Episode Summary
The D2D Team is back to answer viewer questions, so tune in to hear the questions on the minds of your fellow authors hosted by Jim and Mark, who always have the answers!
Episode Notes
The D2D Team is back to answer viewer questions, so tune in to hear the questions on the minds of your fellow authors hosted by Jim and Mark, who always have the answers!Â
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Transcript
Kevin Tumlinson [00:00:01]:
You just tuned into the hippest way to start and grow your indie author career. Learn the ins, the outs, and all the all arounds of self publishing with the team from d two d and their industry influencing guests. You’re listening to self publishing insiders with Draft2Digital.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:00:26]:
Hey. We are live. No more dancing!
Jim Azevedo [00:00:30]:
No more dancing. Are you serious? Welcome to Self Publishing Insiders. I am Jim Azevedo. I lead marketing and corporate communications here at Self Publishing Insiders. And today, I’m thrilled to welcome my buddy and colleague, Mark Wesley, the fave, back on the Hey.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:00:45]:
Hey, Jim. Always great to be here. I am the director of business development with Draft2Digital, and it’s always so much fun. I love the ask us anythings because it really gives us a chance to engage with folks and say, hey. What are you thinking about? What do you wanna know? And I see people have already asked some amazing questions.
Jim Azevedo [00:01:02]:
Nice. Yeah. So this is completely unscripted. There’s no agenda. We want you guys to just feel free to ask us questions you might have about the publishing process, about marketing. Maybe you have a question about seeing maybe you’ve seen some authors out there who are doing interesting things on Facebook or on TikTok or other social media channels. So let’s talk about it. Let’s just have a conversation.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:01:28]:
Yeah. Yeah. And and and then just like this was unscripted, our our dance steps at the beginning for those watching the the video was completely unchoreographed too.
Jim Azevedo [00:01:38]:
Just tell them the truth, Mark. We’ve been working on that for at least a couple of weeks to get those
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:01:43]:
I know. I can’t believe. I they don’t they don’t know we can’t dance. No way. I think they
Jim Azevedo [00:01:48]:
know now. They they know now. You know, maybe maybe we kinda kick it off with, a recap of our recent D2D print day. Should we talk about that first?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:02:03]:
Yeah. Look. Beth has a comment about that. Did you see that?
Jim Azevedo [00:02:06]:
What’s that?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:02:06]:
Beth has a comment about that. I’ll pop it up.
Jim Azevedo [00:02:09]:
Oh, okay. Cool.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:02:10]:
Beth says, Mark, thanks so much for the series you did on the this past Saturday. It was so helpful. What is Beth talking about? Well, we know. Well, let’s explain. Thank you. By the way, Beth, thank you so much. I’m so glad it was helpful. It was a really fun time, and I’m so glad you could check it out and and that that it was useful.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:02:27]:
So what we did was a D2D print day, and it was it was six hours. It was on, it was on Saturday, April 19, and it was from noon eastern until 7PM. And we had six different sessions. Jim joined me for one of the sessions where we just did an overview of D2D print and how it works. I had Nick Thacker talking about BookCovers.com. I had folks from Vellum and Atticus talking about the really great tools they have for formatting your ebooks and print books. I had, some cover designers to talk about, cover design. Even an introductory at the very beginning of the day is, hey.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:03:02]:
What what are print books and how does it work for the publishing industry? How does it work for authors? A panel with best selling authors who who are doing really well with print books. And it’s like, how do you market a print book? Because it’s different than ebooks. Right?
Jim Azevedo [00:03:15]:
Mhmm.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:03:15]:
And then and then an open q and a. And and it was just meant to really help, get authors who may not be familiar with print books understand the value. I mean, I I understand the value of print books. The other thing is really important, right, is, this is, this is a book from author t Thorne, Coyle, on, resistance matters, essays on love and action. It’s a fantastic book that, was created via print on demand and and available, and I I’ve got this beautiful, lovely, matte finished copy. Yeah. Very beautiful. But when I hold this book up, it’s phenomenal because you can see the cover, and it it’s advertising.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:03:51]:
When I hold up the same book on my phone, because I’m reading it on the Kobo app as well, you can’t see what what I’m what I’m reading. So print books are in and of themselves marketing.
Jim Azevedo [00:04:03]:
They are. And, Mark, again, I know I’ve told you privately, but, publicly, I wanna just express my sincere gratitude to you because, you know, you you you did a lot of work. You put a lot on your shoulders. You created a full day of content for everybody out there. And not only that, not only did you create all of these things, you brought all these experts from, you know, Atticus and Valem and different speakers. And then you hosted 95% of the entire day yourself. So I hope that your voice, you know, stayed strong and true
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:04:37]:
It did. During the day. I had just enough time, fifteen minute, you know, biological breaks and filling up my glass of water between sessions. But but I also had I had a a tremendous support as always. Right? Like, we show up here or you show up here. There’s so many people working behind the scenes. So I had
Jim Azevedo [00:04:52]:
That’s right.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:04:53]:
You and Lexi and Alyssa doing a lot of the heavy lifting as well. I just got
Jim Azevedo [00:04:57]:
to be in the spotlight.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:04:58]:
Yeah. So we have an amazing team. And that’s the thing. The the thing to understand about Draft2Digital is we have so many people working so hard every single day on all of the great features and all of the great tools that you get to see. We get to go to writers conferences and take credit for all the hard work that everyone else does. I that’s my my favorite part. But but no. Because we get to engage and interact with the author community.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:05:23]:
But there’s so this is such an amazing team, and and I absolutely I just wanna say a huge shout out and a huge thank you to every single person on the Draft2Digital team who’s doing all of this work behind the scenes, interacting directly with their authors, helping our authors out, publisher operations, like working with our partners and sending making sure your data gets to the right places and your updates happen. I mean, just so incredible. We’re we’re so Jim, you and I are so lucky we get to work with such a great team.
Jim Azevedo [00:05:49]:
I I talk about it all the time with to anybody who will listen to my family. Like, how’s work? I’m like, oh my god. I just did this big project. I went to this conference or I did this thing or did that thing. But my team, they’re so reliable. I just I feel incredibly fortunate to work with the
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:06:05]:
team that we have. Yeah. So 100%.
Jim Azevedo [00:06:09]:
And before I forget, Mark, since we’re talking about print day, I wanna just put that link up there again because that link still exists. So if you’re wondering, well, when was print day? What is it? Print day, as we explained, if you’re arriving late, print day was a full day of sessions devoted to bringing authors, whether you’re brand new at this, creating a print on demand book, or maybe you’ve got several books under your belt already and you wanna just learn a little bit more about maybe marketing tips or just looking for some affirmations about how you’re doing the work that you’re doing. If you go to that link, you can see what all the sessions were all about, and then you can hit different replays for all of those six Yeah. Seven sessions where they’re all
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:06:51]:
And you yeah. And you can skip the, skip the boring parts where I just lather on about stuff and get to the good get get to the good stuff, like, usually when someone else is talking.
Jim Azevedo [00:07:01]:
Never wasted word out of you, Mark. Alright. So I’m gonna get rid of that and go back over to the comments. I see that the comments are adding up really quickly. Let’s
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:07:13]:
see. Is great. I just I you know, I love the engagement of people talking to one another in the comments. That is fine. Because the other thing too is when you do that, you’re just helping feed that algorithm to help maybe YouTube show our videos to to more people who who could benefit from hanging out with y’all.
Jim Azevedo [00:07:29]:
Y’all. Alright. Shall we start hitting up some questions here?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:07:34]:
Well, I guess we should since it’s an ask us anything.
Jim Azevedo [00:07:37]:
Right.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:07:38]:
Yeah.
Jim Azevedo [00:07:39]:
Okay. I’ll bring up this first question here from Lee. I’m looking at it, and I don’t sure if I know how to answer this one. So, Lee, thanks for joining, Lee, and I appreciate the question. Lee asks, with some companies going the route of government photo ID, will D2D head down the same path?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:07:55]:
You know, that’s a good question. So, what I can tell you, Lee, is so it’s very important for us as as the entity responsible for distributing titles to partners who trust us, and they trust us for a reason, is when you create your account, we don’t allow you to publish. Now there’s no photo IDs or any of that required, but there is the ability for us to pay you. And we do authorization to make sure you’re a legit actual person, and that’s connected through your bank account or whatever. And there’s an additional company we work with to validate that these are are real people, real accounts, real, persons. Because, again, it’s just one and there’s so many other things that our, publisher operations and and customer care, customer service team does to preview content to make sure that people aren’t just uploading, you know, low content junk that’s not really gonna be beneficial to our retail and library partners. Right? And then that way, you know, when you because you put a lot of heart and soul and effort into your books, we wanna make sure that our partners take you seriously. Right? So provided they they publish the the the categories that you want, there are some some retailers that say, well, we don’t want this category, but we want that.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:09:07]:
Like, some of them, you know, fiction only, non like, whatever it is, we wanna respect those businesses. And so, a, we wanna make sure that the people who publish to us are legit, and we already have, for the longest time, a way to validate people. So I don’t see any reason why we would have to head down that same path.
Jim Azevedo [00:09:28]:
Yeah. Yeah. That and you never know because things are changing so quickly. It’s ridiculous. So
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:09:36]:
Yeah. But you you know yeah. You know, like, you know, it’s funny when we started, Smashwords and Draft2Digital, it was like, hey. Let’s let’s remove the barriers for ebooks and make it easier because look what we can do with ebooks. And and when we launched Draft2Digital Print just a couple years ago, we forgot just how big and how powerful that part of the industry is. So we we probably couldn’t have predicted. And we thought, well, we’ll make prints because it’s another barrier we can remove, but it’ll just be a secondary thing. And and it’s proven to to be a very significant thing for many of our authors, you know, just just making it easier to get the print books available.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:10:12]:
So, again, yeah, we can’t always predict, but, but we do our best. Right?
Jim Azevedo [00:10:16]:
We wish we could. We wish we could. Yeah. I’m gonna I’m going to take a stab at reading Ricardo’s message here, so you can all hear my awful, awful Spanish. Okay? But, Ricardo, Ricardo says, and drop to digital.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:10:39]:
I think I understood
Jim Azevedo [00:10:43]:
Ricardo. Ricardo says I sold my first book on Draft2Digital. Thank you very much. So
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:10:48]:
Oh, how do you say congratulations?
Jim Azevedo [00:10:50]:
And thank you for being here.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:10:51]:
How do you say congratulations in Spanish? Or or Yeah. What he said. Yes. Or or, say say as as we may say in French.
Jim Azevedo [00:11:02]:
My little girl who’s in a Spanish immersion school would just be baring her head right now if she heard me speaking.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:11:08]:
Okay. I’ll make sure she gets to watch this video replay.
Jim Azevedo [00:11:12]:
Please no. Please no. Gosh. So okay. So we covered print a little bit. I’m I’m scrolling down looking for additional comments and questions. Let’s talk about Smashwords a little bit and the Smashwords store. So Smashwords is another business unit of Draft2Digital.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:11:33]:
Yeah.
Jim Azevedo [00:11:33]:
And for those of you who don’t know, so Smashwords got its start before Draft2Digital, and we’ve probably talked about this ad nauseam in previous episodes of self publishing insiders. But just really quickly, if nobody knows, so Smashwords was a pioneer in the world of of self publishing ebooks and ebook distribution going back to 02/2008, and then Draft2Digital acquired Smashwords in 2022. So going forward, Draft2Digital is going to control all the publishing and distribution tools for all of you out there. Smashwords is going to remain as an online retail store only. So maybe first, Mark, we talk about migration and sort of where we stand with that, and then we talk about what’s happening with the Smashwords store. That sound okay to you?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:12:21]:
Yeah. Of course. Of course. So, the migration that the process is to get to that point, we need to get all of the authors who are publishing on Smashwords into Draft2Digital to be the publishing entity. And we’ve invited the majority of authors. Not a lot, have taken us up on this gracious offer to to help migrate, and there’s even tools because, you know, merging different pieces of metadata and stuff is very complex. And I I’ll be honest. I’m one of the problem children.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:12:47]:
And I I was working, I was working with a few folks from the dev side on that process in terms of, okay. I have one of the oldest accounts, Draft2Digital as well as Smashwords, because I’ve been with both since the very almost the very beginning. And my books are in so many different weird configurations and forms that it’s not as easy. Like, if you had no draft digital account, it was so easy to go here. Here’s your account. We’ve moved your data. You’re done. And then there’s people who have a little bit of both, but I have a weird mixture.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:13:16]:
So I’m probably fault everybody. Well, no. But there were probably a lot of authors like me, especially the, you know, the pioneers, the ones who are there early that are gonna have some some data. So I get to be the poster child for or the guinea pig to go in and see how this works. I’m gonna be creating some videos for any authors who are like, okay. I’ve been along around for a long time. How is this gonna happen? So I’ll be creating videos to say, okay. Here’s what I see.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:13:40]:
Here’s the tool that’s available to me as an author, and then I’m gonna share those videos. It’ll be on our YouTube channel. So, and then we can get there because once once we finish this process, which, again, it’s like defragging a gigantic hard drive. It’s just taken a long time because there’s so many so many things going on in in the back end. Once we get there, then that frees up our resources to say, okay. How do we make the Smashwords store an even better store? How do we make the tools for publishing even better? And and then that’s the main focus. And and, again, implementing the the amazing things you guys have been asking for.
Jim Azevedo [00:14:13]:
Yeah. So the Smash Bros. Store, it’s we’re thrilled and frankly, a little bit surprised in how quickly and how, it’s been it’s been growing year over year over year, and it’s growing faster and faster. And a lot of that has to do, of course, with, you know, the merger of the two companies. There are so many more authors from Draft2Digital who have their books at the Smashboard store as well. But the Smashwords store is kind of bucking an overall industry trend of ebooks sales kind of remaining flat, sort of anemic. But the Smashwords sales have been growing over time, and we think that in addition to just the the sheer amount of indie authors who who have their books in the Smashword store, we believe there’s, you know, kinda something else going on, like, the emergence of the indie reader. We believe that there’s this trend called sort of bubbling up where indie readers out there, the influences out there, they’re, you know, they’re not content with being just kinda spoon fed books from the mainstream.
Jim Azevedo [00:15:15]:
They’re looking for the next breakout big thing. For them, it’s exciting to uncover the diamond in the rough, to find that needle in the haystack, to find that next author who’s going to break through and hit the mainstream. So I I believe it’s just it’s such an exciting time right now, and I’m so happy to be on the front lines of this change of this indie author movement that just keeps growing and growing and growing. So with the Smashwords store, I think we mentioned it before when we were talking with Chris Austin and Mark Hooker. But with at the Smashwords store, we are hoping to do not one new sale this year, but two new sales this year. Looking at, genre based sales on romance and erotica. And possibly more things coming too when we kind of get to the stage where we’re going to sort of completely redo the the user interface for Smash. Whereas, we’re gonna do some more fun store type stuff where we’re gonna take the physical the best physical aspects of your favorite brick and mortar store and try to emulate some of those best practices at the Smashwords store.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:16:24]:
For sure.
Jim Azevedo [00:16:24]:
Busy year.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:16:26]:
Lots to do. Always lots to do.
Jim Azevedo [00:16:28]:
Yes. Job security. What a break. K. Next question.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:16:36]:
Okay.
Jim Azevedo [00:16:37]:
Alcmuse says and thank you for this comment and question. I plan to use D2D for my next book. Thank you very much. With Amazon, I’m used to having control. When I was on Smashwords, I had control too. What would be the difference of control with D2D?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:16:55]:
A very good great question. I’m glad I’m glad you asked that. Very similar to Smashwords, except the one thing, you won’t have to use the meat grinder, which required really going in and massaging your, kneading the dough, the the word document, in in very significant ways in order for it to be accepted. The import of the word document’s a lot more forgiving and a lot more flexible. So you can say, no. Look for this, not that, to find chapters and stuff. So if it doesn’t read it properly, you can work with it and tell it that, which is great. And and one of our videos from last, from this last Saturday kind of explains that in more detail and shows you how that works.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:17:28]:
But, one of the other things is if you’re used to using coupons and stuff like that on Smashwords, the the teams, the design and development team and and operations teams have created those tools. So you can go under your account at Draft2Digital, and you can kinda see, like, there’s this, there’s there’s a whole bunch of tools, Smashwords specific tools. So you can say, okay. Here are coupon codes, and here are all the things you can do, and you can still make coupon codes for your books on Smashwords. So you’ll have the same control. If not, maybe just a a few more controls.
Jim Azevedo [00:18:00]:
Yeah. A few more things. Yeah. There is now a dedicated Smashwords dashboard. It’s specifically for those of you who have migrated over from Smashwords into Draft2Digital. So you can find all of those tools that you’re used to using as well as new Draft2Digital tools too.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:18:17]:
Oh, of course. Yeah. Yeah. Always building new tools.
Jim Azevedo [00:18:20]:
Appreciate that. Next question because there’s a lot of them. Next from Kaneshi. Hi, Kaneshi. She says, is is D2D active actively looking for a print partner in Canada, or is it a little more on the back burner while you guys work on getting us other features like large print or hardcover?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:18:42]:
Yeah. So that’s a great question. And as the as the Canadian in the group, on the on the team, that’s something that’s very near and dear dear to my heart. And I have looked at various platforms that offer the option within Canada, but to be quite honest, there’s nobody who’s able to do it as efficiently, as timely, and, effectively as even cost effectively as as our current partner. So right now, we have an amazing global partner available. They don’t yet have printers in Canada. But, yeah. So my apologies.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:19:13]:
And and I’ll be honest with you. We’re more interested in rolling out new features of what we can do, what we can control is okay. Let’s and I know large print is next on the list for print. Like, okay. You know, large print is a huge, huge missing opportunity for indie authors. Let’s make it easier for them to get large print books out there. Let’s use our distribution partner to get large print. Let’s make those templates, for large print books.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:19:36]:
Let’s help you make a large print cover and all that stuff. And and I know the team’s already been working on it, but they’re gonna be focused on it very soon. That’ll probably be the next big release that we announce. And then, of course, obviously, hardcover as we continue to expand all of the options, for print. So that’s more of a focus because that’s something we can control internally and do all our development rather than say, oh, I wish someone existed who could do this for us.
Jim Azevedo [00:20:01]:
Yeah. Thank you for that question, Kaneshi. And thank you for giving us a little bit of a some some buffer room there understanding as we work on other things as well. Appreciate that. Brian has a question. Brian asked, will you by chance raise the royalties for your authors in the future?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:20:22]:
If, Brian, if you’re talking about, ebooks, we’re kinda limited based on what we get from the retail partners. You gotta remember, we do not charge anything upfront. In order for us to to be able to pay our, you know, utilities and mortgages and rents and stuff like that as as the people who work at Draft2Digital, that 10% margin that we keep on those ebooks is basically what funds our operations. Now we do give more royalties, higher royalties for the Smashwords store because, again, that’s our store, and and we have to you know, we still have to cop copper, operating expenses as well as the credit card, surcharges that we get on those. So we do, pay higher royalties because we can with Smashwords. And anytime we negotiate with a new partner, we are in looking out to see what is the most we can get in order to to give that back to you authors. As print books continues to grow and expand, I mean, the the higher the volume, the more books that we put through the system, the more that the partner is able to give us, and then we can then, relay that back to you. So that could mean now I know print costs are always going up, but the cost of paper and manufacturing and stuff like that.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:21:32]:
But it could mean if the volume of DTD print gets even higher, it could mean, like, every time we get those extra pennies from the partner, we’re gonna pass that on to the author. Again, we we need to take our slice because, you know, boys gotta eat, gotta gotta be able to pay to pay for our operations so we can be around tomorrow. But, yeah, we we do our very best to try to be very author centric. And and and, again, the focus of our success is we make money when you make money. That’s that’s a that’s a a main goal of Draft2Digital, and and I’m very proud, that that is our business model. Because it means when you’re successful, we’re successful. Right.
Jim Azevedo [00:22:12]:
And it’s also one of the reasons why we’re continuously talking about, you know, how can we help educate the authors by doing things like d two d print day and providing free resources out there to help you guys learn about best practices, best selling indie authors to help everybody sell more books. Yeah. Okay. Let me bring up this question here. I don’t know if I could answer it. Maybe you can, Mark. Math for Matthew Baxter. And thanks, Matthew, for the question.
Jim Azevedo [00:22:40]:
Oh, travel writer. Cool. Matthew says, Amazon has a great look inside feature, but a lot of online stores don’t offer this function or show oddly formatted ebook samples. Why is this? And do you think things will improve in the future?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:22:57]:
That’s a that’s a great one. Yeah. Amazon does have a really great look inside feature for both print and ebooks. I know, for example, when I worked at Kobo for for many years, their The previews that Kobo has are just not very nice. They’re not very useful. I still love Kobo, and that’s where I purchased my ebooks as a consumer. But yeah. And we don’t have any control over the preview function that the retailers have.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:23:19]:
So what what I would recommend is if if there is a preferred retailer, and I and I think Apple does a pretty decent job of it too because Apple’s always about the look and feel. They’re very, very sharp. But, reach out to the retailer and say, hey. As a consumer, I would really, really like this. But, yeah, we we we don’t really have much control. We provide the EPUB, either the one that you’ve provided to us, and then we and then we relay that to them. Or, we we make a professional EPUB from your word file, and we send that to the vendor, but we can’t really control, control what they do with it on their in their catalog.
Jim Azevedo [00:23:53]:
So, Mark, from the publishing perspective, when someone goes through the publishing process at Draft2Digital, do we give them the option of providing, a free sample amount, like 10% to 20%?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:24:03]:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We do. Yeah. We we control that on our end. You can say how much of a percentage, but we can’t control what that looks like on the retailer’s side. You can control and I think by default, it’s, like, five or 10% or something like that, and you can change that.
Jim Azevedo [00:24:15]:
By default. Yeah.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:24:16]:
Yeah. Change that as as an author in your account. I think you have the ability to change that, but it makes sense. Yeah. 10% is probably reasonable for to give people a just to show them how amazing and awesome your book is so they can go, oh, I have to read this now.
Jim Azevedo [00:24:29]:
If they were yeah. I was gonna say to give them that little teaser. Give them that taste of what you have to offer. Okay. And thanks again, Matthew, for the question. Question.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:24:37]:
Yeah.
Jim Azevedo [00:24:38]:
Okay. Let’s see.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:24:40]:
So many great questions. I’m not sure if we’re gonna get
Jim Azevedo [00:24:42]:
them out. Absolutely. Yeah. Let’s see. Okay. Oh, so this isn’t a question, but a comment from Ethan Versed.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:24:54]:
Hey.
Jim Azevedo [00:24:54]:
Hey, Mark. This is Carl. You’re such a legend. I’m so happy to see you here.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:24:59]:
Hi, Cara. How are you doing? Great to see you.
Jim Azevedo [00:25:03]:
So I couldn’t help myself. Sorry about that. Let’s
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:25:05]:
see. Cool.
Jim Azevedo [00:25:07]:
Oh, but there is a she also has a a different question.
Kevin Tumlinson [00:25:12]:
Do you think
Jim Azevedo [00:25:12]:
So let’s get to this question from, from Cara, Ethan Vers, who asks, do you think it’s better to publish a holiday themed book in September or start marketing now to build buzz for a later release?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:25:25]:
Okay. So I’m gonna thank you. Great question. I’m gonna go back to my my book industry experience that goes back to 1992. And I do know that in the book industry itself, in general, and this is for online sales, ebook sales, and print book sales, very, very similar models because I’ve worked in all three, is the sales really pick up, you know, back to school September, end of summer vacation here in North Northern part of the hemisphere. September to December tends to be the biggest. It’s it’s the biggest thing. It’s why, you know, London Book Fair and and and stuff like that happens this time of year and even it used to be in this in the, like, late, like, May late May for, Book Expo America because that’s when all the bookstores were were buying.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:26:07]:
All the buyers were meeting with the publishers, and the publishers’ biggest catalogs tended to be September to December. So, again, that’s because of things like Christmas and and the and the other gift, buying that happens in that season. So I think it would make sense. Yeah. I I publish it in September, but do take advantage of preorder. Why not? I mean, if it’s ready to go and edit it and stuff like that, take advantage of the preorders, and then your marketing buzz can be getting excited and anticipation for this book as well if that, if that’s something you’re capable of doing. Because, again, depending on your schedule and when your editor, when when the stuff gets back from your editor and all that stuff.
Jim Azevedo [00:26:46]:
Okay. Good answer. Thanks for that. I’m gonna keep Slack going through all the questions here. Keep them coming, everybody. This is great. Yeah. R Loomis asks, is there a way to edit the EPUB file for print, or is it finalized for only EPUB?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:27:00]:
Yeah. So, if you’ve uploaded your own EPUB into our systems, we do not parse the EPUB to spit it back into a format like Word because that right now systematically is not reliable. It’s gonna make a mess, and that’s no fun for anyone to deal with, especially you. But if you
Jim Azevedo [00:27:19]:
provide a mess in the word file, Mark?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:27:21]:
Yeah. No. Like yeah. To to try and and and back, convert it from an EPUB into a word file is is not clean. It’s not pretty. It’s not something you really wanna look at. So instead of putting people into that frustration, we’ve just said, this is not something we can easily do. Therefore, we’re gonna focus on the things we can do.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:27:39]:
If you load an EPUB, ideally, you got the EPUB from something. Therefore, you you’re happy with it, and we’ll publish it for you. And then we do check to make sure it’s legit, and we can add the automated, I think we can add the automated back matter and stuff like that, like the universal book links into it for you. But if you’ve provided a Word document, you can use our templates and and make that. And the same thing is for for print. You can provide a print ready file that you got from a designer or other system, or or you can provide a word document and use our tools to preview it. And and now you can’t edit it on the fly. You’re going back and editing the source document.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:28:14]:
And it’s and, again, as somebody used to manage a database in in the book industry for it’s like, you always wanna fix the source. You don’t wanna fix it on the fly on the way to the source. You really wanna fix it at the source as much as possible so you have a master. And and as an author myself, I actually have a a Word document print master that I use, and then I have a separate different print, EPUB, which is kinda convoluted because every time I make a change to one, I have to make a change to the other. But that’s how I I manage it, myself as an author, but I always have those two master files to play with.
Jim Azevedo [00:28:45]:
Mark, if somebody uploads a Word doc and they would say let’s say they wanna publish it in a an ebook first
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:28:51]:
Yeah.
Jim Azevedo [00:28:52]:
Then they wanna do a POD, print on demand book right after that.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:28:55]:
Same file.
Jim Azevedo [00:28:56]:
We’re taking all that data and moving it over You have
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:28:58]:
your choice.
Jim Azevedo [00:28:58]:
On demand file. Yeah. From the original Word doc, not from an EPUB.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:29:02]:
Yeah. You as the author can can say go back and get the original Word doc I used for the EPUB, or you can upload your own Word doc or your own p d a PDF or print print ready PDF file.
Jim Azevedo [00:29:12]:
Okay. Just Yep. Making extra extra sure. Okay. Thanks again for the question. Yeah. These are great. Great questions.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:29:19]:
Yeah. Another question
Jim Azevedo [00:29:21]:
from Ron Kays. And welcome, Ron. I’m seeing a lot of new names out there. So to those of you who are new to self publishing insiders, thank you so much for joining. We really appreciate you being here. Ron asks, will D2D partner or partner increase designer layout tools for the direct to print aspect?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:29:40]:
Yeah. Actually, Ron, and that will be something we’ll be able to do, you know, once the migration finishes. Again, focusing on large print first. But, Ron, if there are particular, design features you want or templates or whatever, please email support@draftdigital.com and request, hey. Hey. I would really love to have this trim size or I’d love to have this whatever. And I’ll be honest with you. That’s why we created a poetry template.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:30:02]:
We had authors who emailed us, and and after, you know, we received several requests from authors who said, we really would love a poetry template. So we made it a priority to create a poetry template. So if there’s particular tools or features that you’re looking for, and we do. We discuss this in a in a Slack channel, all the time. Like, you know, it come comes from one of us. You know, we’re talking authors or it comes from the usually from the customer service team that gets a tick because it’s a trackable ticket, way better that way. And then they put it in feature requests. And then the discussions happen, and then that create is a ticket that gets created and prioritized.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:30:37]:
So please, Ron, thank you for asking that question, but please email the specifics of what you’re looking for to support at draft to digital dot com because that’s how we build those new things for authors is is based on your requests. So because we want to be able to, you know, remove the barrier for you and say, hey. This is a roadblock. Ron is looking for this. And and potentially, Ron, if you’re thinking about that, there’s probably other people who are thinking about things. And then and then we use that again for prioritizing.
Jim Azevedo [00:31:02]:
A %. I just wanna underscore what you said there. So if you email customer support with the feature request, that goes into customer support. We create a ticket out of that. It’s a trackable ticket so we can keep, we keep track of how many of those requests that we have and the ones that have the most requests get the highest priority. Okay. Thank you for that. K.
Jim Azevedo [00:31:24]:
Let’s see.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:31:26]:
Jim is juggling all the questions.
Jim Azevedo [00:31:28]:
I am. This is great. I’m I’m distracted. So I’m looking over here. I’m looking
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:31:31]:
at you.
Jim Azevedo [00:31:31]:
Looking over here. Looking at you. But I’m back. Nigel. Welcome back. Nigel, always has good questions. Nigel asked, am I correct in thinking that D2D is a distribution machine to make physical books available, but it is still up to authors to market them?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:31:46]:
Yeah. Physical books and ebooks. Right? Ebooks and print books. So, yes, distribution for either or, both if you want. Yeah. Well, yeah, technically, it is up to you as the publisher, as the author to market them. But but, again, that’s why on Saturday, we had a panel talking about marketing tips. Often SPI, we bring in guests who share marketing tips.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:32:05]:
We have a full time person, Megan, who’s working on, marketing for authors. One of the things Megan and I are working on right now is I’m gonna be at the American Library Association conference in June in in Pittsburgh. Sorry, in Philadelphia. Sorry. It starts with a p, and it’s in Pennsylvania, but it’s in Philadelphia closer to the to the Coast. And, we’re gonna be bringing a catalog, and and I I thought I had a physical copy of an old one, but a physical catalog of of books available in print as well as ebooks available to libraries through Draft2Digital to market your books for you. And that’s based on, Jim, do you have the the the URL, the drop in, for the marketing form?
Jim Azevedo [00:32:44]:
I do.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:32:44]:
And Megan will also invite you to various promos we do. For example, she sent out several from Overdrive, a library distributor, and we work with Apple and Barnes and Noble and Kobo on those things. So there’s constantly promotions going on. So, yes, it’s your responsibility to market. Yes. It’s your responsibility to tell us about your books using this form so Megan has access to them so we can include them in features. But we do what we can to market your books because, again, we only make money when you sell books, so we really do wanna try and help you sell more books. And that’s one of the reasons we have a full time person whose whose sole responsibility is author promotions.
Jim Azevedo [00:33:21]:
I I love it when people ask, do you guys do anything to help me market books or promote my books? And, yes, Nigel. Yes. We do. And about that form, so for those of you who have never used that form, Megan always suggests adding more detail in that form than you might even feel is necessary. So what does that mean? That means that well, maybe you’re working on an anthology with some of your author friends or box it with some of your author friends or maybe you’ve published books in the past that are are longer winning books or maybe you’ve hit a bestseller list. The more information that you can give to Megan, the better because that’s going to help her get your book in front of the merchandising managers at the libraries and at some of our retail partners as well. I mean, some of our library partners and retail partners. Yeah.
Jim Azevedo [00:34:05]:
Yeah. So thanks for that question, Nigel. Okay. Going back to the comments. Run running back over there. Let’s see.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:34:17]:
You’re doing great, Jim.
Jim Azevedo [00:34:20]:
You’re such a nice
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:34:21]:
You got this. You got this.
Jim Azevedo [00:34:22]:
You’re such a I got this. Linda asked, hi, Linda. Smashwords publishes ebooks that other retailers won’t. So would D2D consider selling print books on Smashwords?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:34:34]:
In in short, yes. We will. And that is one of the things we plan on on working with you on in terms of being making, print books available on Smashwords. But that probably isn’t coming up until after we do things like large print for everyone and and and and and other and other functionality that we wanna do to improve both the publishing experience from Draft2Digital as well as the Smashboard store. So the other thing, Linda, I would highly recommend, please email that to support@draftdigital.com and let them know. I can’t wait to sell my print books on Smashwords. I’d love I would love that too. Again, because then
Jim Azevedo [00:35:09]:
love that.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:35:09]:
I mean, let’s be honest. Smashwords is the world’s largest repository of indie author titles. It’s the only it you know, it’s pretty much exclusively indie author titles and small publishers who use Draft2Digital or Smashwords. So it’s very indie, so you’re not competing with some of the major, you know, names, from from traditional publishing. And so what can we do to to make the the buyer’s experience more exciting saying, oh, I’d like I’d rather get this one in print. Won’t just click here? So, yeah, I think I think that’s a great idea. So please please email us, with that suggestion or request, Linda.
Jim Azevedo [00:35:43]:
Yeah. Thank you for that, Linda. It’s on the road map, but I don’t have a specific timeline for it.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:35:48]:
That road listen. We have lots of big road maps, We can barely see off into the horizon.
Jim Azevedo [00:35:54]:
So many road maps. You can see the back
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:35:56]:
of my eyes. Years of work. Yes.
Jim Azevedo [00:36:01]:
Gio. Hey, Gio.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:36:04]:
Hi, Gio.
Jim Azevedo [00:36:05]:
Yeah. Guillaume has a, comment. I could see why Smashwords call it the meat grinder. It takes ages to get through like meat does. I call it version the pasta grinder. Much easier to grind pasta than meat.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:36:21]:
The pasta grinder. Okay. I like that. See, you can tell Guillaume is a creative spirit because coming up with, these ingenious parallels. Great anecdote.
Jim Azevedo [00:36:31]:
Yes. Regret this already asks, what is the ETA on getting hardcover prints through you guys?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:36:41]:
Well, I know large prints come in first because it’s an underserved market, but I know Yeah. I know hardcover is on that on that road map. I’m not sure how far behind large print it is, to be quite honest. Again and I sound like a broken record. It’s not a scratchy record, but, I sounded like a monkey just ran into the room. But, no, email support@drafted.com and say, I’d love to get hardcovers from you. And and and, again, that’s one of the ways we prioritize.
Jim Azevedo [00:37:07]:
Yeah. And as the PR corporate communications guys, I wish I can give you a timeline. I have somewhat of an idea, but I’ve learned in my years of experience that never share that because if a bug will come up or something will come up technically that you weren’t expecting, you know, it will. So, all I can tell you is that we’re working diligently to get you large print and hardcovers as soon as we possibly can. So it’s coming.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:37:32]:
Yeah. No. No. Of course. And and, again, like, we would have we would have thought, the migration would have taken a lot less time, but it it took a little bit longer than than we initially
Jim Azevedo [00:37:41]:
migrating. Yeah. 50,000 accounts was so different.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:37:45]:
Well, Penguin and Random House, where they merged twelve years ago or ten years ago or something like that, they still haven’t merged their databases. Now I know why. Now I get it.
Jim Azevedo [00:37:55]:
Yeah. Let’s see. Oh, question. ALC Muse asked, do you offer any pre publication marketing help?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:38:11]:
Well, of course. Yeah. Yes. So with Smashwords, you have the option to do, pre and not preorders, but you can do you can do presales, which is cool. And I think we’d there’s probably a link on our blog to how that works. But the other thing and, again, I mentioned this earlier. Megan and I are putting together a catalog for the libraries, and one of them is we’re running reports on books that, are already coming out in the next six to nine months. And we’re running reports to to add to the catalog to share the library saying, hey.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:38:45]:
I know it’s June when we’re here, but this book’s coming out in August, and this one’s coming out in July, and this one’s coming out in September, and this one’s coming out in October. We want you to be aware of these books. So when you plan ahead and and get those preorders up, we we do that work. Megan also runs reports on, preorders that are happening
Jim Azevedo [00:39:03]:
Yes.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:39:03]:
On on those existing titles and sends that to almost every one of our partners. Now we don’t say, hey. This is hot at Apple. Therefore, Barnes and Noble, you should pay attention to it. We just say, in general, there’s a lot of preorders in this title. You should pay attention to this. So, again,
Jim Azevedo [00:39:18]:
what we’re doing important, Mark, coming from our perspective as a distributor?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:39:22]:
Well, it’s important because we know, oh, this is popular somewhere. Hey, print or or hey, retail partner or library partner. You may wanna pay attention to these titles that are selling at another partner. Now, again, we don’t provide that proprietary data, but that’s also the way the book industry works is that’s an anticipation of, oh, people are already interested in this. And this means you, as an author, are now able to compete effectively with the traditional publishing world because that’s how they operate as they get those titles six to nine months, if not more, into the database systems and start their buzz a little bit earlier, let people know go and preorder. And I know for a fact, that, preorders on Apple and Kobo in particular are very powerful. They get, like, a two times bonus in different ways. With Apple, you get, like, a bit of a ranking bonus the day that it’s ordered, and then you also get on the day of release, it gets shown a little bit higher and a little bit more broadly.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:40:16]:
Thus, the more preorders you can get at places like Apple are good. Kobo, you get a two times bang for your buck. So if somebody preorders your book now, Kobo’s, big data team will say, oh, that must be so important. So instead of giving it a regular ranking boost, we’ll take whatever that boost was gonna be, and it’s like Dungeons and Dragons. You get a two times bonus when you roll. Whatever the number is, it’ll be two times that number. And so, again, at both Kobo and Apple, that helps them, that helps them populate those titles to their customers and say, hey. This is coming out.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:40:46]:
You probably might wanna pay attention to it. So we spent a lot of time working with our retail and library partners to spotlight those preorder, titles. But, again, we can only spotlight the preorder titles. And, again, fill out that marketing form we showed earlier and say, hey. I’ve got this book. It’s it’s the next one in the series. Here’s how this other one did. And Meghan also does send that to our, our partners and says, hey.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:41:10]:
Haven’t seen any sales on this yet, but you know that this this author has this other book that did this, and you should pay attention to it. So, again, she she spends a lot of time, again, trying to help authors and spotlight them. But only with your help.
Jim Azevedo [00:41:26]:
If if you’re watching this and you’re currently a draft digital author, make sure that you’re signed up for our indie advantage newsletter because in the next issue that’ll come out in early May, there’s going to be an article in there about all about preorders and how to use them and why they’re so important. And I could tell you that, especially in terms of ebook preorders, they’re one of the most effective book launch marketing tools that I’ve seen since I started at Smashwords back in 2011. They’re one of the most effective tools out there, but they’re also one of the most underutilized, like, highly underutilized tools out there. Only about 16% of our authors are using preorders, but they work. And the reason they work so well is you can have a preorder at Kobo, Apple, Amazon, and is it Barnes and Noble? For up to twelve months.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:42:14]:
Twelve months.
Jim Azevedo [00:42:15]:
So you can have you can have a book where you don’t even have the finished manuscript yet, and you don’t have your finished cover art yet. That’s called an asset list preorder. So you can have this shelf space at a retail store months and months before your book is even is ever released to the public. Now the magic fairy dust comes in because as your book is is accumulating these preorders, at Apple Books in particular, those preorders count as full sales. So on the day of your release, it’s like you could have this concentration of months worth of sales all hitting on day one because that’s when the credit cards are charged. Not when a person reserves a preorder, but when your book is released, and that is what can cause a spike in your sales rankings on day one of your books being released. So Yeah. Sign up for Draft2Digital’s newsletter, and I’ll try to give you all of those details and more in that next issue of the Indian Advantage newsletter.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:43:10]:
Jim, question from Bev is where do you sign up for the for the newsletter? Because, or are people getting it, and is it going into their spam folders maybe?
Jim Azevedo [00:43:20]:
Possibly. I believe as you gosh. Alyssa, if you’re listening. Alyssa, help us. Help us. I’ve seen it somewhere on the site. Gosh. Thanks for that question, Bev.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:43:33]:
No. I think it’s in accounting. In in account in account. In account. Right. You can go in and say, give me just information about my publishing. Give me marketing information, I think. And if you’ve selected the marketing information, it should it should, be available to you there.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:43:50]:
But, again, double check your spam folder because chances are maybe you already received and, again, that would be emails potentially from Megan saying, hey. I’m inviting you to this thing. Maybe you’re not seeing those either.
Jim Azevedo [00:44:00]:
Yes. Right. Okay. I’m gonna bring up this question from Francis. I’m sure this is a question that a lot of people may be thinking about because we get this question fairly often. Thanks for the question, Francis. Francis asks, once the book is published on D2D in paperback, will it be distributed to Amazon as well as other retailers, or do I have to upload the PDF to Amazon myself?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:44:25]:
Yes. When you publish your print book through Draft2Digital, it’ll end up going through Ingram’s ecosystem, which goes to pretty much every retailer in the English speaking world. But you can still go direct to Amazon and upload it through, Kindle Direct Publishing, as well. So you can you can do that, Francis. So, yeah, it it goes to Amazon. So if you wanna leave it like that, cool. And if but you can also override, at least from Amazon’s perspective, override that and and go directly into Amazon. It just goes everywhere.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:44:54]:
There’s no unlike ebooks where you can choose and pick and choose, with print, our partner just sends it everywhere automatically. So, yes, it does go everywhere, almost everywhere. Clarification here from Beth.
Jim Azevedo [00:45:09]:
She’s asked, so to upload an edited EPUB, you really need to edit in Word and make a new EPUB. Correct? Yes?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:45:17]:
Yeah. Yes. Yes. I mean, unless yeah. Unless you have a designer or a tool like Atticus or Vellum that you’re using, you’re still gonna do the edits there somewhere or in Reedsy or whatever tool you’re using. Yeah. But if you’re using our tools, yeah, go back to word edit and then reupload.
Jim Azevedo [00:45:33]:
Thanks, man.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:45:34]:
Great question. Yeah.
Jim Azevedo [00:45:36]:
About a minute left. Gosh. This goes by so fast.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:45:38]:
Oh, this went fast. Yeah.
Jim Azevedo [00:45:40]:
Let’s see. K. Get rid of that. K. We kind of already covered that one. I’m gonna skip that one. Sorry. I’m talking to myself.
Jim Azevedo [00:45:54]:
Oh, how about this one from Nigel again? He Nigel’s looking at the comments here too, and Nigel says large print is featuring a lot in the questions. Is it really so significant? Is it really so significant a part of the market?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:46:06]:
Yeah. You know what? Print is still billions of dollars industry. Print is still the majority of our book industry. And and people who don’t read ebooks, ebooks are automatically large print, but print books are not automatically large print. And it’s an underserved part of of the population. So, yes, I think I think it could really help indie authors get their books into a space, and and not every big publisher is doing large print. So think about that. They’re only doing large print for the the James Patterson’s of the world.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:46:36]:
They’re not doing large print for every book they, produce. Therefore, you as an indie author have a chance to get into a space that other, that the big publishers are not in, and we’re pretty excited about doing that. Not just removing barriers, but allowing you to be ahead of traditional publishing.
Jim Azevedo [00:46:54]:
Thanks, Mark. Quick comment from Russell. Russell says, I just wanted you guys to know how much I appreciate all your hard work for the indie author community. Thank you so much. I love being a D2D in Smashwords. Oh, there. Russell, we love you more.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:47:08]:
Yes. We do. We do. Thank you, Russell. We couldn’t do this without authors. So I do. Yeah.
Jim Azevedo [00:47:12]:
Yep. Thank you for trusting us with your work.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:47:15]:
Yes.
Jim Azevedo [00:47:16]:
Okay. You Mark, can you hang out for a couple more minutes? Because there’s a few more questions.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:47:22]:
Okay.
Jim Azevedo [00:47:23]:
I wanna get to this question from ALC news again, because I don’t I wanna make sure we’re not confusing anybody out there. They ask, can you explain publishing with D2D and IngramSpark? Are we supposed to do first? I think some people are are hearing Ingram, and they’re thinking IngramSpark. So maybe
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:47:41]:
we should start there. IngramSpark is a a front end for Ingram Lightning Source, which is a print on demand function of Ingram, the world’s largest English language book seller. D to D print is a different front end for Lightning Source to distribute that. If you’re doing print books, do one or the other. You can do one book through Ingram Spark and a different book through D to D print if you wanna experiment with it, but do not duplicate it. There’s no point. It is just gonna cause actual what’s known as vendor, vendor, I can’t remember the term. But it’s it’s an issue where Ingram can only identify one vendor at a time, and so there’ll be a conflict between is is Ingram Spark the vendor or is I mean, the vendor of record.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:48:22]:
Vendor of record. Thank you. So that that causes an issue, so don’t. The other thing I will tell you is I think IngramSpark is a phenomenal tool, and I think IngramSpark is great for print. I will tell you without a doubt, and I stand by this 100%, IngramSpark is horrible for ebook distribution. When I worked at Kobo, one of the biggest problems we had because, again, like, print, they don’t let you pick and choose. So you can go direct like, with us, you can go I go direct, for example, to Amazon and and Kobo with my ebook, and then I use Draft2Digital to go to all the other places, but I don’t select Amazon. And that but with IngramSpark, they don’t give you the choice how to distribute your ebooks.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:48:57]:
So I think going with Draft2Digital or PublishDrive or StreetLib or any other distributor, for ebooks is great. IngramSpark, great for prints, not good at all for ebooks. So I hope that helps out Muse.
Jim Azevedo [00:49:09]:
K.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:49:10]:
I hope that helps. Thanks, Mark. Yeah.
Jim Azevedo [00:49:12]:
I think that was pretty clear.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:49:13]:
Without being negative. I’m, again, I’m trying not be negative. I’m trying to be honest.
Jim Azevedo [00:49:16]:
Well, you’re talking from your experience too. We appreciate. I got a quick question here from Matthew who asked, what ebook devices do you think we should recommend to our readers?
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:49:28]:
Kobo, of course. And I saw Alyssa left a message in the comment that she’s she prefers Kobo. I mean, again, okay. I worked for Kobo for six years. I’m Canadian. I own about six different Kobo devices. They’re absolutely amazing. They’re just beautiful devices.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:49:43]:
I love them to death. The Nook devices are really good too. They’re really, top of the line. And and Kindle’s really good too. Heck, if you’re an Apple person, the fantastic. You’ve got, like, the different size iPads and the phones and stuff. So, really, Matthew, it’s whatever the reader prefers. You know?
Jim Azevedo [00:50:00]:
I would say, Matthew, like, if your readers don’t want to purchase a new device, phones are great e reading devices. I I read Yeah. Probably most of the books that I read, I read on my phone.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:50:11]:
The one thing I don’t like about What I don’t like about the phone, though, Jim, is it’s actually it’s a it’s it’s a lit up device, and it triggers a part of your brain. So if you wanna read in bed at night, it actually stimulates part of the brain. It’s hard to go to sleep. And I know that a lot of the EE rates does not do that, and there is a special of a filter that, allows it to relax your brain so you can actually read and and drift off into peaceful bliss. Thanks to the authors who’ve written amazing stories.
Jim Azevedo [00:50:39]:
I’m just thinking about a device that people are gonna have with them all the time. You know? It’s like Textwork.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:50:44]:
Yeah. That’s true. The life support system I always carry with me. That’s right.
Jim Azevedo [00:50:48]:
There’s so many fantastic, reading apps out there these days. I think I’ve got, like, five or six different reading apps on my phone, including all the different library apps as well. So
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:50:57]:
Yeah. And and and the great thing about your phone is I saw a a question about color and stuff like that. Phone’s always color. Now when it goes to an e e reader, it’s gonna go black and white. But if there’s color images embedded if you’re reading it on your phone, if they’re color in the source material, they’ll they will be color as well.
Jim Azevedo [00:51:19]:
I am going through the comments and
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:51:21]:
Look at us. We’re into fifty one minute. We’re like, we’re going over time, baby.
Jim Azevedo [00:51:25]:
We are. Look at this. A lot of them are just comments here. Oh, okay. I want one last question from Ronnie that I think we’re over time, and we’re gonna have to call it. Ronnie asked, when will we have photo illustrations? Because I also write craft books, and I don’t wanna go outside.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:51:43]:
So photo illustrations, I guess, if you’re talking ebooks or print books, I mean, it’s whatever you embed, in in the in the file. Let’s be honest with you. Photo illustrations work best on fixed layout, and fixed layout is not really an ebook friendly format. It just works unless you got a big iPad or some giant screen where you can see it. And fixed layout is the layout you get in a print book. It’s like a PDF file. It never changes. And ebooks EPUBs are reflowable.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:52:11]:
And reflowable means so if I’m reading a book on a big tablet, I can you know, it’s a, let’s say, a 300 page book, and then I read it on my phone, and it’s an 800 page book because whatever. And I can also change the font size. A fixed layout, means it’s fixed. It does not change or whatever the publisher specified is gonna be that. And so with ebooks, it’s really difficult. You can still insert them, but it’s not gonna be as good of an experience. Those are probably gonna be for print books. And, yes, as we continue to expand and and allow larger trim sizes and hardcover and stuff like that, that will be available.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:52:44]:
And, again, one of the functionalities we’ll probably introduce for print books is the ability to do color interiors for print books, but I’ll be honest with you. That’s very, very expensive. I’ve done it in the past. It is not cheap. It cost me an arm and a leg to to to make some color versions of one of my most recent, books, which I I, you know, I used Ingram. I used Ingram Spark to get that out into the market, and I’ve also used a local printer for it, but it is not cheap. So that’s something to be very, very, mindful of.
Jim Azevedo [00:53:12]:
Thanks for that, Mark. Well, we’re over we’re overtime now. So I just wanna, again, just very sincerely thank all of you for joining us here again today. And a special shout out, special word of gratitude for all of you who may be joining us for the very first time. Thank you for spending a part of your day with us. It means the world Great questions.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre [00:53:30]:
Yeah. And you guys are amazing. Thank you. Yeah. Fantastic questions.
Jim Azevedo [00:53:35]:
And if you if you enjoyed this episode, do us a favor and share it with some of your author friends and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We appreciate that. Also, if you can bookmark dddlive.com when you bookmark dddlive.com, that will show you what our subsequent issues or topics will be and who our guests are going to be, which reminds me I need to get on the I need to get on the ball for our future episodes because I’m falling a little bit behind with that. So that that page may not be populated today or tomorrow, but it will be populated very soon. If you’re brand new to us and maybe you haven’t yet published a book for the very first time or maybe you’ve been traditionally published and you’re just dipping your toe into the self publishing waters for the very first time in your career, you can sign up for a free Draft2Digital account simply by going to draft2digital.com. As we come to the close, one final thank you to my esteemed colleague here, Mark Leslie LeFave. Thanks, buddy, for taking some time out of your day to join us. And, again, for everybody else, thank you so much for spending a part of your day with us.
Jim Azevedo [00:54:43]:
I hope to see you here again next week. We’re going to leave you with a quick thirty second commercial spot to talk about a D2D print, which is Draft2Digital’s print on demand service. Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you next week.
Kevin Tumlinson [00:54:57]:
Ebooks are great, but there’s just something about having your words in print. Something you can hold in your hands, put on a shelf signed for a reader. That’s why we created D2D Print, a print on demand service that was built for you. We have free beautiful templates to give your book a pro look, and We can even convert your ebook cover into a full wrap around cover for print. So many options for you and your books. And you can get started right now at draft2digital.com.
Kevin Tumlinson [00:55:21]:
That’s it for this week’s self publishing insiders with Draft2Digital. Be sure to subscribe to us wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with your will be author friends, and start, build, and grow your own self publishing career right now at draft2digital.com.