Episode 044 - Using Aggregators versus Going Direct with Dale L. Roberts
September 15, 2020
Dale L. Roberts of Self Publishing with Dale discusses the pros and cons of using an aggregator such as Draft2Digital or Findaway Voices versus going direct to platforms such as Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. He gives tips on how to assess which approach best meets your business goals, and, if those goals change, describes the considerations if you switch from one approach to the other. Perhaps most importantly, he emphasizes the importance of factoring in not only the financial cost but also the time cost when assessing your options.
Dale L. Roberts is a fitness author, video content creator, and self-publishing advocate. Voted by Feedspot among the Top 100 websites and Top 50 YouTube channels devoted to self-publishing, Dale has cemented his position as the go-to authority in the indie author community. Anyone who meets Dale for the first time will discover his enthusiasm and passion for business and life. When Dale isn’t publishing books, creating videos, and networking with business professionals, he loves to travel with his wife Kelli and spend time playing with his cat Izzie. He currently lives in Columbus, Ohio.
"If somebody is, say for instance, new to the business and their revenue is small, then I think it would make sense to go to an aggregator." -Dale L. Roberts
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast! Today my guest is Dale Roberts. Hey, Dale, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Dale: Hey, fantastic. Two-time guest, baby. I must've been a good guest if you're having me come back.
[00:00:13] Matty: You absolutely were. I think there's only one other repeat guest and that's Mark Lefebvre, who was on twice.
[00:00:18] Dale: I'm coming for you, Mark. You see me! I'm coming for ya!
[00:00:21] He's a good friend. I like Mark. He's an awesome guy.
[00:00:25] Matty: For anyone who might've missed that previous episode. So that was Episode 34 Connecting through Video, and I'll definitely include a link to that episode in the show notes, but just in case anybody missed that and missed Dale's introduction as part of that, let me reintroduce you.
[00:00:39] Dale L. Roberts is a fitness author, video content creator, and self-publishing advocate. Voted by Feedspot among the Top 100 websites and Top 50 YouTube channels devoted to self-publishing, Dale has cemented his position as the go-to authority in the indie author community. Anyone who meets Dale for the first time will discover his enthusiasm and passion for business and life.
When Dale isn’t publishing books, creating videos, and networking with business professionals, he loves to travel with his wife Kelli and spend time playing with his cat Izzie. He currently lives in Columbus, Ohio.
[00:01:18] So I had invited Dale back because there was a topic that I wanted to discuss, and I was casting about for someone who I felt could be bring an impartial third-party perspective to it, and the topic is Using Aggregators versus Going Direct. And so, Dale, I wanted to start right out, so that we're all approaching this conversation with a common understanding, can you describe what aggregators do and how that is different than going direct?
[00:01:46] Dale: So with going direct, we're just going all the way to whatever platform. So in the instance, let's say, Kindle Direct Publishing, we set up our own account and when we make a sale, they pay us directly. With aggregate publishers, what they do is they play like a go-between, a person who does the work for us to where they will send it out to multiple platforms. And all they do is typically most aggregators will collect a certain percentage of the net profits that come in from each of the areas, be it Apple, Kobo, Google Play, so on and so forth.
[00:02:22] The benefit and the advantage of using something like that, a lot of people are like, why don't I just go direct? Well, the nice thing is you have one dashboard, one tax form, only one area that you can look at and you can be able to tweak and understand everything. Whereas if you were to go to each one of those avenues, let's say, the Amazon alternatives and Apple, Barnes and Noble, Google Play Books, and Kobo, and then KDP. If we were to go to those five different platforms, let's just say, Matty, you just did your manuscript and you go, Oh my gosh, there's a big typo on page one. Now you've got to go through and update five different dashboards.
[00:03:05] However, if you have one dashboard, all you've got to do is upload it to that one dashboard. They send it out on your behalf. So it saves you a lot of time, heartache, and energy by using an aggregate publisher. Is it for everyone? Possibly not, but for the vast majority of indy authors out there, I highly recommend it.
[00:03:27] Matty: I agree. And I think that the model I use is common among a lot of indy authors, which is that I go direct to Amazon for both ebook and print, and we can talk about why that's a smart thing to do. And then with one exception, I go to Draft2Digital for everything else. So as you said, that's getting me to Barnes and Noble and Kobo and Apple Books and so on.
[00:03:49] The one exception being Google Play, which Draft2Digital doesn't currently support. And then, although I think our conversation's going to be focused on eBooks, but just to throw it out there, on the print side, as I mentioned, I'm going to Amazon KDP for print for Amazon, and then going to Ingram, which is pretty much the only game in town, in the US at least, for print on other platforms. Is what I just described for myself common among other indy authors?
[00:00:06] Dale: Hey, fantastic. Two-time guest, baby. I must've been a good guest if you're having me come back.
[00:00:13] Matty: You absolutely were. I think there's only one other repeat guest and that's Mark Lefebvre, who was on twice.
[00:00:18] Dale: I'm coming for you, Mark. You see me! I'm coming for ya!
[00:00:21] He's a good friend. I like Mark. He's an awesome guy.
[00:00:25] Matty: For anyone who might've missed that previous episode. So that was Episode 34 Connecting through Video, and I'll definitely include a link to that episode in the show notes, but just in case anybody missed that and missed Dale's introduction as part of that, let me reintroduce you.
[00:00:39] Dale L. Roberts is a fitness author, video content creator, and self-publishing advocate. Voted by Feedspot among the Top 100 websites and Top 50 YouTube channels devoted to self-publishing, Dale has cemented his position as the go-to authority in the indie author community. Anyone who meets Dale for the first time will discover his enthusiasm and passion for business and life.
When Dale isn’t publishing books, creating videos, and networking with business professionals, he loves to travel with his wife Kelli and spend time playing with his cat Izzie. He currently lives in Columbus, Ohio.
[00:01:18] So I had invited Dale back because there was a topic that I wanted to discuss, and I was casting about for someone who I felt could be bring an impartial third-party perspective to it, and the topic is Using Aggregators versus Going Direct. And so, Dale, I wanted to start right out, so that we're all approaching this conversation with a common understanding, can you describe what aggregators do and how that is different than going direct?
[00:01:46] Dale: So with going direct, we're just going all the way to whatever platform. So in the instance, let's say, Kindle Direct Publishing, we set up our own account and when we make a sale, they pay us directly. With aggregate publishers, what they do is they play like a go-between, a person who does the work for us to where they will send it out to multiple platforms. And all they do is typically most aggregators will collect a certain percentage of the net profits that come in from each of the areas, be it Apple, Kobo, Google Play, so on and so forth.
[00:02:22] The benefit and the advantage of using something like that, a lot of people are like, why don't I just go direct? Well, the nice thing is you have one dashboard, one tax form, only one area that you can look at and you can be able to tweak and understand everything. Whereas if you were to go to each one of those avenues, let's say, the Amazon alternatives and Apple, Barnes and Noble, Google Play Books, and Kobo, and then KDP. If we were to go to those five different platforms, let's just say, Matty, you just did your manuscript and you go, Oh my gosh, there's a big typo on page one. Now you've got to go through and update five different dashboards.
[00:03:05] However, if you have one dashboard, all you've got to do is upload it to that one dashboard. They send it out on your behalf. So it saves you a lot of time, heartache, and energy by using an aggregate publisher. Is it for everyone? Possibly not, but for the vast majority of indy authors out there, I highly recommend it.
[00:03:27] Matty: I agree. And I think that the model I use is common among a lot of indy authors, which is that I go direct to Amazon for both ebook and print, and we can talk about why that's a smart thing to do. And then with one exception, I go to Draft2Digital for everything else. So as you said, that's getting me to Barnes and Noble and Kobo and Apple Books and so on.
[00:03:49] The one exception being Google Play, which Draft2Digital doesn't currently support. And then, although I think our conversation's going to be focused on eBooks, but just to throw it out there, on the print side, as I mentioned, I'm going to Amazon KDP for print for Amazon, and then going to Ingram, which is pretty much the only game in town, in the US at least, for print on other platforms. Is what I just described for myself common among other indy authors?
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[00:04:18] Dale: Absolutely. And you're right in the fact that aligning yourself with Ingram Content Group is a good idea. The way that I would recommend for anybody that's an indy author, you go through IngramSpark. If you are a small publishing house, then you would want to consider Lightning Source. Both--good news--are underneath the Ingram Content Group banner. So you can't go wrong. And the nice thing is Ingram does distribute print books out worldwide, and it reaches some areas that Amazon does not reach and there's a good reason why Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing uses Ingram Content Group by way of Lightning Source to distribute through their Expanded Distribution Program. So if you've ever been on KDP and you see the expanded distribution offer, you're taking a little bit of pay cut on that, distributing through that way. It's because Ingram is the one who's doing that. More importantly, Lightning Source is fulfilling those print runs. Pretty interesting, right? But yeah, you've nailed it.
[00:05:16] Matty: And I think that for 99% of the people who are going to be listening to this podcast, IngramSpark, the more indy-focused one, is the one they'd want to be going to because as I understand it, it's more user friendly for the person who isn't in it all the time, the way a publisher would be for Lightning Source.
[00:05:35] Dale: Exactly. Honestly, I've run into some people who've gone through Lighting Source and I'm always left scratching my head going, why didn't you go to IngramSpark? It's way easier. It's meant for indy authors. If you're doing Lightning Source, that should be an avenue that's reserved for just small publishing houses. And when I say small publishing houses, if you're not publishing anywhere from about a dozen or more publications within the course of the month, Lightning Sources is not going to be your solution. If you're doing a dozen or more, and you're experienced in it, then that's definitely going to be it. But you're going to need to make sure you have your own imprint, that you have your own LLC or incorporation, things like that. But for those indy authors that are listening to this, and I imagine at least nine out of every 10 people that are listening to this are indy authors strictly working on their manuscripts, trying to get it out there as the world, IngramSpark is definitely the way to go.
[00:06:26] Matty: The other thing that Ingram offers that Amazon generally doesn't is that bookstores won't buy from Amazon, so if you're ever going to see your book on a bookstore shelf, no bookstore I've ever spoken to will order from Amazon. They'll order from Ingram, and libraries also generally won't order from Amazon. And so if you want to get into those two venues, then for print something like IngramSpark is key. And even for eBooks, an aggregator like Draft2Digital is great. Can you talk a little bit about the entree that Draft2Digital gives authors into libraries?
[00:07:02] Dale: They actually have a few resources, but one of the biggest ones that they have, and this is pretty awesome, is Overdrive. Overdrive feeds out to five figures in libraries and institutions such as that, and a lot of people might be thinking to themselves, why do I want to go into libraries? Because it's a different audience. It's a different subset of readers. Some people that either, A, cannot afford to purchase books or, B, don't want to afford that expense or, C, they're just lifelong library goers. Full disclosure, I'm a mixture of both. I like to go to the library, but in some instances, I like to own the book.
[00:07:42] So you're probably saying yourself, why do I want to go to Overdrive? Because Overdrive is what we were saying about IngramSpark for print books, Overdrive is like that for eBooks to libraries. So that right there is one of the best avenues.
[00:07:56] Matty: Yup. And I'm going to also link to the episode I did with him, our buddy Mark Lefebvre about libraries. So Mark has a book, An Author's Guide to Working with Bookstores and Libraries, and I will include a link to that because Mark dives into a lot of detail about all the benefits of going to libraries.
[00:08:14] So you had talked about most of these aggregators making their money through taking a cut of the proceeds but talk about PublishDrive cause PublishDrive is a different model.
[00:08:26] Dale: Yeah. They're a little bit of a different bird. And I'm not saying that in a derogatory way, because I do know Kinga <Jentetics> who is actually the CEO and founder of PublishDrive, so I wouldn't want to say anything disparaging about her on the podcast. PublishDrive, believe it or not, it actually has been one year, that they had actually launched into this new subscription style model.
[00:08:45] They used to, in the old version of PublishDrive, do the same as Draft2Digital was doing, which was they would do what's called revenue share, which means they would take 20% of all net profits and in exchange they just send out the stuff on your behalf. Well, they decided, Hey, screw it, we're going to go ahead and take a different direction. They felt like it was going to be something that was more sustainable for them as a company and especially the upward trajectory and growth that they wanted for their company.
[00:09:12] So what they did was, first of all, if you're on the fence and I had somebody even comment on a video yesterday and they were like, This isn't true. And I'm like, actually it is, if you want to upload your first title, first ebook on there, is a hundred percent free because they want everybody to try a test drive. It's a hundred percent free. So here's the cool thing. You still get 100% of all profits by them aggregating. So even if you use PublishDrive for that one publication, you're going to collect a hundred percent of all revenue. But obviously they're wanting to get your foot in the door and get it to where they're doing things. It's kind of a tier-based subscription model.
[00:09:53] What sets PublishDrive also apart from other aggregators is they have all three different iterations of publications. That means they have ebook. They have print book. And they also have audio book, which they just got the last two most recently. I distributed through them so far. The jury's still out. I'm not really sure on how much results I've gotten so far from distributing my audio book there. But the nice thing is they have everything. It's not saying anything disparaging about the likes of, say, Smashwords or Draft2Digital, but PublishDrive wants to make it worth your while and make it to where it's more enticing to part ways with your money and hedge the bets on yourself. So that's the whole reasons, like a lot of people are like, Oh, that's a scam. I got to spend $5 per month to send out my books? I can do it for free over here.
[00:10:49] Well, they're kind of saying, look, we're going to give you a hundred percent of all earnings. All you got to spend is X amount of dollars per month. So if you could at least say, sell X amount of books or whatever you have your retail cost on each one of those books, then you'll be able to make that back. So, for example, let's say I've got my ebook, it's priced at $9.99. Okay. I'm going to collect all of that, be it whatever model they send it to, you let's say they distribute it over to Amazon KDP, then it would be 70%. That means I get $7 back for selling it through there. So a lot of people are hung up on that whole deal of having to pay subscription model. But if you're actively promoting it through the different avenues that you make it available through PublishDrive, it might actually make more sense.
[00:11:36] Matty: I think it makes sense for people to wonder when there's one company who's using a different approach, and whenever there's a question about that, I always direct people to Writer Beware, which is a Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America-sponsored site. And that if you ever have a question, you can always drop a note to Writer Beware and say, Hey, have you gotten any reports on this?
[00:11:58] And I can pretty much guarantee you that they're going to give the good thumbs up to PublishDrive because PublishDrive is a very reputable company. But it's a good thing to remember because if you see that anomaly, it makes sense to research it, to make sure that you're not getting into something that is a little bit shady.
[00:12:13] Dale: Yeah. PublishDrive has got a great reputation. They did upset a few people by doing that sudden pivot to doing subscription model. But here's the good thing. If you're listening to this and you got an account back, let's say, three years ago with PublishDrive, they grandfathered in all of the old accounts. So if you had an account from back then, you already published through there, they're still going to honor the revenue share. I purposely went and switched to subscription-based because they weren't going to allow me to have print or audio book distribution without going over to the new one. So I was willing to go ahead and part ways and take a gamble on myself, get it to where I'm like, okay, let's take a gamble, let's see if this is going to pay off again. Jury's still out for me, but I'll definitely let everybody know in due time over on my YouTube channel.
[00:13:04] Matty: You had used the example of if PublishDrive is publishing to KDP and then obviously they have to take into account the royalty that KDP is paying. And when I was describing my model, which we agreed is one that many indy authors follow, I'm going direct to KDP for Amazon and then I'm going to Draft2Digital for everybody else with the one exception that we'll talk about, Google Play. Can you talk a little bit about why that's common, that almost everybody goes direct to KDP for Amazon, even if they're using an aggregator for other outlets?
[00:13:37] Dale: A primary reason: you get a little bit more control. When you're going to each one of these, this is going to be an issue with all aggregators, with the exception of one, with the exception of one, and we already talked about them and I'm going to put a pin into that just for right now. Going direct to a platform, you're going to actually have more flexibility in what you'd be able to do. So by going to Amazon KDP, I can put in my seven keywords, and have that done that way to where I can be more discovered on the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing platform or through amazon.com.
[00:14:08] However, I don't get that through the aggregators. They will allow me to have specific keywords, but the problem is relevant keywords on Amazon aren't the same relevancy over on Apple or Barnes and Noble or on Kobo. Keywords have different weight and different value based on the specific type of platform. So there's one specific reason.
[00:14:33] I would say the biggest main reason--I'm not sure if this is what you're thinking about, but I'm sure if you're thinking what I'm thinking--the reason that you want to go to KDP direct is you get Amazon advertising. Amazon advertising is the most dead simple and most cost effective way to run ads to your book. And unfortunately you don't get that if you're distributing to Amazon KDP through Draft2Digital, you don't get that through Smashwords. You do get that through PublishDrive. PublishDrive does have Amazon advertising built into their system, but they run it on your behalf. So you have to end up paying them and they take care of all of that stuff over there. I don't think they charge any more than what the ads are going to run, so they just run the ads on your behalf.
[00:15:22] Matty: Very interesting. Yeah, for me, the primary reason that something like Draft2Digital is appealing is because of the time savings. And the tradeoff does seem to be more limited promotional opportunities that direct to the retailer, direct to the platform authors might enjoy. What are some other considerations that can help people decide how to balance those two things, balancing the time versus the promotional benefits they might get.
[00:15:51] Dale: If somebody is, say for instance, new to the business and their revenue is small, then I think it would make sense to go to an aggregator. Now, small is going to be subjective. It's going to be completely up to you on what you think is a small amount of money. To me, if I'm going to have all of these different accounts open, then that means it's going to take me more time. If it's going to take me more time, then I'm just going to hire somebody to actually manage those assets on my behalf, rather than me doing that. And since I'm going to be hiring somebody out, that means that I need to at least have that discretionary expense to hire that person and bring them in to do that. With doing aggregators, you can handle it yourself and do it in one place. That way you're not taxing your time, just so you can be able to save a few bucks.
[00:16:48] Because let's face it, if you're new to publishing, then chances aren't very likely you're going to be getting dozens of sales of your eBooks over on Apple, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Overdrive, all these other ones. It's going to probably be pretty small at first. In fact, the vast majority of people, it is small. So rather than nickel and diming your time so you make an extra 20 cents per sale of your ebook, then that's why you want to go with aggregators.
[00:17:17] Because I want you to think about the time it's going to take for you to update a manuscript. And it will happen, by the way, folks--you're in the world of self-publishing, you will update your manuscript at some point. You're going to find something messed up, or you're going to want to add a chapter, or maybe you're going to do a call to action to subscribe to your email list. You're going to need to update that. And you're going to probably want to do that across the board on each one on those platforms.
[00:17:40] I'm going to tell you, even if you work fast, it'll take you at least 15 minutes. At least 15 minutes, that's working my pace. That means you have everything ready to go. You've got your keywords all dialed in. You've got your ad copy done. You've got your manuscript ready to go. And it's formatted--by the way, that takes extra time too--and then let's just say, you're on five of those platforms. You got 15 minutes times five. We're doing hour and 15 minutes now. Okay. Is that worth getting an extra 30 cents or maybe $2 per month? To me, I don't think it is.
[00:18:20] Matty: Yeah. And I think the vast majority of people would be taking way longer than that to do that same task.
[00:18:27] Dale: Yes. I'm a rare bird. I've been in this business for six years and I've published scores of publications. I'm experienced. I can work really fast. I know exactly how to get everything going. For a lot of people, they're not able to work 15 minutes. I've even heard some people, it takes upwards of about an hour for them to go ahead and upload to a specific platform because they aren't familiar with it and they have to take their time and make sure everything looks good, cross their T's, dot their I's, that type of thing. And it takes a lot longer.
[00:18:53] So just think about what is your time worth? Is your time really worth an extra $2 per month? And you spent, let's say four hours grinding it out, uploading and updating to each one of those platforms? I've seen some people that completely just poo-poo all over the aggregate model. Oh, keep all of your earnings. Go ahead and upload it. Well, that's all well and good for you, but guess what I like to do? I like to actually live my life. And if that means I gotta sacrifice some earnings, it's okay.
[00:19:21] There does get to a point, though, when you go to each of the aggregate distributors, track your sales, see where they're coming from. And if you find that you're starting to trickle in a substantial amount of money, let's say you're pulling in a thousand dollars from Amazon, or you're pulling a thousand dollars from Apple. Maybe I de-select Apple and I can go directly to there. Okay, I'm game. But if you're not making at least four figures or more through each one of these avenues, then do the aggregator. It just saves you the time and the heartache.
[00:19:54] Matty: Another thing that is just supporting what you're saying about using your time effectively, is that the platforms that I use, with one exception, are very user friendly. So KDP, very user friendly, very easy to navigate around in. Draft2Digital, super easy to use. The exception being Google Play, though. Because for a while, Draft2Digital did distribute to Google Play and then they stopped, as I understand because Google Play's requirements of them as an aggregator were becoming onerous. So I loaded my books directly to Google Play, and in general, the user interface was pretty good. In some cases it was almost too good because you can put in so many different currency denominations to sell your book in that it gets a little overwhelming, but the reporting is horrible. So if someone's trying to make the decision about whether it's even worth it to go to Google Play or to any other platform, do you have any advice on that front?
[00:20:55] Dale: It's all going to come down to, what's your time worth, honestly. Google Plays great. Google Play Books is awesome. I'll go ahead and address it, because I have no dog in the fight on this one and Google Play, I don't think is going to beat me up for saying this, but Google Play actually Draft2Digital I think distributed twice to them already. First time around was probably before I had done it, and something had gone south. Google Play Books was kind of messing around and so that was gone.
[00:21:21] And then more recently they came in for a cup of coffee. The problem is, and what you referred to as an onerous relationship, the issue was Google Play Books was requiring authors to directly come to their platform. And they would allow aggregates to come work as managers, but you had to jump through all these different hoops. And at the end of the day, I think Draft2Digital was like, Nah, no, bro. I'm out. They're like, Peace signs, deuces, I'm out, we're good.
[00:21:48] At the end of the day, when you start to look at some of these platforms, figure out, doesn't make sense. For Google Play, I think they have distribution out to over 70 different avenues. Amazon goes out to far less than what Google Play Books does. Google Play Books reaches out to lots of areas that you wouldn't see Amazon reaching out to, which is pretty exceptional.
[00:22:12] And the other thing is Google's one of the world's largest search engines. And when you upload your book to Google Play Books, you're going to have an option to share 10% of your book or more as a sample. Here's the cool thing. And I'm not sure if you knew this, Matty, that with that 10%, they actually use it for indexing your book. Which means it makes your book more discoverable through the Google search engine. So let's just say, for instance, you put out, I don't know, underwater doily knitting for dolphins and someone types that up, your book will probably come up because you're one of very few people that talks about underwater doily knitting for dolphins, and it'll get some of those keywords and serve people that specific book. So that's one of the big advantages to go in Google Play Books.
[00:23:05] But when you're looking at a platform, I want you to think to yourself, what is your end goal? What is your end goal? And typically it breaks down into two areas. Do you want to make more money, or do you want to reach more readers? Make more money, reach more readers. If you want to reach more readers, you're going to probably take a little bit of a sacrifice in your pay by using an aggregator, but at least you're able to get out there and you're optimizing your movement.
[00:23:34] For lack of better words, it's almost like a growth hack, if you will. It's a way that you're able to hack your scaling of your business without having to go out and nickel and dime your time. So look at the specific model, and does it make sense. So for Google Play Books, if you're like, Hey, I want to reach out to as many readers as humanly possible, that might make sense for you. And look at the pay. Does it make sense? Are you going to be paid your worth? Is this going to represent you as an author as you wish to be represented and distributed to the readers that you wish to reach?
[00:24:11] Matty: And I think that if I'm understanding you correctly, there's a nuance about readers versus money, which is, do you want to make more money per book? Because the very fact that you're potentially reaching more people through an aggregator, it means that you might make that up because you're getting in front of more people, you're reaching more readers, so it makes up for the fact that Draft2Digital is keeping whatever percentage they're keeping or PublishDrive is charging you a monthly fee to do that.
[00:24:39] And the other thing I think is interesting is that whenever I'm talking about Draft2Digital with anyone, I always mentioned as an example, if you want to get on Barnes and Noble and Apple Books and I list a couple of big ones, but there are a ton of platforms. I'm just looking at my Draft2Digital dashboard for my first book, The Sense of Death, and it's going to Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Scribd, Tolino, which I believe is an Italian platform, 24 symbols. I've never even been on some of these platforms. Overdrive, as we mentioned, also in the library space, it sends it to Bibliotheca and Hoopla, Baker and Taylor is another platform it goes to. Vivlio, which I think is a French platform.
[00:25:20] I am never going to go to all those direct. And when I get my monthly statement from Draft2Digital, sometimes some of those are zero and sometimes it's a tiny little amount of money, but it's a tiny amount of money I wouldn't have gotten it all if I wasn't on an aggregator platform.
[00:25:36] Dale: Yeah. You mentioned two of them, by the way, that we went right past. We did talk about Overdrive for library, distribution. Bibliotheca and Hoopla and other great one. In fact, I actually have the Hoopla app on my phone. That's how I check out some of my books that I do, audio books and eBooks you can get through, and Hoopla actually has other things like movies and things like that you can actually check out from your local library. Hoopla was a very big acquisition for Draft2Digital. When they got that, I was like, Yeah! I was pumped cause I was like, Oh my gosh, something to note that some of these platforms are not available to go directly to.
[00:26:09] It's because of some of these relationships that some of the aggregate publishers have done, they've done all the work for you. They act like your agent ahead of time. And they were able to acquire these different areas that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do. So for instance, you're mentioning an Italian publisher, or retailer. If you don't know how to speak, Italian chances are very likely you're probably not going to be able to set up a stinkin' account. It's going to be next to impossible. So that's another big benefit of using an aggregate publisher is they're getting into areas you wouldn't otherwise be able to get to.
[00:26:43] Matty: And I think in some cases, although I imagine this is the exception, that there are even promotional opportunities that the aggregator gets that the people who are going direct don't get. So I know, for example, that I have seen offerings of submitting your book for consideration for a sale on Apple, and you can only submit for that promotion through Draft2Digital, not if you're direct. And I'm sure that there are obviously tradeoffs there, but it's not like you're cutting yourself off from every promotional opportunity. It's just that it's a different pool and it's probably a smaller pool, but those promotional opportunities are still there.
[00:27:19] Dale: Yeah, I've noticed that for Draft2Digital. I've noticed that also for a PublishDrive. PublishDrive also curates quite a bit of different specific promotional opportunities you wouldn't another otherwise get.
[00:27:30] Matty: One of the things that we had talked about earlier was how do you make that decision? Maybe you've been using an aggregator and you wanted to start going direct to a platform. And this is one that I struggled with for months over some of my books, because I really got intrigued with Kobo and I had interviewed Tara Cremin from Kobo on the podcast and she had been talking about some of the promotional opportunities they offer. And I was like, yeah, I want to be part of that. And I was talking to our buddy Mark, who was the person who established Kobo Writing Life, which is the Kobo author platform--
[00:28:04] Dale: Isn't that a trip? And he's so humble about it too.
[00:28:07] Matty: Yeah, I know! You read us his resume and you're like, holy cow.
[00:28:12] So I had been talking to him about moving my books, taking them down from Draft2Digital and going direct to Kobo, and one of the things he pointed out is that if you do that, you lose any reviews that you've gotten on the retail platform when it was fed by the aggregator. So if I have 10 reviews for The Sense of Death on Kobo now, and then I go direct to Kobo, I lose those. Is that generally true across the board for retailers, that you lose that connection to the original version of the book?
[00:28:43] Dale: Generally speaking, yeah. There are a few exceptions to the rule. Essentially what ends up happening is you're feeding through the aggregator. Let's say you're listening to this and you go, I'm making a thousand dollars per month, I'll just do it through Apple. That'll make sense. I'm just going to go directly Apple. Wait, whoa, hold on. Because you are going to remove that distribution from the aggregator and go direct, the issue is you're spinning this plate and you're going to go ahead and spin a new plate.
[00:29:11] The problem is that old plate is going to fall because you're going to end up, of course, delisting that original one. Here's the problem is, a lot of search engine algorithms function on what's called relevancy. And part of that relevancy is influenced by sales, of course, that's the biggest metric, through things like reviews, engagement activity on those specific product pages. So the issue is that you take a product that was doing really good on a specific platform, let's say a thousand dollars per month, as just a bare metric there. That metric alone, let's say, okay, I'm going to go ahead and do it myself, I'm going to upload directly to Apple. Here's the problem is you're starting to hedge the bets on yourself. You're going, okay, I'm going to delist this one that has built a lot of relevancy, has quite a few reviews, people know where this product's at, but I'm going to take that same content and create a new listing for myself.
[00:30:10] You sure have removed the middleman out from everything, but now you have the issue of building relevance for that new product listing. So there's a good likelihood that if you're a relatively new author and you delist a relevant product and post a new product, whether the content is the same or not, it's still a new product, you're going to have to really work to promote this thing, get more sales, get reviews on it again, and build more relevancy on it so that way, that specific platform will go ahead and serve it out. So a good example would be Amazon has something called Also Boughts or Customers also Viewed, things like that.
[00:30:53] Matty: Is it true that you would need a new ISBN if you delisted from the aggregator and went direct?
[00:31:02] Dale: It is true if you were using the free ISBN that you would normally get through a platform, that's theirs. So here's an analogy I like to give to people because they always just kind of like, Why can't I use this free assigned ISBN other places. Matty, I'm going to invite you to come on over. You're going to make your lunch over here at my place. No problem. I've got some pots and pans. All right. You can use my pots and pans. Or you can bring your own and use your own pots and pans. The nice thing is when you use your pots and pans, you can take it wherever you want to go. Use in whatever kitchen you want to.
[00:31:37] You come into my house though, you use my pots and pans, you start walking out the door with my pots and pans, I'm going to take umbrage to it. Obviously, I'm going to be like, what are you doing? That's my pot and pan. You've got to leave that here. You can't do that. So the same thing goes for the free assigned ISBNs. They actually own those ISBNs there. You can't take that international standard book number to another place.
[00:32:01] Now here's the exception. If you own the ISBN, yes, you can take it with you. The biggest issue you're going to run into, though, is you've already listed it through this particular platform as an aggregate, if you were using your own ISBN. If you go over and try to list again, you're going to probably run into a little bit of friction with that particular platform, because they're going to go, Whoa, that was already listed over here. What are you doing here with this? Amazon's especially one of the ones that will definitely push back. They're going to go, That ISBN was already used. Don't bring that garbage over here. So you're going to possibly have to consider getting a new ISBN.
[00:32:42] And I would recommend, too, so it helps out the percentage, the small percentage of the audience that will notice that there was a listing that had a bunch of reviews at one point, and it was a specific price point and then it changes another day and there's no reviews on it and such, it might be a good idea is if you do pull it down from an aggregate distributor, easy for me to say, then you may want to list it as a second edition and come in with your own ISBN. It's what I would recommend. There might be some other experts out there that will say, No, it's your ISBNs you take it down from the aggregator, just go ahead and list it on the other one, use that one. Again, you're going to probably get met with friction and if you buy ISBNs in bulk, you can get them as cheap as $1.25, I think, or $1.50 per ISBN going through Bowker, and that's I think if you buy a thousand at a time. But nonetheless, you get the idea. I would just recommend buy the ISBN, get your own, start with something new listed as a second edition.
[00:33:42] Matty: Yeah, I bought a group of ISBNs from Bowker and whatever grouping I picked, it was about $30 a piece, as opposed to the, I don't know, $150 <actually, $125 as of September 2020> bucks or whatever it is if you buy them individually.
[00:33:54] Dale: Yeah. So it gets expensive.
[00:33:56] Matty: If you're publishing one book and you think you might ever publish another one, just buy a bunch of them.
[00:34:01] Dale: For sure.
[00:34:02] Matty: The system is so dependent on ISBNs and I really had an experience of this myself until I had put a book onto the Draft2Digital print beta. This was a while ago, so it was pretty early in the print beta. And the launch dates started coming and I got uncomfortable, so I decided I was going to just go to KDP Print and IngramSpark and the book was never published through Draft2Digital. I had put it up and it had gone out to the printer, and then it was in their QA queue for a long time. So it had never been for sale on any of the platforms. Nonetheless, when I went to KDP and to IngramSpark to load it, they perceived it as being a book that already existed, and I ended up having to use another of my ISBNs just to get it going. So, yeah, the system is very connected because Draft2Digital or the printer, whoever was doing it, was already sending that information out, so the ISBN already existed in the other platform. I really like the idea of doing a second edition to get around that.
[00:35:06] Dale: Yeah, you just have way less friction, cause I'm sure you probably could have pushed back, Matty, but you're going to have to get people on the phone. You're going to have to explain it 50 times. By the time you've done, you just think to yourself, was that really worth, I don't know, you said $30 for an ISBN. Was that really worth me spending five hours just to keep that ISBN and save $30. Me, I don't waste that time.
[00:35:29] Matty: Yeah. I really love the theme of consider what your time is worth, not just what the dollars are you're sending out, because there's a definitely a value to your time that needs to be factored in as well.
[00:35:38] Dale: Yeah, I think of that in all regards, when it comes to any facet of my business. I always think to myself, how much is this truly costing me, is my time valued at that. And if I'm looking at, say for instance, a bad book order or something like that, and I'm like, ah, this is not quite what I want looking for. Is it really worth my time to go in and get a hold of Amazon and be like, Hey, can you refund me this? I'm like, I just sometimes I think about what is my time worth, is it going to be worth me sitting here complaining about $5? Some people are like, It's the general principle about things. I'm like, you go for it there because while you're getting your $5 back, I'm probably going to make $30 or $50 or $200 leveraging my time for more higher earning things.
[00:36:23] Matty: Yup. I always think I could spend an hour doing this or I could spend an hour working on a book. Working on a new book. I can spend an hour writing and many times the one hour writing proves to be more valuable in my assessment.
[00:36:37] I did want to ask you about Smashwords cause Smashwords is not a platform that I have any experience with. Can you talk a little bit about what's Smashwords is and how you use that?
[00:36:46] Dale: It's so convenient because just yesterday I recorded this on my podcast, shameless self plug. I've actually been on the Smashwords platform since roughly, I would say, 2015, 2016. I started in publishing in 2014, I think in 2015, 2016, I was like, okay, I want to see what the rest of the world looks like. And I looked at aggregate publishing. At that time I'd only vaguely heard of Draft2Digital. PublishDrive just wasn't even on my radar, I don't even know if they were even around then. Smashwords was the thing that came up instantly. A lot of people were recommending Smashwords.
[00:37:23] The thing that stuck out to me the most, and it didn't make sense to me at first. I'm thinking, I'm like, it is 85% royalty. Now I do know that, you don't even have to look this one up. I recall this because I just had my show note yesterday. 85% royalty. Oh my gosh, my eyes go like this. I'm like, what am I doing over on Amazon KDP? I need to be over here on Smashwords because they're giving me 85% regardless of what I'm charging for my book.
[00:37:50] So you go over on KDP. You're having to go $2.99 to $9.99 to get 70%. And if you're outside of that, you get paid 35%. Boo hiss. What if I want to go to like $19.99? Smashwords is going to reward you for that. But the problem is there's the fine print. Since they're an aggregate distributor, that means that if they're sending it off to say, for instance, Amazon, or they're sending it off to Apple, they're going to be doing the percentage that platform honors, and then they pull the 15% from that.
[00:38:21] I just remember, I was initially looking at this I'm like, this is insanity. Why isn't everybody over here? I didn't understand aggregate publishing at the time. But to their credit 85% is pretty freaking stellar. They're only taking 15% to do the distribution and they reach, oh gosh, tens of thousands of different distribution avenues, some of them very much in conflict with what Draft2Digital does. And I love you guys, by the way, D2D, please don't disown me. Anytime I do that, Kevin Tumlinson's like, Bro, what are you doing?
[00:38:58] Smashwords is fantastic. They have great distribution. I will tell everybody, they do reach Amazon, but there's an asterisk next to it. By the way, they only do eBooks. There's no print books like Draft2Digital has in beta, and they don't do audio books at all. They have a partnership with Findaway Voices, but technically you're just going to Findaway Voices in that specific instance. But in order to get Amazon, you actually have to prove yourself. You have to sell at least $2,000 for a particular title before you can be considered to be distributed to Amazon KDP by way of Smashwords. So, sorry, I had to add that one in there.
[00:39:32] Matty: Interesting. One of the surprising things I found about pricing is that for my short stories, I sell them for 99 cents as standalone eBooks, basically, and what I realized was that if I was selling them on Amazon -- and this isn't a direct versus aggregator issue, it's just Amazon versus other people -- I was getting dinged because it was only 99 cents, so I was getting the lower 35% royalty. If I was selling it through one of the other platforms via Draft2Digital, I was actually getting, I think, 65% because the other platforms weren't dinging me for the low price the way Amazon does. Does that make sense?
[00:40:13] Dale: Yeah, absolutely. You nailed it right on the head, actually. That is one of the nice benefits of going through an aggregator because they do have that developed relationship with those particular retailers and they have a percentage put in place, which you otherwise wouldn't be able to do on your own.
[00:40:29] Matty: And we have been giving a lot of love to Draft2Digital -- it's the one I know, because it's the one I use -- and Smashwords and PublishDrive. Are there any others that people should be looking at or do you consider those the big three that people should be considering if they want to use that aggregator approach?
[00:40:44] Dale: Selfishly those are the ones I always bring up. There's another aggregator out there. It's called BookBaby, works much in the same way that PublishDrive does, except you have a complete upfront payment. A lot of people will confuse it as being a vanity press. They're not. They're not. Essentially you have to hedge all your bets on yourself. It's almost a slight done-for-you style service and then they feed it out and you get a hundred percent of all profits that come in from each one of those different avenues. BookBaby, by the way, is very well known, very trusted. They actually even have the Alliance of Independent Authors stamp of approval as being a good partner, a good-standing partner. I have yet to use BookBaby.
[00:41:24] And then we can't forget about other aggregate publishers that also step outside of the sphere of eBooks and into the land of audio books. So you look at Findaway Voices, they're an aggregate a distributor. In fact, I am bullish on Findaway Voices right now because they have distribution to 43 audio book platforms, I slowed down just for emphasis on this one. Findaway Voices. Do not sleep on them. They are amazing. And they also have distribution to something that's called Chirp.
[00:41:55] You're not familiar with Chirp, it's the audio book avenue of BookBub and everybody and their mother knows about BookBub. If you don't know about BookBub, do me a favor, you're going to pause this podcast, you're going to go ahead and search up BookBub and you're going to find out why they are so freaking amazing, and just having Chirp right now in its early stages is an amazing opportunity. And the way that you get it? Findaway Voices. Findaway Voices is audio book.
[00:42:20] ListenUp, I'm still just studying these guys and gals. There's one little bit of a quirk and hang up I have with them. Their support is really slow, really slow. I communicated with them. They got back to me three months later. I hated to be that guy, but I had to flex where I'm like, Hey, I'm Dale from Self Publishing with Dale. I've got about 36,000 subscribers. I talked to people --
[00:42:44] Matty: -- you don't want to piss me off.
[00:42:47] Dale: I'm going to sit here and just throw around this like celebrity card. But I'm like, Hey, I would love to show what your platform is. And they're also a platform that has the stamp of approval from the Alliance of Independent Authors. So it was thrown off when they were so slow on things. But ListenUp is another avenue for audio books. There is a new dog to the game called Audiobooks Unleashed. Audiobooks Unleashed used to just be a platform where you would find listeners to get your promo codes and there would just be an exchange to where you would get listed on Audiobooks Unleashed and in exchange they would go ahead and share it to the readers, they get the promo codes and you get reviews and it's all legit. 100% legit. They just now released aggregate distribution and they have tons of platforms. I don't know, this is not my stamp of approval on them, I have not used them yet, I don't know what the whole deal is on them. But Audiobooks Unleashed is in the game now.
[00:43:40] Another aggregator is called Author's Republic. Now, before you go jump into Author's Republic, sorry, I'm going to have to throw shade on them just a little bit. They have distribution to two avenues plus Findaway Voices. The two avenues, I don't even know those audio books distribution, but I was willing to go ahead and give it a shot. The issue is if you want to distribute through Author's Republic, it's an all or nothing thing. You either go all in on Author's Republic, they distribute over to Findaway Voices and those two additional avenues, and you can't use Findaway Voices, or use Findaway Voices and don't use Author's Republic.
[00:44:18] I told them boo hiss. I'm like, that doesn't make sense. Can I just take the two distribution avenues? And then they're like, sorry, we don't do that. I'm like, okay, so I have to pay a middleman that's going to pay another middleman to get me distribution. I'm like, why don't I just go over to Findaway Voices? And I'm just going to miss out on two platforms. So Author's Republic, a lot of people swear by them. But they're the same people that aren't using Findaway Voices directly.
[00:44:43] Matty: I think that it's also a great thought to wrap up on is that you can pursue more and more platforms in hopes of more and more readers. But at some point, if you're catering to an American audience and your book is on Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble, how big a pool do you need to be playing in? And it is definitely one of those things that I think people can sink almost endless time into pursuing, what are those two obscure audio book platforms that they might be able to get into? Or you can just say, okay, I can already reach a billion people. That's enough.
[00:45:22] Dale: Yeah, you gotta know when enough is enough and start to, again, a time versus money type situation. Does it make sense for you to go to these obscure distribution avenues? So there's going to probably be some people that look at PublishDrive and they go, Ooh, I don't know, subscribe, pay for that. Then you got to do apples to apples to oranges. You need to look at say PublishDrive. What is it that they're offering that has a little bit of a crossover with what Smashwords and Draft2Digital do? What is it that they have that the other platforms don't have and are those platforms truly going to be the avenues you want. To let you know that I've used PublishDrive and they have some different distribution out to various Chinese markets, which is pretty amazing.
[00:46:03] I was like, yeah, I get to make it in China? Count me in. Never landed the sale there. And I had dozens of books put up there. None of them. Typically it was the usual suspects. You would get it from Google Play Books. That one was like pulling me in a lot. I was like, oh, Google Play Books, fantastic. And then you get the little smaller platforms here and there that would bring it in. But I discovered some these more obscure platforms, even ones I'd never heard of, -I just wasn't getting that much from it. So you've got to think to yourself, okay, compared each of these platforms, which one makes the most sense to you financially and move wise that way you're not wasting your time and movement.
[00:46:40] There is one more platform, and I would actually get beat up if I didn't say anything. Lulu, why did I forget? Lulu actually happens to be the sponsor of my channel this month. They'd probably go ahead and hang me out to dry on this one. Lulus definitely another one. They more recently went through a major overhaul and facelift. and they have really steered their ship on the right course most recently and just are amazing. They have excellent print quality and they also have ebook distribution. Sorry, Lulu, if you're listening to this, I love you guys. It's not that I purposely forgot about you. It's just, we got in the heat of the moment, Matty?
[00:47:13] Matty: Yes, exactly. And I will put links to all these different platforms so people can, check them out. And of course we want them also to check out your YouTube channel among other things. So tell us where people can go now that they're intrigued, and they want to find out more about Dale Roberts.
[00:47:29] Dale: You can find me actually, at selfpublishingwithdale.com and it'll feed out to everywhere, between YouTube to Facebook, to Instagram, to the podcast, everything in between. So that's selfpublishingwithdale, think like Chippendale.
[00:47:41] Matty: And with that visual we'll wrap up. Thank you very much, Dale. This was great.
[00:47:46] Dale: Thank you.
[00:05:16] Matty: And I think that for 99% of the people who are going to be listening to this podcast, IngramSpark, the more indy-focused one, is the one they'd want to be going to because as I understand it, it's more user friendly for the person who isn't in it all the time, the way a publisher would be for Lightning Source.
[00:05:35] Dale: Exactly. Honestly, I've run into some people who've gone through Lighting Source and I'm always left scratching my head going, why didn't you go to IngramSpark? It's way easier. It's meant for indy authors. If you're doing Lightning Source, that should be an avenue that's reserved for just small publishing houses. And when I say small publishing houses, if you're not publishing anywhere from about a dozen or more publications within the course of the month, Lightning Sources is not going to be your solution. If you're doing a dozen or more, and you're experienced in it, then that's definitely going to be it. But you're going to need to make sure you have your own imprint, that you have your own LLC or incorporation, things like that. But for those indy authors that are listening to this, and I imagine at least nine out of every 10 people that are listening to this are indy authors strictly working on their manuscripts, trying to get it out there as the world, IngramSpark is definitely the way to go.
[00:06:26] Matty: The other thing that Ingram offers that Amazon generally doesn't is that bookstores won't buy from Amazon, so if you're ever going to see your book on a bookstore shelf, no bookstore I've ever spoken to will order from Amazon. They'll order from Ingram, and libraries also generally won't order from Amazon. And so if you want to get into those two venues, then for print something like IngramSpark is key. And even for eBooks, an aggregator like Draft2Digital is great. Can you talk a little bit about the entree that Draft2Digital gives authors into libraries?
[00:07:02] Dale: They actually have a few resources, but one of the biggest ones that they have, and this is pretty awesome, is Overdrive. Overdrive feeds out to five figures in libraries and institutions such as that, and a lot of people might be thinking to themselves, why do I want to go into libraries? Because it's a different audience. It's a different subset of readers. Some people that either, A, cannot afford to purchase books or, B, don't want to afford that expense or, C, they're just lifelong library goers. Full disclosure, I'm a mixture of both. I like to go to the library, but in some instances, I like to own the book.
[00:07:42] So you're probably saying yourself, why do I want to go to Overdrive? Because Overdrive is what we were saying about IngramSpark for print books, Overdrive is like that for eBooks to libraries. So that right there is one of the best avenues.
[00:07:56] Matty: Yup. And I'm going to also link to the episode I did with him, our buddy Mark Lefebvre about libraries. So Mark has a book, An Author's Guide to Working with Bookstores and Libraries, and I will include a link to that because Mark dives into a lot of detail about all the benefits of going to libraries.
[00:08:14] So you had talked about most of these aggregators making their money through taking a cut of the proceeds but talk about PublishDrive cause PublishDrive is a different model.
[00:08:26] Dale: Yeah. They're a little bit of a different bird. And I'm not saying that in a derogatory way, because I do know Kinga <Jentetics> who is actually the CEO and founder of PublishDrive, so I wouldn't want to say anything disparaging about her on the podcast. PublishDrive, believe it or not, it actually has been one year, that they had actually launched into this new subscription style model.
[00:08:45] They used to, in the old version of PublishDrive, do the same as Draft2Digital was doing, which was they would do what's called revenue share, which means they would take 20% of all net profits and in exchange they just send out the stuff on your behalf. Well, they decided, Hey, screw it, we're going to go ahead and take a different direction. They felt like it was going to be something that was more sustainable for them as a company and especially the upward trajectory and growth that they wanted for their company.
[00:09:12] So what they did was, first of all, if you're on the fence and I had somebody even comment on a video yesterday and they were like, This isn't true. And I'm like, actually it is, if you want to upload your first title, first ebook on there, is a hundred percent free because they want everybody to try a test drive. It's a hundred percent free. So here's the cool thing. You still get 100% of all profits by them aggregating. So even if you use PublishDrive for that one publication, you're going to collect a hundred percent of all revenue. But obviously they're wanting to get your foot in the door and get it to where they're doing things. It's kind of a tier-based subscription model.
[00:09:53] What sets PublishDrive also apart from other aggregators is they have all three different iterations of publications. That means they have ebook. They have print book. And they also have audio book, which they just got the last two most recently. I distributed through them so far. The jury's still out. I'm not really sure on how much results I've gotten so far from distributing my audio book there. But the nice thing is they have everything. It's not saying anything disparaging about the likes of, say, Smashwords or Draft2Digital, but PublishDrive wants to make it worth your while and make it to where it's more enticing to part ways with your money and hedge the bets on yourself. So that's the whole reasons, like a lot of people are like, Oh, that's a scam. I got to spend $5 per month to send out my books? I can do it for free over here.
[00:10:49] Well, they're kind of saying, look, we're going to give you a hundred percent of all earnings. All you got to spend is X amount of dollars per month. So if you could at least say, sell X amount of books or whatever you have your retail cost on each one of those books, then you'll be able to make that back. So, for example, let's say I've got my ebook, it's priced at $9.99. Okay. I'm going to collect all of that, be it whatever model they send it to, you let's say they distribute it over to Amazon KDP, then it would be 70%. That means I get $7 back for selling it through there. So a lot of people are hung up on that whole deal of having to pay subscription model. But if you're actively promoting it through the different avenues that you make it available through PublishDrive, it might actually make more sense.
[00:11:36] Matty: I think it makes sense for people to wonder when there's one company who's using a different approach, and whenever there's a question about that, I always direct people to Writer Beware, which is a Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America-sponsored site. And that if you ever have a question, you can always drop a note to Writer Beware and say, Hey, have you gotten any reports on this?
[00:11:58] And I can pretty much guarantee you that they're going to give the good thumbs up to PublishDrive because PublishDrive is a very reputable company. But it's a good thing to remember because if you see that anomaly, it makes sense to research it, to make sure that you're not getting into something that is a little bit shady.
[00:12:13] Dale: Yeah. PublishDrive has got a great reputation. They did upset a few people by doing that sudden pivot to doing subscription model. But here's the good thing. If you're listening to this and you got an account back, let's say, three years ago with PublishDrive, they grandfathered in all of the old accounts. So if you had an account from back then, you already published through there, they're still going to honor the revenue share. I purposely went and switched to subscription-based because they weren't going to allow me to have print or audio book distribution without going over to the new one. So I was willing to go ahead and part ways and take a gamble on myself, get it to where I'm like, okay, let's take a gamble, let's see if this is going to pay off again. Jury's still out for me, but I'll definitely let everybody know in due time over on my YouTube channel.
[00:13:04] Matty: You had used the example of if PublishDrive is publishing to KDP and then obviously they have to take into account the royalty that KDP is paying. And when I was describing my model, which we agreed is one that many indy authors follow, I'm going direct to KDP for Amazon and then I'm going to Draft2Digital for everybody else with the one exception that we'll talk about, Google Play. Can you talk a little bit about why that's common, that almost everybody goes direct to KDP for Amazon, even if they're using an aggregator for other outlets?
[00:13:37] Dale: A primary reason: you get a little bit more control. When you're going to each one of these, this is going to be an issue with all aggregators, with the exception of one, with the exception of one, and we already talked about them and I'm going to put a pin into that just for right now. Going direct to a platform, you're going to actually have more flexibility in what you'd be able to do. So by going to Amazon KDP, I can put in my seven keywords, and have that done that way to where I can be more discovered on the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing platform or through amazon.com.
[00:14:08] However, I don't get that through the aggregators. They will allow me to have specific keywords, but the problem is relevant keywords on Amazon aren't the same relevancy over on Apple or Barnes and Noble or on Kobo. Keywords have different weight and different value based on the specific type of platform. So there's one specific reason.
[00:14:33] I would say the biggest main reason--I'm not sure if this is what you're thinking about, but I'm sure if you're thinking what I'm thinking--the reason that you want to go to KDP direct is you get Amazon advertising. Amazon advertising is the most dead simple and most cost effective way to run ads to your book. And unfortunately you don't get that if you're distributing to Amazon KDP through Draft2Digital, you don't get that through Smashwords. You do get that through PublishDrive. PublishDrive does have Amazon advertising built into their system, but they run it on your behalf. So you have to end up paying them and they take care of all of that stuff over there. I don't think they charge any more than what the ads are going to run, so they just run the ads on your behalf.
[00:15:22] Matty: Very interesting. Yeah, for me, the primary reason that something like Draft2Digital is appealing is because of the time savings. And the tradeoff does seem to be more limited promotional opportunities that direct to the retailer, direct to the platform authors might enjoy. What are some other considerations that can help people decide how to balance those two things, balancing the time versus the promotional benefits they might get.
[00:15:51] Dale: If somebody is, say for instance, new to the business and their revenue is small, then I think it would make sense to go to an aggregator. Now, small is going to be subjective. It's going to be completely up to you on what you think is a small amount of money. To me, if I'm going to have all of these different accounts open, then that means it's going to take me more time. If it's going to take me more time, then I'm just going to hire somebody to actually manage those assets on my behalf, rather than me doing that. And since I'm going to be hiring somebody out, that means that I need to at least have that discretionary expense to hire that person and bring them in to do that. With doing aggregators, you can handle it yourself and do it in one place. That way you're not taxing your time, just so you can be able to save a few bucks.
[00:16:48] Because let's face it, if you're new to publishing, then chances aren't very likely you're going to be getting dozens of sales of your eBooks over on Apple, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Overdrive, all these other ones. It's going to probably be pretty small at first. In fact, the vast majority of people, it is small. So rather than nickel and diming your time so you make an extra 20 cents per sale of your ebook, then that's why you want to go with aggregators.
[00:17:17] Because I want you to think about the time it's going to take for you to update a manuscript. And it will happen, by the way, folks--you're in the world of self-publishing, you will update your manuscript at some point. You're going to find something messed up, or you're going to want to add a chapter, or maybe you're going to do a call to action to subscribe to your email list. You're going to need to update that. And you're going to probably want to do that across the board on each one on those platforms.
[00:17:40] I'm going to tell you, even if you work fast, it'll take you at least 15 minutes. At least 15 minutes, that's working my pace. That means you have everything ready to go. You've got your keywords all dialed in. You've got your ad copy done. You've got your manuscript ready to go. And it's formatted--by the way, that takes extra time too--and then let's just say, you're on five of those platforms. You got 15 minutes times five. We're doing hour and 15 minutes now. Okay. Is that worth getting an extra 30 cents or maybe $2 per month? To me, I don't think it is.
[00:18:20] Matty: Yeah. And I think the vast majority of people would be taking way longer than that to do that same task.
[00:18:27] Dale: Yes. I'm a rare bird. I've been in this business for six years and I've published scores of publications. I'm experienced. I can work really fast. I know exactly how to get everything going. For a lot of people, they're not able to work 15 minutes. I've even heard some people, it takes upwards of about an hour for them to go ahead and upload to a specific platform because they aren't familiar with it and they have to take their time and make sure everything looks good, cross their T's, dot their I's, that type of thing. And it takes a lot longer.
[00:18:53] So just think about what is your time worth? Is your time really worth an extra $2 per month? And you spent, let's say four hours grinding it out, uploading and updating to each one of those platforms? I've seen some people that completely just poo-poo all over the aggregate model. Oh, keep all of your earnings. Go ahead and upload it. Well, that's all well and good for you, but guess what I like to do? I like to actually live my life. And if that means I gotta sacrifice some earnings, it's okay.
[00:19:21] There does get to a point, though, when you go to each of the aggregate distributors, track your sales, see where they're coming from. And if you find that you're starting to trickle in a substantial amount of money, let's say you're pulling in a thousand dollars from Amazon, or you're pulling a thousand dollars from Apple. Maybe I de-select Apple and I can go directly to there. Okay, I'm game. But if you're not making at least four figures or more through each one of these avenues, then do the aggregator. It just saves you the time and the heartache.
[00:19:54] Matty: Another thing that is just supporting what you're saying about using your time effectively, is that the platforms that I use, with one exception, are very user friendly. So KDP, very user friendly, very easy to navigate around in. Draft2Digital, super easy to use. The exception being Google Play, though. Because for a while, Draft2Digital did distribute to Google Play and then they stopped, as I understand because Google Play's requirements of them as an aggregator were becoming onerous. So I loaded my books directly to Google Play, and in general, the user interface was pretty good. In some cases it was almost too good because you can put in so many different currency denominations to sell your book in that it gets a little overwhelming, but the reporting is horrible. So if someone's trying to make the decision about whether it's even worth it to go to Google Play or to any other platform, do you have any advice on that front?
[00:20:55] Dale: It's all going to come down to, what's your time worth, honestly. Google Plays great. Google Play Books is awesome. I'll go ahead and address it, because I have no dog in the fight on this one and Google Play, I don't think is going to beat me up for saying this, but Google Play actually Draft2Digital I think distributed twice to them already. First time around was probably before I had done it, and something had gone south. Google Play Books was kind of messing around and so that was gone.
[00:21:21] And then more recently they came in for a cup of coffee. The problem is, and what you referred to as an onerous relationship, the issue was Google Play Books was requiring authors to directly come to their platform. And they would allow aggregates to come work as managers, but you had to jump through all these different hoops. And at the end of the day, I think Draft2Digital was like, Nah, no, bro. I'm out. They're like, Peace signs, deuces, I'm out, we're good.
[00:21:48] At the end of the day, when you start to look at some of these platforms, figure out, doesn't make sense. For Google Play, I think they have distribution out to over 70 different avenues. Amazon goes out to far less than what Google Play Books does. Google Play Books reaches out to lots of areas that you wouldn't see Amazon reaching out to, which is pretty exceptional.
[00:22:12] And the other thing is Google's one of the world's largest search engines. And when you upload your book to Google Play Books, you're going to have an option to share 10% of your book or more as a sample. Here's the cool thing. And I'm not sure if you knew this, Matty, that with that 10%, they actually use it for indexing your book. Which means it makes your book more discoverable through the Google search engine. So let's just say, for instance, you put out, I don't know, underwater doily knitting for dolphins and someone types that up, your book will probably come up because you're one of very few people that talks about underwater doily knitting for dolphins, and it'll get some of those keywords and serve people that specific book. So that's one of the big advantages to go in Google Play Books.
[00:23:05] But when you're looking at a platform, I want you to think to yourself, what is your end goal? What is your end goal? And typically it breaks down into two areas. Do you want to make more money, or do you want to reach more readers? Make more money, reach more readers. If you want to reach more readers, you're going to probably take a little bit of a sacrifice in your pay by using an aggregator, but at least you're able to get out there and you're optimizing your movement.
[00:23:34] For lack of better words, it's almost like a growth hack, if you will. It's a way that you're able to hack your scaling of your business without having to go out and nickel and dime your time. So look at the specific model, and does it make sense. So for Google Play Books, if you're like, Hey, I want to reach out to as many readers as humanly possible, that might make sense for you. And look at the pay. Does it make sense? Are you going to be paid your worth? Is this going to represent you as an author as you wish to be represented and distributed to the readers that you wish to reach?
[00:24:11] Matty: And I think that if I'm understanding you correctly, there's a nuance about readers versus money, which is, do you want to make more money per book? Because the very fact that you're potentially reaching more people through an aggregator, it means that you might make that up because you're getting in front of more people, you're reaching more readers, so it makes up for the fact that Draft2Digital is keeping whatever percentage they're keeping or PublishDrive is charging you a monthly fee to do that.
[00:24:39] And the other thing I think is interesting is that whenever I'm talking about Draft2Digital with anyone, I always mentioned as an example, if you want to get on Barnes and Noble and Apple Books and I list a couple of big ones, but there are a ton of platforms. I'm just looking at my Draft2Digital dashboard for my first book, The Sense of Death, and it's going to Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple Books, Scribd, Tolino, which I believe is an Italian platform, 24 symbols. I've never even been on some of these platforms. Overdrive, as we mentioned, also in the library space, it sends it to Bibliotheca and Hoopla, Baker and Taylor is another platform it goes to. Vivlio, which I think is a French platform.
[00:25:20] I am never going to go to all those direct. And when I get my monthly statement from Draft2Digital, sometimes some of those are zero and sometimes it's a tiny little amount of money, but it's a tiny amount of money I wouldn't have gotten it all if I wasn't on an aggregator platform.
[00:25:36] Dale: Yeah. You mentioned two of them, by the way, that we went right past. We did talk about Overdrive for library, distribution. Bibliotheca and Hoopla and other great one. In fact, I actually have the Hoopla app on my phone. That's how I check out some of my books that I do, audio books and eBooks you can get through, and Hoopla actually has other things like movies and things like that you can actually check out from your local library. Hoopla was a very big acquisition for Draft2Digital. When they got that, I was like, Yeah! I was pumped cause I was like, Oh my gosh, something to note that some of these platforms are not available to go directly to.
[00:26:09] It's because of some of these relationships that some of the aggregate publishers have done, they've done all the work for you. They act like your agent ahead of time. And they were able to acquire these different areas that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do. So for instance, you're mentioning an Italian publisher, or retailer. If you don't know how to speak, Italian chances are very likely you're probably not going to be able to set up a stinkin' account. It's going to be next to impossible. So that's another big benefit of using an aggregate publisher is they're getting into areas you wouldn't otherwise be able to get to.
[00:26:43] Matty: And I think in some cases, although I imagine this is the exception, that there are even promotional opportunities that the aggregator gets that the people who are going direct don't get. So I know, for example, that I have seen offerings of submitting your book for consideration for a sale on Apple, and you can only submit for that promotion through Draft2Digital, not if you're direct. And I'm sure that there are obviously tradeoffs there, but it's not like you're cutting yourself off from every promotional opportunity. It's just that it's a different pool and it's probably a smaller pool, but those promotional opportunities are still there.
[00:27:19] Dale: Yeah, I've noticed that for Draft2Digital. I've noticed that also for a PublishDrive. PublishDrive also curates quite a bit of different specific promotional opportunities you wouldn't another otherwise get.
[00:27:30] Matty: One of the things that we had talked about earlier was how do you make that decision? Maybe you've been using an aggregator and you wanted to start going direct to a platform. And this is one that I struggled with for months over some of my books, because I really got intrigued with Kobo and I had interviewed Tara Cremin from Kobo on the podcast and she had been talking about some of the promotional opportunities they offer. And I was like, yeah, I want to be part of that. And I was talking to our buddy Mark, who was the person who established Kobo Writing Life, which is the Kobo author platform--
[00:28:04] Dale: Isn't that a trip? And he's so humble about it too.
[00:28:07] Matty: Yeah, I know! You read us his resume and you're like, holy cow.
[00:28:12] So I had been talking to him about moving my books, taking them down from Draft2Digital and going direct to Kobo, and one of the things he pointed out is that if you do that, you lose any reviews that you've gotten on the retail platform when it was fed by the aggregator. So if I have 10 reviews for The Sense of Death on Kobo now, and then I go direct to Kobo, I lose those. Is that generally true across the board for retailers, that you lose that connection to the original version of the book?
[00:28:43] Dale: Generally speaking, yeah. There are a few exceptions to the rule. Essentially what ends up happening is you're feeding through the aggregator. Let's say you're listening to this and you go, I'm making a thousand dollars per month, I'll just do it through Apple. That'll make sense. I'm just going to go directly Apple. Wait, whoa, hold on. Because you are going to remove that distribution from the aggregator and go direct, the issue is you're spinning this plate and you're going to go ahead and spin a new plate.
[00:29:11] The problem is that old plate is going to fall because you're going to end up, of course, delisting that original one. Here's the problem is, a lot of search engine algorithms function on what's called relevancy. And part of that relevancy is influenced by sales, of course, that's the biggest metric, through things like reviews, engagement activity on those specific product pages. So the issue is that you take a product that was doing really good on a specific platform, let's say a thousand dollars per month, as just a bare metric there. That metric alone, let's say, okay, I'm going to go ahead and do it myself, I'm going to upload directly to Apple. Here's the problem is you're starting to hedge the bets on yourself. You're going, okay, I'm going to delist this one that has built a lot of relevancy, has quite a few reviews, people know where this product's at, but I'm going to take that same content and create a new listing for myself.
[00:30:10] You sure have removed the middleman out from everything, but now you have the issue of building relevance for that new product listing. So there's a good likelihood that if you're a relatively new author and you delist a relevant product and post a new product, whether the content is the same or not, it's still a new product, you're going to have to really work to promote this thing, get more sales, get reviews on it again, and build more relevancy on it so that way, that specific platform will go ahead and serve it out. So a good example would be Amazon has something called Also Boughts or Customers also Viewed, things like that.
[00:30:53] Matty: Is it true that you would need a new ISBN if you delisted from the aggregator and went direct?
[00:31:02] Dale: It is true if you were using the free ISBN that you would normally get through a platform, that's theirs. So here's an analogy I like to give to people because they always just kind of like, Why can't I use this free assigned ISBN other places. Matty, I'm going to invite you to come on over. You're going to make your lunch over here at my place. No problem. I've got some pots and pans. All right. You can use my pots and pans. Or you can bring your own and use your own pots and pans. The nice thing is when you use your pots and pans, you can take it wherever you want to go. Use in whatever kitchen you want to.
[00:31:37] You come into my house though, you use my pots and pans, you start walking out the door with my pots and pans, I'm going to take umbrage to it. Obviously, I'm going to be like, what are you doing? That's my pot and pan. You've got to leave that here. You can't do that. So the same thing goes for the free assigned ISBNs. They actually own those ISBNs there. You can't take that international standard book number to another place.
[00:32:01] Now here's the exception. If you own the ISBN, yes, you can take it with you. The biggest issue you're going to run into, though, is you've already listed it through this particular platform as an aggregate, if you were using your own ISBN. If you go over and try to list again, you're going to probably run into a little bit of friction with that particular platform, because they're going to go, Whoa, that was already listed over here. What are you doing here with this? Amazon's especially one of the ones that will definitely push back. They're going to go, That ISBN was already used. Don't bring that garbage over here. So you're going to possibly have to consider getting a new ISBN.
[00:32:42] And I would recommend, too, so it helps out the percentage, the small percentage of the audience that will notice that there was a listing that had a bunch of reviews at one point, and it was a specific price point and then it changes another day and there's no reviews on it and such, it might be a good idea is if you do pull it down from an aggregate distributor, easy for me to say, then you may want to list it as a second edition and come in with your own ISBN. It's what I would recommend. There might be some other experts out there that will say, No, it's your ISBNs you take it down from the aggregator, just go ahead and list it on the other one, use that one. Again, you're going to probably get met with friction and if you buy ISBNs in bulk, you can get them as cheap as $1.25, I think, or $1.50 per ISBN going through Bowker, and that's I think if you buy a thousand at a time. But nonetheless, you get the idea. I would just recommend buy the ISBN, get your own, start with something new listed as a second edition.
[00:33:42] Matty: Yeah, I bought a group of ISBNs from Bowker and whatever grouping I picked, it was about $30 a piece, as opposed to the, I don't know, $150 <actually, $125 as of September 2020> bucks or whatever it is if you buy them individually.
[00:33:54] Dale: Yeah. So it gets expensive.
[00:33:56] Matty: If you're publishing one book and you think you might ever publish another one, just buy a bunch of them.
[00:34:01] Dale: For sure.
[00:34:02] Matty: The system is so dependent on ISBNs and I really had an experience of this myself until I had put a book onto the Draft2Digital print beta. This was a while ago, so it was pretty early in the print beta. And the launch dates started coming and I got uncomfortable, so I decided I was going to just go to KDP Print and IngramSpark and the book was never published through Draft2Digital. I had put it up and it had gone out to the printer, and then it was in their QA queue for a long time. So it had never been for sale on any of the platforms. Nonetheless, when I went to KDP and to IngramSpark to load it, they perceived it as being a book that already existed, and I ended up having to use another of my ISBNs just to get it going. So, yeah, the system is very connected because Draft2Digital or the printer, whoever was doing it, was already sending that information out, so the ISBN already existed in the other platform. I really like the idea of doing a second edition to get around that.
[00:35:06] Dale: Yeah, you just have way less friction, cause I'm sure you probably could have pushed back, Matty, but you're going to have to get people on the phone. You're going to have to explain it 50 times. By the time you've done, you just think to yourself, was that really worth, I don't know, you said $30 for an ISBN. Was that really worth me spending five hours just to keep that ISBN and save $30. Me, I don't waste that time.
[00:35:29] Matty: Yeah. I really love the theme of consider what your time is worth, not just what the dollars are you're sending out, because there's a definitely a value to your time that needs to be factored in as well.
[00:35:38] Dale: Yeah, I think of that in all regards, when it comes to any facet of my business. I always think to myself, how much is this truly costing me, is my time valued at that. And if I'm looking at, say for instance, a bad book order or something like that, and I'm like, ah, this is not quite what I want looking for. Is it really worth my time to go in and get a hold of Amazon and be like, Hey, can you refund me this? I'm like, I just sometimes I think about what is my time worth, is it going to be worth me sitting here complaining about $5? Some people are like, It's the general principle about things. I'm like, you go for it there because while you're getting your $5 back, I'm probably going to make $30 or $50 or $200 leveraging my time for more higher earning things.
[00:36:23] Matty: Yup. I always think I could spend an hour doing this or I could spend an hour working on a book. Working on a new book. I can spend an hour writing and many times the one hour writing proves to be more valuable in my assessment.
[00:36:37] I did want to ask you about Smashwords cause Smashwords is not a platform that I have any experience with. Can you talk a little bit about what's Smashwords is and how you use that?
[00:36:46] Dale: It's so convenient because just yesterday I recorded this on my podcast, shameless self plug. I've actually been on the Smashwords platform since roughly, I would say, 2015, 2016. I started in publishing in 2014, I think in 2015, 2016, I was like, okay, I want to see what the rest of the world looks like. And I looked at aggregate publishing. At that time I'd only vaguely heard of Draft2Digital. PublishDrive just wasn't even on my radar, I don't even know if they were even around then. Smashwords was the thing that came up instantly. A lot of people were recommending Smashwords.
[00:37:23] The thing that stuck out to me the most, and it didn't make sense to me at first. I'm thinking, I'm like, it is 85% royalty. Now I do know that, you don't even have to look this one up. I recall this because I just had my show note yesterday. 85% royalty. Oh my gosh, my eyes go like this. I'm like, what am I doing over on Amazon KDP? I need to be over here on Smashwords because they're giving me 85% regardless of what I'm charging for my book.
[00:37:50] So you go over on KDP. You're having to go $2.99 to $9.99 to get 70%. And if you're outside of that, you get paid 35%. Boo hiss. What if I want to go to like $19.99? Smashwords is going to reward you for that. But the problem is there's the fine print. Since they're an aggregate distributor, that means that if they're sending it off to say, for instance, Amazon, or they're sending it off to Apple, they're going to be doing the percentage that platform honors, and then they pull the 15% from that.
[00:38:21] I just remember, I was initially looking at this I'm like, this is insanity. Why isn't everybody over here? I didn't understand aggregate publishing at the time. But to their credit 85% is pretty freaking stellar. They're only taking 15% to do the distribution and they reach, oh gosh, tens of thousands of different distribution avenues, some of them very much in conflict with what Draft2Digital does. And I love you guys, by the way, D2D, please don't disown me. Anytime I do that, Kevin Tumlinson's like, Bro, what are you doing?
[00:38:58] Smashwords is fantastic. They have great distribution. I will tell everybody, they do reach Amazon, but there's an asterisk next to it. By the way, they only do eBooks. There's no print books like Draft2Digital has in beta, and they don't do audio books at all. They have a partnership with Findaway Voices, but technically you're just going to Findaway Voices in that specific instance. But in order to get Amazon, you actually have to prove yourself. You have to sell at least $2,000 for a particular title before you can be considered to be distributed to Amazon KDP by way of Smashwords. So, sorry, I had to add that one in there.
[00:39:32] Matty: Interesting. One of the surprising things I found about pricing is that for my short stories, I sell them for 99 cents as standalone eBooks, basically, and what I realized was that if I was selling them on Amazon -- and this isn't a direct versus aggregator issue, it's just Amazon versus other people -- I was getting dinged because it was only 99 cents, so I was getting the lower 35% royalty. If I was selling it through one of the other platforms via Draft2Digital, I was actually getting, I think, 65% because the other platforms weren't dinging me for the low price the way Amazon does. Does that make sense?
[00:40:13] Dale: Yeah, absolutely. You nailed it right on the head, actually. That is one of the nice benefits of going through an aggregator because they do have that developed relationship with those particular retailers and they have a percentage put in place, which you otherwise wouldn't be able to do on your own.
[00:40:29] Matty: And we have been giving a lot of love to Draft2Digital -- it's the one I know, because it's the one I use -- and Smashwords and PublishDrive. Are there any others that people should be looking at or do you consider those the big three that people should be considering if they want to use that aggregator approach?
[00:40:44] Dale: Selfishly those are the ones I always bring up. There's another aggregator out there. It's called BookBaby, works much in the same way that PublishDrive does, except you have a complete upfront payment. A lot of people will confuse it as being a vanity press. They're not. They're not. Essentially you have to hedge all your bets on yourself. It's almost a slight done-for-you style service and then they feed it out and you get a hundred percent of all profits that come in from each one of those different avenues. BookBaby, by the way, is very well known, very trusted. They actually even have the Alliance of Independent Authors stamp of approval as being a good partner, a good-standing partner. I have yet to use BookBaby.
[00:41:24] And then we can't forget about other aggregate publishers that also step outside of the sphere of eBooks and into the land of audio books. So you look at Findaway Voices, they're an aggregate a distributor. In fact, I am bullish on Findaway Voices right now because they have distribution to 43 audio book platforms, I slowed down just for emphasis on this one. Findaway Voices. Do not sleep on them. They are amazing. And they also have distribution to something that's called Chirp.
[00:41:55] You're not familiar with Chirp, it's the audio book avenue of BookBub and everybody and their mother knows about BookBub. If you don't know about BookBub, do me a favor, you're going to pause this podcast, you're going to go ahead and search up BookBub and you're going to find out why they are so freaking amazing, and just having Chirp right now in its early stages is an amazing opportunity. And the way that you get it? Findaway Voices. Findaway Voices is audio book.
[00:42:20] ListenUp, I'm still just studying these guys and gals. There's one little bit of a quirk and hang up I have with them. Their support is really slow, really slow. I communicated with them. They got back to me three months later. I hated to be that guy, but I had to flex where I'm like, Hey, I'm Dale from Self Publishing with Dale. I've got about 36,000 subscribers. I talked to people --
[00:42:44] Matty: -- you don't want to piss me off.
[00:42:47] Dale: I'm going to sit here and just throw around this like celebrity card. But I'm like, Hey, I would love to show what your platform is. And they're also a platform that has the stamp of approval from the Alliance of Independent Authors. So it was thrown off when they were so slow on things. But ListenUp is another avenue for audio books. There is a new dog to the game called Audiobooks Unleashed. Audiobooks Unleashed used to just be a platform where you would find listeners to get your promo codes and there would just be an exchange to where you would get listed on Audiobooks Unleashed and in exchange they would go ahead and share it to the readers, they get the promo codes and you get reviews and it's all legit. 100% legit. They just now released aggregate distribution and they have tons of platforms. I don't know, this is not my stamp of approval on them, I have not used them yet, I don't know what the whole deal is on them. But Audiobooks Unleashed is in the game now.
[00:43:40] Another aggregator is called Author's Republic. Now, before you go jump into Author's Republic, sorry, I'm going to have to throw shade on them just a little bit. They have distribution to two avenues plus Findaway Voices. The two avenues, I don't even know those audio books distribution, but I was willing to go ahead and give it a shot. The issue is if you want to distribute through Author's Republic, it's an all or nothing thing. You either go all in on Author's Republic, they distribute over to Findaway Voices and those two additional avenues, and you can't use Findaway Voices, or use Findaway Voices and don't use Author's Republic.
[00:44:18] I told them boo hiss. I'm like, that doesn't make sense. Can I just take the two distribution avenues? And then they're like, sorry, we don't do that. I'm like, okay, so I have to pay a middleman that's going to pay another middleman to get me distribution. I'm like, why don't I just go over to Findaway Voices? And I'm just going to miss out on two platforms. So Author's Republic, a lot of people swear by them. But they're the same people that aren't using Findaway Voices directly.
[00:44:43] Matty: I think that it's also a great thought to wrap up on is that you can pursue more and more platforms in hopes of more and more readers. But at some point, if you're catering to an American audience and your book is on Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble, how big a pool do you need to be playing in? And it is definitely one of those things that I think people can sink almost endless time into pursuing, what are those two obscure audio book platforms that they might be able to get into? Or you can just say, okay, I can already reach a billion people. That's enough.
[00:45:22] Dale: Yeah, you gotta know when enough is enough and start to, again, a time versus money type situation. Does it make sense for you to go to these obscure distribution avenues? So there's going to probably be some people that look at PublishDrive and they go, Ooh, I don't know, subscribe, pay for that. Then you got to do apples to apples to oranges. You need to look at say PublishDrive. What is it that they're offering that has a little bit of a crossover with what Smashwords and Draft2Digital do? What is it that they have that the other platforms don't have and are those platforms truly going to be the avenues you want. To let you know that I've used PublishDrive and they have some different distribution out to various Chinese markets, which is pretty amazing.
[00:46:03] I was like, yeah, I get to make it in China? Count me in. Never landed the sale there. And I had dozens of books put up there. None of them. Typically it was the usual suspects. You would get it from Google Play Books. That one was like pulling me in a lot. I was like, oh, Google Play Books, fantastic. And then you get the little smaller platforms here and there that would bring it in. But I discovered some these more obscure platforms, even ones I'd never heard of, -I just wasn't getting that much from it. So you've got to think to yourself, okay, compared each of these platforms, which one makes the most sense to you financially and move wise that way you're not wasting your time and movement.
[00:46:40] There is one more platform, and I would actually get beat up if I didn't say anything. Lulu, why did I forget? Lulu actually happens to be the sponsor of my channel this month. They'd probably go ahead and hang me out to dry on this one. Lulus definitely another one. They more recently went through a major overhaul and facelift. and they have really steered their ship on the right course most recently and just are amazing. They have excellent print quality and they also have ebook distribution. Sorry, Lulu, if you're listening to this, I love you guys. It's not that I purposely forgot about you. It's just, we got in the heat of the moment, Matty?
[00:47:13] Matty: Yes, exactly. And I will put links to all these different platforms so people can, check them out. And of course we want them also to check out your YouTube channel among other things. So tell us where people can go now that they're intrigued, and they want to find out more about Dale Roberts.
[00:47:29] Dale: You can find me actually, at selfpublishingwithdale.com and it'll feed out to everywhere, between YouTube to Facebook, to Instagram, to the podcast, everything in between. So that's selfpublishingwithdale, think like Chippendale.
[00:47:41] Matty: And with that visual we'll wrap up. Thank you very much, Dale. This was great.
[00:47:46] Dale: Thank you.
Links
Dale's links:
Website – http://selfpublishingwithdale.com
Twitter – https://twitter.com/selfpubwithdale
Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/selfpubwithdale
Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/selfpubwithdale/
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ALLi Self-publishing Advice Blog Roundup - Visit their blog at https://selfpublishingadvice.org/alli-blog/
Draft2Digital (Matty is an affiliate of D2D)
Mark Lefebvre's An Authors Guide to Working with Libraries and Bookstores
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