Episode Summary
Every author, at every level, as some burning question they need answered. About the business. About the craft. About the business of marketing the craft. You probably have a dozen or so questions yourself! And that’s why we here at D2D are determined to make asking us your questions as easy as possible. You can email us any time at support@draft2digital.com, tag us on Twitter, or (our favorite) tune in for one of our live “Ask Us Anything” sessions, where you can become immortalized in an episode of Self Publishing Insiders! This episode, we’re answering questions from some of our live guests.
Episode Notes
Ever wondered how to convert your book from a Word Doc to an EPUB in an instant? Looking for a way to send readers to everywhere your book is sold online from a single link? Trying to figure out how to set a promotional price for your book that ends on a specific date?
That’s a lot of questions. And we’re here to answer all of them and more! In this episode of Self Publishing Insiders, we’re answering questions and giving you everything we’ve got!
//Draft2Digital is where you start your Indie Author Career//
Looking for your path to self-publishing success? Draft2Digital is the leading ebook publisher and distributor. We’ll convert your manuscript, distribute it online, and support you the whole way, and we won’t charge you a dime. We take a cut of royalties on each sale you make through us, so we only make money when you make money!
• Get started: https://Draft2Digital.com Get insider info on indie author success from our blog.
• Visit: https://Draft2Digital.com/blog Tune in to our monthly livestreams and ask us anything!
• D2D Live: https://D2DLive.com Promote your books with our Universal Book Links!
• Books2Read: https://books2read.com
//Get ahead of the Self-Publishing game with our Amazing Partners//
Findaway Voices || Find a narrator, produce your audiobook, and distribute it to retailers worldwide, including Audible.com and Apple Books.
• http://findawayvoices.com/d2d
Reedsy || Assemble your team of publishing professionals! Find editors, cover designers, marketing experts, ghostwriters and more.
BookBrush || Build graphics and video that help you market and promote your books.
• https://bookbrush.com/d2d-mockups/
//Join the D2D Community Online//
Facebook || https://facebook.com/draft2digital
Twitter || https://twitter.com/draft2digital
Transcript
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
book, print, people, author, amazon, draft, ebook, publish, promotion, beta, isp, edition, question, dvd, wattpad, read, run, digital, free
SPEAKERS
Mark Lefebvre, Dan Wood, Kevin Tumlinson
Kevin Tumlinson 00:02
Well, hello, everybody, thank you for tuning in. We are live from draft to digital, the sort of virtual draft to digital, we’re, you know, we’re still kind of all spread out here at the tag end of the apocalypse. So we’re all very grateful that things are starting to kind of open up. And we’re all looking forward to returning to the office Pretty soon, most of us, I’m probably still not going to see any of these people in the flesh for a few months yet. But thank you for tuning into our virtual faces here on Facebook and YouTube for self publishing insiders. And with me, I am Kevin Tumlinson, by the way, I’m the director of marketing and public relations for draft to digital and to my virtual. My virtual right, I can’t even tell my directions on here. But Dan, you’re up what? Once you introduce yourself.
Dan Wood 00:53
I’m Dan Wood. I am the VP of operations here at draft to digital.
Kevin Tumlinson 00:59
And Mark, what do you do?
Mark Lefebvre 01:01
What do I do? I hang out in Canada representing draft to digital from the from the frozen north. And I’m the Director of Business Development, the draft to digital.
Kevin Tumlinson 01:11
Excellent now. So that’s three big drafted digital brains all in one space. And we are here today to answer any questions you have about drafted digital about the self publishing space. Anything that we can field for you, we’re happy to do so fire your questions off right in wherever you’re watching this, if you’re watching live, you can pop your questions into the Facebook, where the video is playing in Facebook or on YouTube. If you are listening to this as a pre recorded podcast, you could still send us questions. We’re open to it. Once you, you know, pop on over on to those videos, we tend to monitor those things and answer questions as we go. And of course, if you have questions about servers, you can always email support at draft to digital comm where real live humans, mostly sitting in Oklahoma City, I used to always say they’re sitting right in Oklahoma City. Some of them are and some of them aren’t at this point. And but you can still get all your questions answered there. So, uh, so we have a question. And Mark, you already sort of volunteered to? To answer this one. Do you want to? I’m going to pop it up here. So the question is, I’m going to assume it’s pronounced Gil Jackson, although Mark threw me off by saying Gil Jackson earlier. So I apologize either way. But the question is, as a UK author of sci fi, when I’m writing with a location that is the USA, should I use American English or English English? Or does it make any difference?
Mark Lefebvre 02:43
So Gil in the in the historic the prehistoric days of traditional publishing only where you would have Penguin, Random House, UK, Penguin, Random House, Canada and Penguin Random House, US, the UK and the Canadian offices would probably go with the proper British spelling, while the American one would go with other English. That is probably more dominant. What I would say is, because you’re publishing internationally and globally, and it’s the same book, I would always default to American English, I’d say that as a Canadian, because Gil is as a UK author, you know that color is spelled co l o u r. But in America, it’s spelled without the EU, it’s just got the O. And anyone who’s reading it in the UK in Canada is used to translating. I would argue that some folks in the US might not realize there’s a different spelling or center spelled ar e rather than er, and they’ll think you’re an idiot. And they’ll give you a one star review. So what you want to do is you want to give people the least amount of of opportunity to thank you don’t know how to spell. Another thing is it’ll actually in a lot of cases, because the American spelling is a little bit shorter, saves you a little bit of space to there you go so it can help. I know you’re very efficient. Yeah, they do that because it leaves more room for ads, even in Canada. So I would go with that default, because otherwise you have to manage multiple editions. And you don’t want to do that as a small business. You know, as an author turnover, you want that one universal edition, I think that makes a lot of sense.
Kevin Tumlinson 04:17
I weirdly do a sort of hybrid. I don’t know why it is but I tend to. I tend to default. For some reason on a lot of different words. I default to the British spellings for some reason, for some reason, and I don’t know if it’s because I read quite a bit of British literature. Maybe that’s it, but it tends to just happen and one of the things that helps me catch that is tools like pro writing aid and Grammarly will alert you if it’s a British spelling, so you may look into running your stuff through that if you do decide you want to write in, quote unquote American English. The thing is, though, there are certain words that I do I prefer the British spelling like like leaped. I don’t want to I don’t want to write leet that that bothers me. That Ed bothers me. I want I want my character who to have leaped. So, you know, it’s and sometimes they’re I don’t know, if there’s anyone out there that’s, I had heard rumors that certain retailers actually may ding you for British spellings in an American oriented literature. I don’t know how true that is. I’ve heard Amazon will do that on occasion. So that is something to consider. So whatever your you’re putting down as your sort of country of origin, you may want to you may want to default to that their spelling. Dan, did you want to throw anything in there you?
Dan Wood 05:50
I, it really does come down to Americans are kind of jerks about leaving reviews and not being aware that there are other ways to spell things that are probably more proper. So? Yeah, yeah, don’t put I agree completely with what Mark’s been saying. Just going with American is gonna help you at the American Spelling’s however, yeah, it’s not a good thing. But it’s the most dominant market for the English language ebooks. And so it’s probably the way to go.
Kevin Tumlinson 06:26
If you are, you know, if you are writing something that is set in America, I would say that, it’s probably, it’s probably pretty important to just go ahead and use American spelling just because that is going to, that’s going to call attention to things, people are going to react that and I say the reverse is true for the UK. I mean, if you’re writing something that set in London, you should endeavor to use British spellings. That just makes sense to me, but not easy. And then another good reason to find an editor from the region where you’re targeting your book, where you’ve set your book, you might want to find someone who can just do what we call a localization edit. That’s a term I completely made up, but I use it a lot now, which is editing to help you localize your work, make it feel like it’s something local. So I usually talk to people about doing that in in a different language, like, you know, if you were translating to German or something, but, you know, kind of translating to American or British English, I guess. So. I see. Gil had another question from earlier, what is the order for downloading paperbacks on different platforms ago, DVD, then Ingram spark and Amazon in regard to the rejection message is being is being used on another platform?
Mark Lefebvre 07:46
Can I start? Sure. First of all, don’t use both DTD prints ending or Spark because you’re pretty much going to the same places, it would be like when you use Amazon extended distribution, and Ingram spark or any DVD print, your it’s just going to be overlapping. So I would I would choose one or the other, whatever you prefer. And, you know, obviously, we’re a little biased towards DVD prints. But and it’s still in beta anyways, right now. So whether it sounds like you’re probably in the beta program right now, in terms of the order, I would typically load my book to Amazon KDP. print directly. And then well, I’ve been defaulting to using D to E print. And what happens is Amazon in the nepotism, nepotism way that they do things, they’ll just ignore the stuff that comes in, and you should be fine. Because when you’re publishing either through DVD print or through Ingram Spark, you can’t say don’t send it to Amazon. But Amazon tends to do a thing that says Nananana. We’re just gonna ignore that. And we’ll keep the one we have. I think you do get that error when you publish through Ingram Spark, where if it’s already listed somewhere, you may get that duplicate eyes banner, I think that’s what you’re talking about. Right? Go? Although we can’t really answer.
Kevin Tumlinson 08:58
Yes, I was waiting. Like, that’s gonna be interesting to hear the answer pop up. So yeah, and I want to be careful. You’re right, as always, Mark, um, you do want to be careful. Actually, you know what, you guys can help me figure this out once and for all because I always tell people making make sure you’re not using the same ISP. And even if you’re doing different print runs through different printers. But I I’m actually not sure at this point. I know that that’s the truth when it comes to your ebook. You don’t use the same ISDN between your ebook and your print book or your ebook and various distributors. Is that true of print books.
Mark Lefebvre 09:43
I use the st because, as a Canadian I registered isbs here in Canada, when I published directs for KDP print, I use the same isbm that I’ll load through drafts. My ISP and I own it, it is the same edition. It’s just ones being printed here. And when Being, you know, distributed through, you know,
Kevin Tumlinson 10:03
alright thrown up the chance I need, I need to update my advice is what you’re saying. And it makes sense to because that that does help you with tracking sales for that edition of the book. I just always worry about, you know, reusing isbs. I don’t know why I have from the start. So because there,
Dan Wood 10:20
especially if you’re getting the for free and a couple of countries like Canada and Australia, I think Australia is but Canada for sure. It you can use as many ISVs as you want. However, it can help a little bit with the tracking or if you have to register. It can save you some time. Yeah. Yeah, if you’re paying for the ISP, and then using ISP ends, willy nilly is kind of bad just because they cost so much. That’s true.
Kevin Tumlinson 10:53
Yeah. And here in the US, we have to pay for all of them. And you can get them in, in batches if you want but they’re still not not really cheap. I there’s really no real reason to actually have to buy an ISP. And honestly, since every service gives you one for free, it doesn’t change anything if you use if you use talking about drugs, right?
Mark Lefebvre 11:14
Because draft a digital print, you get the ispm for free, too, but you know exactly nearly everywhere you get it with That’s true. If you don’t Yeah, I am your printer you Do you get it? Yeah, you get a free one, you get
Kevin Tumlinson 11:27
a free isbm through DDD print, just like with ebooks. And it’s the same sort of quote unquote rules that apply, like you’re not you’re not losing out on anything, by using the free ISP and there’s no there’s not going to you’re not losing ownership, you know, your your intellectual property still belongs to you. You can use that isbm freely. And the only thing that is sort of associated with it is in like the Library of Congress, it will list drafted digital as the publisher. But that doesn’t change anything about whether or not you own it, you can do whatever you want. We claim no ownership of your of your book, if ever. So, you know, you can do what you like. And you’re still listed as the publisher like on these various services, you you tell them what the publishers name is. So Amazon and elsewhere, you’d be listed as you know, I have happy pants books, for example, all my books are, are listed under happy pans books. So Alyssa actually
Dan Wood 12:27
say it’s a quick nitpick about that. When we say you can use it freely, you can use it freely on our service, you can’t take one of our free s ISP ends and use it like if you’re direct with your ebook. Just because of the way the rules ISP ends work. It has to be distributed through us use our free ISDN
Kevin Tumlinson 12:47
Yeah, that’s a good point.
Dan Wood 12:48
You will have a different ISP and for your print versus ebook with your ebook. You can use the same ISDN for everywhere you go. But you do want a separate one for print.
Kevin Tumlinson 13:00
Very good point. Yeah, I did not mean to confuse that issue. Alyssa wanted to add something to our earlier discussion. The too long didn’t read is coddle the Americans. So always good advice. coddle all your Americans. cottolin. Close. So Lexi price is asking, I’m getting close to relaunching a book that had major rewriting done any suggestions. I’m happy to jump in. I just always try to I want to make sure you guys have an opportunity. Well, okay, yes. If you’re having me major rewrites done, there’s nothing I don’t think there’s anything that’s going to be like a roadblock for you. I think you’re you’re good all around, you might want to make sure it passes through another round of edits. Because when you do those those rewrites, there tends to be you introduced new errors and logical errors that are also kind of a possibility. So you might get someone to actually do sort of a content, edit for the whole thing, just to check, make sure you’re not adding a character who didn’t exist or forgetting about a character in chapter five or something like that. But no, there’s nothing. Now, this is by the way, where you would use if you’ve already published the book, this is when you will get a chance to use the addition. So which is one that I think people overlook and forget, and I’m actually starting to see little hints that some services use that edition number two, determine whether they should send alerts to readers that there’s a new version of a book. And I don’t I have seen it at least once. So I don’t know how consistent anybody’s being about it, and that was on Amazon. So but now you can put in your this is the second edition or third edition of that book. So congratulations. It’s like you’ve opened up a whole new tool to use
Mark Lefebvre 14:55
a couple things you may want to do to let people know it depends on how much you’ve written In traditional book, publishing, and a new edition or a new isbm, a new like release is usually if more than 10% of the book is changed. That’s the textbook side of things. But you may want to do some branding either on the cover and the blurb to inform readers that it’s been revised, it’s been updated, you sometimes see that with products and do no improvement, oh, whatever. Not new coke. But you know, that kind of thing where that, you know, the same great, whatever new. And that may inform people, especially if you’ve done that many changes, it may inspire some of your biggest fans to go back and go, Well, I want to read Lexi’s director’s cut or whatever. Right. Like I remember when Stephen King published the stand, it was originally edited down to 800 pages. And then there was I got the, you know, the Director’s Cut the the preferred edition, which is like 1200 pages. Yeah. And the same novel, but just with a lot more stuff in it. So potentially, that could be a great thing for your fans, like, see
Kevin Tumlinson 16:00
if there’s enough seen a lot of good guy. I’m sorry, Dan, go ahead.
Dan Wood 16:05
You have seen a lot of authors that give a warning in the description just to make sure they don’t get dinged in the reviews. If it’s a books i’d previously read, but they didn’t realize that they had read it and bought it. I don’t know if I’d say that’s the best advice. But it’s something I do see a lot. And so I would you guys say you see that as well.
Kevin Tumlinson 16:27
Yeah, I see that quite often actually. And I the whole, it’s sort of the same thing they do or used to do with DVD DVDs still around blu rays and that sort of thing. When they would have like a director’s cut, they’ve made a big deal of making sure it said on the cover, they’d be like a big strip that says Director’s Cut, and then in the description, it would say the same thing. So I would go to that extreme and make sure that you are doing if you’re releasing a whole new version, that is its own book and leaving the old version there, that’s when you would do this. If you’re just replacing the old book with a new edition. There’s not a lot of need to do that per se, but you might want to let people know that there have been updates and improvements or something in the description at a minimum. So um, okay, so this is an interesting question about D to D print. And I know where this is coming from. So Charles is asking Good morning, what’s the difference between DVD print and DVD print classic, who’d like to
Dan Wood 17:31
do a brand classic was are we using our old partner, we’ve switched partners just recently, it’s a process we began at kind of at the beginning of this year, we had to have the two different types, because we were working with two partners, the people that were already in the print beta before, like February, March of this year, we’re still using the old system. And then new people we were adding into the beta, we’re using the new system. As of last week, we switched everyone over into the new system. We’re finishing up a couple of things, working with our old partner, as far as like we’re still outstanding. But now, you should mostly I don’t know if it’s right now or if it’s going to be soon, you’ll only see one DVD print, the classic stuff will be going away.
Kevin Tumlinson 18:24
So this follows right on the heels of that question, Craig price is asking when does DVD print come out of beta?
Dan Wood 18:33
That’s a good question. I it very well could be one of the things like Gmail if people remember Gmail was in beta for like 10 years. There’s the
Kevin Tumlinson 18:42
Prentice vague function.
Dan Wood 18:44
Yeah, it’s fully functional. As far as like when we’ll take it out of beta. I think probably once we add international support for author copies and everything, it already like you if a reader buys your book internationally, it’s already going through the whole supply chain where they can buy it and it’ll be print on printed in the country nearest them. There’s a lot of cool stuff going on there. Right now, it’s cost prohibitive to do author copies in other countries, but our new partner supports all of that. And so we’ll be able to add a lot more support than we’ve had in the past. So I don’t have an exact answer on when we might leave the beta. But we want to get the product up and running in the same way that our ebook process is so friendly and easy. And print is much more complicated because you’re dealing with physical objects. I will say COVID really disrupted the entire supply chain of print and physical goods in general. So that kind of delay like most of last year was a bust. Like all the beta testing we’re doing at that point really wasn’t telling us a lot other than the whole supply chain is taking A lot longer to deliver things than it normally would. Yeah. And so things are going great with the new partner, we’ve been testing with some new people into the print program for several months, we just moved our entire catalogue over. And so that should give us a lot more testing to see what they’re capable of, and like what their delivery times are, but it marks ordered a lot of books. He’s kind of been our guinea pig, but you’ve seen it’s been much quicker delivery of bugs, you’ve had less problems, right?
Mark Lefebvre 20:35
Yeah, the other thing I think I should note is that Craig, there are still there’s still a waiting list, you can still get yourself added to the waiting list. And what we are doing is as as the, as we, you know, update things and test new things, we’ll still slowly roll people in, we’re just not going to come out of beta till to where we’re, you know, till it’s of the DVD quality that people have come to expect from ebooks.
Kevin Tumlinson 21:02
Pop this,
Dan Wood 21:04
I will say, just real quick on that same night, something that’s new that we’re doing with our new partner versus the old partner, is we have introduced an idea of change credits. And so what we’ve learned for the past few years is, we were hoping people at automated, like all the metadata feeds and all the exciting stuff they didn’t really want to know about. But we were hoping we need to send people updates, just like we do with ebooks. And that’s just not the case, the print chain is based on much older software. Getting like changing things changing, like the blurb or your cover or the interior file just is a lot takes a lot longer, it’s an automated process at some places are not an automated process in some places. And so you’re gonna be able to make a free change every so often, like when you first uploaded the book, but you want to make sure and either, you know, very carefully go over the digital proof that we provide, order a print proof copy, to make sure it’s exactly how you want before we go ahead and send it on to all the different places. Because otherwise you’re going to be charged. Like if you had to make like a little change, like let’s say you find a typo. It’s going to be like a $25 charge to make a change. Right after you publish it. I don’t realize it because remember the timeframe for you, you’re going to get a free credit to make changes every so often every
Kevin Tumlinson 22:36
30 days. Yeah, so every quarter, that’s a better way to put it. Yeah, it’s not necessarily strictly 90 days. Yeah. So you
Dan Wood 22:44
won’t be able to make changes, we just have to slow down the amount of changes you’re making, because that supply chain doesn’t support. So just something to now.
Mark Lefebvre 22:57
But also important to note, Dan is if you’re making a change to your blurb, or any of the metadata associated with your book, it’s fine. If you need to update the price. It’s the files that actually caused the systematic issue that cost the money that cost the time, which is why on those systematic interior print file or cover file, that’s where that’s where you’re going to be prohibited unless you purchase a credit. That helps slow it down. So that it’s not overwhelming for, for a partner to.
Dan Wood 23:33
Yeah, yeah, that’s very good playing, it gets confusing to talk about like, in the ebooks supply chain is so much easier in comparison. But print remains the dominant format that people are reading in. And we really want it to be a part of all the formats. And so you know, we now we’ve got the print beta, we’ve got audio books, through our partnership with find a way. And of course, we’ve been doing ebooks for about 10 years now nine years. So amount of time we’ve been doing it.
Kevin Tumlinson 24:05
Yeah. And we should, we should just, I guess put it out there that this is in beta that it doesn’t mean that it’s not ready for primetime. Everything about it being in beta is about us making it better for the author, and proving the author experience for it. That’s why, you know, we were trying to figure out little problems, like how to get inexpensive author copies to people in Europe, that sort of thing. So if you’re in the print beta, from the readers perspective, it’s going to work just like any other pod service, we’re being cautious only in that we want to make sure that we take care of authors the way we always have. So that’s that’s what that’s about. And everybody always asks us when it’s coming out of beta. It really doesn’t matter. The the beta part of it is only about protecting you. So I’ve gotten More questions popping up. DVD print is a popular topic, guys. So we’re going to be talking about that a little bit. I’d love to use DVD print for my paperbacks in hardcover. But unfortunately, DVD print accepts many scripts, manuscript PDFs, no more than 92 megabytes in size. We discussed this internally recently, and I don’t remember where things landed. So we
Mark Lefebvre 25:22
Alyssa just scroll down. Alyssa just confirmed with the developers on the update that happened. Maybe you can pop up her comment. She said, If I can see it,
Dan Wood 25:34
we just change that we’ve been doing some testing on it. And we can support bigger files. Okay.
Mark Lefebvre 25:41
Yeah, it is. She did pop it up. I saw it somewhere. I’ve just double checked it out. blueprint size limit is much, much larger. That’s what it was.
Kevin Tumlinson 25:51
Okay. For some reason, I’m not seeing that. So
Mark Lefebvre 25:56
from a Facebook comment, she’s saying if your file is less than 650 megabytes, it should here’s this, I see
Kevin Tumlinson 26:01
that one less than 600. So we’re our upper limit is 650 megabytes now. So
Dan Wood 26:10
that change? So you’re correct, that we hadn’t limited before. So
Kevin Tumlinson 26:15
that was sort of a holdover from something else. We it wasn’t it from classic. Yeah, it’s a good. Lexi had asked. She said she corrected this to say I sbn later, but she says that so I won’t need a new isbm. And that’s true. You won’t necessarily if you’re releasing as a as a
Dan Wood 26:39
I wouldn’t do that the the edition stuff. I kind of disagree with you on that. Like none of the other retailers have edition stuff, I’m not quite sure is that a KDP thing that you’re talking about?
Kevin Tumlinson 26:51
Amazon definitely does addition, I think Apple does to
Dan Wood 26:55
light like Mark was saying if it’s 10% or more change, you really should switch isbs and release it as a new thing entirely. I wouldn’t leave the old edition up, because you’re just going to split your rank between the two books, that’s going to confuse readers. So I would use a new SPN if it’s changed that 10% or more. Otherwise, it’s not really a major rework. It’s just updating the file to be better. But it sounds like you’re kind of relaunching and so I would go with the new ISP and and just make it a different thing entirely.
Mark Lefebvre 27:29
Last summer, I revised a book originally published in 2016. significant change, like cover design for the whole series. There were at it, I don’t think it was a 10% change. But I just I opted to just keep going with the same old isbm even though it was a completely new cover. Because again, I didn’t want to lose the reviews. And yeah, and maybe there would have been more relevance in terms of Oh, it’s a new book. And you know, places like Amazon, see, get all excited about new books and don’t care as much about blacklist. But at that point in time, I just thought, No, it’s the same. It’s pretty much the same book. It’s just been revised. I’m just going to rerelease it with a new cover. And I think some authors, Joanna, Penn revised even the titles of her first three books. And I think she went with the same ISP ends and then made made a note saying that used to be called something. But that’s because the title change too. And she didn’t want people to think they, you know, might not have already read it. So that’s the I think Be true to your readers and think about your readers. And just be clear with your updates or new additions.
Kevin Tumlinson 28:32
interesting idea. I’m going to have to experiment and see, see what happens if I rerelease? Yeah. And then the next edition now releases its own book, and we’ll see what happens.
Dan Wood 28:46
Yeah, so the reviews are one thing you would lose, you get you get the extra juice all the algorithms give a new book and say it’s gonna get a little bit more visibility. If you’re already ranking and it’s selling perpetually, then that would be a reason to stick with the original, or like if you did have a lot of reviews. But generally, if you’re doing a major rework, I assume that you’re not as concerned about that. So
Kevin Tumlinson 29:13
yeah, yeah. True. We got a question from Charles Harvey again. Do you guys have any opinion on Amazon Vela? And are other retailers planning something similar? I was just discussing this with and he’s in the chat and see Roland Ansel in the Facebook chat. I was just discussing this and he kind of talked me off the ledge about it. But if you haven’t heard of Amazon, Vela, it’s a it’s like radish. It’s a Amazon’s releasing a service that lets authors serialize their stories and you can scale you can release an entire book all at once in in chapters, or you can do an ongoing, you know, every week or every month you’re posting a new edition or an new chapter or new short story or whatever set in that story. And they have a fund that they’re going to use to pay. So it’s a little bit like Kindle unlimited. Where it’s a little different is is not requiring exclusivity per se. So if you are publishing in Vela, you can also publish on radish and wattpad. You just can’t make the book free on those services. And otherwise, it’s pretty wide open. You also cannot publish a like a novel like I complete work, complete book based on that story while it’s still in Bella. So if you do your your book as a series of chapters, you can do it that way. But in order to release it as a full novel, you’d have to take it out of Vela. I think I’ve got all that straight now. Yeah.
Mark Lefebvre 30:52
Just can’t publish to wattpad because that is free.
Kevin Tumlinson 30:56
But they have a paid version of wattpad.
Mark Lefebvre 30:58
Oh, I see if you’re if you’re a paid. Okay.
Kevin Tumlinson 31:01
Yeah, yeah. So at least I believe that’s correct. So I could be wrong about that. I haven’t used wattpad in a while. So maybe I’m completely off. But what do you guys think of Villa as an opportunity for authors?
Mark Lefebvre 31:15
2010. Again, when serialized
Dan Wood 31:23
I feel like it’s just another one of Amazon’s let’s copy. Like popular startups like radish. For this market. There’s a couple of different ones. There’s radish, there’s topless, which sometimes was more aimed at like, comic King graphic novel stuff, I believe. It’s Amazon just covering their bases in case a format takes off. They did it with Kindle Scout, which was kind of a wattpad copy. They did it with a couple of other different things can go unlimited was to answer the threat of script and waster and all the small subscription all you can eat type services. I don’t see Amazon sticking with it. Honestly, I you know, I think if you have a love of serialized content, you’ve been wanting to write a serialized series, it’s worth pursuing. I think Amazon just gonna drop it in a couple of years like they’ve dropped 90% of those projects that were direct clones of some other small startup, right? It’s a very popular business model in Asia. It’s just I don’t see how it fits into the western market like it. Anyone that runs the numbers again to see if they’re paying more for the book, like if when they’re buying it, and that’s a little token chunks than they would if they just bought the book outright. So I don’t know like it could catch on. I could catch on with younger people. It’s just we have so many alternatives, Kindle unlimited and Scribd offer pretty good, like Netflix style service, Kobo plus for Canada, Kobo plus for Belgium, and Netherlands. Yeah. There’s just so many alternatives that if you run the numbers will serve readers better, like it’ll be cheaper for them, and have plenty of content. So we’ll see like it with everything. Kindle unlimited did survive. But there’s just so many projects that Amazon has started, they filled authors out of this the new thing they’ve really made incentives for them to get in and then they’ve dropped it at the base, get the drop of the hat. They’ve gotten rid of it and you get like a month notice at most.
Kevin Tumlinson 33:43
Yeah. I was telling rolling this, I just there’s just something that doesn’t sit well with me with it. And I can’t I can’t put it in a logical terms. But it just doesn’t to kind of turn I want to try it. I have an idea for something that I could try on it. But for some reason, it just rubs me the wrong way. Maybe because it’s because it’s Amazon.
Dan Wood 34:08
I mean, think about the reusability of the content. If you read a book and you put in Kindle Unlimited, and can allow me to get us away, you can go post that somewhere else. With this, you kind of have to write this type of serial novel with the hook with every chapter to keep people buying. And so it’s a little bit different style of writing in the way that there’s a big difference between like a show on NBC primetime, versus a show on HBO, where the show on HBO as planned as a whole story, and they can have slow character building episodes. Yeah, yeah, Primetime. You just gotta have the hook. You’ve got to resolve everything in like a nice little package in 3040 minutes. So
Kevin Tumlinson 34:53
right. Yeah. A Roland says I’m quite the craw but you I also had a question, will books to read get an upgrade for print books soon?
Mark Lefebvre 35:05
Can I take this? Yeah, it is in the queue. It is, DVD print is obviously our number one priority to get that result so we can serve our authors better. And and I’m, you know, pushing this from behind waiting until we can actually start doing some of that work, it’s most likely going to be the way audiobooks is now where you’d have to add the link yourself. And the real one of the reasons is there are so many sites like Amazon, where there’s used editions of the book. And what we don’t want you to do when you’re adding your print book link is we don’t want to have to link to all these used editions where you’re not going to get any money for it, we want you to be in control. I know this is my print edition, I want to link to that on these all these different retailers. So Roland it should it should operate very similar to the way that the audio books read audio, and in which case, then it will become all books to read, which I’m pretty passionate about.
Dan Wood 36:04
Yeah, yeah, it is, it makes it very difficult to scan. So we can’t make it automated in the way that we have ebooks. And we probably audio books at some point, we can add into some audit automation. But print books with Amazon, especially the way in which they handled the buy box for a print book. It can go to any number of different bidders like it, Mark included us but even someone else like to run a different supply chain like the Ingram listing for a book versus the Amazon listing for a book. And so it probably will be something where yet the automatic are where you have to manually input the exact link that you want it to go to.
Mark Lefebvre 36:51
Yeah, we may be able to with our print partner, once we get to that point, we may be able to figure out a way to identify none at all. This is the this is the this is the main link, for example. But it you know, give the author control I say,
Kevin Tumlinson 37:05
yeah, just one of the many things we’re working out behind the scenes. Alright, so Craig ass says, This is back talking about DVD print again, my main issue is I work with a company where we help others publishing we’d rather do DVD print than KTP. And who can blame? Yeah. So are you on the waiting list? Craig? If you’re on the waiting list, we should we should try to get bumped up. Ah, try and just. Yeah, well, why don’t you? Well, Alyssa can help. Alyssa will help. Right Alyssa? Whenever we don’t know what we’re gonna do, we have a listen to it. Craig,
Dan Wood 37:57
can you share the link for the bundle? Again, so you can sign up for the waitlist.
Kevin Tumlinson 38:03
I had it on screen. So it is draft digital comm slash print beta. If you go there, you got to make sure you are if you’re not already, make sure you are signed up for that beta. And it will come through via email to our support team. And we’ll we’ll jump on things. So I always have people weak. So yeah, we are in we had paused adding people while we were making the adjustments behind the scenes and switching things over. So now we’re we’ve resumed what we had been doing before. So Craig asks, Can you royalty share 0% and 100%? Can collaborators order print copies yet?
Mark Lefebvre 38:48
Can I take the first one? So we can I mean 100% or 0% means there is no share. But but so for example with with royalty share you you have a different royalty share for print and ebook. And so let’s say for example that you wanted to give someone 0% on the on the ebook and whatever percent on the print. So yeah, you can have a 0%, you can have 100% going all to one contributor. But if if it’s just one, you can only add up to 100%. So that’s flexible. So I think in terms of ordering print copies for collaborators, that’s going to be something that I know we need to talk to our developers about the ability to do because I’ve gotten numerous numerous collaborations just just got one in the in the mail yesterday, my author copy, and it’d be great for you know, my my co author, if she wanted a copy and print, she could just order it right now I have to facilitate it so that Craig please email support and ask that question, because then we can properly tag it and track it. And that can be a really solid discussion with our dev team to figure out if we can do that for you.
Kevin Tumlinson 39:55
He posted a follow up to that that I think explains what he’s trying to do because if I’m incorrect This right Craig, if I’m getting it wrong was no, but it looks like what they’re trying to do is, is share 100% with the collaborator. So they help them get it on, they set it up because they don’t want to have to get a collaborator set up in the beta. You get what I’m saying there? Yeah.
Mark Lefebvre 40:22
I’ll test it out. And I’ll I’ll let you know, Craig,
Kevin Tumlinson 40:26
kind of we expected and we fully expected that people would come up with creative ways to use this stuff. And that’s one I hadn’t heard yet.
Mark Lefebvre 40:35
I think if it adds up to 100. That’s all I remember from the ribbon that up to 100%. Right. Yeah. And so if I give you if Kevin, I’ll take our I’ll take our collaboration, and I’ll give you 100%. And I’ll see if I can do it. And then we’ll let Craig know in the comments afterwards.
Dan Wood 40:49
I think there’s a minimum payment split. That’s not zero. I don’t recall exactly. But I think there is some number. We can answer it in the Yeah, yeah, on YouTube and on Facebook, once we get the
Mark Lefebvre 41:05
answer, because I know if you give all the contributors, all the percentage I had, I had a book with 16 contributors. And if I gave them all the percentage, that would be zero left for me. So that suggests if I only had one collaborator, I could give them 100. But I’ll test it. Kevin, I’ll give you 100% of our of our co authored type.
Kevin Tumlinson 41:23
Excellent. I could use another nickel, three months. All right. So Olga says hello, what is the point of promotions? Nobody sees my book unless I promote it myself. Right. And I believe Olga is talking about our, our merchandising efforts, Mark. So you want to feel this?
Mark Lefebvre 41:43
Yeah, well, I mean, nobody will see your book ever anyways, because you’re all in millions and millions of titles out there. When you are in a promotion. It is a collaboration between you and the end retailer who is promoting your book. So if you’re in a promotion, share it share that you’re part of a promotion, I have a friend of mine who’s in a Kobo promotion right now, which is a 40% off box set promo. And she’s not just relying on them to push the promotion out. She’s also sharing it and sharing that special coupon code and sharing a link to her book there. So I know it’s frustrating. But the more the more that you collaborate with whoever is running the promotion for you, the better off you’re going, you’re going to be, I think of it like promo stacking, right? If you have a bookbub feature deal. And then you also run a bargain book, see the day after you send out a newsletter notification. So you have at least three different things that are hitting. So promotions are also hitting Miss. I’ve been in promos where it didn’t really seem to make a difference. And I’ve been another promos, where it did. So as an author, I kind of, you know, your cross your fingers, hope for the best and give it as much of a push. So the point was, is hopefully getting new people to find your work. That’s in my mind. That’s the point of promotions. And obviously, this stuff,
Dan Wood 43:07
most of the retailers do send out like emails about the promotions, they promoted on their social media, marketing, you’ve got to also promote yourself, they’re gonna promote the books and show the books like especially Apple, they order it by the most popular. So if you want more visibility, you’ve really got to push it yourself, which is what the traditional publishers are doing. Yeah, with all of our promotions that we do with the retailers, they’re all free. So there’s no reason like not to be doing them. If you’re not seeing the success that you want. I would say like make sure that your book is converting, like make sure you’ve got the right cover for your genre. So like if your book isn’t selling a promotion isn’t going to help because there’s something wrong with the packaging. Oh, yeah, like if it if it’s the book cover, it looks different than the top sellers in your genre, you should probably redo that your blurb should read like the top blurbs in your genre, your blurb should be not a like description of the plot, it should be a sales pitch. So make sure that everything you’ve got out there is helping convert users over to buyers, once I see it. And I’m free to participate in every promotion. Like Yeah, like, everyone is going to give you a possibility and getting in front of new people. It’s like if you share if the retailer shares, if other authors share that that promotions going on, it’s just gonna give you the most visibility. So I it’s there’s never a moment where promotion is pointless unless, like, you know, there are some promotions that require you to do a lot of work like not necessarily the retailer promotions, some of the promotions out there, their promotions that cost money. So you need to make sure that your promotion like whatever You’re doing it’s give me a return on investment. But if the permissions free, why wouldn’t you?
Kevin Tumlinson 45:08
I’m sharing something in the chat, called better book descriptions, which is one of our blog posts. If I can actually type at this angle, you can feel free to pop over there and take a look at that there’s two of them. Actually, that’s the first one. It’s about writing book descriptions for fiction. And then there’s one for nonfiction as well if you if you follow through. So search book descriptions at draft digit comm slash blog and you’ll find something we’ve got enough time, we need to wrap up. But I wanted to get to Shannon’s question here says I’m 10 years old. And I want to know if I should build a business from scratch or get involved with my mom’s business. And we can say right away that one limitation for you, Shannon, unfortunately, is we, you have to be at least 18 years old, to be able to set up an account through us. And that’s that’s not us, necessarily, that’s just the law here in the US. And you but that doesn’t mean you can’t do this, I would recommend working with your mom getting set up. So you can kind of handle the tax stuff and everything on your behalf. And you can still publish as long as you’re working with a parent or guardian. You should be fine. Now check me on that, Dan. And Mark, I believe that’s correct. But just in case, I don’t want to get bad advice.
Mark Lefebvre 46:29
That’s my understanding that Shan working with working with your mom working with somebody who’s 18 or older, who can then vote as an adult, cuz you can’t legally sign certain documents. And that’s one of the one of the things that’s our document, is that legal?
Dan Wood 46:44
All I want to do with like your parent or guardian, right, not just any 18 year old? Yeah, yeah, of course, you can’t, you can’t establish a legal contract with them. And so a lot of younger people, it’s very difficult to start in publishing until you’re 18. A lot of younger people will pay us on sites like wattpad and roll road. You don’t get paid for that. But you do get a lot of feed on your craft for an adult.
Kevin Tumlinson 47:18
So we are at time, we need to go ahead and wrap up. Before we do I wanted to let you guys know that we if you’re liking this whole live experience with DDD, we haven’t something else coming up. at one o’clock central today, we’re doing a clubhouse event me Dan Ricardo Fiat from reads the and anyone else, Dan, anyone else in that? That’s it. That’s it. If you’re not familiar with clubhouse, it’s sort of like a live stream. It’s all audio, you do need an app to run it. And now they have it on both your iPhone and Android device, I dropped a link. This link that you see on your screen is there. But you can also pop into the the comments and see a link there. It’ll allow you to actually join in download the app. So that’s at 1pm. And we’re going to be talking about free tools and resources for authors, the stuff that’s out there that allows you to do this no matter what your budget may be. So really kind of excited to talk. That’s one of my favorite topics is how to do stuff for free. So looking forward to that. If you are on Facebook or YouTube, you have to be right now, right. So we would appreciate if you’d go ahead and subscribe and follow us on both those platforms, you can go to youtube.com, slash draft to digital or facebook.com, slash draft to digital. And like follow click bells, all those things that that the youtubers tell you to do, make sure you’re doing that. And of course, bookmark D to D live calm, because that’s where we’ll have countdowns to each of these live streams. We’re doing at least one a month, we’re usually doing like two months. And we got some we do interviews, we do these ama’s we do all this stuff just for you. It’s all free. It’s a great chance for you to learn more about us in the industry and all those free tools we keep talking about. So that’s going to wrap us up for this episode of self publishing insiders. Dan and Mark, thanks for helping me and you guys carried the load of answering questions. So thank you for making me look good.
Dan Wood 49:21
Thanks, everybody.
Kevin Tumlinson 49:23
All right, everybody. Well chat with you next time. Take care. Bye