The Only Thing You Need to Self-Publish

…besides a story that you’ve written, of course. ; )

Out with the Old

Okay, so you’ve written this novel, right? You’ve fact-checked, proofread, edited. Your beta readers have feedbacked the whole thing. You’ve rewritten, cut, killed your darlings. You’ve (hopefully) retained the services of an editor to catch all the errors you’ve missed (because you did miss them — trust me). You are ready to publish this work. You’re ready to feast your eyes on your sales pages at Amazon Kindle, Kobo, iPad, Nook.

Now what?

Last week you would’ve had to access Amazon Kindle, Kobo, iPad, Nook, and go through the entire publishing process at all four vendors, each of whom has a slightly different process that you would’ve had to figure out.

I don’t know about you, dear inklings, but the two times I’ve gone through the whole thing just at Amazon and Barnes & Noble (my publisher has done it for me the other two times), I found it less than exciting, less than simple, less than user-friendly. The best I can say is that it didn’t suck.

But that was last week.

That was old technology.

You heard me right. Uploading to all the different vendors individually is obsolete. This week, there’s a new service available

that will do it for you

in a single upload

AND WILL DO IT FOR FREE.

This new kid in town, my dears, is called Draft2Digital, and it is cramazing.

In with the New

 

 

Draft2Digital does exactly what the name says it does: takes the final draft that you’ve created in your word processor, converts it to the different formats necessary for the different e-readers, and spits out lovely, professionally formatted e-books at the various vendors. Draft2Digital does this at no cost to you. They lovely folks at D2D don’t get paid until you start selling books (marketing and selling, btw, are up to you). For saving you a ton of time, work, and headache, all they get is a small cut of whatever royalties you make off the book you uploaded.

Because they love writers, that’s why.

I got the happy task of beta testing D2D, and lemme tell ya, it was easy. What would’ve taken me hours upon hours (spread over several weeks, no doubt), took about 10 minutes. I got to preview my ebook in each of the different formats, and it looked perfect. D2D even generated a copyright page, an About the Author page, and a Table of Contents for me. I didn’t produce a single drop of authorial sweat.

What’s also tremendously cool here is that D2D pulls all the sales info, sales rank, stars, and reviews from all the different vendors and displays it all in one place. So you don’t have to go skipping about from site to site checking all the stats and trying to figure out just how many books you’ve sold and how many reviewers have said nice things about your baby novel. D2D does it all for you.

You want this, writers. You know you do. Because we’re all in it to write, right? The more we can load the business burden onto someone else’s shoulders, the better, right? Because that gives us more time for writing, right?

Right. Draft2Digital has the shoulders. It’s the singular hub of your entire writing business. All you gotta do is upload.

It’s still in the beta testing stage, so there are a couple of kinks. I, for one, write my stories in Google Docs, so I had to contact D2D to ask how to make it work. The good news is that the fix was simple, and the fix worked. And in the FAQs, the D2D people promise to get the Google Docs thing worked out. So I’m down wid it.

If you wanna beta test this beautimous operation, you can request an invite here.

THIS IS BIG STUFF, PEOPLE. This is the kind of thing that revolutionizes industries. Why? Because it makes people’s lives easier. The e-books of self-publishing and indie publishing have already made legacy publishing obsolete. Draft2Digital is the next step, and it’s a huge one.

Me, I’m excited to be stepping along with it. So go hop on board, me lovelies, and get your beta invites while they’re hot!