Don't Let "Them" Hear You

Part I The Darkness Before Dawn

 How Amazon KDP works with authors...and sometimes hurts them...

As many of you know, I have been a strong advocate of Amazon "publishing" for self-publishing writers for many years. In fact, I worked as an editor for Amazon when it first started out in self-publishing platforms and worked as an editor for them through their several iterations, finally coming to an end in 2015 after more than ten years. It bought out the company I had been working for for several years called Booksurge, which was an on-line editing service (for a fee), and a POD publisher. Part of the deal was that it would list an author's books on Amazon. Amazon then morphed that company into CreateSpace, through which I also worked as it changed its business model. It no longer charged authors to create their books in that platform and only charged them for editing. Eventually they phased out their editing altogether, and left it up to writers to go elsewhere to get their books edited. It kind of created a Wild Wild West, no holds barred platform where any book with a pulse could get published. And when that transformation was complete, CreateSpace morphed into Kindle Direct Publishing, which began life as an ebook publishing platform and then eventually went to town as a print publisher, as well.

Don't let "them" hear you.

So far, so good (or bad), depending on if the reading and book buying public would be comfortable knowing that the books published by KDP are not necessarily professionally edited. Even so, I have always advocated for KDP telling authors it was therefore up to them to make sure their books were edited, and so, Two Brothers Press has put out an interactive workbook for self-editing, one for bringing a novel into being from opening lines, and one about finding your writer's voice. I will revisit these books in another post because right now, I don't have the links. The three workbooks were available at Amazon until something happened, which I won't go into detail here ("Don't let 'them' hear you.") but suffice it to say that there's a KDP team that controls or attempts to control some aspects of this wild-wild-west, anything-goes publishing environment that Amazon has created, and right or wrong, really correct or not, KDP has closed my account and my works that were published through that platform have been removed from Amazon's book store—ALL OF THEM. And it has nothing to do with the quality of my edited books but with a perceived (but not true) lack of adhering to "requirements" when it comes to bringing out public domain editions of the classics. I was going great guns with that activity and brought out more than thirty classics, including Charles Dickens's Tale of Two Cities, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, etc. Two of the ebooks out the 30 plus titles supposedly did not meet the KDP team's idea of edition differentiation. If you care, look it up, but really don't bother. I had the audacity to ask for a better explanation as to why two out of the thirty books had been "blocked" from publication, and the team was unwilling to say exactly why it did not meet their requirements. And so when I attempted to get better answers, the team decided that I would just be banned from KDP and all the books I had published through that program and through CreateSpace that had been migrated to KDP would also be deleted. 

So, I will no longer advocate for writers to use the KDP free services, but if a client wishes me to help format a book for the upload, of course I will help them (for a fee). You can view Youtube videos of other writers who have been banned by the KDP team for violations of their policies—made up on the spot or possibly actually real policies (which is the only thing the KDP team will tell you).

No, I'm not really bitter or overly angry about having almost twenty years of my writing banned from Amazon bookstore. This was really a blessing; it got me out of my lazy-ass doldrums about how "easy" it was to publish with KDP and I didn't pursue other ways to market my work. I therefore had to pursue other publication venues, maybe through Barnes and Noble Press, Apple Books, Direct2Digital, and other platforms. And I have discovered the beauty of using an aggregator company for distribution, a kind of one-stop venue, kind of like what Amazon claims itself to be, but in reality is not really a one-stop place to publish your book.

My point in writing this article about my demise at Amazon KDP and my search for an alternative has led me to a few reality checks about Amazon. These are general observations and sometimes a weakness is also a strength, bigger is sometimes better, but it is also sometimes impossibly big and becomes difficult to navigate.

• Amazon has become the 20-acre flea market and while big flea markets are fun to visit and bargains can be found, treasures and trash are lumped all together in an endless sea of items to buy; but worse the individual seller (the author in the bookstore) with a single book title is going to get buried. When you have seven million titles for sale at amazon, it takes a mighty powerful and specific algorithm to help buyers find what they're looking for. Sometimes Big is too big. Amazon is too big.
• The author is sold on the idea that Amazon has expanded distribution, but it's only to other amazon sites, and it restricts an author's ability to sell outside its hermetically sealed system. This is exactly the same issue with publishing your book with any other POD self-publishing outfit. You're stuck having your book appear on their website (their bookstore) and maybe being listed at Amazon. The author's fees for the listing on Amazon is usually hidden, but it's there. You're paying a fee out of your potential royalties to get onto the 20-acre book flea market.
• The competition for a single author's book to be noticed is again subject to the blind logic of a non-human algorithm with certain parameters that trigger its appearance on the first page of a search for book title, type, genre, niche—and while this system works well much of the time, again the list your book appears on is way too long to make the discovery of your work any more likely, because there are millions of titles.

Part II Dawn Has Come and Daylight Reveals Something Better (potentially) Than Amazon

How Draft to Digital (or D2D) works with authors

With so much better distribution to real wholesalers, libraries around the world and all those ebook reader companies, D2D reaches more ebook buyers than Amazon alone. In fact, Amazon is just one of the many places your ebook will then be listed.

The rest of this article concerns the quickly growing options to self  publishing  with the convenience of one-stop "publishing" but potentially so much better than Amazon KDP.

Visit Draft2Digital's website.

Here are the main points you should come away with:

• First, it is a very effective ebook publisher and provides the necessary formats for every known ebook reader. For example, your ebook is made for B&N Nook, but it is also prepared for Apple's epub reader, as well as KDPs Kindle, etc. All you need is a simple Word document. D2D expertly and quickly turns that Word document into very nice looking ebooks. Note that ebooks don't have headers and footers. Do not put them in the word document.
• Second D2D now does paperback print books (it's still in the beta stage) but I published three of my books using this option, and it was instantly available at the companies and libraries that deal with print books:

• Draft2Digital helps you publish your e-books to: 

  • Apple
  • Barnes & Noble
  • Baker and Taylor (a major wholesaler) to bookstores
  • Bibliotheca
  • BorrowBox
  • Hoopla
  • Kobo
  • Overdrive
  • Scribid
  • Tolino
  • Vivlio
• These next venues are also ebook sellers or wholesalers. For example, Baker and Taylor supplies ebooks to libraries as well as brick and mortar bookstores. Others serve libraries around the world, for a total of 28,000 libraries. Every time an ebook is check out, you are paid a fee.
• Kobo (including Kobo Plus)
• Tolino
• OverDrive
• Bibliotheca
• Scribd
• Baker & Taylor
• Hoopla
• Vivlio
• BorrowBox

The point is D2D is the only place where you have to create an account. They will collect the payments from all the other sellers and they be the only place you need to fill out the IRS paperwork. You will not have to deal with any other publisher for a report on your royalty earning. Of course, you can also work out deals with places like Barnes and Noble and fill out the paperwork for them, but in a sense...why bother? By going with D2D for ebooks and paperbacks, it is the only place that will send you a royalty check or deposit a check directly into your account, the only place that will send you a tax report that you take to your tax accountant. You don't have to deal with each venue listed above—at all. 

At the moment Hardbacks and interior color print books are not handled by D2D.

Also note that this is also the case with the beta print versions that are now available at D2D. They are also automatically published at the list of venues. Ironically, Amazon lists the three of my books that I created with D2D and they won't stop them from being sold.

From a $10.00 retail print book, the breakdown of costs that are deleted from your royalty is the printing costs, 10% of the retail goes to D2D and 30% of the retail goes to each company that sells copies. The net amount that you get is very similar to what you get from Amazon when the smoke clears. There you pay for the print costs when the book is sold, along with 40% directly to Jeff Bezos, plus sales taxes, etc. 

Note that for ebooks, you will also pay 10% off retail to D2D and 30% off retail to the other booksellers, but there is no printing cost. So basically a $10.00 book will cost you $4.00 and you take home royalty of $6.00. These numbers vary slightly.

I have been dealing with D2D for only three months and have already sold through B&N, Amazon, and Apple, and when the smoke clears I will also find out in future reports about which libraries my books have been placed (both print and ebook).

If you want the true background of D2D founding and business model here is the interview with one of D2D's founders.