Episode Summary
As D2D Print continues to grow and improve, Mark is here in a special pre-recorded SPI to show how easy it is to set up a print-on-demand version of your book with D2D Print.
Episode Notes
We’ve been jetting all over for author conference season recently, so now it’s time to wind down, share experiences, and talk about the current trends of the publishing industry.
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Transcript
Kevin Tumlinson [00:00:01]:
You just tuned into the hippest way to start and grow your indie author career. Learn the ins, the outs, and all the all arounds of self publishing with the team from D2D and their industry influencing guests. You’re listening to self publishing insiders with Draft2Digital.
Jim Azevedo [00:00:29]:
Love that music. Swanky music, Mark. Thanks for putting that together. Hello, everybody. Welcome to a special prerecorded edition of Self Publishing Insiders, where this time, we have a webinar where we’ll be we’ll be giving you an update and a walk through for D2D Print. With me today is my friend and colleague, Mark Leslie Lefebvre. Hey, Mark.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:00:52]:
Hey, Jim. How are you doing? I absolutely love, Draft2Digital print. I mean, I use it all the time as an author. I take advantage of so many of the features, and I know we’re gonna talk about some of those features and and show some, examples because I think it really it really no matter where you are in in your publishing journey, in your writing and publishing journey, we allow you, even if you’re not familiar at all with print, we kinda walk you right from the very basics, right, to to get through. And if you’re a bit more advanced and have the files all ready to go, you can still take advantage of it.
Jim Azevedo [00:01:27]:
Yeah. Perfect perfect comment. And one thing I wanted to mention too, Mark, and you might not even be aware of this, but before Draft2Digital acquired Smashwords, like, when I finally, you know, learned that this was going to happen Yeah. Mark Coker, Smashwords founder, took me aside, and he was like, wait until you see what Draft2Digital is doing with their D2D Print service. That was, like, couple couple years before I came out of beta.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:01:49]:
Oh, wow. And and it is so, yeah, so amazing because I I remember prior to the merger, having great discussions with Mark and doing collaborative stuff. I mean, Draft2Digital and Smashwords had worked on some author promotion collaborations together previously because we recognized, you know, if we could work together to help authors, then, we’re all that many steps ahead.
Jim Azevedo [00:02:09]:
Absolutely. And print is such a big part of that conversation with being a self published author as well. Now before we get into it, I wanna remind everybody, I’ll state it once again in case anybody joined late, that this is a prerecorded webinar because, like, literally, a, 90% of the team is going to be out when this airs live on September 19th. Well, we had those, like, 3 different conferences where we’re going to be. However, you can still ask your questions live in the comment section as the video plays because we’ve got a couple of staffers who are awesome. They’re gonna be there in the comments, and they can answer your questions live. Alright?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:02:46]:
Yeah. I love that too. So so yeah. So even
Jim Azevedo [00:02:49]:
though we’re prerecorded hey, everyone. Thanks for watching. Yeah. Thanks for tuning in again week after week after week. So let’s get into it. Are we talking about print books in the first place? Isn’t an ebook good enough?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:03:01]:
No. So so here’s the thing. So Draft2Digital, obviously, and Smashwords was founded upon the principle of, hey. Let’s make it easy for authors to get their books into this new ebook market. Let’s make it super simple. Take a word document, upload it, make it into a beautiful professional EPUB for yourself to use for distribution, whatever. But here’s the reality is most people who read I mean, most people don’t read, but most people who do read still read print books. Yeah.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:03:28]:
A lot more people are reading print books still than ebooks. That’s not to say that there aren’t millions and millions of e book readers around the world Right. And that ebooks aren’t awesome and and amazing because I can, you know, take my phone or or my Kobo and travel, and I can have, you know, 100 and 100 of books loaded on this nice little thing to write. But the majority of readers still read print, and there is nothing like holding a print book in your hand. There is there’s this magic. And here’s the other benefit of a print book too is when you’re on a on a subway or on a bus or out in public and and somebody’s reading your book on a Kindle, a Nook, a Kobo, or Apple device, whatever it happens to be on their phone, you can’t tell. You just think that they’re on some sort of device. But when they’re reading a print book, the cover is there, and it’s kind of marketing and advertising for you.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:04:17]:
Not to mention, I’ve been doing a lot more in person events, especially since, since we’ve been allowed to go out in public and mix and make with people post pandemic and and doing a lot, especially this summer of 2024. And, there’s nothing like a nice signed copy of of your book and and and going out doing some of those local events, as well. So getting access to author copies is also a really, important attribute. But the reason why this is important for us at Draft2Digital is we wanted to take the same approach to what we did with ebooks and say, let’s assume you have a manuscript ready to go, but you’re not sure what to do. You don’t have access to formatting for the print cover for the interior. What can we do to get you started with just having your manuscript, you know, ideally polished and and obviously a beautiful, cover ready to go? And I’m talking about a front cover ready to go.
Jim Azevedo [00:05:15]:
Yeah. That’s perfect. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons I’ll be out next week is because I’m going to be giving a presentation on how GraphQL helps you sell more books and save more time. So
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:05:27]:
Yeah. This is perfect. You wanna talk, about, working with libraries and and bookstores. And and one of the ways, obviously, is we distribute your ebooks to, lot so many different library systems, what half dozen or more have library systems, as well as Right. D2D print. You can, get author copies, so you can do, you know, consignment, as well with your local bookstores.
Jim Azevedo [00:05:50]:
Right. And this is this is an update to to what you may have experienced 10 years ago where you’d have to order a bunch of books and have them stocked in your garage and and boxes. Yeah.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:06:00]:
We’re
Jim Azevedo [00:06:00]:
talking about print on demand here where you don’t have to have this huge inventory of books. Yeah. You can order what works for you.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:06:07]:
Yeah. And the and the the way that it works with D2D print is you load the file. It gets loaded as a print on demand file. It gets into distribution system, ultimately ends up in Ingram’s distribution system, which is, the world’s largest English language distributor of print books. And so when a customer finds this book online, whether it’s Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Chapters Indigo here in Canada, you know, a whole bunch of different online bookstores because Ingram does supply most English language bookstores, particularly in, North America, somebody places that order, that book gets printed, and it gets shipped to the customer charged by that retail site, and you don’t pay anything for that. What happens is there are costs involved because it’s a chain. Right? Unlike unlike with the ebooks where you keep most of the margin, there’s the print cost, and then there’s the distributor cost, and then there’s the wholesaler cost, and then with the bookstore cost. So what we show you then, of course, is this is the money you make from Draft2Digital every time the book sells, and that’s the magic and beauty of of print on demand.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:07:10]:
You don’t need to print I mean, you don’t have to print a single copy if you if you don’t want to. I mean but, usually, you wanna take a a look at it and make sure it looks good, right, like a a a proof copy.
Jim Azevedo [00:07:21]:
And a reader can go into a store or even they can go into their local indie bookstore. They can ask for your book. If the bookshop owner says, well, we’re sorry. We don’t have that. But we can look it up in our catalog so that they don’t have to physically have your book on their store shelves because it’s print on demand file. Is that
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:07:36]:
right? They could, they could they could order it. They could special order it in because it is available through a wholesaler that deals with pretty much every single bookstore in North America.
Jim Azevedo [00:07:46]:
Okay. Awesome. Well, that sounds good. Should we show them how it works?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:07:50]:
Yeah. Of course. So I’m gonna take the start off with the basics, assuming, okay, you’ve already taken advantage of, Draft2Digital, EPUB. Right? You’ve loaded your word document. You’ve made an EPUB. You’re happy. Your your ebook is out there. Woo hoo.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:08:04]:
Alright. Now I want a print book. So the first screen I’m gonna show you is so this is just a screenshot that just shows, a a new book in my own in my own catalog, in my own, bookshelf with Draft2Digital. And so you see over on the right hand side, you’ve got ebook, print book, audiobook, which sends it off to our partners at, Findaway Voices, and then there’s the promotion tab where you do pricing, etcetera, etcetera. But today, we’re gonna focus on that second tab, the yellow one, print book. So you go into my books, you pick the book from your catalog, and then you click on, print book. And the first screen you’ll see is this screen here. You’ll see, okay, print book.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:08:41]:
Alright. If you’ve never done anything before, it talks a little bit about print book and, a little bit of verbiage about that, and then you can start your print book. And here’s the cool thing depending on where you are in your author journey. So this is the next screen you’ll see. So you see, step 1, details, and then you’ve you see 2, 3, 4, 5, as well with price cover, etcetera approved. And those are the other steps, and and they’ll highlight in yellow just like you see details, when you’re on that screen so you know what screen you’re on. But then you see the title. And over to the right of the title, you’ll notice it says, it says, edit shared metadata and cover.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:09:22]:
And that’s because the front cover image, for promotional purposes and the title, etcetera, and all that information, is the same for the ebook and the print book. Right? So that that’s where that’s shared. And when you first set up your ebook, you would have entered that information. We’re not gonna go there now because you probably already know how to do that. But over here, the next step you see is either I wanna update my print interior, because you can use your ebook file, or on the right, if you have your own print interior, and then we support docdocx, ODP, RTF, and PDF. Now usually when you have a print interior, it’s usually a print ready PDF. So if you have that ready to go, you can load it right there. And then below you see the the release date, you can have a separate release date for the print book, then the ebook, and then the description, etcetera.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:10:12]:
So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna assume that I just loaded my ebook. I’m happy with my ebook or whatever, and I’m gonna use the same file I loaded for my ebook to make the print book to make it as easy as possible. So the next screen, you know, you click on that, and you’re gonna see the screen pop up. It’ll probably take about 30 seconds, to about a minute, and then you get to a default screen that looks pretty much something like this. It’s a D2D simple print interior. You’ll notice the paper color choices are cream and white, and, so it’s default, selected cream right now. You have the trim size, and and we can choose from about, oh, about 10 different trim sizes at this point in time, and that may change over time as we continue to grow this program. But you’ll see this trim size is 5.5 times 8.5.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:11:00]:
So somewhere in that realm, 6 by 9 is usually standard for trade paperbacks. The template, which I’ll get back to in a second, is D2D simple. Very simple template. As you can see right there, you got the chapter header. The the text is is justified. You’ve got, you know, the the page numbers, etcetera, etcetera, and and the title of the book. And then you can get into advanced editing, and I will talk about advanced editing in just a minute because you can see all the different things you can do. But right now, let’s say, hey.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:11:31]:
This is D2D simple. I want something a little bit fancier. So I I hover over that choose a template style, and I pick something else. And then I hit apply changes, And what you’ll see is this is, hard line. So I I picked hard line from the drop down, and what you’ll notice is, very specifically, the header over on the left has changed. It’s got some fancy graphics in there, and you’ll notice there’s a drop cap. So the first word I, in in that is now a a large drop cap. So that’s an example.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:12:01]:
There are so many other, interiors. This is just an example of a few of them. This is Nevermore, which comes under mystery, so it’s got the creepy trees over on the left. And, again, you got drop caps. And you’ll notice the title and subtitle are formatted a little bit different. The subtitle’s below, the title in this particular format. And then you move over to this is the classy mystery. I I really like the, the classy look of that header, with the silent screens and the Yeah.
Jim Azevedo [00:12:31]:
It gives kind of a historical look to it.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:12:33]:
Yeah. Exactly. It’s really neat. And then and then, of course, you know, fantasy. This is a scroll. So, again, you can choose that. So those are just some of the and as you pick a template and hit apply changes, you see it right there. And you can page through and see how different chapters look.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:12:48]:
Right? Because this is just the that opening introduction of the book. But this is where it gets really fun and really fancy. So you can include a table of contents, for example. You’ll see a little checkbox there, if you didn’t already include that in your, document, and chances are you probably didn’t if it was an EPUB file. But then when you click on advanced, there’s so many choices here, and this is where you can really get into the nitty gritty. So over on the left, you see page numbers and headers, and numbered pages start on. And you can say where and you see the drop down there. Where do the number pages start? Does it start with the dedication? Does it start with the title page? Does it start with the first chapter? Does it start with, you know, the next note? So you can say where you want the page numbering to begin.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:13:34]:
Then when you get into chapters and scenes, this is where you can say the beginning of chapters, I want drop caps, and that’s where you saw that larger I font, that, you know, drops down into the body of the text or a phrase cap. And a phrase cap is basically it’s the first few words of the first sentence, all uppercase. Right? And or or none if you don’t want any of that fanciness. And then the beginning of scene declaration. So within a chapter, if you have a scene break that’s usually recognized by default by 3 carriage returns in your word documents, the so the scene and and, again, you can tell, you can tell us when you’re loading the manuscript how to how to interpret that for for when you first load the manuscript in ebook format. So, at the beginning of a scene, you can have you’ll notice the default here was drop cap for chapters and phrase cap for the beginning of a new scene. And then the body text, this is where it can get even more sophisticated. Do you want to use hyphens or not? Do you wanna hyphenate, at the end, like, a a longer word that’s gonna get hyphenated? So you can choose to hyphenate yes or no.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:14:44]:
This one is chosen no. I don’t want hyphenation. And then you can you can do widow and orphan control. And we were discussing this before the recording, and so this is what, for people who aren’t for this is these are terms used in, print book layout, by publishers, by by professional designers. So a widow occurs when the last line of a paragraph is not able to fit at the bottom of a page or a column. Instead, it sits at the top of the next page looking out of place. These almost sound like they’re very, these terms should probably need to be updated.
Jim Azevedo [00:15:20]:
They’re a little sad, aren’t they?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:15:23]:
And an orphan, is is the exact opposite of a widow. It’s when the first line of a paragraph sits at the bottom of a page by itself as well. So, so, again, you can control, those widows and orphans with with the numeric keypad, as well. So you can change it from 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, and then what you do is you just hit apply changes, see if that looks to your specifications. So that’s that’s some of the really advanced features that you can do. So, again, you don’t need to pay an interior designer. If you have, great. You just get them to send your print ready file, but if you haven’t, you can still use the same file you used for your EPUB.
Jim Azevedo [00:16:06]:
Yeah. And then, Mark, you could flip through every one of those pages. Right? Like, all the your entire book if you wanted to.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:16:11]:
You can preview the entire book online to make sure it looks perfect. And so, that’s that’s a great thing to do. And I do I do recommend that if you change the style and you change the format, go to a place where you have scene breaks. Go to a new chapter. Make sure that you know, just because the first chapter looks really good to me doesn’t mean that it works for the other chapters in the book. So you you really wanna give that a good a good go because once you commit, and then and we’ll get to this in a bit when you go go to order your author copy, that sends the files to the printer that we’re partnering with. And then it’s locked in place for the obviously, you to order, either a proof copy or to approve the proof digitally. And I do recommend, if you’ve never done this before, seeing the book in your hand, it’s it’s so amazing.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:16:59]:
Sometimes there’s things you don’t see on the screen, but you notice on a personal page. So sometimes that extra cost and buffering in the extra several weeks it may take to to make sure you can get your copy back in time and then go back and make the changes that you may need to make, it’s probably well worth your while. I know I’m a procrastinator. I don’t do it enough. I don’t do it really enough, but, don’t do it like I do. Do it the proper way.
Jim Azevedo [00:17:24]:
Don’t do what I do. Do what I say.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:17:26]:
Yeah. Exactly.
Jim Azevedo [00:17:27]:
I wanted to ask you. So when you make those little changes, do you have to click apply changes every single time?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:17:32]:
Yeah. In order to see the preview. So you can go you can make numerous changes at once and then hit up or you can make one change, apply change, see what it looks like. Okay. Now I’m gonna try another change and then see. Because that way you can layer in the changes so you know the difference each time. So it’s up to you how you prefer to how you prefer to do that. But, Jim
Jim Azevedo [00:17:50]:
Okay.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:17:51]:
So we talked about we talked about, I loaded my my word document. I made my EPUB. Now I can make a interior from the exact same file. But, oh, no. What if I don’t have a cover file for but for the print book?
Jim Azevedo [00:18:05]:
Bogus days, Mark. What are you gonna do about that?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:18:08]:
Well, we’re gonna use Draft2Digital. That’s what we’re gonna do because
Jim Azevedo [00:18:10]:
we don’t
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:18:11]:
need to to to do that. Well, again, to try and make it easier for authors, particularly if you’ve never done this before, if you Yeah. If your designer only designed a beautiful front cover for you
Jim Azevedo [00:18:21]:
Yeah.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:18:22]:
We have the ability to automatically so what we do is we take the front cover file you’ve already loaded, and we automatically make a print ready file. Machine perfect print ready file based on the the the trim and the page count that you put in there, and and and we layer it over. So this is just an example you yeah. It’s it’s amazing. So this is what you’re seeing that high level screenshots. When I first went to the cover, it took the front cover that my beautiful, designer Juan Padron designed for me, and then it took the most prominent color in that front cover, which is black, and it did the wraparound. So you’ll notice the thick spine. This this book is almost 400 pages.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:19:07]:
Well, actually, it’s 420 some pages based on the automatic formatting that was done here. And so it does the spine, the exact, size. You can see the the the lines for where the book’s gonna fold, where where the the trim is going to be. Everything’s inside, the lines. But if for some reason if for some reason the front cover had my name, for example, outside the trim line, then I could go back and and and, you know, reload a a front cover where it’s not so close to the edge. But what you’ll notice is you can see, matte or glass finish as your choices. You can you can pick a whole bunch of different options and choices here, but what I wanted to show you is, again, just like in the interior, this is the default that’s the machine spits out without me pushing any buttons. And if I’m happy with that, I’m happy with that.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:19:56]:
It took my author profile picture, and it automatically inserted it, and it inserted my bio Nice. Etcetera. But then I can go in and I can make adjustments to it. And this is what happened after I went in and adjusted a few things. So what I did is I changed the upper spine text from my name in proper case to the title in upper case, and I did the lower spine text as my name in uppercase character. So that’s customizable. I also loaded, what’s called the colophone or the publisher logo. I loaded the publisher logo, start publishing, as a a transparent, PNG file.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:20:31]:
So, again, it was white on on a black background. So when I first loaded it, it was black, transparent black one, and I couldn’t see it. I went, whoops. I need the letters to be white. So I went back and changed it, loaded it again. Just took an extra minute for me to do that. And then, I changed the font. I there’s so many font choices, you can, change.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:20:50]:
You can change the color of the font, the size of the font, and even the font style. There’s a whole bunch of choices. But what I did is I made that text at the at the top a little bit bigger, punched it up. I probably wanna punch up that text in the middle. It’s a little bit small, but I can customize that. I can change the author photo. I can update the biography, etcetera. And that really, I mean, that really makes it, customizable.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:21:13]:
So, again, yes, I do work with a cover designer, and I have a cover designer who does sometimes does only front covers for me and sometimes does full covers. And and let me let me show you a trick that I use, Jim, is when it’s a larger book, like this is a 400 page book or 200 or 300 page book, I usually invest in paying my cover designer extra money to design the full cover for me because it’s just easier for me. But when I’m doing, like, this is like a short story collection of 3 short stories that I did through Draft2Digital Print. Nice nice matte finish. I only had a front cover. But what I did is and because it’s so thin and I didn’t wanna have to spend all the mic because I’m not gonna be charging much for it. I didn’t wanna spend the money on it, so I used D2D, cover wrap, automatic cover wrap. And again cheaper pro.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:21:59]:
Yeah. And I I just went with the default text on this one because it’s like, hey. It’s a it’s a $5 print book. Right? So it’s not, it’s just a nice little a nice little handy thing that I use for promotional purposes. So, again, if you’ve never done a print book, maybe experiment. This is this is what? A 14,000 word, you know, 3 short stories. So you can try it out like that, and it doesn’t cost so much. Right? The author copies don’t cost me as much, as well.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:22:23]:
So that’s that’s kinda cool thing. Yeah.
Jim Azevedo [00:22:25]:
I was talking to customer support because I was trying to get some averages. Like, how long does it take to to publish an ebook? Or how long does it take to make a print on demand file? How long does it take for the full wrap around? I mean, you can do those things. You can create an ebook in under 5 minutes. You can create a a POD file in under 5 minutes. You can create a wrap around cover in under a minute. But you may not wanna do it that quickly because of all of those intricacies that you talked about, of all those different things that you can do with our templates. And Yeah. With the automated, wraparound cover option, I when you say automated, but that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with it.
Jim Azevedo [00:22:58]:
As Mark was showing you, there’s so many different things that you could do to play around with that wraparound cover image, and we encourage you to play around with it. Make it yours.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:23:07]:
Yeah. And and if there’s something that again, we didn’t have the ability to load a, a publisher, logo. It were it was you. It was it was our beta users. Our early beta print users basically were using it. They were playing around saying, oh, I’d love to be able to put my publisher logo on the spine and, emailed our service team. And enough authors requested that that, our development team made that a priority to allow you to add that. So the features and functions I mean, when it first launched, you couldn’t modify the font or style.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:23:40]:
So, again, based on requests from our early users, we’ve we’ve updated it. So, yeah, like Jim says, do play around. Now if you have a designer that you’re working with, once you load your file, whether it’s a print ready interior or whatever, we actually have right on that screen, that that screen before the preview I was just showing you, you can see, you can download a template. And this is an example of the template that I downloaded. It’s it’s basically an image file that I send to my cover designer who tells them, okay. Here’s the here here it is in inches and millimeters. So, again, you know, I’m Canadian, so some some part of the letters you centimeters and millimeters. It’s got the spine width.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:24:22]:
It’s got the, basically the pixels. Like, the 300 pixels per inch, obviously, is is for print. You don’t wanna go below 300 pixels per inch. And so the full size template, that’s the dimensions for it. Here’s the where the spine’s gonna go. And then the area, the red area is the area that’s expected to be in the trim area that’s gonna get trimmed off most likely. The blue area is it’s a trim safety zone. So it’s like, don’t get too close to this.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:24:47]:
It might get trimmed. This gets really it might be close too close to the edge. And then, of course, you can see there’s a there’s a spot where we’re gonna automatically put a machine perfect ISBN. And, again, if you put in your own ISBN, we’ll create a barcode for you automatically. If you don’t, we will supply an ISBN for free and put in the barcode for you. So you can give this to your designer, and the designer can use the template to make sure before they give it back to you that it’s gonna load perfectly. But then when you load it, again, you’ll see let’s pretend this was one that was made made by a designer. You’ll actually see the trim.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:25:21]:
You’ll see, yep. No. Okay. Everything’s within the trim lines and stuff like that.
Jim Azevedo [00:25:25]:
Cool. So it’s gonna guide you along through the entire process.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:25:28]:
Yeah.
Jim Azevedo [00:25:29]:
And I’m glad you you added the the, the part there about the barcode. I was gonna ask you about that, but it should beat me to it.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:25:34]:
Yeah. Well, I I saw the barcode space in my oh, yeah. The barcode space. And, and, again, we make it machine perfect because, again, what we wanna make sure is that by the time you finish what you’re doing on the screen and you approve the digital, we send that to our partner. And instead of the partner having to review it and spend several days checking it, we send a machine perfect to try to expedite the partner actually accepting the file in their system. And, again That’s what we want. That scannable barcode with the the high resolution machine perfect, actually because because, again, in the early days, we allowed the toggle of of adding your own. And, unfortunately, we we did have, enough users that weren’t able to provide a proper barcode that was accepted, and it got rejected by a partner.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:26:24]:
And so what we did is is we tried to make it, default easy. No. We’ll make the barcode machine perfect. So Yeah. So if your designer is designing, a barcode, some some some authors will have a designer that, designs a designs their book with a barcode built in. Some of them, will will have an alternate, no barcode for when they wanna use Draft2Digital print. For example, if you lose it using a local printer, right, because I I do use a local printer for some of my stuff up here in Canada, I I don’t wanna put the barcode on myself. We dropped the digital.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:26:56]:
I just let Draft2Digital put it on. So I have two versions of the cover, usually.
Jim Azevedo [00:27:00]:
Okay. Makes sense.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:27:02]:
So
Jim Azevedo [00:27:03]:
Alright. What’s that next step?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:27:06]:
Well, the next step of course, I didn’t grab any screenshots, but the next step, of course, are you finalize, you approve, and then you set the price. And you wanna set the price based on there’s a few factors. We actually we we do a default, and we recommend a price to you. We estimate the the print cost based on the page number. So Yeah. The bigger the book, the thicker the book, the more pages, the more it’s gonna cost. And then then you put in your retail, and and, obviously, you can’t set a retail price that that is below what the cost to print the book is because we don’t want we’re not in the business of of burning your money and our money. We want this to be we want this to be a profitable venture.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:27:48]:
And so what happens is you put in your price. So let’s say, for example, just to make math easy, that the print cost is $10 for the book, and and I set the the book price at 14.99. Well, the the I may not be able to set it at 14.99 because, I’m trying to remember how the math works, but there are there are like, you have to leave room for the discount for Sure. The wholesaler that we distribute through as well as for the bookstore, and then that eats in into that or that adds the cost, makes it a little bit higher. But what we will show you right up front, if you put in 19.99 and the print cost is $10, you’re gonna make 9.99 every time this book sells.
Jim Azevedo [00:28:27]:
There’s a pricing calculator there to help kind of
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:28:29]:
that pricing. And we even have before you do your print book on on our website, we even have a pricing calculator. So, and I think it’s even under our FAQ page where you can go and use it and say, well, what would it cost me for a 400 page book? What, you know, what would I have to set the the print price for? And and so that’s one of the things that we do. But then when when you finish that, when you set the price and you’ve you’ve picked the release date, etcetera, etcetera, and you can set up you can set up a preorder. You do need to have all the files ready to go to send to the printer so they can have it all set up and ready to go. You can set up a preorder, but then you can also order author copies. And this is kinda what it looks like for this is a different book because, again, I was just walking through those steps to get screenshots.
Jim Azevedo [00:29:10]:
Okay.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:29:11]:
This is a screenshot from an earlier book that I put through draft2digitalprint. And so what you can see is when I look at the book, you’ll see that main screen, ebook, print book, audiobook. But below that, once I’ve clicked on the print book tab, you’ll see the author copies are ready to order. And if I go into order now, this screen pops up. And what you can see is that this book, based on 352 pages, my unit cost is $5.91 US. So if I go and want to order a copy, I can click add to cart. I can change the quantity. I can even change the quantity once it gets into my shopping cart.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:29:47]:
Then I know that for I’m I’m just gonna round it up to $6 in my head because it’s easier for my little brain. So it’s gonna cost me $6 per author copy, and then I can order them. And so when you when you put the author copies in the order, these are the copies that are that are getting printed to be sent to you. Okay. And you add them to your cart, and you can do one. You can do, you can do multiples, you know, 10, 20, 30, whatever whatever number you wanna put in there. It’ll show you what the cost would be. And then this is really important.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:30:20]:
If you’re a US, author, you’ll have a whole bunch of choices. Right? You can use media mail. You can use the United States Postal Service. You can use a courier system. You can get expedited. So you can go from the cheapest possible way to ship books, the best price possible, which is through media mail. Right? That’s the the best rate you can get. Uh-huh.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:30:40]:
Or the most expensive, you know, delivered on a silver platter to your house. Well, it’s not
Jim Azevedo [00:30:45]:
A couple days.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:30:46]:
Exclusive. Like, the minute it’s done at the printer and and and the primary printers are in Tennessee. So the minute it’s out out of the printer, it’s gonna get put on the fastest possible courier courier. So you can spend a lot on printing. You can, shipping. You can spend a little bit. Now a trick I use as an author Cool. Is when I let’s say my my print book is $6 and I’ve ordered 10 copies and just for lack of a better term, my my shipping costs $20 or something like that.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:31:14]:
I’ll take the $20 cost. I’ll divide it by the number of copies I’ve ordered, and I’ll add that to my print cost. So when as a business person, as an author, when I go, well, my print cost is really $8 per book. Or where I again, I’m just making that math up in my head. And then that way I know I can’t sell them for less than $8 because the cost of the book and the cost of shipping is gonna go up. So that’s something authors should should really pay attention to.
Jim Azevedo [00:31:39]:
Okay. Well, that’s good to know about the different that’s really good to know about the different, author copy shipping options now that we have.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:31:47]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Jim Azevedo [00:31:48]:
Is there, like, a funky proof printed on these author copies? Does it say proof on there somewhere?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:31:55]:
No. No. Not at all. We don’t do that at all. So whether you’ve ordered so if you order a proof copy, and you can order a proof copy before you enable it for distribution to the to the print partner, it doesn’t want that little ugly band that says not for retail sale. It’s a regular copy of the book. Just looks the exact same as it’s going to look when it’s good good for the while. Okay.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:32:14]:
And, again, ordering your proof copy, you choose, we used to by default, go with the fastest possible shipping. We actually lost money on that because we wanted to save author’s money, but author said, no. I’d rather have choice.
Jim Azevedo [00:32:26]:
Yeah. One choice, but I need it right away. Yeah.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:32:28]:
Yeah. So we now give you the choice. You can get it at the the lowest possible shipping cost or the highest possible shipping cost. It’s completely up to you how fast it, takes to get there. But you can order your proof copy. It will not have that ugly band that you see from KDP print on author books. So that’s kind of a that’s kind of a nice benefit. The other thing I should mention is in print books, if your manuscript, rounds, ends up being an odd number, we will round it to an even number because print books have to have an even number of pages.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:33:00]:
There’s a front and a back to every page, right, in a three-dimensional world. So so we can’t get a can’t get around the three-dimensional world. So that will happen. So if you’re like, well, my book’s only 355 pages. Sorry. We had to make it 356 because that’s just the way the print the print cookie crumbles.
Jim Azevedo [00:33:17]:
I did not know that.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:33:18]:
Yeah. So that’s I mean, so that may be like but it’s an extra page. Sorry. The printer requires in the physical world that we actually have back of a blank page.
Jim Azevedo [00:33:27]:
Yeah. Completely different world than the ebook world
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:33:30]:
Yeah.
Jim Azevedo [00:33:31]:
You know, based on my history. So but it’s good to learn about all of this stuff. What if I what if I need to make some changes? How what can I do, Mark?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:33:40]:
So here’s the other, limitation in the print book world, in the real book world. In the ebook world, you can go in and change your book a 1000 times a day, 5000, 10000. There is no limit. I mean, I as fast as you can type and key do keystroke. And it’s fine because it’s all digital. In the physical world, the print partner we work with actually charges us money every time we initiate a change to the print book files, not a change to the metadata, so the description and all the all the metadata, but a change to the print interior or the print cover. Okay. So every time that happens, they charge us $25.
Jim Azevedo [00:34:21]:
So the actual product is off.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:34:23]:
Here’s what we do. Once per quarter, we will give you a free change that’s on us that we’ve paid for so that you can make some changes to to the to the file. If you require to make more than that, then we can’t we can’t afford to cover all of your expenses. We actually have to cover our costs because we want to again, we’re not charging you anything for the service. We’re giving free ISBN. We’re doing all the free tools. We want to be able to cover the cost because let’s say you go in and make a 100 changes in an hour on your print book. Well, that’s gonna cost us a 100 times $25.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:35:08]:
That’s a lot of money.
Jim Azevedo [00:35:10]:
If you up all those changes for Yeah.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:35:12]:
So to do that one. So that’s one of the reasons why we had to limit it. But Yeah. If you do need to make a change so, again, the thing I would recommend authors do is make sure it’s as good as perfect as it as it can be to go. And, again, you can still make changes. So if you’ve ordered your proof copy and you haven’t verified it and you need to make changes, you can still make you can still make changes, right, without that without that charge. The charge only happens once you’ve approved and say, yeah. This is it.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:35:40]:
This is the final file. I’m good to go. Yep. That’s the only time that we get charged. And, again, if, you know, we have to charge you, except once a quarter, again, stuff happens. It happens in the in the traditional publishing world all the time. You know, printing errors happen. There’s a typo here or something that you wanna fix or another modification you wanna update.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:36:01]:
You know? So up up to 4 times, a year, you can make those changes, and we’ll cover the costs for you. So, again and that’s only because if it was up to us and it was our print system and we were printing the book ourselves, we wouldn’t charge you for that. But, you know, we we have to work with partners who are the best in the business at doing this because that that’s what they do. And, unfortunately, their process requires that charge, so we have to we have to pass that along.
Jim Azevedo [00:36:27]:
Well, it’s a physical artifact. It’s it’s gonna cost money to to make that change.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:36:31]:
Yeah. Their systems, they actually have to do things in their systems to update the files, and that takes labor, and they have to cover the cost of that. I I you gotta respect that.
Jim Azevedo [00:36:41]:
Sure.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:36:41]:
For sure.
Jim Azevedo [00:36:42]:
Okay. Cool. And I wanna remind people too that if you run into a snag or you have a question during any of this, that, you know, the industry’s best support team will have your back the entire way. They’re they’re used to this stuff.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:36:57]:
Yeah. 100%. Yeah. And they are they’re so amazing at helping. And so here’s the thing is I use this all the time, and I still run into questions and issues. So when I reach out to the support team, I’m so appreciative, that how how patient they are at helping me or reminding me, like, how do I do this? I can’t
Jim Azevedo [00:37:15]:
They’re like, it’s you again?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:37:16]:
Yeah. Yeah. A Paul Guy from Canada again. So the other thing too, I did mention I mentioned the shipping, cost. So in the US, you have all of these amazing choices. Here in Canada, for example, I only have a single choice. There’s a there’s a single courier that and so it’s a it’s a default price cost. So when I order print copies from Draft2Digital, I make sure I order enough copies.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:37:39]:
Like, I’m not gonna, you know, necessarily if I’m if I’m doing author events and I wanna have a bunch of author copies, I maybe will order 10 copies so that I can I can amortize my print or my shipping costs into the cost of those books? K. You know what I mean? So sometimes it’s a little bit cheaper to order a few more copies than it is just to order 1.
Jim Azevedo [00:37:58]:
Yeah. And for folks outside of the US, they can order off the copies from regions that are close to their home base.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:38:05]:
Yeah. Yeah. Because there are printers in the UK, and there’s printers in Australia. There there are printers in other countries on That we’re working with. We’re so close to the US that Canada ends up leveraging the US printers. Yeah. There are no printers with our partner in Canada. So, therefore, as a as a Canadian, I’m getting my stuff coming in from the US as I often do with many of the other service providers too.
Jim Azevedo [00:38:26]:
Right. Yeah. So I would I would what I was trying to get to is, like, if you’re if you’re based in Australia or New Zealand or, you know, in Europe somewhere, you’re wondering if you have to order your author copies all the way from the US and then pay for those shipping charges. No. You don’t. We have partners that were kinda spread out.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:38:42]:
Yes.
Jim Azevedo [00:38:43]:
And I I can’t remember the exact number of countries, but I wanna say it’s a couple dozen now at least.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:38:48]:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. There’s many, many countries. Like, the primary, English language countries around the world except except for Canada. And, you know, overseas, away from the United States.
Jim Azevedo [00:38:58]:
We’ll fix that for you.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:39:00]:
Oh, come on. Even if you’re in Hawaii, it’s gonna cost you more. Yeah. Yeah. That’s part of the US.
Jim Azevedo [00:39:06]:
Right. Well, I’m getting an education.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:39:11]:
Yeah. That’s kind of that’s kind of print, and I think we’ve covered the majority of of of, you know, looking at what how it looks for prints or or how it works.
Jim Azevedo [00:39:21]:
Oh, there is a question I wanted to ask. I can’t remember. If you covered it already, my apologies. But if you’re someone like me and you’re you’re going through this process, and you’re being super careful, I’m I’m I’m one of those guys that’s just, like, super cautious when I’m doing anything on the on the web because I’m afraid I’m gonna do it wrong. I’m gonna break the Internet. But then, oh, my little girl’s calling me or, oh, my dog is having a fit because saw a squirrel outside or just whatever. Can I pause it and then come back to it later?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:39:51]:
Oh, yeah. Of course. Yeah. So that’s a great question, Jim. So you’ve done the first screen. You’ve picked the the the interior, but you’re not ready to do the cover because it’s time to pick up your girl from school or you gotta go, walk the dog or whatever it is that you have to do. Yeah. You save it, and then you can come back to it later.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:40:11]:
The the so that that the same thing for ebooks. Right? You can go in. You can make your updates. And, again, if you’re making your updates to an existing book, it’s not until you go to commit that and actually sort of republish it that those updates get sent to the printer. So you can kind of experiment with making changes while the live one’s still out in in in the wild. Right? Let’s say you you got a new cover design and you’re so excited and you wanna change the cover. You you can go and see what those changes are, but you’re not you don’t have to commit to those changes until that final step.
Jim Azevedo [00:40:41]:
Okay. That makes me feel, like, so much better. I’m so much more comfortable. I I I didn’t go through there and and play with my book that I keep talking about that I don’t touch for years that I’m
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:40:52]:
And you can leave it there for years. You can. I actually have some files, some example files that I’m typing. I’m not ready for this one yet.
Jim Azevedo [00:40:59]:
Alright. Mark, this has been wonderful. Like, you teach me something every single day that I have the opportunity and the pleasure to work with you and to talk with you about different aspects of the industry. So, again, man, thank you so much for making some time today. Always.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:41:14]:
Did we cover it all?
Jim Azevedo [00:41:14]:
Is there anything else that we’re leaving out there?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:41:17]:
We probably forgot something, but I think we covered, the I’d say we got at least 85 to 90% of that area. There’s probably some intricacies we haven’t even touched upon, but I think we’ve covered all the big
Jim Azevedo [00:41:30]:
ones. Okay. Great. And, again, folks, for those of you if you joined late, this is a prerecorded webinar, but you could still even if right now before we close down, if you have a lingering question, pop it into the comments really quick. And there are folks in the comment section who are going to answer that question for you. As we come to a close, I’m gonna go through the, the obligatory YouTube stuff. Thanks for joining us week in week out. If you guys could do us a solid and like, share, comment, and subscribe to Self Publishing Insiders, we promise to bring you more experts to help you along your author career, to help you navigate the publishing industry, and we will bring you more webinars like this.
Jim Azevedo [00:42:16]:
Mark and I have been talking about some different topics that we can share with all of you. Also, bookmark dtdlive.com. On that page, you’ll you’ll receive a countdown timer for when the next episode is going to be. You’ll also learn about our topic and our guests for the next week. And, finally, Mark, if you are just maybe investigating, kinda dipping your toe in the self publishing waters, why not just sign up for a free drafted digital account simply by going to draft, the number 2. Write it down.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:42:54]:
I’m I’m signing. I’m signing up my account. Okay.
Jim Azevedo [00:42:58]:
.Com. Thanks very much. For everyone out there, thanks again for joining us. We really appreciate you and your time, especially we’re going to leave you with a 30 second commercial spot for, would you guess, D2D print if I can only find it. I know it’s around here somewhere. There it is. I got it here, Mark. This time, I’m gonna click it because we’re only clicking at the same time.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:43:23]:
I’m not touching that. My hands are right here.
Jim Azevedo [00:43:25]:
I’ll see you in the green room, buddy. See everybody else next week.
Kevin Tumlinson [00:43:30]:
Ebooks are great, but there’s just something about having your words in print. Something you can hold in your hands, put on a shelf signed for a reader. That’s why we created D2D Print, a print on demand service that was built for you. We have free beautiful templates to give your book a pro look, and we can even convert your ebook cover into a full wraparound cover for print. So many options for you and your books. And you can get started right now at trap to digital.com. That’s it for this week’s self publishing insiders with Draft2Digital. Be sure to subscribe to us wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with your will be author friends, and start, build, and grow your own self publishing career right now at draft2digital.com.