Should you migrate your books from Smashwords to Draft2Digital?

If you’ve read this blog a long time, you know I view aggregation as a necessary evil. I use it to get my books onto Nook pre-order and free. Others prefer it to save the time and labor it takes to manage their literary assets on 6-7 sales sites, although no aggregator eliminates the need (or strategic advantage) of publishing directly on Kindle.

I’ve long used Smashwords for aggregation, mostly out of laziness. They were my best option when I first published. Once I’d mastered working their system, I heard about the upstart Draft2Digital and its better royalty share (SW takes 15%; D2D takes 10%), but I already had my books on SW. And I kept adding them to SW, like a sheep.  Meanwhile, D2D added the very features I aggregated for: pre-order and free.

Yay, D2D!

Another awesome feature of D2D is that they have a deal with Nook that earns them and their authors 60% royalties on 99 cent books. If you publish DIRECT on Nook, you make only 35%. So you get 25% more (and D2D takes 10% of that) by publishing through D2D, netting you 22.5% more if my math is correct. In other words, 99 cent are better through D2D to Nook than on Nook itself!

D2D offers publishing services to authors as well. SW doesn’t. I haven’t heard negatives (share your experience in the comments, if you have any).

All my future books, I will aggregate through D2D. But not all my current ones. So what’s to stop me from adding all my books to D2D now?

1. Apple Reviews/Legacy Perma-free: Apple won’t move reviews earned through direct publishing on Apple or through aggregation through another aggregator to a D2D-published version of the book. Shame on you Apple. A book is a book is a book. Especially one like mine, which has an ISBN to identify it. This is one instance in which Nook does it better than Apple.
   1. Beginners, don’t read this–it will make your head explode! Wait, stop! Don’t say I didn’t warn you . . . Since I only aggregate free and pre-order, it’s even more complex than this. Let’s consider pre-order first: I aggregate, then pull the aggregated book down on day one of its publication and switch to a direct publication record. This results in very few reviews, if any. But when I aggregate free, I garner hundreds (thousands) of reviews. They’re part of the reason I use the free strategy in the first place. Apple is my second-largest royalty source. An amount significant enough, that I just can’t leave those reviews behind. (This is true even after I remove a perma-free book from free status back to paid status. I leave them aggregated to Apple to save the reviews.) Now, this is only for books that I aggregated to free before Apple started allowing me to do that directly. But, still, it affects one of my books 🙂
   2. If any of you have been in this situation and want to talk me out of this perma-free-to-paid aggregation strategy re Apple b/c of reviews, I’m ALL EARS!!
2. Man hours: For my other books, the ones that are past pre-order and aren’t perma-free, I don’t really aggregate to anywhere significant. The investment of time to put them on D2D is not worth the cost in time/money. (Unless I run a 99 cent promo!)
   1. HOWEVER, even as I’ve written this post, I’ve realized that my 99 cent book (the formerly perma-free Saving Grace), should be added to D2D for Nook. I can’t remove it from SW/Apple because of 1.1. above. If I do this, though, I’ve just added another sales site to manage to an already teeming list, since I direct publish my novels. Ay Carumba!! What to do, what to do 😉 (I just went and activated in on D2D, that’s what)

Whew, that was confusing!

Head to head, I find D2D easier to use than SW, and I love their communication. From henceforth, all my aggregation will be through them. So sayeth the Pamelot.

What about you?

Pamela

Pamela Fagan Hutchins writes overly long e-mails, hilarious nonfiction (What Kind of Loser Indie Publishes, and How Can I Be One, Too?), and series mysteries, like What Doesn’t Kill You, which includes the bestselling Saving Grace and the 2015 WINNER of the USA Best Book Award for Cross Genre Fiction, Heaven to Betsy, which you can get free in ebook, anywhere. She resides deep in the heart of Nowheresville, TX and in the frozen north of Snowheresville, WY. Pamela has a passion for great writing and smart authorpreneurship as well as long hikes with her hunky husband and pack of rescue dogs, traveling in the Bookmobile, and experimenting with her Keurig. She also leaps medium-tall buildings in a single bound (if she gets a good running start).