Episode Summary
It’s the three year anniversary of Draft2Digital and Smashwords joining forces. Kris Austin and Mark Coker join Jim to look back on the last three years and forward to our plans to come.
Episode Notes
It’s been three years since we shook up the indie publishing industry and merged Draft2Digital and Smashwords into one big player in the indie space. Now that we’ve had three years and most authors have been migrated into Draft2Digital, Kris Austin and Mark Coker join Jim to look back on the last three years and forward to our plans to come.
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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.
Jim Azevedo [00:00:26]:
Hello, everybody. Welcome to another rousing edition of Self Publishing Insiders. Today, I’m thrilled to welcome you all and to welcome my friends and my colleagues. I’ve got Kris Austin, the CEO of Draft2Digital, And I’ve got Mark Coker, the former CEO of Smashwords and now chief strategy officer at Draft2Digital joining us here on Self Publishing Insiders today. Welcome, guys.
Kris Austin [00:00:54]:
Hi, Jim. Hi.
Mark Coker [00:00:55]:
Hey. Good morning. Good afternoon.
Jim Azevedo [00:00:59]:
It’s been a while since I’ve had you both on the show. And today, we are kinda celebrating the this is gonna blow people’s minds because it blew my mind. We’re celebrating the three year anniversary of Draft2Digital’s acquisition of Smashwords. Three years.
Kris Austin [00:01:17]:
Yeah. So it’s pretty crazy.
Jim Azevedo [00:01:19]:
It’s nuts. We’re gonna we’re gonna break this conversation, kind of into three parts out there for all of our viewers. We’re gonna talk about, like, what led up to the acquisition in the first place. Now we’re going to talk about sort of where we are right now with the integration of the two companies. And then we’re going to talk about, like, what’s coming up? What are some of the things that Draft2Digital is working on that’s going to benefit our indie authors and indie publishers out there? So without further ado well, let me just stop for a second and pause because I want to invite our viewers out there to submit your questions, submit your comments. This is the time. This is for all of you to ask questions of Kris and Mark. So with that, let’s get into the let’s get into the meat of all of this.
Jim Azevedo [00:02:09]:
So I don’t wanna assume that everybody knows about the the the merger between Draft2Digital and Smashwords. So, Kris, I’ll pose the first question to you. What led to your decision? What made you think that, you know what, this we should talk to Smashwords about merging our two companies. What led you down that pathway initially, and did it begin? Like, was it right around 2022, or does it go back further?
Kris Austin [00:02:37]:
Sure. Yeah. So, actually, I’ve admired Smashwords from the very beginning. We actually modeled Draft2Digital off of Smashwords and the Smashwords, way of doing things and the way of thinking about authors in the industry. And, really, by the time that you you get to 2021, which is, you know, nine years after the founding of Draft2Digital, we, I I was just really interested in what the whole industry was doing and how it was treating indie authors. And I just didn’t think indie authors were really getting the place that they deserve, in a way that they should. And so it occurred to me that Smash Bros. And Draft2Digital were doing the same things, working with the same authors Mhmm.
Kris Austin [00:03:21]:
And spending a lot of time competing with each other in a way that I think we could be a much more effective, as a combined company, to fight on behalf of indie authors. We could just do better for them if we were working together. The whole thinking was, how how do we serve the author better? And so I reached out to Mark, in November of twenty twenty one. And by by March of twenty twenty two, it was done. So yeah.
Jim Azevedo [00:03:49]:
Yeah. Relatively quick. Did you wanna add something to that, Mark?
Mark Coker [00:03:51]:
And we did you
Jim Azevedo [00:03:53]:
did much convincing?
Mark Coker [00:03:54]:
Kris described it really well. It, you know, it was just really clear to me within our first couple calls that we were cut from the same cloth. We have the same values in terms of how we wanted to treat authors and what we wanted to fight for.
Jim Azevedo [00:04:13]:
Yeah.
Mark Coker [00:04:14]:
And, and, you know, the realization that we could be much stronger together, that, you know, the time that we’re wasting, just trying to take authors from one another is time wasted when there’s really bigger, bigger fights to fight. And, and the opportunity to combine forces and combine the technologies. I mean, we, we each had developed some really innovative industry, unique capabilities for authors and publishers. And by combining those things together, you know, it just, to me, it was just kind of a no brainer. And, you know, I, I knew very early on within my first couple of conversations with Kris that, you know, very, very soon after our first couple of conversations, I was to the point where I really couldn’t imagine the future of either one of our companies, without us being one, you know, being together.
Jim Azevedo [00:05:10]:
That’s an interesting perspective. I’m certain that both of you, prior to going into it, realized, okay. This is this is, this is an exciting opportunity for both of our companies. But, surely, both of you must have been thinking that this is gonna be this massive, massive project, with multiple facets to it, with multiple challenges. Can you give our viewers and listeners a sense of just the magnitude of what it takes to bring in two companies such as Draft2Digital? I mean, there’s gotta be the legalities of it all, the culture blends, the people blending, the infrastructures in the background, like, all of that stuff. Can you give the sense of what that’s been like?
Kris Austin [00:05:59]:
Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. The, you you know, you mentioned a lot of the big aspects. Whenever two companies come together, the really the probably the most scary and most unknown part of that is how is the team gonna work together. Like, what’s the culture? Are the cultures going to clash in some way? Are there gonna be personalities that are causing conflicts? You really, really worry about this because mergers don’t succeed if you have a culture clash. And, that was probably the most worrisome part. It’s just because you can never know for sure until you just have to start working together as a company.
Kris Austin [00:06:35]:
Yeah. And, and, honestly, that part, my fears were completely unfounded. We blended together so well as a cult as a culture. It was it was shocking. The it was clear that, both teams really have the same goals in the same direction in mind, how we think about other people, how we think about authors, and how, how we wanna work together. That that part ended up being, frankly, the easiest part. So, but what we knew would also be difficult was the technical parts. We have two systems that are more than a decade old systems and, that have been solving the same problems.
Kris Austin [00:07:17]:
But as software development goes, they were solved in different ways. And but we knew one of the major goals had to be that we don’t need to run two systems anymore. It’s redundant. It’s a waste of resources, and we needed to get rid of a system. And we chose to to wind down the Smashwords system and put it into the Draft2Digital system. We knew that would be difficult. It has taken longer than we wanted. There’s just no no other way to think about it.
Kris Austin [00:07:43]:
It’s a it’s a massive technical challenge. And the teams have been working feverishly for the the the whole time. And we’re about 90% done now. We’ve had we’ve moved over 90% of the of the accounts over. We have that last 10% to go. The biggest issue is really moving people over who have an account at Smashwords and Draft2Digital using the same email address, and a solution for them is what we’re testing as we speak. And I expect in just the next few weeks, that solution will release, and then we’ll be able to move over the final around 18,000 accounts. So
Jim Azevedo [00:08:24]:
Okay. I mean, just gonna show up a quick quick question here from author, Tom McCullough, who’s asking. So when will the merger migration be complete? So I’m hoping what Kris just stated helps answer that question. Tom?
Kris Austin [00:08:38]:
Thanks for thanks for writing in. The, your name’s been shown up for me many times. I’ve seen I’ve seen you around, so I appreciate you staying connected. The, yeah, really, my expectation is the next few weeks will kick off the process to move the last 18,000 or so. There’s gonna be some stragglers, some, over the another month or two after that, I would expect, because there’s always weird edge cases. But, in the next couple months, two to three months, I expect us to be completely done. So
Jim Azevedo [00:09:07]:
Great. Were there any, sort of unknown unknowns or surprises that kind of kind of that really took you guys out of I don’t know. I don’t wanna say your comfort level, but just I imagine there are so many things that were unknown going into it, that you had to sort of plan for that. But I’m curious, were there any big surprises, technologically? You already mentioned culturally that your fears were unfounded because everyone just sort of blended together. But I’m curious if there was anything else that was just kinda like, woah. Like, we hadn’t anticipated that.
Kris Austin [00:09:50]:
Nothing pops into my head, but Mark’s got a better imagination than I do.
Mark Coker [00:09:54]:
Well, to, to build on, you know, I agree with everything Kris said there, about bringing things together and, you know, and we were solving a lot of the same problems and solving them differently. And, and so, like, one thing that was kind of a surprise to me that I hadn’t really anticipated was that we could solve the same problem so differently. And, and, and so, you know, you had, you know, thousands of authors who chose the Smashwords platform because that’s the way their brains worked and it worked really well for them and it was logical and easy and all that stuff. And then you had thousands more authors that were going the D2D way because for them, that, that, that system, that interface, that way of thinking, worked well for them. And so, you know, it, it, it’s been interesting to really see how the two worlds are so different and then bringing them together has been kind of fun. And then, of you know, of course, there’s there’s different ways that the two companies planned things, thought about things like like future developments, how we manage development projects. And it’s it’s not that one way is better than the other. They’re just different ways.
Mark Coker [00:11:08]:
And so, you know, for me, that was, an early realization and also in my mind helped ease the, the merge to recognize that, you know, there are multiple ways to do something and it’s not that one way is wrong and one way is right. It’s just there are different ways. And so it’s kind of a different approach to, to problem solving. Yep. That’s been helpful to me.
Jim Azevedo [00:11:31]:
Okay. I wanna ask you guys both one last question about the merger, then we’ll kinda shift gears here a little bit. But, Kris, I’ll go to you first. What pleases you the most about where we are today, you know, post announcement? How far we’ve come?
Kris Austin [00:11:50]:
I’m actually most impressed with the Smashwords store growth, just when it comes to just real results. I think it’s been amazing what we can do for authors there, you know, and it’s kind of a unique platform that the Smashwords store provides, and it’s just shown some real, real benefits there from the happened to two companies combined. That has been very, very impressive. So I would say that probably my number one. So
Jim Azevedo [00:12:15]:
Okay. Thank you. Mark, what what pleases you the most?
Mark Coker [00:12:19]:
Well, in general, it’s just the the abundant opportunity that I see for us to really help authors and publishers realize their dreams. The you know, one of the reasons that we wanted to, you know, combine operations and eliminate redundant parts, like one publishing platform instead of two, is to free up resources, to focus on new developments and new opportunities that we can surface for our authors. And, you know, that’s, that’s what I spend a lot of my time thinking about is future planning and dreaming about, you know, what are the new inventions that we can deploy, that can help our authors realize their dreams.
Jim Azevedo [00:13:03]:
Well, we should change your we should change your title strategy offer to serve the chief dreamer.
Mark Coker [00:13:09]:
Fine with me.
Jim Azevedo [00:13:13]:
Be before we shift gears into the next thing, I wanna bring up a question from, I think it’s Kiel or Kiel Allen. I appreciate this question. Kael asked, how can you tell if your books have moved over? I’m assuming from Draft2Digital.
Kris Austin [00:13:29]:
Sure. Yeah. Great question. The the major way you’re gonna know is that you’ll be now logging in to the Draft2Digital platform. So if you’re not logging into the Draft2Digital platform to manage your books, which looks totally different than the Smashwords platform, then you haven’t been moved over yet. So if you’re still on the smashwords.com website to manage your books, then you have not yet been migrated.
Jim Azevedo [00:13:53]:
Okay. Okay. We’re gonna shift gears and talk about some of the things that are upcoming. So I wanna tell the viewers that my job in communications is to tell the world about these new things that we have that are coming up, whether they’re they’re a new product or or a service enhancement or something like that. So I don’t wanna hold that to myself. But before we get into it, I wanted to bring up another question from Tom because this is acts as a as a nice segue. So, Tom, thanks again for your question here. Tom asks, with the merger being complete, what do you see as D2D’s future as far as adding things like color interiors for print, hardcovers, etcetera.
Jim Azevedo [00:14:36]:
So, Kris, I’m gonna punt this over to you. But before you answer Tom’s question specifically, can you talk just about what DGG print is and the growth that we’ve seen since it’s come out of out of beta, especially?
Kris Austin [00:14:49]:
Yeah. Absolutely. So DTD print is a service that Draft2Digital offers to help you to very easily get your books into the print system, the print distribution system for your readers to buy print books. And, there’s a lot of technical steps involved just like there is with on the ebook side of the business. The tool allows people who have ebooks with us to convert them into print books, very easily and create covers for them. But you can also just be print first if you want. But d two d print is really our solution to help indie authors get their books into print. And we just try to make it as smooth and simple as possible because there’s just so many options and questions and how do you do it, things involved when it comes to putting your book, in the print system.
Kris Austin [00:15:38]:
So so that’s basically, what d two d print is. And if you don’t have your book in print, you you really should. There’s just almost no reason to not do it, because it’s just so easy these days. You don’t have to pay for books upfront. There’s still no upfront cost. If you want to have a physical proof copy so you can hold it in your hands and flip through it, you do gotta pay for that because there’s an actual cost to print that book. But, for the most part, though, it’s very similar to an ebook once it’s out there. And bookstores can order it.
Kris Austin [00:16:10]:
They can buy it. People can buy it at online stores. And so over the last, really many years, this DCD print took four or five five years now we’re into this program. It’s it’s been a lot of challenges. It’s a very tricky part of the industry, and we’ve had to work with, partners to really make this a good experience for everybody involved. And, but over the last year, we’ve really seen some massive growth because it’s really coming to fruition, all the all the work we’ve been putting in. And so we’ve added 28,000 print titles, last in the last twelve months, which was a to put that in perspective, that’s almost a 50% increase on the number of titles in the program. So it’s really starting to ramp up now, and I strongly recommend people start putting, those books in.
Kris Austin [00:17:04]:
Over the last twelve months, authors earned or paid by us, about three quarters of a million dollars. And that’s this is a lot of money available to authors in this space, and I strongly encourage authors to get in there. And it’s going to continue to grow. So to answer Tom’s question specifically,
Jim Azevedo [00:17:24]:
yes.
Kris Austin [00:17:25]:
DTC print is huge, and we’re adding features, like, as our number one priority this year. Merger has been number one priority. Print has been number two. Merger’s wrapping up, so we’re gonna be hitting print even harder. And we are adding different print formats. And right now, the focus is on, large print and hardcovers. So, color interiors is not there yet, but that would probably be a third item on the list. But right now we’re looking at large print and hardcovers as upcoming formats, in the coming months.
Kris Austin [00:17:59]:
So So for 2025? Yeah. Sometime this year, it better happen. But, you know, sometimes technical things become more challenging than we expect, especially in the print side of the business. Print is complicated. It’s a 250 year old industry. So, there’s some old cruft that has to be worked through when it comes to print. So
Jim Azevedo [00:18:18]:
Yeah. Thanks for that question, Tom. And I wanna remind DTD authors that if you haven’t seen the indie advantage newsletter, the first three issues of the indie advantage newsletter was like a series on DTD print from, you know, what it is, how to use it, the differences between publishing print on demand books and ebooks. And then in the final issue, we gave, advice on how to market print books differently than your ebooks. So check it out if you haven’t seen it yet. Those issues are on the D2D blog if you wanna learn more about D2D print. Next question goes over to you, mister Coker. So, the Smashwords store just wrapped up its most recent annual sale, the reading ebook week sale, which took place the March.
Jim Azevedo [00:19:06]:
Can you talk about, what happened with that sale and sort of the growth that we’re seeing at the Smashwords store sort of going back a little bit to what Kris was mentioning earlier? Like, how was he was been the most pleased with Smashwords growth since the acquisition?
Mark Coker [00:19:22]:
Yeah. Well, the growth has been surprising, for, people listening in that aren’t familiar with the history of Smashwords. When we first launched the business in 02/2008, we started as a publishing platform. This was before we were a distributor. And so we had to create a store so that our authors could sell their books to readers. So the store was just that’s all it was. And then it was the following year after we launched the business that we did a big pivot into distribution and became the first, you know, indie ebook distributor to open up all these major retailers to eBooks, to self publish eBooks. Once we entered distribution, the store kinda took a back seat, and and we really neglected it.
Mark Coker [00:20:09]:
We didn’t do much to it other than, you know, continue to enhance the coupon capabilities. And then about seven years ago, we did a a major refresh of the homepage to make it we deliberately wanted to make it look more like a bookstore. And, that really helped launch the store on a new trajectory. So we have been surprised by the growth in Smashwords. So eight consecutive years of sales growth at the store at a time when most of the other the other major retailers are in decline or flat. So something magical is happening at the store, and you’ve got a whole bunch of theories, but I can’t say that we know for sure what’s happening. Other than that, readers are reacting positively to the store and authors are reacting positively to the store and the store is doing a good job of bringing authors and readers together. So one of the one of one year into the merge with d two d three years ago, so after one year, we opened up the store to d two d books.
Mark Coker [00:21:20]:
So d two d became the first distributor into the Smashwords store. And that was really interesting to see that big influx of inventory and to see what happened afterwards. And, basically, what it what happened is that, sales grew quite a bit. And so here we are a store that’s getting larger and growing faster as it grows larger. So last year was a fantastic year. And this reading ebook week sale that we did here in 2025, we had that was a record reading ebook week. We had, we achieved our record highest sales level of any day ever in seventeen, eighteen years of Smashwords history. Mhmm.
Mark Coker [00:22:08]:
So it’s just really exciting to see how, our community gathered together. You know, these Smashwords is really famous for these super sales that we do. Read an ebook week, the Smashwords summer winter sale, the Smashwords end of year sale. These are the world’s largest ebook sales, and they’re collaborative sales. These sales are driven by the authors and driven by the readers. You know, we provide the tools, the platform, and then we pretty much just step out of the way and let the the the authors and the re and their readers interact through the sale. So I you know, I I’m really excited about the prospects for the Smashwords store. And, you know, from the very beginning, as we announced, when we announced the merger, we were go going to move the, the publishing platform operations over to D2D, and then smash words was going to become a dedicated store.
Mark Coker [00:23:06]:
And that’s already started happening. And I think the readers are responding to that. You know, it’s creating a better shopping experience for readers as we start pulling out a lot of the author centric information that was on the on the store. It just brings the store forward. It makes our books more accessible to more readers.
Jim Azevedo [00:23:27]:
Mark, can you speak to, some of the data that you saw in terms of recurring readers and new readers? Because whenever I I caught a little bit of that, from one of the reports I saw post sale, and it was pretty exciting.
Mark Coker [00:23:42]:
Yeah. So, you know, in the last few years, we’ve started paying more attention to the store and and and and learning more about operating the store. You know, how do we we become good bookstore managers? And what are the metrics by which to measure the success of a store and how things are trending? And so, you know, we’re starting to look at metrics that we never paid any attention to before in the past. So, you know, like, what is the average cart size? How is that trending? You know, what percentage of, you know, customers are buying books or, you know, what happens, you know, when someone signs up for the store, you know, what percentage of them buy a book or, you know Yeah. What are they buying? You know, what’s the what categories? You know, what’s the breakdown? Fiction, nonfiction, all that stuff. So we’re becoming more familiar with those statistics, starting to follow them and track them over time. So, you know, some of the basic statistics, they’re just really encouraging. So, the, the, the shopping cart size is increasing, you know, for the last five years, it’s been increasing incrementally every year.
Mark Coker [00:25:05]:
So why people
Jim Azevedo [00:25:06]:
are just buying more books?
Mark Coker [00:25:08]:
Well, it, it, it could be it’s, you know, the answer to any question is usually multiple answers.
Jim Azevedo [00:25:14]:
Sure.
Mark Coker [00:25:14]:
You know, usually there are multiple factors driving something. So, yeah, people are buying more books. But it, but beyond that, what does that mean? It means that that as customers interact with the store oh, and also another companion statistic. Existing customers, so repeat purchasers, have larger shopping carts than first time purchasers. And that makes logical sense. But it but it also points to the fact that as readers are customers, you know, we’re very clear. Authors and publishers, they are not our customers. They are suppliers.
Mark Coker [00:25:57]:
They’re our partners, but they’re not customers. We’re not selling anything to them. Customers are people who buy books. And what we’re seeing is that as customers, form a relationship with the Smashwords store, over time, they buy more. And that tells me that there’s something about the store that customers are enjoying. They’re they’re starting to spend more of their book buying wallet at the Smashwords store as opposed to somewhere else. And so it’s it you know, for me, it’s fun to think about, okay, what are we doing right to to to deliver that happiness and that trust and support? And what can we do better? And, you know, what can we do better to to to help connect more readers with more books that make them happy?
Jim Azevedo [00:26:44]:
K. K. With that, I’m gonna bring up a question from Leila Rose. Leila, thanks for this question because it helps me segue into the next question I had about the Smashwords store. So I’ll let you ask it for me. Leila asks, with the migration close to finishing, are there any big plans to make new opportunities for promotion, especially at the Smashword store? Well, Mark, you’re
Mark Coker [00:27:08]:
really that is a thank you for that softball question. Yes. Yes. So there will be, quite a few new developments at the store this year. And and so you I think a lot of a lot of authors are going to start seeing the fruits of our promised labors paying off in terms of us being able to start doing more things at the store now that the merge is, now the technical merge is is almost completed. So the first thing that we’re we’re focused on and really excited about is preorders. So for the first time ever, this year, the Smashwords store is going to be able to start, taking preorders from customers. And this has been a long time coming.
Mark Coker [00:27:58]:
We should have done it fifteen years ago, but we didn’t because our focus was on distribution to the stores. Because Smashwords was probably one of the first distributors to open up preorders to self published authors. We’ve always been huge supporters of preorders. We love preorders, but, you know, the store took a second seat, so we didn’t offer that capability for our customers at the store. But now we will. I’m really excited about that. And so that should be coming around May. You know, maybe June.
Mark Coker [00:28:29]:
We’ll see. But it’s it’s coming this year. It’s probably the top development priority for the Smashwords store. Another thing that we’re working on that we’re really excited about is, you know, when you think about, you know, what makes a great indie bookstore, well, one of the great things about a physical store is you can have physical events where readers can get closer to authors. You can attend book signings, you can attend, book launch talks, readings, things like that. So, we’re putting some thought into, launching some events at the Smashwords store this year that that bring authors and readers together. So that that that should be happening, shortly after we launch preorders.
Jim Azevedo [00:29:21]:
So like a virtual in store event?
Mark Coker [00:29:23]:
Yeah. It’s a they will be virtual in store events, broadcast live, moderated, and, with interesting authors doing interesting things. I I don’t wanna say anything more about it than that, you know, as we’re still fine tuning the plans. But, you know, I I I’m I’m optimistic that it will be well received, because, you know, on any given moment, we’ve got or any given day, any given hour, we’ve got hundreds, sometimes thousands of customers filtering through the store. They’re gonna see that there’s a live event happening up at the top of their page. And it’s an opportunity to just serendipitously discover an author that you might never even heard of before. And authors are really interesting people. So I think that’ll be fun.
Mark Coker [00:30:17]:
Another thing that we’ll be doing this year, now we’ve been talking for several years, about our desire to, launch more super sales at Smashwords. Because we we think, you know, this I don’t know which one you call it a franchise, but the super sale franchise at smash words, like, some of our super sales, I mean, are have been going for seventeen years. They are annual traditions that thousands of readers and authors look forward to every year.
Jim Azevedo [00:30:46]:
Why don’t you mention the titles of those sales, Mark, so we can I just disturb as a reminder?
Mark Coker [00:30:52]:
So, read an ebook week was the first one. So we just did our seventeenth annual reading ebook week. I think it was the seventeenth or the sixteenth. You tell me, Jim.
Jim Azevedo [00:31:02]:
Sixteenth, I believe that was the March.
Mark Coker [00:31:04]:
Yeah. Yeah. And then the Smashwords summer winter sale in July. So it’s a full month sale. That’s our second oldest sale. And then our youngest sale, which is about seven or eight years old now, is the Smashwords end of year sale. And these sales just cause incredible spikes in traffic, sales, reader interaction. They they really have become, you know, global international events, and we wanna do more of them.
Mark Coker [00:31:35]:
So what we’re looking to do this year, we’re going to introduce at least one new sale, and it’s going to be a thematic sale. And this idea of thematic sales is completely new for us. In the past, these sales have always been general. Any book at Smashwords is eligible to enroll their book into the sale. These thematic sales are going to be more around genre or category and other things. So the the we’re looking, to launch two sales, this year or up to two sales. So there’s a chance we launch one in May. Not quite sure if we’re gonna make that deadline and then definitely by October.
Mark Coker [00:32:16]:
So in October, it’ll probably be, a one week sale on romance, tentatively called, romance week. And then if we make the May schedule, it’ll be erotica week or some similar name. These names are tentative. And these would be sales where from your D2D dash board, you can enroll in the sale. So if you’re an erotica author or romance author, you can go and and you can you can enroll all the appropriate books that are classified within that within that category. And and so this will be the first time that we try it this year. And if it works well, if it’s well received, if the authors and readers enjoy it, then it opens up the opportunity for other thematic sales. So there can be a a sci fi week, a fantasy week, you know, name your category.
Mark Coker [00:33:07]:
Yep. You know, GLBTQ plus week because that’s another pop popular category that we’ve seen at the store that we wanna support. So that that’s those those are three things that we’re looking at, this year, and there’ll be a lot of other, you know, smaller incremental things that we do behind the scenes that we always do.
Jim Azevedo [00:33:27]:
Yeah. Thanks for that, Mark. And, Leila, thanks again for your question. That was a great question. Kris, I wanted to ask you about, self pub book covers. So we announced the acquisition of self pub book covers. I believe that was in 2023. For those who aren’t familiar with self pub book covers, it was a pioneering marketplace, a decade old pioneering marketplace for professionally designed premade book covers.
Jim Azevedo [00:33:56]:
Draft2Digital made the acquisition, and we’re waving our magic wand to give her that D2D look. We’ve changed the branding to BookCarvers.com. And as I understand it, we’re kinda we’re, close to announcing the refresh and the rebrand. How how close are we, Kris?
Kris Austin [00:34:13]:
Sure. Yeah. And we’re we’re very close. Yeah. We’re super excited about this. The whole concept of premade book covers is just excites us. One of the biggest barriers to an author getting their book, their ebook, or their print book, out is getting a a a cover, a good cover that represents that book, to the reader so the reader knows what they’re getting. And, but, you know, covers can get very expensive.
Kris Austin [00:34:39]:
And when you’re a brand new author, you you frankly shouldn’t be spending a lot of money on anything because, you might not get that back. And I I would feel really terrible people spending a thousand dollars on a cover, and they just never earned a thousand dollars. And Good point. With with pre made covers and this sort of marketplace idea, you know, there are covers available on selfpubbookcovers.com right now that are $69. And, they’re very inexpensive, but they’re high quality books. And they’re unique books, book covers. And so they’re unique covers that you can’t get anywhere else. Once it’s sold, it’s gone.
Kris Austin [00:35:15]:
It’s your cover. And then one of the innovations that selfpubbookcovers.com had is that you as the author can, customize the title and the author name on it yourself. So you don’t have to go back and forth with a graphic designer trying to get that put on there. You’re able to put those words on there yourself and then and buy the and buy that cover. But the site’s old. It’s it’s very old. It’s running a very old platform. It’s just not modernized.
Kris Austin [00:35:47]:
And so we’ve been spending the last quite a lot of months now making a whole new website called bookcovers.com that all this self pub book covers, artists and Mhmm. Authors will be migrated to. Gives a whole modern interface, modern discoverability of of image of covers. And this is just a a way to help authors, find something very affordable, especially for their for their those new authors who I really get concerned about spending way too much money. I I want new authors to spend as little as possible to get to get their books out there, and this is one of the ways we can help facilitate to do that. So to answer your direct question, Jim, I would expect, within the next few weeks, once, it’ll be I’m thinking by the April, almost certainly by the April, but we actually it’ll be it’s gonna be really soon. It’s right on the cusp. It’s one of those things, engineering projects.
Kris Austin [00:36:42]:
The last little bit always takes a long time, and, we wanna make sure it’s right and it’s a good product. And there’s just we’re not gonna release it unless it is. And so, but I’m thinking April. So
Jim Azevedo [00:36:53]:
Excellent. Thank you. I wanna get to some more viewer questions here. I still have some more questions for you guys, but I wanna make sure that we give as many folks as possible a chance to answer a question or to ask a question. Kermit asked Kermit, thanks for your question. Will you be adding any new templates or options for templates? And it says in parenthesis, absolutely love TDD. Thanks, Kermit.
Kris Austin [00:37:18]:
Yeah. Kermit, thanks for the question. So, for those who may not be aware, the templates that I assume Kermit’s talking about is whenever you upload your word document to our interface to get converted into an ebook, we automatically format all of it. We we we put it into chapter sections and titles and everything, but we then allow you to choose from a a preset list of kind of what you want it to look like. Do you, do you want it to have, like, little flourishes here or, certain fonts, sizes and things? And just kind of a design pattern. And we’ve prebuilt a lot of them, and we call them templates. They they’re used on the ebook side and and the print side. Mhmm.
Kris Austin [00:37:58]:
And, a very cool feature, one of my favorite features actually of our of our interface. And, yes, we want to add new templates. Kermit, it just never gets the higher high enough priority to happen. And, yeah, it’s always on the list. Alyssa, our very amazing graphic designer, she loves doing stuff like that. That’s what she does. She she’s just cool at stuff like that and making those things. And I’m glad you asked, and I’ll I’ll find out again where we are on the on that and if we can throw a couple in there.
Kris Austin [00:38:29]:
If you have genres, specific templates you’re interested in, like, if you write in a specific genre and there’s a template that doesn’t quite fit for you, please send us a note, to our support team. We’ll get make sure it gets added to the ticket where we define the sort of priorities and see what we can do. There’s there’s some tediousness on the technical side to get all those to look correct. So it’s one of the reasons we don’t add them very often, but I do want a lot more of them. So yeah.
Jim Azevedo [00:38:55]:
Thanks, Kermit. Let’s see. Next question here from Chuck. Chuck, thanks for your question and and for viewing here. Chuck says, I’m collaborating with two others on my upcoming book. How do you accommodate multiple author royalty distributions?
Kris Austin [00:39:11]:
Yeah. Probably my second favorite feature of Draft2Digital is, we have a process called we call it our payment splitting. This allows you on a per book basis to specify, a payment split, a royalty split with other people. The way that would work is, the owner of the book or the one that’s uploaded it to the system would go in there and turn on payment splitting for that title. And then you would invite others to join that payment split, and then they would create a drafted digital account and agree to, you know, to to be paid this way, then they would pay they would give Draft2Digital all the tax and payment information for them. And then at the whenever money comes in for that title, we’ll automatically split it based on the information that you’ve given us in the, interface. Very popular to do this with, multiple author books. It happens sometimes where people who wanna split royalties with maybe a maybe a translator or maybe an editor or, you know really, the sky is kind of the limit on who you might wanna split, and work out a deal with.
Kris Austin [00:40:16]:
It’s a very, very flexible system. And then you as the author or the main owner of the book don’t have to deal with all the taxes and reporting situations and stuff like that. We we handle all of that. So
Jim Azevedo [00:40:28]:
Nice. Thanks, Kris, and thanks again, Chuck. Another question here from Leila. Mark, I’ll punt I’ll punt this one over to you. Leila asks, did you print and Smashwords question? Any plans in the future to get print books on Smashwords?
Mark Coker [00:40:44]:
Yes.
Jim Azevedo [00:40:49]:
Yeah. Is that it?
Mark Coker [00:40:53]:
Yes. Definitely. It’s something that we want to do, and we see lots of opportunities for us to serve authors and readers in ways that they haven’t been served before. But, I I don’t know that we can promise that for this year, But it it’s on our our list of things that we definitely want to do in the the near to intermediate term. So not not years and years, but sooner.
Kris Austin [00:41:22]:
Mhmm. Yep. And it goes back to that whole print the print industry is complicated. So this will be on the consumer purchasing side, and it’s kinda like, well, how does the industry fulfill print orders on the other side of the equation? It’s a lot for us to learn, and to implement in an interface. But, yeah, as Mark said, it’s it’s on the list. It’s just not gonna happen this year most likely.
Mark Coker [00:41:44]:
Yeah. And keep in mind that when we do these new things, we’re not just trying to do what other people are doing. We’re trying to create, we’re trying to invent things that represent, like, a step change in usability, ease of use, complexity, simplicity. You know, we’re we’re we’re really looking to make big innovations so that when, you know, we do these things, they’re like, wow. You know, that’s really nice.
Kris Austin [00:42:22]:
Mhmm.
Jim Azevedo [00:42:24]:
Yeah. That’s an excellent point. And, Beth, just a quick comment here from Beth. Hey, Beth. Beth says, well, it sounds like Smashwords focuses on readers and focuses on authors. Yes.
Mark Coker [00:42:39]:
Yes. But I I wanna add a little bit to that.
Jim Azevedo [00:42:42]:
Please.
Mark Coker [00:42:44]:
So one of the things that, you know, after the merge, we did a ton of business planning and, I mean, business planning is always ongoing. But we put a lot of thought into, who are who are D2D’s constituents? Who do we serve? It’s really important for any organization to be razor focused on who are you serving. So at D2D, the on the publishing platform side, you know, we’re serving authors, independent publishers, retailers, you know, service providers, all of these different folks that collaborate with us for the benefit of our authors. Now it it’s Smashwords, to Beth’s question or or comment here. Yes. Smashwords is working to become very customer reader centric in ways that that we have not been in the past. But one little difference about Smashwords, you know, drawing on our roots, our author centric roots, and also drawing on, our shared values between Smashwords and d two d. We have a saying at d two d, we call it shared success.
Mark Coker [00:44:13]:
So when we do anything, when we facilitate any transaction with a retailer, with a service provider, with a customer, we want all of our constituents to benefit from that transaction. So we’re optimizing transactions so that the customer benefits and the author benefits. And so Smashwords will always be different than other retailers and that we do consider the author, the publisher, one of our constituents. We want to help them find success at the Smashwords store. We want the Smashwords store to be their most successful sales outlet. Now, obviously, we’re a small store today, but we know that some authors are finding that that, you know, if they interact with our store, if they use our tools, that that they can do things that they can’t do at other retailers. And the opportunity to combine D2Ds interface with authors to Smashwords interface, Smashwords’ interface with readers, I think we can create so much magic together to facilitate, interactions, sales, different types of transactions between authors and readers in ways that are positively beneficial to both, to both constituencies. So, it’s just a long way of saying the Smashwords store cares a lot about readers, but we also care about authors and you’re gonna see that in the tools that we continue to to develop.
Mark Coker [00:45:58]:
You see it in Smashwords coupons. You see it in Smashwords presales. It’s all about putting control in the hands of authors. And then from the reader perspective at the Smashwords store, we provide them tools. We provide readers that give them control over the interaction as well.
Jim Azevedo [00:46:16]:
Yeah. Good answer. Something I wanted to bring up with you both. So in in late I think we we can talk about this. It’s out in it’s public knowledge now. But in late January, Bookshop dot org announced that they are now supplying ebooks or ebook. They’re now selling ebooks via their website. And some of those stories I mean, they made a huge splash.
Jim Azevedo [00:46:41]:
The story was covered everywhere. Some of those stories mentioned that, they would soon be selling indie author ebooks. So indie ebooks. And some of those books would be coming from Draft2Digital. So we have a partnership in place. Do we have any indication of of when we can announce that Draft2DigitalBooks will be flowing into bookshop.org?
Kris Austin [00:47:06]:
Yeah. Unfortunately, timing is not firm yet. As you can imagine, a retailer, especially one like bookshop. Or actually, I feel like we should give bookshop.org a little bit of a background. This is an amazing company that serves the indie bookstore community. So think think about your your bookstore in your local town. They might use bookshop.org and but with Amazon becoming such a huge player in the market, they just don’t get as many sales as they used to, and it’s been a big problem. And bookshop.org came in with this concept that allows you as a reader, to go buy an ebook and give the the the the basically, the retailer portion of that sale to your local bookstore.
Kris Austin [00:47:53]:
So you just go to their website, choose your local bookstore, when you buy an ebook, and they just get that money. It’s fantastic. And whenever a reader doesn’t choose a local bookstore, Bookshop.org keeps a portion of that, money and then half of it, in fact. And then the other half, they divvy up among all of their books their Bookshop, partners. It’s it’s just amazing. I love it. Their ideas are incredible. It’s been working great in print.
Kris Austin [00:48:22]:
For a long, long time, I just mentioned ebooks, but they’re actually it was all print until recently, until January. So you would buy a print book from bookshop.org, and it would come straight to your doorstep, but your local bookstore could get actually the money for it. It’s amazing. So they added ebooks in January, and we have, been working with them, on getting the technical sides worked out to get all of our books over to them. So if you want your book, your ebook available at bookshop.org, you, just need to get your book with us, and we’ll announce it once it’s available. And with one click of the button, all your books can be sent to them. If you are using DTD print, your print books are already at bookshop.org, already part of this program. And then your ebooks can be added later.
Kris Austin [00:49:13]:
And believe me, it’s important to both Bookshop and to Draft2Digital that we get indie books into the into their indie bookstores are asking for indie books. It’s just it’s a match made in heaven. And, so we, we’re very excited. But timing is still, not firm, although I promise you it’s being worked on, daily. So
Jim Azevedo [00:49:38]:
Excellent. We I told you guys this is gonna go by in a blink, and we’re already at time. So I just I wanted to thank you both because I know that you’re busy behind the scenes. And I wanna thank our viewers, especially those of you who have been visiting with us and tuning in week in and week out. And I wanna give a huge shout out and welcome to all of those new names that I’ve seen in the comment section this week. So welcome. I hope you enjoyed this session and that you’ll keep coming week in and week out to self publishing insiders. We really appreciate it when you join us, and we love you to death when you can share, subscribe, and like these episodes because that enables us to spread the word even further and then attract other self publishing insiders, other experts, other people out there in the industry to come on to the show and to share their experiences and advice with you all.
Jim Azevedo [00:50:33]:
And consider bookmarking in dddlive.com because when you go to that website at dddlive.com, you can see what our next topic and who the next guest is going to be. Like, next week’s guest is Tadra, Tadra Kendall. So Tadra is a best selling romance author, and she is also a conference director extraordinaire putting on these large, large events. And next week, she’s gonna be on the show, and she’s going to talk about savvy marketing for savvy authors, talking about reader events and conferences in particular and how to get the most out of both of those types of things. And finally, for those of you who may be new to self publishing, did you know you can sign up for a free Draft2Digital account simply by going to draft2digital.com. Now before I leave, I wanted to quickly mention, I’m going to run, our outro commercial on D2D print. Draft2Digital is planning a one day event on D2D print. We’re going to talk about what print on demand is, how it works, and how to work with D2D print to get your books into print.
Jim Azevedo [00:51:49]:
We’ll we’ll do everything from an introduction all the way through to how to market your print on demand books. We’re gonna take you from beginning from being a novice, print on demand author to being an expert. We’re kinda still working on that date. We’re hoping to get this full day virtual conference, at the April, but stay tuned, everybody. We will hopefully, by next week’s episode, we’ll have all of this locked in and confirmed, and we’d love to see you there. So that was a mouthful. Kris and Mark, thanks again. I’ll meet you guys backstage.
Jim Azevedo [00:52:25]:
In the meantime, to everybody else, thanks again for joining us. We will see you here next week at the same time.
Kris Austin [00:52:32]:
Yeah.
Jim Azevedo [00:52:32]:
Thank you, Joe.
Kris Austin [00:52:33]:
Appreciate it. Bye.
Kevin Tumlinson [00:52:34]:
Goodbooks are great, but there’s just something about having your words in print. Something you can hold in your hands, put on a shelf, sign 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 drafttodigital.com. 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.
Kevin Tumlinson [00:53:20]:
And start, build, and grow your own self publishing career right now at draft2digital.com.