Welcome to the first of many account migration updates. It’s been a busy couple of years and we are actively moving author and publisher accounts from the Smashwords system to the Draft2Digital system.
To keep up with these updates, please visit our main Migration Updates page.
Background
A little background is needed to understand the context of most of the information below and in future Missives.
Our ultimate goal is to retire the Smashwords book ingestion and distribution systems. These systems are fully redundant with the Draft2Digital systems. Maintaining two systems that essentially do identical tasks uses a lot of resources throughout the company. Once we can remove this duplication, we will have many more resources to apply to improvements, upgrades, and brand new tools across all parts of the company. This is why migration has been our highest priority ever since we completed the merger of our two companies over two years ago.
Integrate
In order to migrate accounts and books from one system to another, it becomes an essential requirement that the two systems can communicate with each other. Although the two systems substantially solve the same problems, they do that in sometimes fundamentally different ways. It took a long time to build this interface up. Much longer than originally anticipated. However, it’s a robust system that allows us to expand its capabilities to ultimately support every kind of account situation.
Solution
Once we built this interface, we then had to decide who we should migrate first. The obvious answer is the accounts with the least amount of complication. We made a list of all types of “complications” and labeled them as exclusions. Essentially, any accounts with these features would be invited to migrate their accounts later after we’ve build support for their situation. Examples of these exclusions are users with accounts at both D2D and Smashwords, non-English titles, global price locks, custom series memberships, etc… In all, there are 27 possible exclusions that accounts could be a part of.
Active Migration
This process left us with a very large number of accounts eligible for migration. We began inviting those users at the end of last year. We did this very slowly so that we could identify and fix issues quickly before ramping up to higher rates of invites.
During this process to invite all of those eligible users, we looked at our list of exclusions and considered how we would handle them. A simple example is the accounts with non-English titles. We originally created this exclusion since we have a primarily all English speaking team. We figured that it would be much easier for us to spot issues if we could read the language. Once we were far enough along, this was an easy exclusion to remove and allow these accounts through.
Throughout this process, we’ve had a very low uptake to our invites. Only about 8% of those invited were accepting the invitations. This means we are very quickly running out of accounts to migrate with the account owner being actively present for the process.
Automatic Migration
Because of this, we decided on a process to automatically move accounts that we felt were low risk accounts to migrate. We sent an email about that a couple of weeks ago and plan to begin automatic migrations in early June. When we begin automatic migrations, we’ve decided to start with accounts in reversed last activity order. Essentially, those that haven’t touched their accounts for the longest will be automatically migrated first. That means those that are actively using their accounts will be the last to be automatically migrated. I think this is a good idea since these accounts are the ones that will be happiest when we have more tools in place.
Multi-account users
Simultaneously, we also decided to drop the exclusion related to users with accounts at both D2D and SW that have different email addresses. We figured that these account holders were already managing two accounts (one at D2D and one at SW). If we move them to D2D, they’ll have two accounts, but now we’d be able to create tools at D2D to let authors merge those into one account.
We quickly learned that moving these accounts to D2D before the merge tools were in place was a mistake. We have since re-enabled this exclusion and creating these tools is a high priority. We just released a Series Merge Tool and a Publisher Merge Tool is near completion. Other tools necessary are Contributor Merge Tool, Book Merge Tool, and Account Merge Tool. Once these are complete, we’ll then turn back on the ability for authors with multiple accounts to migrate.
What this will look like for these account holders is that they’ll have multiple accounts at D2D, but there will be a self-serve process to make them into just one account.
A similar situation will be accounts at both D2D and SW that have the same email address. In this case, we’d merge all the SW information into the D2D account and then the merge tools can be used to get rid of all the duplicates.
Progress
We have migrated 10,241 accounts out of 131,291. A total of 94,657 accounts have been invited to migrate. The remaining 36,634 accounts are currently ineligible to migrate because of various exclusions that we don’t currently support.
Invited – waiting on user: 82,555
Invited – waiting on us: 1,840
Migration Processing: 21
Successfully Migrated: 10,241
Ineligible to Migrate: 36,634
Total: 124,126
59,899 Books have been migrated.
Current Activity
Merge Tool for Publishers
Provide a tool in Multi-Book Actions for merging one publisher into another.
Merge Tool for Contributors
Provide a tool in Multi-Book Actions for merging one contributor into another.
Migration News & Roadmap
Establish a Migration News section that is accessible from the D2D website and provided by blog site pages. This will provide updates to the migration and important things to note about what is happening behind the scenes and where things stand for authors and users alike.
Prepare for Automatic Migrations to begin in June
Communications sent as a reminder that users who are eligible can take the questionnaire and move themselves or will be eventually moved by D2D starting in June.
Resolve Duplicate Contributor Names
Creating a script that will automatically resolve all duplicate contributor names created during the migration process.
Recently Completed Items
Added epub reader to Smashwords
D2D sends epub samples for books to Smashwords. To make it easier for readers to read these samples, we added an epub reader right on the Smashwords website. This allows samples to be read without downloading any files.
Merge Tool for Series
Deployed tool to allow for consolidation of your existing series into your preferred organization of series details. Part of a concerted effort to provide multiple tools for merging related items for migrated and regular D2D users. Found under Account -> Multi-Book Actions
Tax processor blocks processing when error returned from tax API
Resolved an issue where migrations were being blocked due to unexpected data which caused the tax handler to raise an error.
Race condition caused 500 error upon migration reset
Some users were affected by a bug where we were unable to reset a pre-migration process that was used to check if their migration could proceed. (We call that process pre-flight testing.) This bug has delayed starting some migrations, but is now resolved.
Known Issues
Duplicate Contributor Names
When accounts are migrated to D2D, a duplicate contributor is being created and is set as the default. This creates a situation where new books might not be connected to the same contributor at Smashwords. We are resolving this issue and then writing a script to clean up the issue for everyone affected.
Sales reports need cleaned up for seven accounts
The race condition recently resolved had the side effect of preventing seven accounts from being able to migrate. A manual process related to some sales report data needs to be done before migrating these seven accounts can begin.
– Kris Austin, CEO