Shawn P. B. Robinson

On April 30/2020, Draft2Digital (D2D) announced their print beta option was live (at least that’s when I got the email… sometimes I’m late to the game).

All of my books are on Ingram and Amazon, so I did not really see a benefit to using D2D for more print options. However, I was curious. Because of that, I decided to walk through the process with one of my books. I already have all my ebooks up online with D2D, so it’s wasn’t that hard to get used to their system.

What I found was a nice, smooth process, but lacking in a few areas.

As with D2D’s ebook system, you can either upload an already formatted file (in this case, a PDF), or you can let D2D format the book for you from an epub file.

How their System Works Well:

I tried both options. One of the things, right away, that impressed me, was that they were able to figure out the size of the book from the pdf file I uploaded. Now, that’s not a shocking concept, but neither KDP nor Ingram does that.

But that’s not the really great thing. If you go with your ebook file (from D2D), that’s where D2D Print shines. You end up with options such as including Drop Caps or Phrase Caps at the beginning of a chapter, chapter styles, you can set all chapters to start on the right hand page of the book (the Recto page), and even whether or not to hyphenate your text. D2D then creates a cover (next page in the setup) of your print book. This is created out of three things: a barcode (on the back), your description (also on the back) and your ebook cover (for the front of the book). On the spine, the name of your book and your author name is inserted (although you can change the text).

In addition to this, you can add in a back cover author image (pulled from your contributor profile), add in a back cover biography, change your text color and more.

Now, truth be told, depending on the style of your ebook cover, your full cover could end up looking fairly basic. If this is the case, you can upload either a PNG or PDF of your entire cover (back cover, front cover and spine). This would be a typical cover file that you would upload to KDP or Ingram.

How Their System Needs a Bit More Improvement

Now, for the book I chose, I set the price as the same as it sells for on Amazon, and I found the royalties were significantly less through Draft2Digital. The final royalties ended up being around 30% less than what I would get going directly through Amazon KDP.

On top of that, when I uploaded my own PDF of the book and interior file (instead of the epub), the book ended up costing even more, and my royalties dropped again.

As far as distribution, at this point, D2D only appears to distribute to Amazon and its expanded distribution. As such, there is no real financial benefit to publishing with D2D instead of going direct with Amazon KDP. The real advantage is if you cannot format your book yourself or if you want a REALLY easy system to use. If either of those are true (especially the second option), then I recommend you check out D2D’s print option.

If D2D’s ebook options are any indication, I suspect in the future, D2D’s print option will one day be pretty great. At this point, however, it looks like they need a bit more time to expand their Print options.

Keep writing!

Shawn