Our first official D2D Ask-Us-Anything was a big success! And we’ll confess, we learned a lot from the experience. There were a few hiccups (mostly around notifcations), but we now have a better idea of what to do next time. So thanks for beign patient and sticking with us as we figure a few things out!
Now sit back, have a cold (or hot) drink at hand, and watch as Draft2Digital’s Three Wise Beards spend the next hour answering questions and providing expertise to help you build and grow your author career! You can also follow along with the complete transcript below the video.
TRANSCRIPT
Read the full transcript below.
You can also DOWNLOAD A PDF of the transcript to open and read alongside the video (file opens in a new window).
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| Mark: | 00:00:00 | All right. Hello. We are live. Welcome to the June, 2019 Draft2Digital Ask Us Anything. This is going to be an hour long program. It’s going to be a combination of questions you guys sent in in advance as well as questions that come from the comments on the Draft2Digital Facebook page. But before we get into that I want to basically talk about who are these three handsome men who are hanging out together here. Dan, why don’t we start with you. |
| Dan: | 00:00:29 | Hey Dan wood. I am the Director of Author Relations at Draft2Digital. |
| Mark: | 00:00:33 | Excellent. And who’s the good looking guy above you on the screen there? |
| Kevin: | 00:00:36 | I am Kevin Tumlinson. I’m the Director of Marketing at Draft2Digital, among other things. So |
| Mark: | 00:00:43 | Excellent. And uh, my name is Mark Lefebvre and I am the director of business development and we’re going to be taking some questions. We also have our good pal Elyssa, who is hanging out in the back end in the wings pulling some of the strings and helping us manage some of this stuff. So we’re going to say, Hey Elyssa, thanks for hanging out with us here too. And uh, we’ll hopefully we’ll be able to convince her to come into the room with us and answer some of your questions that are future one. But right now I just want to give you a bit of an overview of the format. So as we mentioned, we had some of the people who preregistered for this, and submitted some questions, some amazing questions. We had about 500 different questions come in. We’re obviously not gonna be able to answer them all. |
| Mark: | 00:01:22 | There were some questions that were very specific and technical. So uh you’ll be hearing from the draft to digital customer care team if you haven’t already. We’re about, you know, an issue you might’ve been having or whatever. There were some feature requests that have gone into our feature requests channel. We’ll probably send you a note saying thanks for that. Uh, and then we tried to, because some of the questions overlapped, we tried to come up with a summary and say, well these five people ask this kind of question. So we’re going to go back and forth between some of those present questions as well as some of your live questions to keep you guys engaged. So hopefully that gives you guys a bit of an idea of what’s gonna happen. But before we do anything else, I’m going to pop up the very first question that came in. And this was a question that actually came in from Dale. Thanks Dale. The question is for Dan. Uh, I’m, I’m actually directing the question at Dan. What is the biggest missed opportunity on Draft2Digital for most indie authors already using the platform |
| Dan: | 00:02:17 | Ya know, I think there are three things that I see people not using quite enough. The first one I think Mark will agree with me with me about this one cause we both are huge advocates of using territorial pricing. Uh, just you can set your price and all the other currencies however you want. Um, when you have sales, you want to run, uh, the sale in that currency as well. Uh, so the book market is so much bigger than just the US. And so we encourage you to look at the territorial pricing. Um, you know, some of the markets can handle a higher price than others. And so, uh, I would look into that and something that I think is just a really cool tool that we offer. Uh, the second one is preorders. We always harp on preorders, but um, it’s such a powerful tool and so many of our retailers use it for merchandising choices. |
| Dan: | 00:03:05 | And so, uh, at Draft2Digital, you can set up preorders at Barnes and Noble at Apple, at Kobo and Tolino and so you can set that up, have it ready so that when someone finishes your last book, uh, and if they love it, they can go buy the next one and they’ll get it as soon as it’s released. The final thing I would say is our end matter tool. Like I think it’s one of the coolest things we built. Um, you know, for anywhere that we’re distributing your book, we can make a list at the end of your book, of all your other books and include retailer specific links at each retailer. And so the Barnes and Noble version has Barnes and Noble links. Apple has Apple links. That’s just, we’ll save so much time when you add a new book, we’ll go and update all the old books. I mean, hours and hours of time you could be saving. |
| Mark: | 00:03:51 | Cool. That’s fantastic. Thanks so much Dan. And so just a reminder to folks who are watching this live, if a question comes up that you want to ask, maybe it’s a follow up to something really cool that Dan or Kevin just said. Go ahead and, and put that in the comments. So Elyssa’s keeping an eye for out that she’s going to poke us so that we can get that popped up on the screen. Um, but before, um, we look at those, I’m gonna jump over to ask the next question that came in and this is a question that came in from George and this one’s going to be going towards Kevin. So, uh, the question is, I understand the ebook will go out to places checked on the next page. And this is, I think when he’s setting up the book to be published, he says, but how do I check on the results? I guess probably of where this is published. |
| Kevin: | 00:04:33 | Uh, so in on the author dashboard, once you’ve kind of gone through the process, there’s a, there is a, uh, and I, and someone’s going to have to remind me what this page is now called, but there’s a page that actually shows you, uh, the Ebook, the print. It’s like a little dashboard in itself. It’s, you can show a few of your, uh, like all the distribution everywhere—everywhere everything’s going, what’s in what stages. Uh, it’s that kind of the end of that little process on a Draft2Digital.com. When you log into your author dashboard, that’s where you, that’s where you can get the, in your, you can also see that as soon as you lock, log in and click on the my books page, you get, uh, some little icons on the right hand side by the, each title. They tell you what stage a book is in. I hope that answered that question. |
| Mark: | 00:05:20 | It sounds like you did answer that question. That’s really, really cool. Okay. So |
| Kevin: | 00:05:25 | There’s a couple of different ways to do that, in other words. |
| Mark: | 00:05:26 | Yeah. I mean, and, and I think that’s one of the joys is that there are always more than one way of doing something on Draft2Digital, I guess. |
| Kevin: | 00:05:33 | Yeah. Yeah. |
| Mark: | 00:05:34 | For some of the functionality. Okay, cool. |
| Kevin: | 00:05:37 | Always. We give you lots of different ways. |
| Mark: | 00:05:41 | Alrighty. So I’m going to pop up the next question. Uh, this is one, uh, that Angie asked, uh, and it’s one that I am slated to answer. So, uh, in addition to universal links, uh, what’s the benefit of using Draft2Digital to list all our books? Um, great question, Angie. I think so. Well, before I started working, uh, Draft2Digital, I use the, the Draft2Digital book links for a couple of things that I thought was beneficial. Well when it’s automatically created, you get a really ugly, a good, like a combination of letters and numbers, who it’s books2read.com/ you know, it sounds like, like the way you might spell out a belch or something like that. And that’s just the, you know, the systematic computer way of, of creating a, um, unique identifier. But what you can do is you can customize that identifier and, and make it, um, uh, what I call a vanity URL. |
| Mark: | 00:06:31 | Or you can make it a URL that’s customized to something specific. So for example, um, and, and uh, because I’m traditionally published, I use it for both of my traditionally published books and my self published books. You don’t actually have to have published a book through Draft2Digital in order to use that. So every single one of my books that’s been published has the actual, um, uh, name of it. So for example, if I’m talking about one of the most recent books that I cowrote with Shanna, Krishna saw me called Macabre Montreal and I’m on a radio program talking about it. I can say, well you can get it at any retailer. Just go to books2read.com/macabreMontreal or if I’m talking about one of my thrillers, I can say go to books2read.com/evasion. So that’s one of the benefits. The other benefit would be the fact that you can actually see where people are clicking on. You see right now it’s currently showing you the top three places where customers are clicking. So you can kind of get a, a measure for when people are coming to this page, where are they clicking? And I do know that we have plans in the works to expand that we have more data. And uh, and I know the three of us are really excited about helping authors get even more data on, on, on the behavior and what’s going on. So I know analytics are really, really important for authors. So for me as an author myself, that’s kind of something that’s really, really important. |
| Dan: | 00:07:48 | Definitely. You know, I kinda read that question a little bit differently though. I think he was looking for other things in addition to the universal book links that are like reasons to use the yeah, please hit, you know, I think one of the things we do great, it’s, we make tools that save you a lot of time. And so, um, there’s a lot of the distributors where you can go direct and we try and make that easy because all of our distribution is opt in. So you choose where you want to go with this. Um, but it’s so easy to just come to our website, upload it everywhere. You Just Upload One manuscript and you can choose all the places you want it to go to. And then if you make a change to your description, if you change the price, uh, we’ll change it everywhere at once for you. And so it just hours and hours of time, same and the Apple will accept it and won’t reject it for something because Apple is kinda particular. So, |
| Kevin: | 00:08:37 | And part of that whole update everywhere thing is we’ll update the metadata for that book. So things like your also by a page, which is all the books that are also by you, uh, we can update that for you on all of your books automatically. So that helps with keeping everything current. So if people pick up something from your back catalog, they can see that you have x number of books and new book just came out, you know, this month or something. |
| Mark: | 00:09:03 | Okay. Excellent. Excellent. And I thought I would just pop up this comment from a Alison who said, I love having the custom links with the book name instead of the computer generated link. And Yeah, I uh, I agree with you on that. Uh, Allison, that’s really, really cool. |
| Kevin: | 00:09:14 | I like all the computer generated characters. It makes it feel official. |
| Mark: | 00:09:19 | Yeah, yeah. |
| Kevin: | 00:09:19 | By the way, we do have a question. Uh, uh, Elyssa has popped a question into Slack that we might want it. |
| Mark: | 00:09:26 | Yeah. Ah- it as well. And so Richard had sent a a question earlier. I didn’t get a chance to key, I type it into the title card cause I think that was one of the ones that the customer care team was going to, to handle. But it’s right here. So there’s Richard with the beautiful green eye on his icon and a question that Richard asks you. Go ahead and read it and a, and answer, Kevin. |
| Kevin: | 00:09:45 | Sure. A is, let me find it. Uh, what I can, maybe, maybe this was a question we were going to ask, um, or let someone else answer, but, well, let’s answer it on, or why does it take so long to receive payment for royalties? Um, who wants to field that? I’ve got, |
| Dan: | 00:10:01 | I can handle it. Okay. So royalties are fascinating because some of the, you know, Amazon kind of set a precedent of Amazon pays for the most part every month. Uh, you know, it trails for some of their international markets, but only 30 days. Most of the other majors do that with all of our other, uh, partners we work with like libraries, with international retailers. It kind of varies how often they pay us. And so sometimes like Kobo for instance, is about 60 days after the sale. Um, part of that’s because Kobo is also working with other partners. And so Kobo’s working with companies like WH Smith, uh, in the UK. Um, let’s see, French one m for NEC. Yeah. FINAC and so they’re gathering money from those companies and then they’re passing it to us. So towards the beginning or towards the end of the month and the beginning of the next month, we start getting in the payments slowly but surely from all of our retailers. |
| Dan: | 00:11:02 | Once we get all of those, then we start making payments. Um, there’s no way really to speed it up because we’re just waiting to be paid ourselves a but basically as soon as we’re getting in the money, we’re getting ready. It saves everyone money when we make one payment at once ’cause there’s all kinds of little financial charges. Um, I will give you like this little hint, uh, if you’re using PayPal as your payment method, they are by far the slowest because once we get paid, we then have to transfer money over to PayPal and they take some time to process it. I mean, it can be one to three days sometimes. And so I highly recommend a, if you have another option that would work for you, uh, like, uh, you know, we do direct deposit, we do international direct deposit, uh, Payoneer. Uh, all of those other electronic means are faster than PayPal. And so that’s one way to kind of speed up how often you’re getting paid. Um, but yeah, we try to pay as quickly as we can. Uh, we’re always encouraging our, our partners and our new partners to pay quicker because we would like to get that money into your hands as quickly as possible. |
| Kevin: | 00:12:07 | One thing we, we, we do want to stress though is as soon as it’s, if there is money in our account that’s earmarked for you, you get it on that next pay period. So the 15th of each month is when we make the payments. So if there is money waiting for you, it doesn’t stay with us for very long. |
| Mark: | 00:12:26 | Okay, cool. That is great. Uh, I noticed there was another question in here, uh, and I’m just going to pop it up. So it’s Lexie Rourke who looks suspiciously like my friend Julie Strauss. Uh, Lexie Rock, a virtual assistant here, a good info here about preorder capability at D2D. So I know that was a question that had come in and, and I thought it sounds like she’s saying, oh, she’s saying good preorder infancy. Yeah. So thanks for that comment. I thought she was asking about, uh, strategies for preorders, but I’m going to go off that. |
| Kevin: | 00:12:57 | We “accidentally” included for you to com- a compliment, in our questions. |
| Mark: | 00:12:59 | A compliment I throw in a com- Thank you for that Lexi. But I want to- I want- |
| Dan: | 00:13:02 | One thing that we didn’t mention about preorders. Yeah. None of the other retailers are, other than Amazon are going to punish you if you need to move your day a little bit. And so that’s another good tip, you know, with all of our partners, if you want to move a preorder back because the book is taking a little bit longer than you thought or if you want to a, you know, you finished it early and you want to go ahead and get it out to your readers a little bit earlier. Um, all of our partners, we’ll let you move that date around. And so it’s really nice to have. |
| Mark: | 00:13:36 | Okay. |
| Kevin: | 00:13:36 | Okay. I want to say real quick, a hello to our, our beard buddy Michael Bunker, who popped in just to just to compliment our beards. |
| Mark: | 00:13:42 | Oh you mean the Michael Bunker right here? Is this. So Michael, he says he doesn’t have a question, but boy do Dan and Kevin look really, really good is what he said. He said gentlemen, which probably excludes me. |
| Kevin: | 00:13:52 | All us beards got gotta run together. |
| Dan: | 00:13:54 | I thought, like, I was gonna have the best beard in this chat. Then Bunker shows up. |
| Kevin: | 00:13:58 | Bunker shows up. |
| New Speaker: | 00:14:02 | Okay. Uh, I just saw another live question come up, so I’m going to bring that up. Um, this is a question from a, I hope I pray. Eiry Reese and Eiry says, Ah, I’m planning to use my own ISBNs for all outlets, uh, bought in the U K that’s an expensive option, but is it worth the outlay? |
| Kevin: | 00:14:20 | ISBNs are kind of the tricky thing. Yeah. So our position on ISBNs, uh, is one that is not shared by everybody, but for the most part for an ebook an ISBN is really kind of pointless. Every retailer out there has their own inventory system. They’re going to assign their own version of an ISBN. Amazon’s is AISN a, I think EISN is Nook. I don’t remember. But it doesn’t really matter because they’re all essentially the same idea. They’re just inventory control systems. If ah, if you’re talking about print, that’s a whole other thing. Uh, but if you’re distributing through us, we’ll give you free ISBNs. So, um, you know, the only thing that, um, people kind of hang up on is if we give you an ISBN, it lists Draft2Digital as the publisher. Uh, but you know, nobody ever goes, look, that doesn’t mean anything. Honestly. It doesn’t, we don’t own anything. We’re not trying to control your book in any way. It’s just the way it works out when we purchased the ISBNs, uh, but nobody goes looking for a book by the publisher. And you can also list your publishing house name if you have a publishing imprint as the publisher anyway, on those sites, uh, and through us. |
| Mark: | 00:15:35 | Now, can I add something to that? Um, the, the fact that Eiry was already invested in ISBNs and has her own ISBNs, this is if you’re trying to, because again, um, my history as a book seller and, and, um, submissions of ISBNs to New York Times and USA Today and other bestseller lists are tracked by the ISBN. So if you’re using a, the ASIN on Amazon and a draft2digital ISBN on some sites and your ISBN, on others, the, the sales data may not link back to the same book, which may mean you may not make it onto the bestseller lists. I know it’s a small thing, but I’m- I’m, I’m a very anal about metadata, so I always want to know that this edition or this ebook edition is this ISBN whether you see it on, on Apple or Kobo or Amazon or anywhere else. So for me, I kind of, uh, I’m particular about wanting to make sure that it’s that ISBN. Uh, and- and I’ve made that mistake in the past where I use the Kobo dummy ISBN and I use the Draft2Digital ISBN and then I use the ASIN so it looks like it’s three different books even though it’s kind of the same thing. |
| Kevin: | 00:16:41 | Yeah. I’m sorry. I actually did neglect to, I noticed after you said that, that she said she already had her ISBN so that’s okay too. You’ve already invested. Go ahead and use it. |
| Mark: | 00:16:53 | Alrighty. Uh, I saw that, uh, there was, uh, something else here. Uh, actually just a quick, a quick comment, I’m gonna pop up from Ann. So Ann is joining us from another part of the world and she says it’s three in the morning and I would have brewed some coffee for you. I actually have a glass of writers’ tears, Irish whiskey. Maybe that is more appropriate, three in the morning than coffee. But uh, cheers to you for being up so early. Thanks for joining us here. |
| Kevin: | 00:17:17 | That’s dedication, right? There is a drive to learn. Now the pressure is on, we have to actually produce something worthwhile. |
| Mark: | 00:17:28 | That is cool. So, uh, I am going to pop this up as a teaser. So Ann says she sent this question in and I want to make sure it’s addressed. What’s the best way to promote on D2D? And that’s just a teaser for later cause we were, we are going to be talking about that quite a bit later on as we move on. Ah, and I guys, I just, I think Elyssa’s just shared something with us and haven’t had a chance to see what that said. Um, but in the meantime, I’m going to pop up another question that came in from Martha. And the question is, um, can author’s using Draft2Digital take advantage of the promotions slash offerings provided by various platforms such as Kobo or do they only offer those options for authors using their platform directly? And, and that is something that I know we sent in as well, but I thought, well maybe we should talk about that now. And I think I’ve, Dan, I’m gonna fire this one over in your direction. |
| Dan: | 00:18:20 | Sounds good. Uh, yeah, we work with Kobo. We work with Apple. We’ve have worked at Barnes and Noble. Um, a ton of the different retailers give us promotional opportunities. Um, we’ve been kind of using the, they work in different ways at different retailers. And so, um, many of you who’ve worked with us have gotten an email from us about different promotional opportunities. Uh, we just started using forms to help us gather more, uh, nominations and everything. So we nominate things. Yeah. Nearly every week or every few weeks we nominate to different promotional opportunities. Uh, some of those places like Kobo will have a theme. Like sometimes it’s a, one of the ones where a working on now is “the dog days of summer.” And so it’s books on sale, but especially they want books with dogs on the cover. Yeah. Because of the dog days thing. Um, sometimes they have holiday sales. Uh, we had a big nonfiction, ah sale that we did recently with Overdrive for their libraries. |
| Dan: | 00:19:23 | Um, and so what we do is we go through and we kind of look through all of our users that have books that’re alive at that retailer and we take like the top hundred who’ve done sales, the top 500, uh, we send out emails about them. Uh, we are working to eventually kind of incorporate those promotions onto our dashboard. And so you can see what all is available out there, but right now the best way to know about the promotions is to watch your emails and make sure that you’ve, uh, you know, your- your Draft2Digital emails aren’t going into a different folder that you might not see like your junk mail. Um, when you see those emails take part in them, uh, they’re great opportunities. They don’t cost any money. Um, and so it’s just another opportunity to promote your book a little bit more. |
| Mark: | 00:20:08 | Okay. Then speaking of promotions, I’m just going to jump back to a question that was submitted ahead of time. And this I came in from Cindy and it basically was how do you make Books2Read a work for me beyond a link on my website? Um, what more should I be doing using those free tools basically? And I think I was probably, uh, yeah, I you guys put my name beside that one. Uh, so I think one of the things that I often see with authors is oftentimes they’ll mention their book is on Amazon and I get it because Amazon is the world’s biggest bookstore, but also making sure that when you use the Books2Read link that you say this is a link to every single retailer. Actually for that matter, even if you are exclusive to Amazon, Amazon has eight different websites in all these different zones. |
| Mark: | 00:20:56 | So have the dotcom and the .ca and the .de and the .uk, et cetera, et cetera. And so even if you’re only on Amazon, that actually helps people around the world, like outside of the u s for example, go to the right site where they can actually purchase of the books. And I know people can purchase books from amazon.com so that’s useful. The other thing that I would suggest look into, and this is something we’re really excited about doing more, is on or via Books2Read. You have the free author page and Kevin talked about that, but you can do more with that and custom carousels. So it’s kind of like you can build your own merchandising of books that you want. Maybe it’s favorite books or cross promotion saying so if you like, you know, game of Thrones, you might like my fantasy novels as well, and you can kind of mix and match and there will probably be more, uh, cross promotion discoverability opportunities coming up as we continue to add more enhancements to that. Anything else, gentleman that I’m missing? |
| Kevin: | 00:21:52 | Yeah, we, we actually have three right now. Like three products, we’ll call them products built around our universal book links. Uh, and we’ve kind of just discussed what UBLs are, right or not. |
| Dan: | 00:22:07 | Yeah. |
| Kevin: | 00:22:07 | Okay. So, um, the three things that we’ve got built around that we’ve mentioned, uh, author pages and, uh, right. Uh, the book pages that we, uh, that are kind of linked together. We’ve also got the reading lists that you can build. And one of the advantages of all those, by the way, is if you have affiliate links or affiliate codes from some of the retailers like Amazon, Apple, Kobo, uh, even Smashwords, you can embed those affiliate links in the universal book links and then all those, uh, products we offer, we’ll have that embedded. So if you create a, a reading list of books, let’s, let’s say that you create a reading list of your book plus books that are similar, right? And you’re pushing this out to your mailing list and, uh, you get the people on that maybe to push it out to their mailing lists. It works for a nice cross promotion, but then you can get affiliate dollars for when people click through and buy books on those pages. So just a little fun extra cash. |
| Mark: | 00:23:05 | That’s cool. I kinda like that fun extra cash. Uh, I’m going to go back to, so Richard, uh, said, um, if you answered this sorry about that, but he said, so is, uh, there are global dashboard for sales across all platforms. Um, so for example, there’s different charts where you can look at, you know, Apple sales and nook sales and Kobo sales for example. But if my books are on several platforms, is there, is there some sort of prebuilt chart or graph that shows all your sales on a single screen? |
| Kevin: | 00:23:30 | Yes. If you go to a Draft2Digital and log in, you can click on My Reports and uh, there over on the left hand side of that page, there are charts there and you can see all of your sales, uh, and break them down by sales channel by book … lots of options there. So that’s where you can kind of see everything in one place. |
| Mark: | 00:23:50 | Okay, cool. All right, thank you. Um, now Eiry has a question that sort of ties into one that I was just about to pop up. So I’ll pop hers up first. And it’s about a, a large catalog, uh, working hard on them. I’m not sure whether to use Vellum since they’re picture textbooks for juniors. Um, can I show up for help if need be. So this is a question about and obviously Vellum are friends of ours, uh, any, any comments on using that for getting your books published |
| Kevin: | 00:24:18 | For picture books? Is that the question? Ah, yeah, I would use Vellum. Uh, well okay. You can use Vellum if you happen to have access to uh, Adobe InDesign and know how to use it or you can hire someone to use it, that- that might end up giving you the best options for layout. But Vellum handles that stuff pretty well. I don’t know that our automated layout handles picture books very well, but we can help with that if it’s something you want to do. |
| Dan: | 00:24:48 | It does not. It’s really aimed at genre fiction. Um, it can work with nonfiction, but there’s stuff that has like, uh, say you have a lot of footnotes or end notes. Um, that’s where you might want to use Vellum or talk to like a professional formatter. Um, picture books are interesting. Like picture books did not make the same digital transformation, uh, because they, they add in a couple of different little other parts where pictures are bigger. So the file sizes are bigger. Some of the platforms like Amazon, uh, are going to charge you for delivery costs. And so sometimes picture books, uh, can end up not netting you very much money, uh, for digital. Um, there are special considerations for it. Um, there’s a lot of groups where people are being successful, uh, with picture books, but there’s kind of ins and outs that you’re gonna wanna look into. |
| Dan: | 00:25:43 | Um, I would say in, in this case, our automated form, you know, we have a free formatting tool, probably not the best for doing it with picture books. Uh, Vellum might be a good good one to work with, um, but a lot of people are using things like Adobe InDesign. |
| Mark: | 00:25:56 | Okay. Thanks Dan. And that kind of leads to sort of one of the other questions related to conversion then. And I believe this question is probably related to our conversion tool. So the questions kind of, so you know, you’re using a word document, um, are the conversion of books. Um, and, and this was asked by, so John and Jeff and Camelio and other folks asked questions along this line. So when, when they’re using word, uh, it, what’s the best way to use it with images, maybe how they linked them in there. Is there an optimal size and how do you ensure the image is centered? |
| Mark: | 00:26:29 | And then, and I guess the comics is kind of related to the picture question probably, you sort of answered that one. But what about other, other images in a, in a regular, like a novel that might maybe have some images in it? |
| Dan: | 00:26:41 | I would say, uh, on the comics thing just specifically, cause I saw that question. Um, it’s a different format. Most of the time that people, uh, read comics in. It’s the CBR format, which is different than epub and Mobi that Amazon uses. Uh, there’s a, Comixology has their own platform for self publishing your comics, but they’d be in the CBR format, which is different than what we do, um. With other images. Um, our conversion software, uh, does allow you to insert some images here and there. Um, it’s kind of a trial and error process. Um, again, like we mentioned on that last question, it’s not, if you have a lot of images, it’s probably not gonna be the best thing for you. |
| Dan: | 00:27:22 | Um, but you can put those images in and just kind of play around with it. Since our converter, you know, generally it’s done within a few seconds, you can kind of change your word document, see what, how it looks uploaded, see how we converted it. Um, you know, for various specific questions cause it’s very different, like depending on the size of image, the dimensions, you know, if it’s a real wide image or if it’s a real thin image, uh, I would recommend contacting our customer support. Uh, our operations team has seen a lot of different things and so they, they’re going to be the best that help you. And, you know, unfortunately there’s not like one size fits all answer to this question in particular. Um, we kind of saw, we had a lot of people kind of asking. Also with our, uh, automated conversion tool, we have, uh, these beautiful graphics that you can include, uh, that are kind of, they’re designed to be genre specific. So, you know, like dragons for fantasy, uh, the little looking glass for mysteries. And several people were asking, you know, can I upload my own custom images? Uh, right now we don’t do that because of, uh, copyright becomes an issue. Making sure that the images you’re uploading to us, uh, aren’t owned by someone else. Uh, but it is something we’ve heard. We’re adding more and more templates. Um, we would love to, to have it where we could take custom images. We just haven’t solved the legal issue of it yet. |
| Kevin: | 00:28:51 | Right. Also a, when it comes to images and Ebooks, uh, it’s just not a format that’s designed for, uh, precise, uh, linking of images to a specific location or layout. And so you might just kind of want to consider giving up on trying to, uh, put, uh, an image in a specific spot in every ebook. Uh, mostly because ebooks, reflow, which is kind of the point so that they can, um, you know, they’re all gonna go reflow depending on the re-, um, what reading device or on, uh, the font size that the reader chooses, that sort of thing. Uh, which also leads us to, you know, a lot of people want to try to lock in the, the fonts and uh, you know, make sure that the layout stays in a specific way. They get their layout perfect in word, and so they want it to appear that way in the ebooks. That’s just not the way ebooks are designed. Uh, so you might want to kind of relax your grip a little on that, which I know is going to irk some people, but it’s just the fact that ebooks are all about the reader. The reader gets to adjust their font, their page size, you know, that sort of thing. And if, if you try to lock them in on that, the reader could have a bad experience with your book and that could mean they don’t, you know, they give you a bad review or something similar. |
| Mark: | 00:30:08 | Okay. Great. Thank you. Um, there’s a bit of a followup question that Ted posted. Uh, if I uploaded my book as a word document, does an editor review it to make suggestions? |
| Kevin: | 00:30:18 | No, no, no. We don’t have, we don’t do it. Or provide any sort of editing services. We don’t, we, we do kind of a check the content of the book to make sure it fits guidelines, uh, for some of the rules that our vendors have. Uh, as far as content goes, um, those are mostly automated scans with some human eyes that come along afterwards, but that’s pretty much all we- we don’t actually read it for, uh, quality or doing quality checks or edit checks or anything like that. So you’re going to want to find a good editor to help you out with that stuff before you, uh, upload Your manuscript. |
| Mark: | 00:30:55 | Great. Thank you. And this is a comment, so um, Martha asked this it, I had to scroll down to, to see that one. It sorta related to something Dan already mentioned, but it ties into this question as well. And it’s related to how does Draft2Digital work with the retailers to help get promo ops, uh, like the ones that you may get direct. Um, this, this was came from Kelly and Jay. Um, but also Martha asked a very similar question, um, along those lines. That was basically how to take advantage of those, uh, of those promos. |
| Dan: | 00:31:23 | Well, I mentioned earlier, the preorders are one of the things that people just aren’t taking advantage of enough. There’s a lot of the different marketing opportunities that are present at the retailers that are just determined on the number of preorders you get. And so you wanna make sure you have preorders. Just ah, you know, really push those, make sure your website, uh, you’ve got links to all the vendors. Make sure on your social media, you’re linking to all the vendors. The Universal Book Links we keep mentioning are good way to do that. Uh, because of the retailers really do go out and check when we send something to their merchandisers, they go look at your page and if you are only sending people to Amazon, then they’re not going to select you. Um, another thing you want to do is you want to make sure you’ve got a wide variety of uh, price points and uh, different formats available. |
| Dan: | 00:32:12 | And what I mean by that is there are some of the promotions that are only for book bundles. And so a book bundle is a really good thing for promotions because uh, you can have a higher price. You can have $9.99 for like the first three books, you can have $19.99. Uh, you know, I’ve done people that are selling, you know, all of their series for like $29.99. Um, the great thing with Draft2Digital is your royalty stays the same no matter if it’s above $9.99. Um, and so you’re still getting paid the same amount. Um, there are people, especially for whatever reason, readers on Kobo buy a ton of bundles. It’s always in our outliers for the month is several bundle sets. Um, some of those promotions out there are just bundle specific. And you know, with a bundle you can have a higher price point and lowered a little bit and it’s still a great deal to a readers out there. |
| Dan: | 00:33:09 | Um, with all of the other types of promotions. Um, kind of like I was saying earlier, we email right now to let people know what’s available. Um, uh, we’ve moved over to this form system and so you just fill in, you know, the title of the book, the ISBN, uh, what the current price is and what a promotional price you will offer for this particular promotion. Uh, with a lot of them. Um, some of the special promotions are a little bit different than that. Um, like when we work with the libraries, they generally would just say a percentage off of the library retail price. Um, and so we kind of let you know in those emails what the requirements are. |
| Mark: | 00:33:49 | Great. A little bit of a quick followup question to, you talking about bundles and uhm Eiry asked a “bundles versus box sets?” |
| Kevin: | 00:33:59 | Yeah, totally. How are we, how are we defining those two? |
| Dan: | 00:34:02 | I think for the most part, that we mean the same thing when we say it. Like either way. Um, there is the question of a lot of times when we’re talking about bundles or boxed sets, we’re talking about with your own books. Uh, but there are people that do bundles with other authors as well. Right. |
| Mark: | 00:34:19 | And, and I mean, I come from traditional print book selling a box that is actually books in a box that are in and so, so like I always tried the semantics for me are, well it’s not really a box set. It’s um, it’s a digital bundle. So, uh, for me I have a different take on that because of my, my, my legacy in, in, in, in, you know, stocking dead trees on shelves. |
| Mark: | 00:34:42 | Um, this question came in live from Anna and uh, is there any way to alter the copyright page? Um, I asked because of like to all alter the info on there and when I removed that option and create my own copyright page, I can’t format it. It becomes problematic when I create a pdf for a paperback version that may be released on another day or a different edition. |
| Kevin: | 00:35:06 | So, okay. I, I’m, I’m kind of trying to wrap my head around what the other, the second half of the problem was. So when she removes the option and creates her own copyright page, she, she can’t format what exactly? That page? Or the- Because I know that if you provide your own epub, you know, it’s Kinda locked. We can’t alter that on your behalf or anything. Uh, but if you, if you’re creating your own copyright page and including it with your manuscript, you would just have to edit it in the original Manuscript and re-upload the manuscript. Right. But I may be oversimplifying her question. |
| Mark: | 00:35:42 | Yeah. That may be something we may have to answer offline. Like look at the specific details. |
| Kevin: | 00:35:48 | Anna, if you’ll email support@draft2digital.com real live human beings will help you answer this question. If we can. |
| Mark: | 00:35:56 | Real-live human beings that aren’t on the spot, trying to not tech- |
| Kevin: | 00:36:02 | They’re all watching us right now so I’m sure there’s like spit balls and other things flying. Yeah. |
| Mark: | 00:36:06 | All right. So this is a sort of a generic indie publishing question and I mean, it’s been a hot button topic for a long, long time. And it’s the overview of, uh, basic pros and cons of being wide versus exclusive to Amazon. And this was a, the style of question that came in from Evelyn and Liz and Rohi. And, and I guess in a nutshell, I kind of look at it from, from two different perspectives. Um, Amazon is the world’s biggest bookstore. And oftentimes when you’re digital publishing, when you’re self publishing, it’s really, really hard to, to learn everything at once. So oftentimes you go, okay, well why don’t we start with the big bookstore and I’ll publish their first and then I’ll get used to it and I’ll get to understand the business. And then once I become comfortable with it, well, A)If I’m making six and seven figure incomes from that, then I’m done. |
| Mark: | 00:36:53 | Uh, but after that, once I’ve gotten used to it, then maybe I can expand my horizons cause it’s hard enough to learn one before learning others. So one of the benefits of, of being exclusive to Amazon is that yes, you get access to kindle unlimited page rates, which work really well for some people, particularly if they have a lot of books in the series and you get access to promos that Amazon’s not going to give you unless you’re exclusive, like making your book free for five days. Um, whereas Amazon does not let you set that book lower than 99 cents at all. But the other retailers do, and through Draft2Digital, you can do that. You can’t set it to free on Amazon. It’ll actually, you will have to submit them at 99 cent price, even if you make it free, because that’s their policy. But they do aggressive price matching. |
| Mark: | 00:37:38 | So a lot of times authors who want to have a free first book in series will use wide distribution to force Amazon to price match to the, to free. So it’s kind of funny. You can use Amazon’s, uh, archaic ways, uh, in a way that benefits you with the other retailers. The pros for me of going wide to publish to the other platforms is, uh, you know, I’m in Canada and I used to work at Kobo. So guess what, I own a Kobo and you know, 98% of my digital library is Kobo. So my default store when I hear about a book that I want to read is I’m probably going to buy it on Kobo. And so if your book is only on Amazon, it doesn’t matter how appealing the book is to me. I’m not going to go and buy a kindle or I’m not going to switch platforms just to buy your book. |
| Mark: | 00:38:23 | I’ll just go and buy another book that is in the same vein because you know, we’re not just competing with other books, we’re competing with other things that are going to get our attention. So for me, um, when, as an author myself, if, if, and I’m not a big name author, so if somebody is interested in buying my book and they go to Apple or they go to Amazon or they go to Kobo or they go to nook or they go to wherever they go to to buy their ebooks, I want them to make sure there’s no excuse not to find me. So that’s why, why it is important, uh, to me. Now, I’ve been talking, I didn’t get to give you guys a chance to talk about this one or should we move on to the next one? |
| Dan: | 00:39:01 | I think it’s an important one. I mean, that is the quintessential question we have to answer at conferences a lot. |
| Kevin: | 00:39:07 | And so that’s the heart of who we are, honestly, yeah. |
| Dan: | 00:39:10 | We actually are champions for going wide, but we also, uh, we’re not evangelical about it. We’re not telling you that wide is the only answer. And in fact, uh, we think the future is hybrid in many ways. It’s hybrid in the sense that many of you are going to at some point in your life do a traditional deal as well as self publish. Um, if you are already traditional, most of you are going to self publish at some point in your life. Um, as long as KU is working the way it is, probably you’re going to have some books in KU, you know, and some books wide, it’s going to be really the best strategy. |
| Dan: | 00:39:48 | Uh, it seems to be like a different group of readers, maybe a new group of readers that are in KU. Um, and so, uh, what I encourage people to do is consult their peers within their genre because it’s very different from genre to genre, where the readers are, uh, and go from there. Um, we’re big fans of wide. I think the number one thing that drives me nuts about Amazon exclusivity is that for some reason they choose to include libraries as their enemy. And so if you have your book in Amazon exclusive, you can’t sell your books to libraries. I grew up in the libraries. We were very poor when I was young. The way I got to be a lifelong reader was through the library system. We love libraries are great for discovery. Um, and so, uh, being wide you get to participate in that and try to sell your book digitally. Um, Mark mentioned, uh, the exclusivity is just digital. You can have your book ready and print and libraries might buy it. Although the libraries don’t buy if you’re only listed in Kindle- uh, Kindle Direct print? Is that what they call it? |
| Dan: | 00:40:59 | KDP Print? Um, you would need to have it listed with someone else for a library to buy it because they don’t buy things with Create Space or with a Amazon now ISBNs. |
| Mark: | 00:41:12 | Okay. I just want to pop this up cause this is kind of related. So Allison commented that I’ve been wide from day one and I actually sell more on Kobo than any other retailer. And Allison, I’m glad you mentioned that because it is true. There are authors where Apple is their best retailer, where Nook is their best retailer, where Kobo is their best retailer and they would not have had that had they gone exclusive to another retailer. Right. They might not have even known that their, their customers, their people, their tribe, the ones who love their books more than anyone are on a different platform. So I think that’s also an important, uh, an important, um, thing to consider. |
| Dan: | 00:41:49 | Looks like we have a couple of questions in the comments so that I think are great ones that- if you can post some of those up. |
| Mark: | 00:41:55 | Yeah, I wanted to, uh, I wanted to go to a, should I jump into the audio book one or should we just stay on this topic for one more second in terms of-? |
| Dan: | 00:42:03 | There was one about libraries I think we should hit on, |
| Mark: | 00:42:07 | Uh, from Ted. Okay. Let me I bring that one up. Uh, thanks Dan. All right, so Ted says, I noticed libraries have a listing of the number of copies they have, uh, for distribution at a given time. The libraries purchased the number of copies they want to be able to lend? Did they pay special rates? If so, who decides it? Yeah, and that’s a great segue into how we work with libraries. |
| Dan: | 00:42:27 | Definitely. So with the digital library systems, how it works right now for most of them is they buy a single copy and that copy they can lend out to someone, but while someone has it out, no one else can, can get it. Um, if they have enough demand for that title, they might buy multiple copies. And so that’s kind of, it’s, it’s the digital copy will be in their library system, uh, effectively forever. Uh, when you sell it through Draft2Digital or as an indie. Um, but only one person could check it out at a time. Um, this is going to be to the, like each individual library purchases what’s gonna show up in their digital system. Um, some of the, uh, different vendors are starting to experiment with models that are a little bit like kindle unlimited where anyone, uh, where you as an author get paid out based on if someone checks out your book and is reading it and that allows unlimited numbers of it to be checked up to their patrons. |
| Dan: | 00:43:27 | Uh, but anytime anyone’s reading it, you’re getting paid for it. And so, uh, we think that’s going to be really good for indies and expand the amount of readers they’re going to have access to. Um, so that’s all changing a little bit. The cool thing with libraries is you get to set your own price. It’s a separate price from your retail list price. Uh, it doesn’t trigger price matching anywhere. Um, generally the traditional publishers are uh, charging anywhere from $50 to $100, uh, for uh, their books, selling to libraries in digital formats. Um, we encourage people, you know, it’s probably you want to, you want your library prices to be considerably higher than your normal retail list price cause they are going to have it forever. They’re going to be lending it out to multiple people. Um, and so that’s something and you get to choose that. Uh, it’s basically just one the fields when you’re setting up to go to Overdrive and to, um, where all do we go, we go to Overdrive, Bibliotheca um, we’ve got HOOPLA in Beta and we’ve gotten one other… oh! Baker Taylor. Yeah. So you get this set, that different library price. |
| Mark: | 00:44:38 | Okay. Excellent. And just to, just to point out, we actually had, um, a few other people, a Jeremiah and Karen for example, had asked the same sort of question about how can D2D help get my book into libraries? So that covers that. Um, as well, |
| Kevin: | 00:44:51 | We will carry … physically carry your book into our local library branches and leave it there. |
| Mark: | 00:44:56 | So we’re gonna we’re going to take a different turn right now. So there was both a pre question, uh, that Ann Marie, uh, Cathy and Austin, Liz, Katie and Peter asked uh Google play. Basically they were asking, what the heck is up with that, what’s the latest? And also, uh, Mark just posted that as well. Any news on Google Play Books? So it’s a, this is the Google section. Uh, can we give an update on uh, on Google Play Dan? |
| Dan: | 00:45:25 | So, Google Play, uh, we are working hard at it. Like we’ve got developers that have been just chipping away at that all summer. Uh, the things they’re asking us to do right now are very difficult and it’s a very, um- |
| Kevin: | 00:45:39 | It’s a manual process. |
| Dan: | 00:45:40 | It’s a manual and arduous process. Um, we don’t have any promises. We’re working on it as hard as we can. Um, you know, we hope to continue to offer it to everyone. Uh, but it’s uh, they’re making it particularly difficult. |
| Mark: | 00:45:57 | Okay. |
| Kevin: | 00:45:57 | But we are coming to some solutions and it will, it will be happening soon. We are, we’ve got a processes in place to help automate a lot of what Google wants us to do ah, and then I think we’re kind of in a position to do that. I’m just going to say it, we’re going to do it better than anybody else out there is going to be able to do it. |
| Dan: | 00:46:16 | Ahhhh, it so awkward though! |
| Mark: | 00:46:19 | It is awkward. So awkward. Yeah. |
| Dan: | 00:46:21 | Well, yeah, we, we want to make things really easy and simple for you authors, because uh, you know, simplicity means it’s quick and your time is your money. But man, they’re not helping us with it. |
| Kevin: | 00:46:32 | Yeah. We want to stress that this is Google making this difficult. So I don’t think anyone really questioned that. But it’s definitely Google making everything difficult. |
| Mark: | 00:46:42 | Maybe they have hidden cameras in our office and then every time they change how they want to do things, they, they, they giggle in watch us jumping through all these hoops. |
| Dan: | 00:46:49 | And twirl their mustaches! MWAHAHA! |
| Mark: | 00:46:53 | Now this is a question that comes up a lot. Um, and, and this was asked by Robert and Steve, uh, and Louis, and it’s basically, how do I get books, uh, in a bookstore and retail bookshelves like Walmart and places like that? Will CreateSpace expanded distribution or now known as KDP Print expanded … |
| Kevin: | 00:47:12 | Oh, I was going to say it will not because it doesn’t exist. |
| Mark: | 00:47:16 | Yeah, exactly. CreateSpace doesn’t exist anymore. Um, no. Um, it won’t. But uh, but what, what is, what are some options that authors have, uh, in, in, to, to try to get books into stores? I’m going to start off with this and kind of explain the difference between traditional book distribution and print on demand distribution. And, and the fact is, is that the one thing that, um, traditional publishers do really, really well is they are the purveyors of risk. Because in the book industry returns are a major, major issue and, and billions of dollars are spent or billions of dollars are burned, uh, due to returns because a bookstore can stock a book for six to nine months and then return it back to the publisher if it doesn’t sell. And when I first did print on demand in 2004, I thought I was really smart. I went through Ingram, I set up my book with a full discount. |
| Mark: | 00:48:07 | I made it fully returnable and it was really awesome when a Canada’s largest retailer ordered 600 copies of my book and they went into the stores and I was really happy and I did a little happy dance. And then three months later when half of those books came back and the cost for them coming back to me was more than the money I earned on them going out and I was in the hole for a long, long time. It wasn’t as fun. And so the challenge with books and bookstores and bookshelves is that discount. Uh, and the other challenge when it comes to KDP extended distribution, which will put it through an Ingram system where people can order it, um, is they don’t give you the full discount. They, they, Amazon doesn’t want you to buy the book at a bookstore. Amazon wants you to buy the book from Amazon and bookstores don’t want to buy from the competitor that’s trying to put them out of business. Bookstores want to buy from distributors like Ingram. So, um, so Dan, Kevin, considering those challenges, what are some of the ways that people can maybe get their print on demand book? At least listed through traditional book chains. |
| Dan: | 00:49:14 | So I would say it’s probably more effort than it’s worth. And so I would highly encourage you a lot of book buying. Like it print as well as digital is just moving to online. Now that so many of the different retailers out there will, uh, can deliver to you and two days or less, um, the days of like the walk into a bookstore, uh, set up are going to… they’re limited. Now I think we’re going to see Barnes and Noble have a much smaller footprint as far as the number of books they have in them and they’re going to be smaller stores. |
| Dan: | 00:49:51 | That being said, like if you want to get into the bookstores, uhm, it’s not going to work with expanded distribution because most of the bookstores and most of the libraries aren’t going to order from Amazon if it’s just listed through Amazon for print. Um, and so you either want to go directly to Ingram spark for your wide distribution of your print book, um, or sign up for our print Beta. Uh, our print Beta gets your books wide as well. Um, we’re teamed up to hammer away at print. Uh, cause we do think it’s really good to have your book available in all possible formats. Uh, you want print book, you want digital, you want audio book. The really neat thing uh on a lot of different storefronts is if you have a print book, like especially on Amazon, will show you, hey, it’s ah, you know, it’s $19.99 for the print, but if you buy it, the digital, you’re saving, you know, $15 cause it’s $4.99. |
| Dan: | 00:50:43 | Um, there are readers that just want to read it in print. And so I, we think you should have your print available on demand. Um, the great thing about print on demand is there’s no risk to you, like you’re not having to deal with that return system that Mark mentioned. Um, yeah, in a lot of cases those returns weren’t even like we called them returns, but they just get destroyed after the bookstore doesn’t sell them. And then either you’re publisher or you, if you’re the one who’s doing it, uh, are just out that money and owe the money to the bookstore. So, |
| Kevin: | 00:51:13 | right. So that, um, extend the, the expanded distribution means that your book is available for those bookstores to order, which is not necessarily a guarantee that that book’s going to be ordered by that bookstore. Um, but one thing you can do, uh, that is, it’s a little bit limited because there’s only one of you and only so much time. Uh, but one way you can start getting your book into physical bookstores is to start making arrangements to do signings at, um, at stores, uh, start locally and then you could expand outward. I know it’s a little bit like, it’s almost a little like the days of buying a bunch of self-published copies and driving around with them in the trunk of your car. But, uh, what it does is introduce you to more and more people who are in charge of organizing these events. Barnes and Noble, for example, there they have a whole division of Barnes and Noble that’s about organizing this stuff. |
| Kevin: | 00:52:08 | Uh, so you begin to create relationships with these people. And if you have a signing that goes particularly well, uh, it gets noticed. And so over time, just like marketing in general, it’s this slow, like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill, you know, you might, you might actually reach the top and roll right on, on over and then gravity takes over. Um, but what happens a lot of times is you do these little- So like I, I spent about two years driving around and doing signings at small bookstores and local bookstores and various towns, but a couple of Barnes and Nobles and that sort of thing. And my books kind of linger. They kind of stick around, uh, cause they’re not a big investment by the bookstore. They’ll buy like, you know, a handful of copies and they’re all print on demand there. They kind of just stick around and stay in the bookstore. So if someone happens to discover it or go in and ask for it, uh, it can, it can benefit you. So |
| Dan: | 00:53:03 | I want to say like, we’re getting towards the end of the broadcast. We’re down to kind of like the last seven minutes or so, um, in the live comments. Uh, if you’re, if you’re not following the live comments, we’ve listed the, the uh, web address to join our print Beta, which is Draft2Digital.com/printbeta. If you’re interested in that. Um, we had a couple of questions about audio and we out to our friends at Findaway. Do we want to address that now? |
| Mark: | 00:53:28 | Yeah. And actually I’ll pop up the question that’s sort of I related to that. So Jess asked, uh, since audiobook markets are expanding a lot right now, does that impact your recommendations regarding wide or Amazon exclusive related to audio books? And then I’m going to dig into that other audio question that we know we had a earlier, which was sort of marketing suggestions or tips for, um, audio books specifically. Uh, and, and, uh, I think Kevin’s got some cool stuff related. |
| Kevin: | 00:53:56 | I have an official statement from Findaway Voices who are sort of our official unnofficial audiobook partners. Um, and I’ll read it out loud. Now. Uh, the biggest untapped opportunity for many authors is to really take the time to understand the retailers and business models quotes. Uh, we give, we give them access to then have that inform their marketing. There’s a world of difference between encouraging someone to make an a la carte purchase versus checking out your book for free at a library or through a subscription service like Scribd … is it Scribd or Scribed? I think Scribd. And your marketing needs to, your marketing needs to take that into account. Uh, I’m going to add to this that I’m audio book marketing is really functionally not any different from marketing your ebooks, print books or, or anything else really. Uh, it is marketing. |
| Kevin: | 00:54:54 | Uh, we like to define as uh, improving the odds that the right reader will find your book at the right time. At the same thing applies to audio books, but you, he a Will from FindAway is, is saying you need to take into account the strategy that you have for both short term and long term in terms of how you want to grow. Um, if your, if your biggest thing is you want to attract as many listeners as possible in short time as possible. That changes the approach you take to marketing your audio books. Um, and it usually means raising the cost of your marketing. I’m a big fan of slow burn, long strategy marketing, uh, which means that, you know, have just really just having an audio book available alongside your, your print and ebooks is very beneficial to you because as Dan mentioned earlier, you get sort of a comparison shopper thing going on on the product page of a book. If the audio is also included. So uh, it becomes an additional marketing tool. |
| Dan: | 00:55:53 | I would say on the question of the wide versus exclusive, uh, particularly to audio books. I do think that’s the most important choice authors have to make in the next few years is um, if you go with ACX and Audible, they have a, uh, an option to be exclusive where you get paid more, but it’s a seven year a term. You know, when we talk about, uh, Kindle Select and Kindle Unlimited, that’s a 90 day. A 90 days experiment and do whatever. It’s not very long time, but seven years of being exclusive as the audio book market is just a really taking off right now. I would highly encourage people to really think about that choice. Um, because, uh, there’s so many other opportunities. There are subscription services around the world that are taking off, uh, platforms like Scribd, like Storytell. Uh, all the library systems now are doing audio books and digital. Um, I would not just limit yourself. Um, I think Mark, you’ve had a lot of success with your audio books in libraries. |
| Mark: | 00:56:55 | Ah, yeah. Libraries and even not, uh, not the big places. I thought, okay. Audible and Apple and Kobo and places like that. But no, I’ve been making most of my audiobook money off of library distribution and other platforms that I had never even heard of. Um, and, and that’s kind of interesting to see. The other thing too is there’s a difference between 90 days of exclusivity and seven years, right? That’s a different, uh, so much can change in a, actually in 90 days, but so much can change in, in seven years. So I wanted to, because we’re getting close to the end, we had marketing questions. We actually had a hundreds of marketing questions and, and, and we did actually have some already to talk about and we did talk a little bit about marketing because you can’t help it as you’re talking about selling books. But we will be doing a marketing only. So no conversion questions, no other questions about that. But just marketing- |
| Kevin: | 00:57:47 | No questions about pants or anything else. |
| Mark: | 00:57:49 | No questions about people’s beards or what? Yeah, so we will be doing a very specific focused marketing hour long where we’ll be taking some of the questions that came in, uh, as well as taking your live questions. But we did want to thank you guys so much for uh, for hanging out with us today and remind you that you guys, uh, you, you can have access to us for half hour a one on one consultations. You can ask any specific questions to Dan or Mark or Kevin and, and the link is going to be popped up. Uh, Elyssa, thank you very much for supporting us. Uh, by pushing those buttons for us is going to pop that up into the comments where you can click through and using Calendly you’ll be able to, uh, book a session, a different time zones, different times of the day where you can book a one-on-one chat with us so we can dig into details and we can even look at, okay, well, look at your specific situation and whatever it is. I mean, if you want to talk scotch or beards or, or whatever, we’re up for that too. But we’d love to be able to help you in your writing journey and in your writing path. Any, any closing words? Uh, Mr uh Tumlinson? |
| Kevin: | 00:58:52 | I do. I want to stay where we’re going to be shutting the consult link won’t last forever. Uh, so, and it’s really only for the folks who are here right now. So get in there and register as quickly as you can for a time slot and a, what it was our time for. What did we say was going to be a timeframe for that? |
| Mark: | 00:59:11 | Oh, for a when it was going to get shut down. Yeah, that’s a good question. Uh, it could be, it could be within the next hour probably. So those live people have an opportunity, click that link and, and, and uh, and book mark it so they can, uh, they can check out the calendars and, and book some time to chat with us. A video chat one on one, uh, as well. We do plan on doing more of these. |
| Dan: | 00:59:32 | It could be audio if you, if you don’t want it to, if you’re not a video fan. |
| Kevin: | 00:59:36 | Or, you know, and you don’t want us to see you. That’s what are doing it through zoom. So you can do it from a computer or a mobile device. Are their phone numbers. You can call and we’ll set up, I want to put this out there. I want to emphasize this, it’s a free free 30 minute author consultation. We’re not going to charge you any money like 49 bucks, like some other, uh, organizations out there. This is free. |
| Mark: | 00:59:59 | It’s free, which is kind of cool. And thanks guys. So many amazing questions. Uh, so you’ll probably be hearing from us directly and we’ll be addressing some of the questions in forthcoming blog posts as well that we’ll be sharing. So keep an eye on our Facebook page. Keep an eye on the Draft2Digital blog. And thank you guys. Dan. Kevin, and Elyssa! |
| Dan: | 01:00:17 | We are looking at doing this, um, once a month. Uh, so this is going to be an ongoing thing. Uh, we’ve really wanted to bring some of the experience, um, that we, we get out at conferences. Uh, you know, many of you we have got to meet one on one and to have these conversations with and answer these questions. But there’s a lot of you that just, you know, maybe you live on the far side of the world. Uh, maybe you just don’t have the time or the money right now to go to conferences. That’s what this session is for. And so we’re going to be doing these, we haven’t set a specific date for the next one, right? But, um, it’ll be sometime in, uh, mid to late July. |
| Kevin: | 01:00:54 | This was to help us workout some of the kinks and bugs. Yeah, we’ve already learned a lot. Um, out shutting, shutting down the, uh, questions, uh, the prewritten questions a little early. Uh, cause we were, that was, that was looking like it was going to get pretty large. |
| Dan: | 01:01:09 | A LOT of great questions. |
| Kevin: | 01:01:09 | So I’m glad everybody got excited about this. We are all very excited about this. Everybody at the Draft2Digital offices is watching us. They’re excited about this. A little mad at us for some of the things we’ve mentioned. I’m just going to put that out there. Uh, but yes, we’re going to be back and we’re going to do a marketing focused one and probably a lot more. So, uh, thanks for tuning in for this. |
| Mark: | 01:01:32 | And Dan and Kevin and Elyssa. Thank you guys so much for this. It’s been amazing. And you authors, thank you. We couldn’t do what we do if we didn’t have your great books that we could share with the world and with readers. So all the be- yeah, we’d be very, very lonely. So all the best to all of you guys. Thanks for hanging out with us today and we will catch you next time. |
| Dan: | 01:01:53 | Later. |
| Kevin: | 01:01:54 | Cheers. |