Ebook Aggregators and Uploading To Draft2Digital

Amazon has almost complete control of the US ebook market. As of 2019, it is estimated that they control between 75% to 83% of the US ebook market. However, this is the US market only. The ebook market is growing throughout the world and other online book sellers like Rakuten are also growing fast.

What Are The Competitors of Amazon?

In terms of online ebook sellers. Amazon is not the only game in town. There are a number of other book sellers besides Amazon. Some of them are eBooks.com, Kobo Books, iBooks Store, Harlequin, Books on Google Play, Waterstone’s, WHSmith, and Barnes & Noble NOOK Books.

Of these online book stores that compete against Amazon, the major players are Kobo Books, iBooks Store and Books on Google Play and Barnes & Noble NOOK Books. But it does not really matter who are the major players. The important thing is you get your ebooks available to as many readers as possible.

Uploading To Many Online Book Sellers Can Be Tedious

It is very clear that for you to reach as many readers of ebooks as possible, you must upload your ebook to all the online ebook sellers and not only the major online ebook sellers. This is just using common sense.

Of course we can immediately see the problem of uploading your ebook to all the online ebook sellers. I just mentioned nine online book sellers. If you were to upload your ebook to all nine of them it would take you a long time to do so.

Having to maintain your ebook account to all nine ebook stores could be chaos for you just waiting to happen. For example, Imagine having to adapt your ebooks to the individual formats of each online book seller. You can already imagine the headache that this would bring to you.

The Advantage Of Aggregators

Aggregators solve the problems I just mentioned. By signing up with ebook aggregators, you only need a single account to maintain all your access to the different online book sellers that they cover.

You also just need to follow the ebook format of the ebook aggregator and they would do the rest of the formatting for each of the ebook online sellers they cover. Ebook aggregators sounds great right? But what are they?

As described by two of their advantages before such as only needing one account to access almost all of the biggest ebook online sellers, ebook aggregators acts as the intermediary between you, the ebook creator and the online ebook sellers.

Book aggregators are in a way your partners in your ebook business. You create the ebook and they take care of publishing your ebook to the major online ebook sellers. In return, just like any business partner, they take a cut from whatever earnings you get from your ebooks.

Not only does they distribute your ebook to most online ebook sellers, they also take care of the accounting side of your sales. They already calculate the expenses like tax and other costs you incur from publishing to most of the online book sellers.

In short, all you do is upload your book with ebook aggregators and they do the rest for you. This gives you a lot more time to concentrate in writing your ebooks and marketing them. This is the advantage of aggregators.

Besides this, if you wanted to expand to other book formats beside ebooks, some of these ebook aggregators have begun to offer services which enables you to print your ebooks in physical format. Some of them have even began to offer audiobook conversion too.

Another advantage of aggregators is that if a new online ebook seller appears, there is a high likelihood that your ebook would become available to this new online ebook seller courtesy of your ebook aggregator.

The Disadvantage Of Aggregators

It seems that ebook aggregators are the best thing in the world right? For all their advantages to ebook creators, they also have disadvantages. One of this is the commission or income sharing you have to pay them from your ebook sales.

However, many say that this is not a disadvantage at all. For many ebook creators, ebook aggregators are a justified expense. For them, aggregators take care of the distribution and accounting part of their work which could be a time draining task better used elsewhere like in writing or marketing.

But like savvy businessmen, ebook creators should also compute if the commissions these aggregators take from them are justified. I have no complete records of just how much these ebook aggregators charge, but I have seen a few who take between 10% to 20% of your ebook earnings.

Another problem with ebook aggregators is that you would not be 100% compatible with the online ebook seller’s platform. Ebook aggregators only access the general features of most of the online ebook sellers.

This is to make the aggregator’s single ebook format and data accessible to almost all the online book seller’s ebook format and data. As a result, the aggregators ebook format and data has no full access of the online ebook seller’s platform.

For example, Amazon has a subscription program for its ebooks. Ebook aggregators lack the facility to enter ebooks in this subscription program of Amazon. An ebook creator must directly register to Amazon to be able to access this subscription feature.

Who Are The Major Ebook Aggregators?

The major ebook aggregators are: Smashwords, Draft2Digital, Ebookit, Publish Drive and Streetlib. Among these ebook aggregators, it is Smashwords, Draft2Digital and Publish Drive that are the most well known.

Of the three popular ebook aggregators, it is Publish Drive who is the newest and Smashwords is the oldest. Draft2Digital in terms of age, is somewhere between these two. But this is not very important.

Publish Drive being the newest, incorporates the best features of the major ebook aggregators and has the best user interface according to many who are knowledgeable about ebook aggregators.

Many however are still adapting a wait and see attitude towards this aggregator because it is still relatively new. But don’t make the mistake that this ebook aggregator is a bad choice for your ebook, many actually have positive comments about this ebook aggregator.

The second is Smashwords, though according to many it is showing its age, it is still one of the biggest if not the biggest book aggregator around. Many however have something to say about its user interface. There also those who comment about Smashwords’ income sharing scheme.

Last is Draft2Digital, it is somewhere between the two but is mature enough in age to be a stable choice for many ebook creators. When I was first researching ebook aggregators, they were the first choice of many ebook creators.

I suggest that you do your own research before trying out any of these ebook aggregators. There are many online articles and YouTube videos that compare these ebook aggregators. But take note that some of these articles and videos could be a little dated.

For example, many before reject Smashwords because they don’t publish in Amazon. But only after a few months after I made my ebook aggregators research, the information has changed. Now, even Smashwords publishes to Amazon. There might be more updates now.

Uploading Your Ebook To Draft2Digital

To make a long story short, I decided to select Draft2Digital as my ebook aggregator. This was because of the sheer number of positive reviews I seen about them online. Their commission rate is quite reasonable too at 10% of the retail price of your ebook.

But one thing I like about their platform is how easy it is to upload your ebook in their platform. I thought that it would take me hours to completely upload my ebook, but I was surprised. At most it took me half an hour to register and make my ebook available for publishing in many of the online ebook sellers.

Registering

Registering is not an exhaustive task in Draft2Digital. All they need are the very basics of your personal information such as name, e-mail, address (which of course includes your country) and you are already registered.

Draft2Digital does not want to build a complete profile of you and are not as inquisitive as the other websites online. They advertise that they value a person’s privacy. From what I can see, they do.

Description Of Your Ebook For Publishing Purposes

One of the first things you need to fill out is a description of your book. This description of your ebook would appear in the pages of the online ebook publishers. If you are a first time publisher, you would have to make an educated guess of how it would look once your description is published to the online ebook seller.

There are a few tips I could give. The first one is to avoid line breaks as much as possible even though Draft2Digital gives you plenty of space for describing your ebook.

The reason for this is that the description part of the online ebook sellers are so small that you want to save as much space as possible in describing your book.

Be concise and to the point when describing your book. You should learn to make just a few words as exciting as they can be. To give you an idea, look at the way ebooks are described in Amazon or Apple iBooks. This would give you an idea of what an ebook description you should do.

The second thing you should do is to avoid adding hyperlinks in the ebook description. Many authors are tempted to include their e-mail address or website link in the ebook description. They think that by adding these links, they would be able to connect more with customers.

But ebook online sellers do not allow this. They prevent ebook buyers from leaving their website which could mean lost sales. Their reason is logical and if you want your ebook to be published, do not add any links which would encourage ebook buyers to leave the site of your online ebook seller.

If you do this, Draft2Digital courtesy of the online ebook sellers would send you an error message asking you to remove your contacts link. This has the effect of prolonging the acceptance of your e-book for publishing.

However, there is a section of Draft2Digital where you could include your author details as well as your contact links. It’s in the author section of Draft2Digital. This is where you describe more about yourself as well as your contact information.

Chapters

You must give adequate spacing for each chapters of your ebook. You must also use bigger and different fonts for your chapter numbering and titling. Draft2Digital has an intelligent AI that automatically detects chapters of your book.

All you need to do is to make sure that your chapter words, chapter title, and chapter numbering are very distinct with each other and you should have no problem. Please note that Draft2Digital cannot correct a chapter numbering that is mixed.

This means that if you use “Chapter 1” and then “Chapter Two” and mix them together, Draft2Digital cannot correct this mistake. So either use only numbers or only letters when numbering your chapters.

Indentations

Once you upload your ebook file to Draft2Digital and inspect the pages of your ebook, one thing you would notice is that if you have line spaces, they would disappear. This is bad if your ebook uses line spaces as one of the central formatting of your story.

My advice is to structure your ebook at the onset to not rely on line spaces as one of the central formatting of your story. You could rely instead on indentations as draft2digital follows your ebook file’s indentation.

This might be a bit disappointing for those who rely on line spacing to format the outline of their story. But if you would read many ebooks, you would notice that many of them also do not use much line spacing to format their stories.

Pricing

When you come to the pricing of your ebook, I strongly suggest that you just follow the pricing format suggested by draft2digital. I have read online that draft2digital’s automated pricing reflects what the normal pricing is for each of the online book sellers as well as in the countries your ebooks are sold.

Tax and Payment Details

If you do not put your tax and payment details, the approval of your ebook for publishing might also be delayed until you do so. This is especially true for Amazon who requires that ebook creators supply their tax and payment details at the onset before they approve the ebook for sale in their platform.

So do not delay putting in these details. This has more to do with US government regulations as most of these book aggregators are American businesses even if they operate online. You should get used to dealing with the US government as most online businesses are based in the US.

Complete As Much Details As You Can

I strongly suggest that you complete as much of the requirements required by Draft2Digital. My mistake was being overly excited in uploading my ebook to Draft2Digital as well as its details for publishing in the online book sellers platforms that I did not completed all the details needed from me by Draft2Digital.

As a result, the approval of my ebook for publishing was delayed for several days. Once approved, it could only take a few days to a few weeks for your books to be approved by most of the online ebook sellers.

Conclusion

Ebook aggregators gives you maximum exposure to almost all available ebook buyers courtesy of their connection to online book sellers. This is especially true now that these ebook aggregators have connections with Amazon itself, the biggest ebook online reseller globally.

Uploading your ebook to Draft2Digital is easy. It would not even take you an hour to complete the registration and ebook uploading process. But it is important to fill in all the details of the requirements of Draft2Digital. Your incomplete data might result in delays in the approval of your ebook for publishing in most of the online ebook seller platforms.

Do You Need To Write A Book?.