Joanna’s experience and advice on using Amazon KDP and D2D for ebooks

mario-beauregard – stock.adobe.com

Regular readers of this blog may remember my tale of woe when Amazon KDP terminated my publishing account. I eventually got it back but it was not a pleasant experience. Some of my ebooks are still available on KDP but I’ve been publishing most of the others on Draft2Digital (D2D). I’ve done enough of them now on D2D—as ebooks and also in print—to have some experience and lessons to share.

I’m not including print publishing choices in this blog because it would make it too long. Nor am I including Ingram Spark here, because my only experience with them is print publishing, not ebooks. I’ll include Ingram when I blog about print choices.

There are upsides and downsides to publishing ebooks on Draft2Digital. Just as there are on KDP. Some of the downsides might not apply in every case, but I’ll explain what they are anyway. Then you can make up your own mind whether KDP or D2D is right for your ebooks.

Which platform wins the grinning yellow mug and which gets the down-in-the-mouth blue one? Your decision.

What do you have to upload to publish an ebook?

Both platforms require more or less the same information for your ebook and the process is relatively straightforward, though the level of detail can be tedious.

KDP has three steps:

1. KDP ebook details: title, author, blurb, metadata, release date
2. KDP ebook content: full internal text, cover, ISBN, publisher
3. KDP ebook pricing: territories, prices, royalty rate

D2D asks for more or less the same information, in four steps:

1. D2D details: title, author, cover, metadata, manuscript, release date, blurb, ISBN
2. D2D layout: front and back matter to be added by D2D (optional)
3. D2D preview: author’s choice of manuscript layout options eg chapter heading styles
4. D2D publish: territories, prices, choice of digital stores, subscription services, libraries. Royalty rates are set by individual outlets, not by the author.

Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay

What are the differences? What are the best options?

KDP needs the full internal text (KDP step 2 above) including front and back matter and table of contents (ToC). It all needs to be formatted to flow properly. KDP Create may help with that, but as I  have always formatted my own text and end matter, I can’t advise there. If you need help, my blogs on formatting main text for upload, formatting front matter and formatting back matter could be useful to you.

With D2D (D2D step 1 above) you can upload the full internal text but you don’t have to. You can ignore end matter and upload only the chapters of your MS. In that case. you need only two bits of formatting—prominent chapter titles, preferably using the Heading 1 style; and two consecutive blank lines between paragraphs to indicate a scene break. D2D will detect chapters and will put scene break markers in for you (more on that below). The clever software also does your table of contents (ToC) automatically and puts it after the title page. Sighs of relief from this author 😉

If you use this plain-text-upload route, D2D offers options (at D2D step 2 above) to provide title and copyright pages, plus promotional pages and biographical pages if you want, though you will have to provide some of the content for those, like your bio. But you only need to do it once. For future books, it will already be there.

This is a screenshot of the options available. [Click to enlarge.] On the Draft2Digital website, once you’ve started working on a book, the orange ? gives more information about how each option works.

Which Draft2Digital options to choose?

So far, I use only the New Releases Email Signup page in my ebooks. It allows readers to sign up to receive an email whenever I have a new book out. Very useful and it works. A Signup page in the actual ebook looks like this and appears at the end:

While the Title Page provided by D2D is fine, I don’t recommend the D2D Copyright Page because it is much too basic and does not include some of the necessary material, like the assertion of the author’s moral rights. Best to do your own copyright page. I would also recommend putting the copyright page in the back matter in a D2D ebook because, if you put it in the front matter, the ebook opens on the copyright page, rather than on Chapter One.

All the other options look great.

For example, if you publish a lot of books with D2D, it will keep your Also By Page updated for you. And a Teaser page will insert the cover and blurb for another one of your D2D books, chosen by you. Both could save you a lot of work.

Text layout options on KDP and D2D:

With KDP, you have to choose your layout options and incorporate them into the formatted text that you upload at KDP step 2. You might want to include glyphs to indicate a text break, for example, rather than the more ordinary asterisks or tildes.

In D2D step 3, you can play with your plain text until you get the look you want. This, for example, is the start of one of my books, using D2D’s Minimal template. I chose Phrase Cap for the first line of the chapter, plus the right-aligned and underlined Minimal chapter heading. D2D did both for me automatically. I didn’t want any decorations for scene breaks but you could have them if you wanted to.

You can have great fun with this. Below, I’ve changed the same text to use the SF&F style and the Dragon template. You could do something similar on KDP, but you’d have to do all the detail yourself before you upload your MS which would be (a) tedious and (b) quite easy to get wrong. On D2D, it takes seconds and you can experiment until you get a result you like.

In the Dragon style, the scene break indicators made me smile. Gold hoard, anyone? In Minimal style, they’re, er, minimal. Note the unindented paragraph in both styles, which D2D does automatically after scene breaks and at the beginning of chapters. You don’t have to remember to do it which is another bonus.

For the steps I’ve described thus far, I’d say that Draft2Digital is much easier to use than Amazon KDP and produces (potentially) a more professional result. It’s more fun, too, I think.

Territories, Prices, Royalty Rates: which are best?

At KDP step 3, Amazon offers two royalty rates, 35% and 70%. For the 70% rate, your book price has to be between £1.77-£9.99 (US equivalent $2.99-$9.99). Even at the 35% rate, your list price cannot be below UK £0.77 (US $0.99) unless Amazon accepts a case for price matching.

D2D works in US dollars at its step 4. It allows you to choose a price between $0.99-$39.99 or to price your book as free $0.00. Once you’ve set your price, you can see the royalty rates you are likely to receive from each vendor and decide whether you wish to distribute through them.

1xpert – stock.adobe.com

Within the price parameters, you can choose and vary your prices by territory on both KDP and D2D. Or you can set one price and let the software match it in all territories. Nothing to choose between KDP and D2D here.

At present, D2D offers the eight digital stores in the screenshot below. In addition, it offers the Everand and Kobo Plus subscription services (not shown). The estimated royalties you see here are based on an ebook price of $0.99. Compare $0.59 from a Kobo sale with Amazon’s $0.29 🙁 You’ll see that if you sell your ebooks at prices below £1.77, you will make higher royalties per copy via D2D than on Amazon KDP, though you will have to forfeit Kindle Unlimited (discussed later).

Draft2Digital also distributes to Library Services and recommends a price 2 or 3 times the sale price. Royalties are either a one-off (One Copy One User) or per borrow (Cost per checkout). Likely royalties are shown in the screenshot below. I was pleasantly surprised at how many library sales I was making.

Summing up: which is better? KDP or D2D?

KDP books are sold only on Amazon. D2D books can go pretty much everywhere, including Amazon, and can also be included in other subscription services — Kobo Plus works like KU and has subscribers in at least 28 countries — and, crucially, libraries. D2D also produces higher royalties for low-priced books. And D2D seems to be easier to use than KDP.
So self-publishing on D2D is a no-brainer…?

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Er, no.
As usual, it depends.

On Amazon KDP, you can sign your book up for Kindle Unlimited (KU) which means you cannot offer it through any outlet except Amazon. For some authors, KU page reads produce such a large chunk of their royalties that they sign up and accept Amazon KDP’s exclusivity rule.

If you publish your ebook via D2D, even if you include Amazon in D2D distribution, your book is not eligible for KU. It’s a choice only you can make. And you might decide to make different choices for different books, depending on price and other factors.

antoonsparis – stock.adobe.com

But D2D has one other carrot to offer you…

If you publish through Draft2Digital, your book may be taken up for Apple Books Digital Voice Narration scheme. If it is selected, Apple will produce an AI audio version of your text. Distribution is limited to Apple books and participating libraries. The samples of audio books done this way do sound very good (and much better than Amazon KDP’s more basic AI audio).

At present, this Apple service is completely free to the author. Because of that, you can set a much lower (and more inviting) audio price than if you had had to employ a professional reader to produce it. This gets us into the thorny issue of AI, I admit. To be honest, I can’t afford to employ a professional reader to do an audio version of my books, so it’s the Apple AI audio route, or no audio at all. I’m not doing a professional reader out of business, honest.

Don’t look away till you’ve read the inevitable promo…

I’m going to include links to my published D2D ebooks, now a bargain at only 99p/99cents each. Click on the titles below to buy. As I’ve said before, buying my books helps to defray the costs of hosting this website. All purchases gratefully received, therefore. And there will be 3 more books later this month, too, in the Unsuitable Matches series.

BUY The Mystery Mistletoe Bride
BUY My Lady Angel
BUY The Solway Bride
BUY Star Crossed at Twilight

Want to read these books on your Kindle? At least some of D2D’s outlets, like Kobo, allow you to download an epub version of purchased books to a computer. You can then email that epub to your Kindle (using your Kindle’s email address in Settings) and read it at your leisure. You really can read on a Kindle without having to buy from Amazon, but don’t shout it too loud.

Joanna