Draft-2-Digital: Publishing's Best Kept Secret

If you're a published Indie author, then you have probably heard of sales platforms such as Amazon and Smashwords. But my guess is you haven't heard about a stellar company called Draft-2-Digital.

I actually found Draft-2-Digital, due to the fact that I was having so many problems publishing my best-selling series Hail Strike (Hail #3) on Smashwords. Over the course of a week, I spent about 18 hours trying to massage my Word file into something that the Smashwords meatgrinder could ingest. The baseline suggestion from folks on the web was paste my Word text into Notepad and then back into a fresh Word document, thus blowing away rogue styles and all formatting. Prior to spending another full day reformatting thousands of italic words, I tried uploading my clean file to Smashwords to see if it would work. The result was an epub and mobi file that had a mixture of fonts and sizes. It was a total mess. Of course, I wrote Smashwords support for help, and they wrote back and told me I should read their 117-page formatting guide. Really? Point of logic: if you need 117 pages of instructions, then something is majorly boned with the process. Albert Einstein said it best with, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." I mean I'm not building a railgun, I'm submitting a book to be converted into different formats, and guess what? Computers intermingled with great programmers can make that job easy. Being a computer expert and having done my fair share of programming, the thought that kept bouncing around in my head was Who was responsible for coding such a bad ingestion engine (ala the meatgrinder as Smashwords refers to it) and why have they allowed it to continue? After all, if a company receives thousands of support tickets complaining about the same formatting issues, any rational company owner would think that something was amiss. Smashwords meatgrinder is aptly named. From my experience, you put a big piece of USDA prime steak in the top, and out the bottoms drops a wad of ground chuck.

Realizing I was running out of options, I began to do what most of us lost souls do, search the posts and blogs for help, the last vestige of a desperate human. There were many helpful people who expained exactly how to get my book to ingest cleanly on Smashwords. The only problem was their posts were about the same length as Smashwords Style Guide. Feeling dejected that my only choice would be to go back to Amazon with my tail tucked between my legs, I got very lucky.

One person, who was having the same problems with Smashwords, wrote ..,

I found the answer to solving my formatting issues with Smashwords. I now use a company called Draft-2-Digital.

Draft-2-Digital (which I will refer to as D2D to save my fingers to write Hail #4) was a name I had never heard before. So, I went to their website and discovered that they distribute to all the major channels, as well as some smaller ones. Not as many as Smashwords, but hey, most of my sales come from Amazon, iTunes, or Barns and Nobel, Kobo and Drive. Since D2D had all those channels covered, I figured what was there to lose.

I few minutes later, I had created an account on D2D, filled in some basic info about me and my novel, and before I knew it, I had reached the pivotal stage of posting my book. The smartest way to solve a complicated problem is to break it down into smaller uncomplicated steps, and that's just what D2D has done. To avoid having their ingestion engine being forced to dither though your text, trying to decide what is a Title, what is a Dedication, what is a Chapter title, and which part is the body of your book, they actually break down the process in just this manner.

The first thing I was asked to do was remove all the extraneous text and save a Word file that had just the body of the book, starting with the first chapter title and ending with the last chapter. To be honest, I was still pretty skeptical at this point, but low and behold, 30 seconds after submitting the body of Hail Strike, D2D's ingestion engine spit out a sample that showed how my finished book would look. All my chapter titles were the same font and size in my original Word file, and that's all their software was looking for. After confirming I was happy with how it looked (which I was because it was fricken perfect) their intuitive app led me to the next simple step.

I was prompted to upload my cover, without any real stipulation about size or file type. D2D simply instructed me to upload a cover that was in the general shape of a rectangle and they would handle the rest, or should I say their automated software could handle the rest. That makes a lot of sense because computers are good at automatically resizing and formatting images. It's not rocket science. Any time you are asked to send in a specific file format at a specific size, that would indicate the programmers were too lazy to automate the task, so it's on you.

Think about how a book is put together. Starting with the Title (which D2D had already collected from me), the Dedication, which they didn't have and I was offered a text box to fill in that info, and then finally the Copywrite stuff that D2D takes care of themselves. To complete the rest of my book, all I had to do was paste in my dedication and whala ... instant book! I pressed the Submit button, and as soon as all the parts had been put together in the background, D2D's wonderful software spit out epub and mobi files that were spot on. I couldn't believe it. I was Flabbergasted! (that's a weird word). And guess what? D2D has automated the process of tagging on a list of previous books you've sold on their platform. which is automatically posted at the end of your book. No need to go back though all the books in your catalogue, make the change, and repost them all. Write a new book and its reflected in the list on ALL of your books. How cool it that?

In a little less than an hour I was staring at a screen that told me my book had been sent to all of their distribution channels. Why is it such a fast process? Because the bright folks at D2D have thought the process out so well that very little human intervention is required on their end to create and distribute a world class e-book. Killer software and fast servers do all their heavy lifting.

The next day I started receiving automated emails telling me that my book was available on different sites (storefronts). Each site that was listed had a link that took me directly to the page my published book was on. The first day, my book showed up on 5 of their channels, including iTunes, and the next day my book was on Amazon, listed the price I suggested.

D2D appears to be thinking about how they can enhance what is already a compelling experience. For example, they offer a Universal link that brings your readers to a D2D landing page that offers them to purchase from any of their channels. No longer will I be required to post three or four links on my website for each book that leads buyers to different sites. Here is the Universal link to Hail Strike: https://books2read.com/u/4DlJXr

Let's talk money, cause some of us need that stuff. D2D takes 10% of the gross, and then the retailer has to get something, so I'm expecting a royalty of $8.50 on a $10-dollar book. Considering if you publish directly on Amazon they take a staggering 65% of your sales, then the D2D option shines even brighter.

After my book was all good to go, I was led though a payment wizard that collected my tax info, filled out my W-9 and submitted it with a digital signature, and gave me a choice how I wanted to get paid, ala direct deposit, check, etc. This process was equally as painless as was their book publishing session.

I recently published my audiobook of Hail Warning with Author's Republic, which was a nice experience, but its been over 10 days and I have yet to see the book show up on Audible. Sure, this delay could be on Amazon's side, having to approve the content, but I saw that D2D offers an audiobook publishing section. I wonder if their process of publishing an audiobook is as easy as D2D's eBook?

I don't typically gush over vendors like this and I certainly don't have any connections to D2D, but when you're down to your last dime and stumble over a 10-pound diamond, you just gotta say WOW!

If you give D2D a try, let me know if you have the same wonderful experience. If you publish your audiobook with them, I would be very interested in hearing about the process at hailwarning@arquette.us