After this week’s announcement that Draft2Digital will now charge a yearly $12 fee for accounts earning less than $100 (net) a year, I thought this is a good time for a reminder on how to make sure your book listing is as good as it can be so that you can earn more than $100. I don’t want to go into whether this change is good or bad – instead, I want to stay positive and focus on increasing your sales and with that, your income.
Some of these points are quite generic and apply to other retailers/distributors.
Metadata: Make sure your metadata is on point. Optimise your blurb for SEO/GEO. Make it hooky (a good rule of thumb is that every sentence should be able to stand by itself and have its own little hook), highlight tropes, make it clear who your target audience is (if you don’t know that, this is the time to think hard – and no, it’s not ‘everyone’). Add keywords. Make sure your most important category is set as your first one, because not all retailers will accept all five categories that D2D lets you enter.
Use D2D’s promo form. Fill it in once at the beginning to let them know what genres you write, what languages you publish in, and what stores/libraries you distribute to. That will get you onto their promo newsletter. Submit to those promos as often as you can!
Let them know about your books. Use the promo form whenever you put a book up for preorder, have a live release, are planning a price promo or a permafree book. They can’t tell retailers about your free book if you didn’t tell them about it. Don’t assume that just because you set a promo price for a book, that they will promote it. You have to be proactive.
Your cover needs to tell the reader immediately what genre it is. Arty masterpieces are pretty but if they don’t scream “cozy mystery set in an outerspace bakery” or “self-help for legless centipedes”, readers won’t click on them. Don’t think your book is so special that it doesn’t have to follow conventions. If your book is a mash-up of genres, focus on one rather than trying to cater to every audience your book might appeal to. Sometimes a new cover will work wonders.
Subscribe to their newsletter (settings > notification preferences), read their blog, listen to their podcast. It’s a treasure hoard of information just waiting to be discovered.
Ensure your backmatter is on point. You want at the very least a link to your next book in the series (or if it’s a standalone, another book that is similar enough to appeal to this reader) – preferably a universal link or landing page on your website – and a sign-up to your newsletter. Don’t lose readers by not giving them somewhere to go after finishing your book.
If you’re only using D2D to reach libraries, make it clear on your social media channels, website and newsletter that your books are available for free at libraries (I personally like to challenge my readers from time to time to go to their local library and request one of my books). This can be especially effective shortly after promos like the ‘Stuff Your eReader Day’ as a ‘Did you know you can always get my books for free in libraries?’ message.
And as a bonus, my favourite piece of wisdom that I had to learn the hard way: you are not your target audience. I actually made mugs with that to remind myself. Just because you love your cover/blurb/… doesn’t mean that your readers will. Try to step back and look at it with fresh eyes. Ask others for their opinion (not your family – your target audience) and listen. As indie authors we are lucky that we can pivot and change at will. We’re flexible. We can react to changes.
If you’re currently making less than $100 net a year on D2D, it is still the cheapest distributor even with the new fee. For Self-Publishing in German, I made a table with all the main distributors (with a German market focus, but the three major English-language ones, D2D, StreetLib and PublishDrive, are included). I had to update this before publication (this is really, really going to be the last change I make!) and it’s clear that if you’re on the lower end of the income scale, D2D is still your best option for wide and library distribution.
There is a second table in the book that shows what stores/libraries the distributors can get your books into, but if you’re looking at library distribution only with a focus on Overdrive as the main one, your options are Draft2Digital, StreetLib, PublishDrive and Feiyr.
Draft2Digital have said that if you want to stop using them for distribution to save the fee, it’s best to unpublish your books on their dashboard rather than to delete your account completely. That way, if you ever want to use them again in the future, you won’t have to pay the account activation fee.
