining both strategies for protecting little ones and acting quickly if accidents do occur. Published by Jo Jo Publishing. We wanted to show the vulnerability of the very young, using crisp, clean type. Title set in Trend Sans, subtitle in Mostra Nuova.
Preparing Your Manuscrript for ebook Conversion
A note regarding the preparation of your book manuscript for ebook conversion, from our preferred ebook converter, Warren Broom:
What can be done in the ePub format:
Firstly, to convert to the epub format, we require a print ready PDF. This must be single page single column. If not, all of the sentences that form each column end up shuffled like a deck of cards. We will also need an ISBN and a description and subject to place into the meta-data that shows up on the retail site. Descriptions should be kept to 2 to 3 paragraphs.
Images:
We prefer to take the images from the pdf as many have captions that we include in the image so that they do not get separated from the image. We do all images in colour for those reading devices that support colour but, of course, they will render in greyscale in those that don’t.
Tables:
We can only do tables that are two cells wide as any more and the words start to get squashed up at higher zoom levels. Tables with more than 2 columns are done as images. Sometimes when table cross “pages, some of the text can separate but this is not usually a problem.
Hyphens:
If the text is justified, some words break in two, utilising a hyphen. Once again, this is not really a problem but, if the author wants to avoid them, we can align the text to the left.
Table of contents:
eBook reading devices produce a digital TOC but we usually add hyperlinks to the TOC in the ePub for earlier reading devices that don’t. We can also link sub heading to the TOC but they are not really necessary.
Indexes:
Redundant in ePubs as all reading devises have a search function. However, if the author really wants to include an index, it should only include single word references as multiple words will link to all references in each of each word included within the entry.
Footnotes:
We place all of the footnotes at the end of the chapter and can link the reference within the text to its’ corresponding footnote. I can also add a return link back to the text the reference is in. It should be noted that footnotes are very time-consuming and can dramatically increase the price of the ePub.
Fonts:
Fonts can be embedded but, many reading devices have a default font that overrides the embedded fonts. A maximum of 2 fonts can be embedded. It is also possible to add audio and video to an ePub but, this is very complex and dramatically increases the file size and also, the cost. Our recommendation is that that a hyperlink to an external website be employed to view or listen to these forms of content.