It all started with this question: where can I publish eBooks besides Kindle Publishing?
It makes me so happy that I didn’t give up on self-publishing and ended up finding more platforms to publish my ebooks.
I’ll share a bunch of self-publishing platforms where you can publish ebooks besides Kindle Publishing. Moreover, I’ll also tell you how I’m submitting my ebooks to those ebook platforms without spending a penny.
You’d be surprised to know that I self-published only three ebooks on Amazon Kindle between 2017 and 2019. Let’s fast forward to the lockdown phase of 2020; I was listening to Joanna Penn’s podcast and she was talking about publishing wide as compared to opting for Kindle Select or going with traditional publishing.
She, of course, is a big fan of publishing wide, meaning she advocates that self-publishing authors shouldn’t be limited to just one source of bookselling, but instead, they should try to sell books to a wider audience.
Her discussion resonated with me, and I also decided to dig deeper into publishing wide. And that’s how I discovered a service that is helping me out, and I’ll share it with you in the latter half of the blog post.
If you’ve self-published a Kindle book before, you’d know how confusing it seems at first. Although, there is nothing to worry about as their system walks you through the whole process. I’m confident that you’d go through this process seamlessly.
Before I head over to the service I’m using for publishing my ebooks, let’s take a look at the ebook stores where you’d be submitting your ebooks, later on.
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Here’s is the list of ebook stores where you can publish ebooks besides Kindle Publishing:
- Kobo
- Barnes & Noble
- Apple Books
- Scribd
- tolino
- 24symbols
- OverDrive
- bibliotheca
- Baker & Taylor
- vivlio
How can you publish and sell ebooks on multiple platforms for free?
Draft2Digital is a book distribution platform that helps you publish your ebooks and audiobooks to a number of popular online book platforms. If you’re a beginner in self-publishing, you might be worried about the process and the requirements.
Once you sign-up on Draft2Digital and start creating your ebook, they’d help guide you at every step. All they need is your word file, and once you upload the manuscript, you can sit back and let them worry about the distribution.
It took me 15 minutes or so to submit my ebook through Draft2Digital. However, the duration of ebook publishing varies from platform to platform. It’d take between 3 to 20 days to finish publishing on all the available platforms.
Had I not found this platform, I wouldn’t have been able to publish my ebook on Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Scribd, tolino, 24symbols, and a few more.
How much does submission through Draft2Digital cost?
They don’t charge any upfront fee for book submission on any platform except for Amazon; Amazon submission costs $0.99 per title. Furthermore, according to the FAQs page on the Draft2Digital website, they don’t charge for any of their services such as formatting, conversion, distribution, and sales tracking. However, they only make money when the author makes money; they charge 10% of the retail price (or 15% of the net royalties).
You should also know that every book platform may have different royalty rates, so you may not get equal royalty for every sale.
Should you use Draft2Digital for selling ebooks?
I’ve started using this service and I’m loving it. If it wasn’t for Draft2Digital, I won’t be able to publish my ebook across multiple platforms. The best thing about Draft2Digital is that it doesn’t charge any fee for book submission and you can go wide with your ebook within minutes.
Make sure that you haven’t enrolled in Kindle Select or Kindle Unlimited with your KDP version. I highly recommend using Draft2Digital even if you’re getting started with self-publishing ebooks.
Does it publish on Amazon Kindle?
Yes. It does publish ebooks on Kindle. What I mean is that you don’t have to manage your KDP account separately. Rather, use Draft2Digital to submit and collect royalties of your books. However, it would cost you at least $0.99 per KDP book and check out the FAQ section on Draft2Digital to find out the exact charges if your KDP book is bigger than 3 MB in size.
I didn’t submit my newest book on Amazon through Draft2Digital, but instead, I submitted it to the Amazon KDP program manually. I wasn’t trying to save $0.99, but the reason is that I don’t want to distribute the Amazon royalties across two platforms.
Are you going to publish ebooks besides Kindle Direct Publishing?
Let’s recap this blog post.
I’ve briefly explained why I started using this book distribution platform. There were two main reasons why I decided to start using the Draft2Digital platform.
1. To publish wide or to list my book on multiple platforms
2. It doesn’t charge any upfront fee for book distribution
It’s your turn to answer my question:
Are you doing to publish ebooks besides Kindle KDP?
Let me know in the comments below.