Episode 087 - Looking Back and Forward at Indy Publishing with Dan Wood
July 6, 2021
Dan Wood of Draft2Digital takes a look back at his eight years at Draft2Digital and, more importantly, looks ahead to share how indy authors can apply that perspective going forward. We discuss how social media has changed over that time, what technical and retail platforms indy authors can take advantage of today that were not available in 2013, and how the writing and publishing worlds’ perspectives on indy publishing has transformed over that period.
Dan Wood is the Vice President of Operations at Draft2Digital, where he has spent the last 8 years helping authors publish their books to stores, libraries and subscription services worldwide. During this time he has had the privilege to present at conferences in 7 countries and to speak with thousands of authors at various stages in their careers. Dan is the Co-Host of the Self Publishing Insiders Podcast and Co-Host of Authors Pubhouse, a (mostly) weekly chat Thursdays on Clubhouse with industry professionals and authors.
Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon or through Buy Me a Coffee!
Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast, today my guest is Dan Wood. Hey Dan, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Dan: I'm doing well. Hello everyone.
[00:00:09] Matty: Just to give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Dan Wood is the Vice President of Operations at Draft2Digital, where he spent the last eight years helping authors publish their books to stores, libraries, and subscription services worldwide.
[00:00:21] During this time, he has had the privilege to present at conferences in seven countries and to speak with thousands of authors at various stages in their career. Dan is the co-host of the Self-Publishing Insiders Podcast and cohost of Authors Pubhouse, a mostly weekly chat on Thursdays on Clubhouse with industry professionals and authors.
[00:00:41] And I invited Dan onto the podcast to talk about looking backward and forward. So I was intrigued with Dan's tenure at Draft2Digital. And what we wanted to do is use that looking back as a way to look forward as well. So what has changed in the publishing world, especially the indy publishing world, since Dan joined Draft2Digital in 2013, and then how can we use those observations and lessons currently and looking forward in our indy author careers.
[00:01:13] So before we dive into that, I wanted to just find out from you, Dan, what led you to Draft2Digital to begin with?
[00:01:22] Dan: It was interesting. I've always been a huge reader and I love books, but I didn't really ever think of publishing as an industry I would work in. I didn't really think about being a writer when I was younger.
[00:01:33] Now I hang out with the authors all the time, so I thought maybe I should try this. But I had a friend who was wanted to be an author most of his life. Several of us went to college together and back when indy publishing really started taking off and people like Joe Konrath were starting to blog about it. He got interested in that. He had been going through the whole trying to get an agent, sending his book off to publishers to see if they would be interested for eight or nine years at that point. So he started indy publishing, went through some of the services that were around back then. Like in 2010, 2011, like KDP, it was very hard at that point to convert your book from a Word document into the different files you needed, like the mobi and EPUB files. And so he had programmer friends that he talked in to helping him make a tool to make that process easy for him. And that became Draft2Digital.
[00:02:26] Flash forward a year or two, the three of them started things off and then brought me in towards the end of 2013. And I came in as the Director of Operations, was really working a lot with the different vendors to try to get our books up, to try to find new places we could distribute to. And yeah, and that's how I ended up at Draft2Digital.
[00:02:46] Since being there I've been in several different roles. We figured out early on that we need to do go to conferences to really get the word out about us and help people know who were and trust us. And I was the least introverted of a whole bunch of introverts. And so I was the one that went. And that eventually became my full-time job for several years. I just went to conferences and spent, I think, the last two or three years before the lockdown, I was traveling more than half the time going to different conferences around the U S and around the world. So it's been really fun. My job role has now changed I'm back in the office a little bit more and managing people, but I'm looking forward to go to a few conferences every year still. ...
[00:00:06] Dan: I'm doing well. Hello everyone.
[00:00:09] Matty: Just to give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Dan Wood is the Vice President of Operations at Draft2Digital, where he spent the last eight years helping authors publish their books to stores, libraries, and subscription services worldwide.
[00:00:21] During this time, he has had the privilege to present at conferences in seven countries and to speak with thousands of authors at various stages in their career. Dan is the co-host of the Self-Publishing Insiders Podcast and cohost of Authors Pubhouse, a mostly weekly chat on Thursdays on Clubhouse with industry professionals and authors.
[00:00:41] And I invited Dan onto the podcast to talk about looking backward and forward. So I was intrigued with Dan's tenure at Draft2Digital. And what we wanted to do is use that looking back as a way to look forward as well. So what has changed in the publishing world, especially the indy publishing world, since Dan joined Draft2Digital in 2013, and then how can we use those observations and lessons currently and looking forward in our indy author careers.
[00:01:13] So before we dive into that, I wanted to just find out from you, Dan, what led you to Draft2Digital to begin with?
[00:01:22] Dan: It was interesting. I've always been a huge reader and I love books, but I didn't really ever think of publishing as an industry I would work in. I didn't really think about being a writer when I was younger.
[00:01:33] Now I hang out with the authors all the time, so I thought maybe I should try this. But I had a friend who was wanted to be an author most of his life. Several of us went to college together and back when indy publishing really started taking off and people like Joe Konrath were starting to blog about it. He got interested in that. He had been going through the whole trying to get an agent, sending his book off to publishers to see if they would be interested for eight or nine years at that point. So he started indy publishing, went through some of the services that were around back then. Like in 2010, 2011, like KDP, it was very hard at that point to convert your book from a Word document into the different files you needed, like the mobi and EPUB files. And so he had programmer friends that he talked in to helping him make a tool to make that process easy for him. And that became Draft2Digital.
[00:02:26] Flash forward a year or two, the three of them started things off and then brought me in towards the end of 2013. And I came in as the Director of Operations, was really working a lot with the different vendors to try to get our books up, to try to find new places we could distribute to. And yeah, and that's how I ended up at Draft2Digital.
[00:02:46] Since being there I've been in several different roles. We figured out early on that we need to do go to conferences to really get the word out about us and help people know who were and trust us. And I was the least introverted of a whole bunch of introverts. And so I was the one that went. And that eventually became my full-time job for several years. I just went to conferences and spent, I think, the last two or three years before the lockdown, I was traveling more than half the time going to different conferences around the U S and around the world. So it's been really fun. My job role has now changed I'm back in the office a little bit more and managing people, but I'm looking forward to go to a few conferences every year still. ...
click here to read more
[00:03:25] Matty: Not to go all the way back to 2013, but in more recent history, would you say that the experience that Draft2Digital went through to deal with COVID in 2020, are there parts of that you're just glad are over, parts that you're carrying forward, especially with regard to conferences and so on? How has that influenced Draft2Digital's business model?
[00:03:48] Dan: We learned nearly all of our marketing strategy revolved around conferences. We got very good at doing conferences and meeting people and knowing people. We were lucky to be able to hire Mark Lefebvre about a year after he left Kobo. He brought a huge number of connections to different people and several conferences he was already doing as an independent consultant. So we were really good at advertising by way of conference.
[00:04:14] We had to learn how to actually market in this last year without conferences happening. And we started a lot of different projects. We started doing live chats on YouTube and Facebook. Just between me Mark and Kevin, sometimes one of us would just interview an author or one of our industry professional friends. So we've gotten really good at that. And that kind of led me into doing some stuff with Clubhouse, which is the new thing getting everyone's attention, and that's been a lot of fun. We've been working on improving stuff like our blog and SEO and all those kinds of dorky things you can do as a business to try to get the word out about you better.
[00:04:51] And so that side of things is probably the thing that I noticed changed the most and I was a big part of because we have about half of our staff are remote, the transition to working from home was very easy for us. I was supposed to go to London Book Fair and Mark Dawson was having a conference there at the same time and London Book Fair ended up canceling, but Mark's conference went ahead and went on. So I was in London at the end of February. And by the time I flew home, we decided to work from home basically until scientists gave us the clearing. And we did that for a year and a half and started back just about two weeks ago, we went back into the office for the people that are in Oklahoma City.
[00:05:32] And that's been an adjustment because you get used to working from home, but it's been really nice seeing people's faces. And I feel like we're a little bit more effective, like when we can meet one-on-one. We learned a lot about how to communicate better on like Slack is what we use to coordinate a lot of stuff. We've gotten much better about planning, I would say. But it's hard to beat one-on-one, those moments where you just get to go talk to someone in their office when you've got a question about something.
[00:05:59] Matty: The Mark Dawson conference is an interesting example because of the things that were going on during COVID, because they were talking about it on their podcast, he and James Blatch, and I was listening to the podcast late, so it was maybe like at least several weeks if not a month after they were speculating about, oh, should we do the conference? Should we not do the conference? And I was like, don't do the conference! At this point, it was like several weeks after the conference had already taken place.
[00:06:28] And I think it's an interesting lesson that you can't judge what other authors or even yourself does at a period of time outside the context of that environment. You know, it was second guessing it two weeks later, three weeks later was totally different than having to make that decision in the moment. I think an important lesson as people look back and their own careers.
[00:06:50] Dan: And so many of the local governments and the different governments at the federal levels didn't declare an emergency until very late. And so one of the reasons I ended up going, like we went back and forth on if that made sense, but we couldn't get anything refunded. The plane ticket was non-refundable, the hotel stuff. And I also felt bad cause they had several speakers pull out. And it was like, we'll take a risk. And then when I get back, I can just self-quarantine myself for a while. That didn't end up needing to happen since we just all went to working from home. It went from being, this is bad, we could be cautious, to like suddenly I think it's when that NBA player got sick, that everyone really took it seriously, at least within the U S.
[00:07:30] Matty: Yep. There was another mention you had made that I think is an interesting looking back / looking forward thing, and that's Clubhouse. Can you just describe what Clubhouse is for people who aren't familiar with it.
[00:07:41] Dan: It's so hard to describe until you experience it, but it's like you and I doing this podcast, but with an audience that we could easily pull in. It's audio only, and then so people can raise their hand from the audience, and you can pull them up and ask them if they want to ask a question or make a comment about the panelists. So it's interesting, I think podcasts have been one of the major tools that authors have used to learn about the industry. Like it's a very important part at least of the indy author community. It seems like an evolution of that.
[00:08:14] Except it's also because many of us have been stuck at home, I think we're just a little bit weary of Zoom and video and they've done studies where part of what stresses us out about Zoom is you like seeing yourself all the time, and people are seeing it all the time. With audio, I'm in like a raggedy old t-shirt and shorts and just can be talking to anybody. So I've really enjoyed it.
[00:08:37] Me and Ricardo Fayet, who works for Reedsy, we've been conference friends forever. We kind of took as an opportunity to have some of those conversations we normally would have had in either workshops or panels at the different conferences. And so we've been inviting people like Carlyn <Robertson> from BookBub was one of our guests last week. This week we talked to Jamie Albright who is a fantastic person and author, has her own podcast. And so just taking those moments to just reconnect. It's been really interesting. We've had anywhere between 40 and 60 people show up and stay for the live session, which is like way more like larger numbers of people in person than some of the stuff we've done live on YouTube and Facebook.
[00:09:23] The downside of Clubhouse is it's really not easy to record that content for the future. And so all the time people are like, oh, I had to miss this one. Did you record it? I like, sorry. It's very difficult. It's like a technical challenge because they haven't built in recording into the software. And then their terms of service limits you to where you need to get people's permission to record them. And when you take questions from the audience that becomes very difficult.
[00:09:49] Matty: They must have made the decision that they intentionally didn't want to have recording because I'm speculating that they were looking for a different kind of interaction and thought perhaps participation would be higher if people knew they weren't being recorded. Is that your understanding as well?
[00:10:06] Dan: I think they've really capitalized on that whole fear of missing out. I think them not releasing the app to everyone, the way in which they have it selective, you had to get an invite at first and it was only on Apple at first, the way Facebook did, that makes me feel old, like 15 years ago. Again, it was just very hard to get an invitation, so suddenly it was exclusive, and everyone wanted in. I think that's part of it. I would guess they'll eventually build something, some functionality in to record things, but at least to get things started, I think that played into that a lot.
[00:10:39] I will say there are conferences that are recorded and there are conferences where they purposely don't record. It does give people within the industry an ability to be more candid, that there are things that I can't say, like there are things I can't go into detail about all the time if I know I'm being recorded or it's going to be broadcast to the internet, whereas if it's just in a non-recorded session, I can be speak a little bit more freely,
[00:11:05] Matty: Do you see individual authors on Clubhouse using Clubhouse to promote their books?
[00:11:13] Dan: I've seen people trying. As far as I can tell, that's not working great. Maybe for some specific non-fiction niches it's working, but I've seen people try and figure out how to do like a book launch. I feel like right now because the way in which you find content there is so based on who you're connected to and little niche interests, I just don't think it works yet. Maybe once you can better connect to let's say readers that love historical romance that might be possible, but at least right now, it seems like it's more of a connect to your author tribe scenario rather than connecting to readers.
[00:11:51] Matty: And probably deepening the connection with people you may already be connected with at a more superficial level, but this gives you a chance to dive deeper on it. I had I think it was a podcast guest who had gotten in touch with me and said that she would invite me to Clubhouse if I was interested. And I'm like, I appreciate the offer, but learning a new platform, it's just not high on my list.
[00:12:10] So taking off your personal hat and putting on the Draft2Digital hat, when Draft2Digital is assessing new social media platforms to pursue, are there criteria that you've applied in the past that authors should keep in mind if they're seeing new things come down the path, TikTok, I wonder if I should be on there any lessons that we can learn from that?
[00:12:30] Dan: I've always, especially because I didn't come into the industry with any real knowledge or preconceived notion of it, I've always spent a lot of time with authors where authors are, so seeking out where they're going. And so being in Facebook groups now, back in the day, it was places like Writers Cafe on KB Forums, I think was the name of it, there were different places where there were pockets of authors talking a lot about the industry. And so I've always tried to be in those places and participate. Not be salesy or anything because I see people come in and do that and authors don't want that. They want you to be interacting with them, talking about the stuff they're talking about.
[00:13:13] I think for authors, that same thing applies. Figure out where your reader tribe is going to be and be there. Interact. Where I get a lot of my book recommendations is from Reddit. There was like subreddits for different genres like fantasy. I think the fantasy one's probably the best example. There are a lot of indy and traditional authors there that participate. And they're not just there, hey, at my books on sale. They're talking about what influenced them, they're talking about their favorite books. And then when they do have a sale, sometimes I'll mention it and those readers respond and just being a part of the community, knowing what they want.
[00:13:49] And I think romance authors noticed better than anyone, just making sure you're hitting all the tropes of what the community expects. Because if you feel like you want to violate a trope, sometimes that works, but you have to really, really understand the genre before you start breaking the rules.
[00:14:06] Matty: Yeah. I think that when people are considering branching into new social media platforms, they do need to consider the learning curve of that. You can't just sign up for an account and then go start reposting what you're used to posting on Twitter or whatever on the new account. And that learning curve can really be a time sink. And so I'm always a big believer in let other people blaze the trail. I'm not really a bleeding edge kind of person. Let other people blaze the trail. And then if they're their results in their business model, feel compatible with what I'm looking for, then it's something that I might dip my toe in as well.
[00:14:41] Dan: Definitely. Like one of my pet peeves is when people use the social media scheduling software, but they don't change up. Like the way graphics are supposed to look on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram are all different dimensions. And there's different things like you use some hashtags on Twitter, you use more hashtags on Instagram, but using hashtags on Facebook is nearly worthless.
[00:15:06] I hate it when it's obvious they just made one post and try to make it fit every platform. I think it's better just to concentrate on one that you actually care about and will be interacting with than to try to hit everything all at once.
[00:15:20] Matty: So I'm going to pull way back. I took us down a very specific path there with COVID and social media and all that.
[00:15:26] But I'm curious if you look back at 2013, what did you see in terms of indy versus traditional that you feel has changed over time or not changed over time as the case may be?
[00:15:37] Dan: Yeah, it's only been like eight years, but it feels like everything has changed. It's a very different world. I feel like it's been decades worth of change in a very short period of time.
[00:15:48] When I came on, they're still very much nearly every author conference was full of authors trying to pitch themselves the entire time to agents, and that is gone. Conferences now, there's maybe a few agents at a couple of conferences, but that's very, very rare. A lot of the traditional publishers have pulled out as sponsors. It used to be I'd go to some of the conferences and official publishers will be everywhere and spending lots of money. And they're not doing that anymore. There used to be that stigma against indy authors and a lot of agents saying that if you self-publish, you're never going to get a traditional contract.
[00:16:27] And as the last five or six years have played out, you can tell like nearly everyone who's getting traditional contracts now started as an indy and proved their audience and had already built a platform. Or they're someone like a celebrity that had a platform from some other area.
[00:16:44] So things just changed very much more positive for indies. It's been a real uphill battle of getting indy books into libraries, but over the years we've managed at Draft2Digital to keep chipping away at that. I think Mark Coker did a lot of the early work and got people into places like Overdrive. I was really happy when we finally also got in to Overdrive and got out of that little indy ghetto that they had people in for a long time. We've continued to look at some of the different international places. And so we just added Borrow Box, which is a library of vendor like Overdrive for Australia and New Zealand as well as a couple of other places in the world.
[00:17:22] We now go to Hoopla, I think we were the first to get indy authors into Hoopla. Baker and Taylor, Bibliotheca, which is cloud library. So those are things that 2013 libraries were like, ah, we don't know about this. And now they are excited and happy to work with indy authors. Especially because indy prices for library books are so much cheaper than the crazy stuff the traditional publishing has started charging the library systems for and limiting the number of times I can check a book out before they have to rebuy it. So that's all changed. We've really matured as an industry.
[00:17:57] Sorry. I know 2013, I used to see all kinds of covers that were obviously done by themselves, right? Yeah. And now would say the majority of people know you have to either have some actual experience with graphic design or pay someone. And there's a lot more professionals those out there than they used to be. A lot of traditional people left the traditional system, like editors and graphic designers, because they're being paid very low. A lot of people have gone on to work with places like Reedsy that connect authors to professional services. And there's all kinds of great resources out there now. I still know people that are using Fiverr and finding professionals that actually are great for them to work with. And so it's been good to see all of that mature and grow.
[00:18:45] There's been a lot of consolidation. A lot of companies come and go, a lot of companies get bought out. There were a lot of new companies in publishing around 2012 to 2014. They were pouring money into it. And now venture funds are not because publishing companies probably aren't going to be unicorns. They're not going to be billion-dollar companies. But they can be multimillion dollar companies, but for the venture capitalists, they want bigger than that.
[00:19:11] Matty: It also seems like the more consolidation there is, the more of those people are leaving the traditional publishing market, the book cover designers and the editors and so on, are available now more easily to indy authors through organizations like Reedsy.
[00:19:25] Dan: Yeah, all of them being bought out by the others and like the Big Five becoming the Big Four, Big Three, however you want to look at it, it means author advances are going down and so there's less and less reason to consider going into traditional publishers. Because a lot of the things that made the system sort of viable are just going down. And I think a lot of times people think that you're guaranteed to have a really impressive marketing plan from the traditional publishers. But a lot of times they're just throwing things out and seeing what sticks and then funneling money into that one thing. And so I think it's a better time than ever for people to consider just trying the indy world. And I think most people that try it get hooked.
[00:20:10] Matty: Yeah, I will point people to the episode with Lisa Regan who has had experience both in the indy and traditional worlds in an Episode 16, way back in Episode 16, I talked with her about Drawing Back the Publishing Curtain with Lisa Regan. And I found that very informative because just as you're saying, a lot of the things that I think people sometimes think publishers will take care of for them, like marketing, like promotion or still on the author. So I would point people to that.
[00:20:39] And I also wanted to comment that I'm a big proponent of library opportunities and I just pulled up my Draft2Digital sales platform here, and so far this year, so we're recording this in June of 2021, and so far this year I've made $350 from Overdrive. So I'm reaping the benefits of Draft2Digital's great outreach into the library arena.
[00:21:05] How about when you think about media? So I think at the time, in 2013, if you look across media like print, ebook, and then you look now in terms of what's available, what changes have you seen there and what lessons could authors learn from what you've seen?
[00:21:25] Dan: Ebooks are really what gave us the opportunity and having some really solid platforms like KDP and Apple opening up to people, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, for the most part, all of that gave indy authors a speed that traditional publishing just can't match. It's amazing that you can go in and change your price and odds are the price change is going to go through within a day. You can quickly react to market conditions. They've made a lot of great platforms. We've been a part of that and making it easy to use platform. So eBooks are easy. Unfortunately once you get going on ebooks and you start dipping into print, print's not so easy. It's a very different world, but there's a lot of money to be made in print and it's still the dominant format.
[00:22:10] I've always encouraged authors to go ahead and have their book in print. Even if you're not selling a lot of print copies, on places like Amazon, where they show the prices of the two formats, it makes your ebook look like it even better deals. They're more likely to buy it.
[00:22:24] Matty: And I think it also gives sort of a credibility, that if a browser sees that you're professional enough to offer multiple formats, that sort of gives you a little extra edge over someone who's only offering ebooks.
[00:22:36] Dan: I really feel like there's a preference within a big group of readers to have all three formats available. Like they take that as a sign of professionalism or quality. So for me, I know I've switched over now to audio books are about half of my reading consumption. I really love audio books. And at the beginning of Draft2Digital, we focus exclusively on eBooks and then we added CreateSpace for a while, but they just didn't have the infrastructure to handle a company working with CreateSpace as opposed to an individual. And so eventually we stopped working with them, but we always had that bug that we wanted to help authors get into print.
[00:23:14] And so we've now been in a print beta for about two and a half years. We've learned a whole lot about print from that. We just recently switched partners and things have been going super smooth. So I'm excited about that. I think we're going to be able to release that to most everyone fairly soon.
[00:23:31] I think one thing we saw when we were working with CreateSpace, a lot of indy authors would stop going through the process of the point we asked them to provide a print cover. Since it's a different type of cover, you've got to have a wraparound cover. It's got to meet certain specifications. If you change the length of your book, like if you go in and edit something that can change what cover size it is. And a lot of people just didn't have the money to go back to their cover designer and get that fixed.
[00:23:56] We've designed software that will take your normal 2D cover that you have for your ebook and make it into that wraparound cover. It'll do the calculations on the PDF. And we take the dominant color that's on the cover front and stretch it around to the back and spine. And then the blurb, the description that you put in for the ebook stores, we put in. We generate the barcode and all of that good stuff. And so I think that's going to really open it up to a lot of people that might have tried a KDP Print or Ingram and just didn't have the money at the time to pay a graphic designer to redesign their cover and to do all the little adjustments you sometimes need to do. So I'm very excited about print.
[00:24:44] And then we partnered with Findaway. It feels like forever ago, I want to say three or four years ago, and that's been a great partnership. Like I said, a huge fan of audio books, and so we just made it really easy. I think what Findaway is doing for the audio book industry is amazing. They really opened it up for authors to have control over their pricing, which was not a thing before they came along. So now everywhere but Audible, because Audible insist they know better than you, and so they set your price for you and you can't do anything with it, everywhere by Audible, you can control your price.
[00:25:15] So if you want to do a free first in series on Apple, you can, if you want to do a Chirp deal through BookBub, you can. There are all kinds of opportunities that indy authors use on their eBooks to become dominant parts of a lot of the different genres, especially like romance, fantasy, sci-fi. Indy authors have taken over those genres from the traditional publishers because they had tools to market effectively in a digital age.
[00:25:43] People are used to being able to try the first episode of a season for free on all these digital video platforms. We've gotten used to things like Netflix, we've gotten used to Spotify and subscription services, And people want that model. And so now there's several of those models going around. Like you've got KU for books, you've got Scribd that does both books and audio books. Traditional publishers have been very leery of those things and indies have fill the demand that's there.
[00:26:15] Matty: Being able to try out the first in series is creates an interesting situation with Findaway because I did my first five audio books with ACX and then I did
[00:26:26] The sixth one, the sixth one is on Findaway the seventh one will be on Findaway. But I really haven't done any promotion because I feel as if it's fine for Amazon or Audible or iTunes customers, because they can still get the whole catalog. But I haven't really been promoting it because I think until I can get them all wide, I feel like it's a tease. Like I don't want to advertise book four in a series that's available on Findaway until books one through three are available. Do you have any thoughts on that?
[00:26:58] Dan: I agree. It's very hard. I've known a number of veterans of traditional publishing that their series got dropped midway through a series, but their readers really want them to finish. And so they've gone on to finish a series self-publishing it, but the traditional publishers still had the rights to the beginning of the series.
[00:27:17] It's very hard, if you don't have complete control over book one it can be very difficult to do anything with it, both in ebook and audio book.
[00:27:26] Matty: Yeah. I'm just counting out the seven years, I guess it is the seven years since I published the first one. And then whenever that seven-year anniversary comes up for the rest, I'll move them all over to Findaway, and then I'll be able to start promoting all of them more accurate actively.
[00:27:39] Dan: I would say unless you're in a narrator split, I think ACX has been giving people exceptions. And so you might just check in with them.
[00:27:48] Matty: Yeah. Unfortunately the first of each of my series is the royalty split. So it's really that that's holding me back. The other two, I think you're right. I think I could request to draw them off that exclusive plan, but I feel like I'm tied by the fact that the first ones are.
[00:28:06] Dan: Audible knew what they were doing. They knew audio was going to take off and they tie people into very long contracts. For several years now I've been telling people, sometimes within the author community it becomes like a religious debate over hanging in Kindle Unlimited versus being wide, and I don't think it needs to be that way. Kindle Unlimited, it's only a 90-day commitment. And so that's the only 90 days. If you want to try it. If it's working, don't change anything. If it's not working, go wide. If you ideologically believe in the whole concept of wide, then just go wide. It doesn't really need to be a war between authors. But with ACX exclusivity, seven years, that's forever.
[00:28:50] And if you just look at where because we were talking about 2013, which is a little over seven years ago, but think about how powerful Barnes and Noble was in 2014 and still everyone knew Amazon was becoming the big dog, but Barnes and Noble was still super relevant in a way that it's really hard to say, I don't think anyone would say they are now.
[00:29:15] Matty: It's another interesting example of consider the context when you look back. You know, I could look back and kick myself for doing the royalty split with my first books, but it made it affordable for me because I could go into it without making any upfront investment. And at the time, if someone said, you're only going to be on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes, I was like, whoa, you know, where else could you need to be? And then the environment changed, so there are plenty of other places that you could be. So I guess the message is, don't kick yourself too much. When you look back and you made a decision that you made, then wouldn't make sense anymore, but you didn't have that information when you made the decision.
[00:29:52] Dan: Yeah. You make the best decision you have the time. I know, like sometimes I kick myself over opportunities that we missed years ago. But again we made based on everything we knew, then we made the right choices. We made a lot of right choices in the background that were great choices.
[00:30:09] And there were some where we just didn't get on board with certain the way things were changing at the time. But you just never know you make the best choice and, in your case, it's better to have the audio book than not have the audio book. And so it was the best choice.
[00:30:24] Matty: I also wanted to loop back on, I think you had mentioned that the platforms that were available back in 2013 are obviously quite different than the platforms that are available now. And what I see is that the upstarts, the people who are just rolling out some new platform or service or app or whatever it is today are having the benefit of no technological baggage. They can be using the best, fastest, latest, snazziest user interface and the whole bit, and the people who've been around forever, not going to name names, but the business could be great, and the people could be well-meaning, but if their technological platform is awful and clearly developed 20 years ago, then it's a deterrent. So can you speak about what Draft2Digital is doing in order to avoid that dilemma?
[00:31:17] Dan: Yes. It's interesting. There's the idea of technical debt, which is where you've written so much code and you need to go back in and update it to a newer version and all that good stuff.
[00:31:29] We just had to go through that about a year and a half ago. And it was torturous because we had gotten used to being able to develop new fun stuff. But the infrastructure side, we needed to solve some scaling problems. So we had to go back and redo a whole bunch of different stuff. I think it's certainly like a cultural mindset too. Like sometimes you just get stuck if you aren't looking at new ways of doing things. And I think that might be some of what happened with Barnes and Noble and having their CEO / co-founder being fairly old school for a very long time and kind of dismissive of web technology.
[00:32:08] I went down the rabbit hole a couple of years ago of looking at comparing our industry to other industries and like what has happened and changes. And right when the web really became something that people knew about and talking about often, Sears was probably in the best position to be the dominant player. They had people used to buying from catalogs to aren't that dissimilar to what website pages. They were delivering a lot. They had warehouses, they had infrastructure, and they're more or less gone now. They really were the best positioned. So it took a new player entirely coming along with Amazon to kind of show here's how we can do retail in a new way with this new technology. I think we tried to learn a lot of lessons from them.
[00:32:55] We tried to learn lessons from some of the other major technical players that have continued to have cultures within them that are like many startups. Like when I start a project, they have it separate from the overall corporate structure. And do things new and different ways. And I think you definitely see Amazon, and some of this is also it's something I hold against Amazon, but if Amazon sees like an exciting up and coming new player, they either buy them or they copy their product exactly, or mostly exactly, until that company goes out of business because they, Amazon enter their space and then they just drop it entirely. We've seen that with Kindle Scout, with Kindle Worlds. KU was their response to Scribd. Some of the things that Amazon stuck with, some of them they just use to attack what they might think could be competition for them in the future.
[00:33:47] I think Kindle Vella seems to be like that where they're worried about the rise of some of the platforms in Asia and then Radish and some of those platforms that are serialized bite-size reading apps.
[00:34:02] Matty: I think that an interesting lesson that individual indy authors might be able to take from the Amazon model, painful is that is for the companies who were acquired and then dropped, is the idea of failing fast. And that if you've experimented and I'm thinking in terms of, I suppose it could apply to let's say trying out a new genre or something like that, but if you're trying out a new marketing approach and it's just not panning out for you, don't keep hammering away at it relentlessly. Give it a reasonable amount of runway, and then just say, that was an interesting experiment and I'm going to move on to something that's going to work better for me.
[00:34:41] Dan: You see that in entrepreneurs, like they always talk about just not being afraid to fail and just when you fail, you've learned something. And so it's not really a failure. But not every idea's going to pay off in the way that you hoped and that's okay.
[00:34:57] Matty: Yep. Absolutely. I also wanted to just quickly loop back and ask you for the Draft2Digital print beta, your current partner, how long have they been in place?
[00:35:10] Dan: So some of the different people within the beta have been on the new partner since the very beginning of the year. We switched everyone over to the new partner about a month, maybe five weeks ago. And so we've been working out some of the little details behind that. Like when you transfer print, it's a little bit different than eBooks, so we're doing a lot of cleanup on the titles that were up with another partner and went into the new partner. But we're getting most of the way there. Just the difference in shipping speed has been incredible. So we've been very excited.
[00:35:42] Matty: That's great. One thing I found I was in the print beta, and I tried it out before, with the previous partner, I'm guessing, and one of my frustrations was that once it went from Draft2Digital to the partner, both I and Draft2Digital loss visibility into its status. Is that different with the current print beta?
[00:36:06] Dan: It is. The company is a little bit more technical and further along in their infrastructure. And so we have a lot more visibility into where things are at now. Which is one of our huge headaches for the first half, and really why we didn't release the print beta earlier, we had hoped to release it years ago, but it just never got to the point where we were comfortable with it to put like the Draft2Digital name on it as a main product.
[00:36:31] Matty: Yep. So another area that has obviously changed hugely since 2013 is retail platforms. So as you're looking across the retail platform landscape, what lessons can you glean from what you've seen between 2013 and now that people could carry forward?
[00:36:53] Dan: That's really a question. With the ways in which the different retailers are experimenting and trying to figure out the different ways to compete against Amazon in different markets, I would really highly encourage everyone to participate in any sorts of promotional opportunities, they give you either through, if you're direct with the retailers to do some direct, or if you're with Draft2Digitalwe're always working to coordinate different promotion opportunities with a lot of our different partners participate.
[00:37:22] I used to do that. That's kind of my side job was like the merchandising side. And now we've hired someone full time, which has been great, because at one point I felt like I was doing like three full-time jobs and just like juggling them. But we hired Kara Tumlinson, who is the wife of Kevin Tumlinson, and she's just been phenomenal at it. It was hard, a hard job to hire someone into. Cause I wanted someone that was used to dealing with authors because it can be a little bit difficult coordinating authors, and so she had years of experience of working with Kevin and I was comfortable with that, and she's been wonderful.
[00:37:56] They're all trying different things. Kobo really believes in the authors. I think people don't give Apple enough credit. Like Apple's always been agnostic about where the book comes from. And so they've given since the very beginning of when they opened up Apple to indy books, they've given opportunities to authors, indy authors just from the very get go. Most of those opportunities are free. And so all you have to do is choose to participate in them. They generally require reducing your price for a certain period of time. But participate in those things.
[00:38:28] I highly recommend going to conferences where some of those different partners might be and getting to know them and have like an actual, face to face relationship with them, because that pays off.
[00:38:39] Matty: How would you reach out if you were interested in pursuing that?
[00:38:44] Dan: Just like looking into the conferences that people go to. Like NINC, Novelists, Inc., one of the conferences in the fall, is one where most of the retailers and the aggregators have a presence. That's a very good one to meet people. Although NINC does have a membership requirement, so you have to have sold so many books. But that one's a very good one. It used to be RWI Nationals, like everyone was there. I don't know if that will be the case going forward since they're going through some restructuring. 20 Books now, generally everyone is represented at the 20 Books conference in Vegas. So those are I would say the big three where you're likely to encounter a little bit of everyone.
[00:39:27] I certainly I've had people just reach out to like our support staff and ask if we had anybody who was going to be there that can meet with. Apple has a similar, like an email, you can email their support staff and they will forward it onto the right people. And then Kobo is probably the most friendly of all the retailers and they always have people and they're very easy to spot. Like the Apple people are ninjas and people can't point them out to you. Like it's hard to get their names, but Kobo, they're just all, you know, Mark Lefebvre set that program up, and of course he's a very people person.
[00:40:01] Matty: Yeah. I'm just, again, scanning my list, so I had Tara Cremin from Kobo on episode 31, talking about ebook pricing. So I can attest about the friendliness aspect. With regard to Apple, I have to say that I cringe going on to Apple because I'm a huge Apple fan. I have an iPhone, I'm Apple all the way, but they just make some ridiculously bad design decisions. And one of the things that makes me crazy is that they make all books look like a hard copy textbook on their site. I'm like, that's so unattractive.
[00:40:36] Dan: I hate it too.
[00:40:38] It's such a surprising decision. After years of them saying we don't accept 3D box art cover, because it might mislead people to think that they're getting a physical product, and then for them to go in and make their books look like a physical product, which just looks awkward to begin with.
[00:40:54] Matty: Yeah. It's just unattractive.
[00:40:56] Dan: I don't like it either. I pass that along to them. My biggest frustration right now with Apple is that when you purchase an audio book on Apple Books, you can't just play it on your Home Pod, if you have a Home Pod. I'm like, why would you like, you're so integrated on everything, and you don't have this one little feature that Amazon has had since they released the first Echo devices. Frustrating. But yeah, they make most of their money off apps and games. There was the big lawsuit. They went through, the price fixing lawsuit in 2012, 2013, somewhere around there. I think for a while, they stepped back from books. In the last year or two, I've seen them really invest in hiring more people for the Apple Books team. And really, I think they're gearing up to do some amazing things.
[00:41:44] And event with them kind of having a hands-off approach, they became the second biggest digital book vendor after Amazon, past Barnes and Noble. and for generally, for most people, Amazon is going to be the top.
[00:41:58] Apple is going to be second, at least for digital, Barnes and Noble, Kobo. Way down a list, maybe Google Play.
[00:42:06] Matty: Another thing that I'm not sure if this is a change in the industry or it's just a change in my awareness, but I distribute to many platforms through Draft2Digital, on Amazon, on Google Play, and on Kobo. Google Play and Kobo and Amazon direct to those platforms. And I realized that there were certain themes, like the one that springs to mind is Kobo readers really do like box sets. And so I don't know if Kobo readers always loved box sets and I've just recently heard about it and seen it play out in my own sales. But do you feel like the different retailers are starting to stake out specialties like that, that authors should be aware of?
[00:42:48] Dan: Yeah. I've noticed that since the very beginning at Draft2Digital and like when I give a workshop at the different conferences, I always mention that you want to make sure you have bundles, especially for Kobo. I think part of that is that places like Barnes and Noble and Kobo and Apple, you're not limited on the upper price in the way the Amazon tells you you can't price anything above 9.99 without taking a huge hit. So we've seen a lot of authors that make box sets and don't even list them on Amazon because the financial aspect of it wouldn't make sense. But you can put together, if you had a whole series, it was like 10 books, you could sell that on Kobo for 29.99, 39.99. It's possible.
[00:43:30] Matty: And when you're saying about taking the hit, that on Amazon, if a book is an e-book is priced over 9.99, you're only getting 35% rather than 70% royalties.
[00:43:39] Dan: Correct. Same thing with under 2.99 on Amazon you're penalized, and you make less. Which that's still the case at Kobo. I believe if you're under 2.99 they reduce your royalty rate. With Draft2Digital, we've negotiated everything to be the same. And so if it's 99 cents or 39.99, you're making the same amount. Apple's always been that way. And I wish some of the other vendors would follow suit. And maybe as Amazon goes through all this antitrust litigation, maybe they'll change their mind on that too.
[00:44:12] But yeah, from the very beginning, our outliers, like I have a list of outliers I look at every day of sales. Consistently at Kobo, box sets are like five out of 10, if not eight out of 10, which is not the same with the other retailers. Like we do have box sets hit the outliers at some of the other, but not that consistently. So that's been really interesting to watch. I know like Barnes and Noble even has a special page that they dedicate to bundles. And so we've got a lot of different bundles and box sets featured there. I've never noticed on Kobo, they have a specific place to advertise them. So I think it's just like a Canadian reader thing.
[00:44:51] There are differences in the demographics of the different platforms. For like Kobo and for Barnes and Noble, it's very much an empty nester, like 50, 60 plus dominant age for the people that buy the books. And so that affects what genres do well there. Apple seems to have captured a much younger crowd. Primarily I'd say female and somewhere in mid-twenties to early forties seems to be the Apple demographic. And so stuff like YA does better there. And like a lot of the different romance, like stuff I knew adult romance really took Apple by storm. Amazon seems to have a lot more of the male readers. And so like for some of the like hard sci-fi it seems like there's just a lot more men are using Amazon for their ebook purchases than some of the other platforms.
[00:45:36] But yeah, the whole bundle thing, we've seen that too. It's a phenomenon. I've always encouraged people to have them. Not only does it give you more products to sell and it looks better on like your various author pages where retailers have them. But there's places like Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and Apple do you have promotions that are exclusive to a box sets and bundles, and so if you don't have one, you can't apply for it.
[00:46:02] Matty: The last area I wanted to hit was discoverability platforms and approaches. So if you, again, look back through your history with indy publishing, what can you tap into in terms of experience you've seen in that evolution that people should be keeping in mind going forward?
[00:46:18] Dan: I'd say the number one thing I've seen is everyone should have an email list. Like you should, from the very beginning of your first book, start asking people at the end of your book, ask people to leave a review and ask people to join your newsletter. How you handle your newsletter, if it's just informational and you let them know when you have a new release, or if you keep in contact with them every few weeks and talk about your life, that's up to you and figuring out what your readers want. But you should be building that email list right from the very beginning, because it's the only platform you can control.
[00:46:49] If you build a big readership on Facebook, if you get people following your page on Facebook, we've seen Facebook has cut the organic visibility. So unless you're paying for your posts to reach all the people that are following you only like less than 5% of the people are seeing what you post on a page that your readers tell a Facebook they want to hear about, but Facebook wants money.
[00:47:12] So email you control, you can do a lot of stuff with email, lets you reach out to them like when you have a new release because the same thing with Amazon, Amazon lets readers follow an author. And supposedly you would think that being, I would get an email when the author has a new release, but it doesn't work that way.
[00:47:29] Amazon has rules about how often do they touch base with customers. And generally they're going to send them emails about much more expensive products with better margins than books. And so you'll hit or miss if Amazon will notify people when you've got a new release of going out there. So have an email list.
[00:47:48] I would say from my perspective, the second-best thing is apply for BookBub Feature Deals as often as possible. They've gotten certain rules, but I haven't seen any tool with a better ROI or reach more people. So like anytime someone's coming out of Amazon K U unlimited and wondering how to kick off their finding readers on the other platforms, BookBub does better than anything else. And so I highly recommend it.
[00:48:15] After that, I would say Amazon ads because with Amazon ads, the people that are looking at Amazon are on Amazon to buy something. And if they're seeing book ads are likely looking at books so those can be very highly effective. Facebook ads for certain genres worked very well. And then BookBub ads. I've seen a lot more authors having success with the BookBub ads that aren't the Featured Deal, where you are showing an ad at the end of their Featured Deal newsletter, and it's targeted to readers that are likely to enjoy hearing about your genre. I think those are all the big ones that I would encourage people to do.
[00:48:52] With email, you've got the opportunity. not only of reaching out to people, but you can use it to help you build a lookalike lists for doing Facebook ads. You can use your email lists to do an email swap with other authors within your genre. And so it gives you a host of different opportunities. I know a lot of people use some of the opportunities that BookFunnel offers to help them build their email list.
[00:49:17] Matty: Well, Dan, this has been such a great overview of what you've learned in the last eight years spent at Draft2Digital. And I just wanted to also mention that, and I wish I could have looked this up. I probably could have if I had spent enough time, but years ago you spent, I think, an hour with me on one of the Draft2Digital consults.
[00:49:38] So I think it was when you guys were doing live events and you can sign up for a consult. And I just thought that was so super generous of you and the other folks who were offering that and valued it so much. And so I'm happy to be able to tap into and share all your information with a wider audience than just me.
[00:49:57] Dan: We saw a competitor that was charging for those, and we were like, why would you charge people? Yeah, it bothered us. And so me, Mark, and Kevin carved some time out of our schedules to talk to people. Because we know it's daunting, like the sheer amount of things out there. Like I said, we've gotten really good at conferences, so people that are connected to the conference world and going to conferences and can afford going to conferences get to talk to us one-on-one, get to hear us in workshops. But we know there's a whole huge group of people that just for whatever reason, can't go to the conferences. And so we wanted to make ourselves open, much more open to them. And I'm really glad we did that because it's I really did get a chance to talk with people I never would have before. And it was great.
[00:50:40] Matty: Does Draft2Digital offer anything like that currently?
[00:50:44] Dan: So we went over to the format of doing more of the live streams. Like we do an ask us anything. Just about every month, we'll do one where we're streaming it to both YouTube and Facebook. Primarily just timewise it became where it was a little bit daunting as is using up a lot of time for us. So we've been looking at the things that are a little bit less that give us content that we can reuse elsewhere. We take all those live streams and make them into blog posts, podcasts, other videos. And so I think we'll probably do it again sometimes. We have done it around conferences.
[00:51:19] And so before the Australia romance writers conference, we've done those one-on-one consults. I think we'll probably do stuff like that where for certain events, like we're doing a lot more virtual events, I think some of the conferences that were physical we'll go to virtual for the near future.
[00:51:35] So we'll probably do that because I learned a lot from it, especially just hearing from people that were new to us. Because getting the same circle of like kind of an echo chamber of the people that are always at all the conferences. And so you think, what's going on in the author world and you're like, oh, there's something new over here that we didn't know about.
[00:51:54] Matty: I will clip this part out of this seems like a no starter, but would you be willing to offer, let's say a 20 minute consult with one listener of the podcast who leaves a comment on the episode?
Dan: Yeah, definitely.
Matty: That would be fantastic. Because I got so much good out of being able to talk to you one-on-one about that, and I know there's going to be an enthusiastic listener who would benefit from that.
[00:52:18] Dan: Definitely. That's a good idea.
[00:52:20] Matty: Thank you. And thank you just in general for sharing your insights. Please let the listeners know where they can find out more about you and Draft2Digital online.
[00:52:30] Dan: Well, you can follow me on Twitter. I share nearly all publishing news, a little bit of weird tech stuff, because I come from like a tech background, but it's a @DanWoodOk. Really, I follow a lot of people that I think everyone in the author community should be following. And people like Joanna Penn and Lindsay Buroker and some of the people that really have a good eye for what's going on in the industry. Kristine Kathryn Rusch. So I like to think that my Twitter can be helpful to people.
[00:52:56] And then I've been encouraging people lately to go to our blog is Draft2Digital.com/blog. We share like all those different interviews that we've done in video, we share those on the blog. You can read it, you can watch it, or you can listen to it as a podcast. And so that's a good way to learn a little bit more about Draft2Digital. And most of the interviews really aren't, they're not just about Draft2Digital. We talked to people about a little bit of everything. A lot of people I've mentioned today and the companies I mentioned, like BookBub and BookFunnel, we've had the owners or the reps from them on and just talk to them about what's going on in the industry. So I think those can be a good learning spot for people.
[00:53:36] Matty: Great. Well, we've given people plenty of food for thought in the conversation, so thank you again, Dan. This has been great.
[00:53:43] Dan: You're very welcome. Thanks for having me.
[00:03:48] Dan: We learned nearly all of our marketing strategy revolved around conferences. We got very good at doing conferences and meeting people and knowing people. We were lucky to be able to hire Mark Lefebvre about a year after he left Kobo. He brought a huge number of connections to different people and several conferences he was already doing as an independent consultant. So we were really good at advertising by way of conference.
[00:04:14] We had to learn how to actually market in this last year without conferences happening. And we started a lot of different projects. We started doing live chats on YouTube and Facebook. Just between me Mark and Kevin, sometimes one of us would just interview an author or one of our industry professional friends. So we've gotten really good at that. And that kind of led me into doing some stuff with Clubhouse, which is the new thing getting everyone's attention, and that's been a lot of fun. We've been working on improving stuff like our blog and SEO and all those kinds of dorky things you can do as a business to try to get the word out about you better.
[00:04:51] And so that side of things is probably the thing that I noticed changed the most and I was a big part of because we have about half of our staff are remote, the transition to working from home was very easy for us. I was supposed to go to London Book Fair and Mark Dawson was having a conference there at the same time and London Book Fair ended up canceling, but Mark's conference went ahead and went on. So I was in London at the end of February. And by the time I flew home, we decided to work from home basically until scientists gave us the clearing. And we did that for a year and a half and started back just about two weeks ago, we went back into the office for the people that are in Oklahoma City.
[00:05:32] And that's been an adjustment because you get used to working from home, but it's been really nice seeing people's faces. And I feel like we're a little bit more effective, like when we can meet one-on-one. We learned a lot about how to communicate better on like Slack is what we use to coordinate a lot of stuff. We've gotten much better about planning, I would say. But it's hard to beat one-on-one, those moments where you just get to go talk to someone in their office when you've got a question about something.
[00:05:59] Matty: The Mark Dawson conference is an interesting example because of the things that were going on during COVID, because they were talking about it on their podcast, he and James Blatch, and I was listening to the podcast late, so it was maybe like at least several weeks if not a month after they were speculating about, oh, should we do the conference? Should we not do the conference? And I was like, don't do the conference! At this point, it was like several weeks after the conference had already taken place.
[00:06:28] And I think it's an interesting lesson that you can't judge what other authors or even yourself does at a period of time outside the context of that environment. You know, it was second guessing it two weeks later, three weeks later was totally different than having to make that decision in the moment. I think an important lesson as people look back and their own careers.
[00:06:50] Dan: And so many of the local governments and the different governments at the federal levels didn't declare an emergency until very late. And so one of the reasons I ended up going, like we went back and forth on if that made sense, but we couldn't get anything refunded. The plane ticket was non-refundable, the hotel stuff. And I also felt bad cause they had several speakers pull out. And it was like, we'll take a risk. And then when I get back, I can just self-quarantine myself for a while. That didn't end up needing to happen since we just all went to working from home. It went from being, this is bad, we could be cautious, to like suddenly I think it's when that NBA player got sick, that everyone really took it seriously, at least within the U S.
[00:07:30] Matty: Yep. There was another mention you had made that I think is an interesting looking back / looking forward thing, and that's Clubhouse. Can you just describe what Clubhouse is for people who aren't familiar with it.
[00:07:41] Dan: It's so hard to describe until you experience it, but it's like you and I doing this podcast, but with an audience that we could easily pull in. It's audio only, and then so people can raise their hand from the audience, and you can pull them up and ask them if they want to ask a question or make a comment about the panelists. So it's interesting, I think podcasts have been one of the major tools that authors have used to learn about the industry. Like it's a very important part at least of the indy author community. It seems like an evolution of that.
[00:08:14] Except it's also because many of us have been stuck at home, I think we're just a little bit weary of Zoom and video and they've done studies where part of what stresses us out about Zoom is you like seeing yourself all the time, and people are seeing it all the time. With audio, I'm in like a raggedy old t-shirt and shorts and just can be talking to anybody. So I've really enjoyed it.
[00:08:37] Me and Ricardo Fayet, who works for Reedsy, we've been conference friends forever. We kind of took as an opportunity to have some of those conversations we normally would have had in either workshops or panels at the different conferences. And so we've been inviting people like Carlyn <Robertson> from BookBub was one of our guests last week. This week we talked to Jamie Albright who is a fantastic person and author, has her own podcast. And so just taking those moments to just reconnect. It's been really interesting. We've had anywhere between 40 and 60 people show up and stay for the live session, which is like way more like larger numbers of people in person than some of the stuff we've done live on YouTube and Facebook.
[00:09:23] The downside of Clubhouse is it's really not easy to record that content for the future. And so all the time people are like, oh, I had to miss this one. Did you record it? I like, sorry. It's very difficult. It's like a technical challenge because they haven't built in recording into the software. And then their terms of service limits you to where you need to get people's permission to record them. And when you take questions from the audience that becomes very difficult.
[00:09:49] Matty: They must have made the decision that they intentionally didn't want to have recording because I'm speculating that they were looking for a different kind of interaction and thought perhaps participation would be higher if people knew they weren't being recorded. Is that your understanding as well?
[00:10:06] Dan: I think they've really capitalized on that whole fear of missing out. I think them not releasing the app to everyone, the way in which they have it selective, you had to get an invite at first and it was only on Apple at first, the way Facebook did, that makes me feel old, like 15 years ago. Again, it was just very hard to get an invitation, so suddenly it was exclusive, and everyone wanted in. I think that's part of it. I would guess they'll eventually build something, some functionality in to record things, but at least to get things started, I think that played into that a lot.
[00:10:39] I will say there are conferences that are recorded and there are conferences where they purposely don't record. It does give people within the industry an ability to be more candid, that there are things that I can't say, like there are things I can't go into detail about all the time if I know I'm being recorded or it's going to be broadcast to the internet, whereas if it's just in a non-recorded session, I can be speak a little bit more freely,
[00:11:05] Matty: Do you see individual authors on Clubhouse using Clubhouse to promote their books?
[00:11:13] Dan: I've seen people trying. As far as I can tell, that's not working great. Maybe for some specific non-fiction niches it's working, but I've seen people try and figure out how to do like a book launch. I feel like right now because the way in which you find content there is so based on who you're connected to and little niche interests, I just don't think it works yet. Maybe once you can better connect to let's say readers that love historical romance that might be possible, but at least right now, it seems like it's more of a connect to your author tribe scenario rather than connecting to readers.
[00:11:51] Matty: And probably deepening the connection with people you may already be connected with at a more superficial level, but this gives you a chance to dive deeper on it. I had I think it was a podcast guest who had gotten in touch with me and said that she would invite me to Clubhouse if I was interested. And I'm like, I appreciate the offer, but learning a new platform, it's just not high on my list.
[00:12:10] So taking off your personal hat and putting on the Draft2Digital hat, when Draft2Digital is assessing new social media platforms to pursue, are there criteria that you've applied in the past that authors should keep in mind if they're seeing new things come down the path, TikTok, I wonder if I should be on there any lessons that we can learn from that?
[00:12:30] Dan: I've always, especially because I didn't come into the industry with any real knowledge or preconceived notion of it, I've always spent a lot of time with authors where authors are, so seeking out where they're going. And so being in Facebook groups now, back in the day, it was places like Writers Cafe on KB Forums, I think was the name of it, there were different places where there were pockets of authors talking a lot about the industry. And so I've always tried to be in those places and participate. Not be salesy or anything because I see people come in and do that and authors don't want that. They want you to be interacting with them, talking about the stuff they're talking about.
[00:13:13] I think for authors, that same thing applies. Figure out where your reader tribe is going to be and be there. Interact. Where I get a lot of my book recommendations is from Reddit. There was like subreddits for different genres like fantasy. I think the fantasy one's probably the best example. There are a lot of indy and traditional authors there that participate. And they're not just there, hey, at my books on sale. They're talking about what influenced them, they're talking about their favorite books. And then when they do have a sale, sometimes I'll mention it and those readers respond and just being a part of the community, knowing what they want.
[00:13:49] And I think romance authors noticed better than anyone, just making sure you're hitting all the tropes of what the community expects. Because if you feel like you want to violate a trope, sometimes that works, but you have to really, really understand the genre before you start breaking the rules.
[00:14:06] Matty: Yeah. I think that when people are considering branching into new social media platforms, they do need to consider the learning curve of that. You can't just sign up for an account and then go start reposting what you're used to posting on Twitter or whatever on the new account. And that learning curve can really be a time sink. And so I'm always a big believer in let other people blaze the trail. I'm not really a bleeding edge kind of person. Let other people blaze the trail. And then if they're their results in their business model, feel compatible with what I'm looking for, then it's something that I might dip my toe in as well.
[00:14:41] Dan: Definitely. Like one of my pet peeves is when people use the social media scheduling software, but they don't change up. Like the way graphics are supposed to look on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram are all different dimensions. And there's different things like you use some hashtags on Twitter, you use more hashtags on Instagram, but using hashtags on Facebook is nearly worthless.
[00:15:06] I hate it when it's obvious they just made one post and try to make it fit every platform. I think it's better just to concentrate on one that you actually care about and will be interacting with than to try to hit everything all at once.
[00:15:20] Matty: So I'm going to pull way back. I took us down a very specific path there with COVID and social media and all that.
[00:15:26] But I'm curious if you look back at 2013, what did you see in terms of indy versus traditional that you feel has changed over time or not changed over time as the case may be?
[00:15:37] Dan: Yeah, it's only been like eight years, but it feels like everything has changed. It's a very different world. I feel like it's been decades worth of change in a very short period of time.
[00:15:48] When I came on, they're still very much nearly every author conference was full of authors trying to pitch themselves the entire time to agents, and that is gone. Conferences now, there's maybe a few agents at a couple of conferences, but that's very, very rare. A lot of the traditional publishers have pulled out as sponsors. It used to be I'd go to some of the conferences and official publishers will be everywhere and spending lots of money. And they're not doing that anymore. There used to be that stigma against indy authors and a lot of agents saying that if you self-publish, you're never going to get a traditional contract.
[00:16:27] And as the last five or six years have played out, you can tell like nearly everyone who's getting traditional contracts now started as an indy and proved their audience and had already built a platform. Or they're someone like a celebrity that had a platform from some other area.
[00:16:44] So things just changed very much more positive for indies. It's been a real uphill battle of getting indy books into libraries, but over the years we've managed at Draft2Digital to keep chipping away at that. I think Mark Coker did a lot of the early work and got people into places like Overdrive. I was really happy when we finally also got in to Overdrive and got out of that little indy ghetto that they had people in for a long time. We've continued to look at some of the different international places. And so we just added Borrow Box, which is a library of vendor like Overdrive for Australia and New Zealand as well as a couple of other places in the world.
[00:17:22] We now go to Hoopla, I think we were the first to get indy authors into Hoopla. Baker and Taylor, Bibliotheca, which is cloud library. So those are things that 2013 libraries were like, ah, we don't know about this. And now they are excited and happy to work with indy authors. Especially because indy prices for library books are so much cheaper than the crazy stuff the traditional publishing has started charging the library systems for and limiting the number of times I can check a book out before they have to rebuy it. So that's all changed. We've really matured as an industry.
[00:17:57] Sorry. I know 2013, I used to see all kinds of covers that were obviously done by themselves, right? Yeah. And now would say the majority of people know you have to either have some actual experience with graphic design or pay someone. And there's a lot more professionals those out there than they used to be. A lot of traditional people left the traditional system, like editors and graphic designers, because they're being paid very low. A lot of people have gone on to work with places like Reedsy that connect authors to professional services. And there's all kinds of great resources out there now. I still know people that are using Fiverr and finding professionals that actually are great for them to work with. And so it's been good to see all of that mature and grow.
[00:18:45] There's been a lot of consolidation. A lot of companies come and go, a lot of companies get bought out. There were a lot of new companies in publishing around 2012 to 2014. They were pouring money into it. And now venture funds are not because publishing companies probably aren't going to be unicorns. They're not going to be billion-dollar companies. But they can be multimillion dollar companies, but for the venture capitalists, they want bigger than that.
[00:19:11] Matty: It also seems like the more consolidation there is, the more of those people are leaving the traditional publishing market, the book cover designers and the editors and so on, are available now more easily to indy authors through organizations like Reedsy.
[00:19:25] Dan: Yeah, all of them being bought out by the others and like the Big Five becoming the Big Four, Big Three, however you want to look at it, it means author advances are going down and so there's less and less reason to consider going into traditional publishers. Because a lot of the things that made the system sort of viable are just going down. And I think a lot of times people think that you're guaranteed to have a really impressive marketing plan from the traditional publishers. But a lot of times they're just throwing things out and seeing what sticks and then funneling money into that one thing. And so I think it's a better time than ever for people to consider just trying the indy world. And I think most people that try it get hooked.
[00:20:10] Matty: Yeah, I will point people to the episode with Lisa Regan who has had experience both in the indy and traditional worlds in an Episode 16, way back in Episode 16, I talked with her about Drawing Back the Publishing Curtain with Lisa Regan. And I found that very informative because just as you're saying, a lot of the things that I think people sometimes think publishers will take care of for them, like marketing, like promotion or still on the author. So I would point people to that.
[00:20:39] And I also wanted to comment that I'm a big proponent of library opportunities and I just pulled up my Draft2Digital sales platform here, and so far this year, so we're recording this in June of 2021, and so far this year I've made $350 from Overdrive. So I'm reaping the benefits of Draft2Digital's great outreach into the library arena.
[00:21:05] How about when you think about media? So I think at the time, in 2013, if you look across media like print, ebook, and then you look now in terms of what's available, what changes have you seen there and what lessons could authors learn from what you've seen?
[00:21:25] Dan: Ebooks are really what gave us the opportunity and having some really solid platforms like KDP and Apple opening up to people, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, for the most part, all of that gave indy authors a speed that traditional publishing just can't match. It's amazing that you can go in and change your price and odds are the price change is going to go through within a day. You can quickly react to market conditions. They've made a lot of great platforms. We've been a part of that and making it easy to use platform. So eBooks are easy. Unfortunately once you get going on ebooks and you start dipping into print, print's not so easy. It's a very different world, but there's a lot of money to be made in print and it's still the dominant format.
[00:22:10] I've always encouraged authors to go ahead and have their book in print. Even if you're not selling a lot of print copies, on places like Amazon, where they show the prices of the two formats, it makes your ebook look like it even better deals. They're more likely to buy it.
[00:22:24] Matty: And I think it also gives sort of a credibility, that if a browser sees that you're professional enough to offer multiple formats, that sort of gives you a little extra edge over someone who's only offering ebooks.
[00:22:36] Dan: I really feel like there's a preference within a big group of readers to have all three formats available. Like they take that as a sign of professionalism or quality. So for me, I know I've switched over now to audio books are about half of my reading consumption. I really love audio books. And at the beginning of Draft2Digital, we focus exclusively on eBooks and then we added CreateSpace for a while, but they just didn't have the infrastructure to handle a company working with CreateSpace as opposed to an individual. And so eventually we stopped working with them, but we always had that bug that we wanted to help authors get into print.
[00:23:14] And so we've now been in a print beta for about two and a half years. We've learned a whole lot about print from that. We just recently switched partners and things have been going super smooth. So I'm excited about that. I think we're going to be able to release that to most everyone fairly soon.
[00:23:31] I think one thing we saw when we were working with CreateSpace, a lot of indy authors would stop going through the process of the point we asked them to provide a print cover. Since it's a different type of cover, you've got to have a wraparound cover. It's got to meet certain specifications. If you change the length of your book, like if you go in and edit something that can change what cover size it is. And a lot of people just didn't have the money to go back to their cover designer and get that fixed.
[00:23:56] We've designed software that will take your normal 2D cover that you have for your ebook and make it into that wraparound cover. It'll do the calculations on the PDF. And we take the dominant color that's on the cover front and stretch it around to the back and spine. And then the blurb, the description that you put in for the ebook stores, we put in. We generate the barcode and all of that good stuff. And so I think that's going to really open it up to a lot of people that might have tried a KDP Print or Ingram and just didn't have the money at the time to pay a graphic designer to redesign their cover and to do all the little adjustments you sometimes need to do. So I'm very excited about print.
[00:24:44] And then we partnered with Findaway. It feels like forever ago, I want to say three or four years ago, and that's been a great partnership. Like I said, a huge fan of audio books, and so we just made it really easy. I think what Findaway is doing for the audio book industry is amazing. They really opened it up for authors to have control over their pricing, which was not a thing before they came along. So now everywhere but Audible, because Audible insist they know better than you, and so they set your price for you and you can't do anything with it, everywhere by Audible, you can control your price.
[00:25:15] So if you want to do a free first in series on Apple, you can, if you want to do a Chirp deal through BookBub, you can. There are all kinds of opportunities that indy authors use on their eBooks to become dominant parts of a lot of the different genres, especially like romance, fantasy, sci-fi. Indy authors have taken over those genres from the traditional publishers because they had tools to market effectively in a digital age.
[00:25:43] People are used to being able to try the first episode of a season for free on all these digital video platforms. We've gotten used to things like Netflix, we've gotten used to Spotify and subscription services, And people want that model. And so now there's several of those models going around. Like you've got KU for books, you've got Scribd that does both books and audio books. Traditional publishers have been very leery of those things and indies have fill the demand that's there.
[00:26:15] Matty: Being able to try out the first in series is creates an interesting situation with Findaway because I did my first five audio books with ACX and then I did
[00:26:26] The sixth one, the sixth one is on Findaway the seventh one will be on Findaway. But I really haven't done any promotion because I feel as if it's fine for Amazon or Audible or iTunes customers, because they can still get the whole catalog. But I haven't really been promoting it because I think until I can get them all wide, I feel like it's a tease. Like I don't want to advertise book four in a series that's available on Findaway until books one through three are available. Do you have any thoughts on that?
[00:26:58] Dan: I agree. It's very hard. I've known a number of veterans of traditional publishing that their series got dropped midway through a series, but their readers really want them to finish. And so they've gone on to finish a series self-publishing it, but the traditional publishers still had the rights to the beginning of the series.
[00:27:17] It's very hard, if you don't have complete control over book one it can be very difficult to do anything with it, both in ebook and audio book.
[00:27:26] Matty: Yeah. I'm just counting out the seven years, I guess it is the seven years since I published the first one. And then whenever that seven-year anniversary comes up for the rest, I'll move them all over to Findaway, and then I'll be able to start promoting all of them more accurate actively.
[00:27:39] Dan: I would say unless you're in a narrator split, I think ACX has been giving people exceptions. And so you might just check in with them.
[00:27:48] Matty: Yeah. Unfortunately the first of each of my series is the royalty split. So it's really that that's holding me back. The other two, I think you're right. I think I could request to draw them off that exclusive plan, but I feel like I'm tied by the fact that the first ones are.
[00:28:06] Dan: Audible knew what they were doing. They knew audio was going to take off and they tie people into very long contracts. For several years now I've been telling people, sometimes within the author community it becomes like a religious debate over hanging in Kindle Unlimited versus being wide, and I don't think it needs to be that way. Kindle Unlimited, it's only a 90-day commitment. And so that's the only 90 days. If you want to try it. If it's working, don't change anything. If it's not working, go wide. If you ideologically believe in the whole concept of wide, then just go wide. It doesn't really need to be a war between authors. But with ACX exclusivity, seven years, that's forever.
[00:28:50] And if you just look at where because we were talking about 2013, which is a little over seven years ago, but think about how powerful Barnes and Noble was in 2014 and still everyone knew Amazon was becoming the big dog, but Barnes and Noble was still super relevant in a way that it's really hard to say, I don't think anyone would say they are now.
[00:29:15] Matty: It's another interesting example of consider the context when you look back. You know, I could look back and kick myself for doing the royalty split with my first books, but it made it affordable for me because I could go into it without making any upfront investment. And at the time, if someone said, you're only going to be on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes, I was like, whoa, you know, where else could you need to be? And then the environment changed, so there are plenty of other places that you could be. So I guess the message is, don't kick yourself too much. When you look back and you made a decision that you made, then wouldn't make sense anymore, but you didn't have that information when you made the decision.
[00:29:52] Dan: Yeah. You make the best decision you have the time. I know, like sometimes I kick myself over opportunities that we missed years ago. But again we made based on everything we knew, then we made the right choices. We made a lot of right choices in the background that were great choices.
[00:30:09] And there were some where we just didn't get on board with certain the way things were changing at the time. But you just never know you make the best choice and, in your case, it's better to have the audio book than not have the audio book. And so it was the best choice.
[00:30:24] Matty: I also wanted to loop back on, I think you had mentioned that the platforms that were available back in 2013 are obviously quite different than the platforms that are available now. And what I see is that the upstarts, the people who are just rolling out some new platform or service or app or whatever it is today are having the benefit of no technological baggage. They can be using the best, fastest, latest, snazziest user interface and the whole bit, and the people who've been around forever, not going to name names, but the business could be great, and the people could be well-meaning, but if their technological platform is awful and clearly developed 20 years ago, then it's a deterrent. So can you speak about what Draft2Digital is doing in order to avoid that dilemma?
[00:31:17] Dan: Yes. It's interesting. There's the idea of technical debt, which is where you've written so much code and you need to go back in and update it to a newer version and all that good stuff.
[00:31:29] We just had to go through that about a year and a half ago. And it was torturous because we had gotten used to being able to develop new fun stuff. But the infrastructure side, we needed to solve some scaling problems. So we had to go back and redo a whole bunch of different stuff. I think it's certainly like a cultural mindset too. Like sometimes you just get stuck if you aren't looking at new ways of doing things. And I think that might be some of what happened with Barnes and Noble and having their CEO / co-founder being fairly old school for a very long time and kind of dismissive of web technology.
[00:32:08] I went down the rabbit hole a couple of years ago of looking at comparing our industry to other industries and like what has happened and changes. And right when the web really became something that people knew about and talking about often, Sears was probably in the best position to be the dominant player. They had people used to buying from catalogs to aren't that dissimilar to what website pages. They were delivering a lot. They had warehouses, they had infrastructure, and they're more or less gone now. They really were the best positioned. So it took a new player entirely coming along with Amazon to kind of show here's how we can do retail in a new way with this new technology. I think we tried to learn a lot of lessons from them.
[00:32:55] We tried to learn lessons from some of the other major technical players that have continued to have cultures within them that are like many startups. Like when I start a project, they have it separate from the overall corporate structure. And do things new and different ways. And I think you definitely see Amazon, and some of this is also it's something I hold against Amazon, but if Amazon sees like an exciting up and coming new player, they either buy them or they copy their product exactly, or mostly exactly, until that company goes out of business because they, Amazon enter their space and then they just drop it entirely. We've seen that with Kindle Scout, with Kindle Worlds. KU was their response to Scribd. Some of the things that Amazon stuck with, some of them they just use to attack what they might think could be competition for them in the future.
[00:33:47] I think Kindle Vella seems to be like that where they're worried about the rise of some of the platforms in Asia and then Radish and some of those platforms that are serialized bite-size reading apps.
[00:34:02] Matty: I think that an interesting lesson that individual indy authors might be able to take from the Amazon model, painful is that is for the companies who were acquired and then dropped, is the idea of failing fast. And that if you've experimented and I'm thinking in terms of, I suppose it could apply to let's say trying out a new genre or something like that, but if you're trying out a new marketing approach and it's just not panning out for you, don't keep hammering away at it relentlessly. Give it a reasonable amount of runway, and then just say, that was an interesting experiment and I'm going to move on to something that's going to work better for me.
[00:34:41] Dan: You see that in entrepreneurs, like they always talk about just not being afraid to fail and just when you fail, you've learned something. And so it's not really a failure. But not every idea's going to pay off in the way that you hoped and that's okay.
[00:34:57] Matty: Yep. Absolutely. I also wanted to just quickly loop back and ask you for the Draft2Digital print beta, your current partner, how long have they been in place?
[00:35:10] Dan: So some of the different people within the beta have been on the new partner since the very beginning of the year. We switched everyone over to the new partner about a month, maybe five weeks ago. And so we've been working out some of the little details behind that. Like when you transfer print, it's a little bit different than eBooks, so we're doing a lot of cleanup on the titles that were up with another partner and went into the new partner. But we're getting most of the way there. Just the difference in shipping speed has been incredible. So we've been very excited.
[00:35:42] Matty: That's great. One thing I found I was in the print beta, and I tried it out before, with the previous partner, I'm guessing, and one of my frustrations was that once it went from Draft2Digital to the partner, both I and Draft2Digital loss visibility into its status. Is that different with the current print beta?
[00:36:06] Dan: It is. The company is a little bit more technical and further along in their infrastructure. And so we have a lot more visibility into where things are at now. Which is one of our huge headaches for the first half, and really why we didn't release the print beta earlier, we had hoped to release it years ago, but it just never got to the point where we were comfortable with it to put like the Draft2Digital name on it as a main product.
[00:36:31] Matty: Yep. So another area that has obviously changed hugely since 2013 is retail platforms. So as you're looking across the retail platform landscape, what lessons can you glean from what you've seen between 2013 and now that people could carry forward?
[00:36:53] Dan: That's really a question. With the ways in which the different retailers are experimenting and trying to figure out the different ways to compete against Amazon in different markets, I would really highly encourage everyone to participate in any sorts of promotional opportunities, they give you either through, if you're direct with the retailers to do some direct, or if you're with Draft2Digitalwe're always working to coordinate different promotion opportunities with a lot of our different partners participate.
[00:37:22] I used to do that. That's kind of my side job was like the merchandising side. And now we've hired someone full time, which has been great, because at one point I felt like I was doing like three full-time jobs and just like juggling them. But we hired Kara Tumlinson, who is the wife of Kevin Tumlinson, and she's just been phenomenal at it. It was hard, a hard job to hire someone into. Cause I wanted someone that was used to dealing with authors because it can be a little bit difficult coordinating authors, and so she had years of experience of working with Kevin and I was comfortable with that, and she's been wonderful.
[00:37:56] They're all trying different things. Kobo really believes in the authors. I think people don't give Apple enough credit. Like Apple's always been agnostic about where the book comes from. And so they've given since the very beginning of when they opened up Apple to indy books, they've given opportunities to authors, indy authors just from the very get go. Most of those opportunities are free. And so all you have to do is choose to participate in them. They generally require reducing your price for a certain period of time. But participate in those things.
[00:38:28] I highly recommend going to conferences where some of those different partners might be and getting to know them and have like an actual, face to face relationship with them, because that pays off.
[00:38:39] Matty: How would you reach out if you were interested in pursuing that?
[00:38:44] Dan: Just like looking into the conferences that people go to. Like NINC, Novelists, Inc., one of the conferences in the fall, is one where most of the retailers and the aggregators have a presence. That's a very good one to meet people. Although NINC does have a membership requirement, so you have to have sold so many books. But that one's a very good one. It used to be RWI Nationals, like everyone was there. I don't know if that will be the case going forward since they're going through some restructuring. 20 Books now, generally everyone is represented at the 20 Books conference in Vegas. So those are I would say the big three where you're likely to encounter a little bit of everyone.
[00:39:27] I certainly I've had people just reach out to like our support staff and ask if we had anybody who was going to be there that can meet with. Apple has a similar, like an email, you can email their support staff and they will forward it onto the right people. And then Kobo is probably the most friendly of all the retailers and they always have people and they're very easy to spot. Like the Apple people are ninjas and people can't point them out to you. Like it's hard to get their names, but Kobo, they're just all, you know, Mark Lefebvre set that program up, and of course he's a very people person.
[00:40:01] Matty: Yeah. I'm just, again, scanning my list, so I had Tara Cremin from Kobo on episode 31, talking about ebook pricing. So I can attest about the friendliness aspect. With regard to Apple, I have to say that I cringe going on to Apple because I'm a huge Apple fan. I have an iPhone, I'm Apple all the way, but they just make some ridiculously bad design decisions. And one of the things that makes me crazy is that they make all books look like a hard copy textbook on their site. I'm like, that's so unattractive.
[00:40:36] Dan: I hate it too.
[00:40:38] It's such a surprising decision. After years of them saying we don't accept 3D box art cover, because it might mislead people to think that they're getting a physical product, and then for them to go in and make their books look like a physical product, which just looks awkward to begin with.
[00:40:54] Matty: Yeah. It's just unattractive.
[00:40:56] Dan: I don't like it either. I pass that along to them. My biggest frustration right now with Apple is that when you purchase an audio book on Apple Books, you can't just play it on your Home Pod, if you have a Home Pod. I'm like, why would you like, you're so integrated on everything, and you don't have this one little feature that Amazon has had since they released the first Echo devices. Frustrating. But yeah, they make most of their money off apps and games. There was the big lawsuit. They went through, the price fixing lawsuit in 2012, 2013, somewhere around there. I think for a while, they stepped back from books. In the last year or two, I've seen them really invest in hiring more people for the Apple Books team. And really, I think they're gearing up to do some amazing things.
[00:41:44] And event with them kind of having a hands-off approach, they became the second biggest digital book vendor after Amazon, past Barnes and Noble. and for generally, for most people, Amazon is going to be the top.
[00:41:58] Apple is going to be second, at least for digital, Barnes and Noble, Kobo. Way down a list, maybe Google Play.
[00:42:06] Matty: Another thing that I'm not sure if this is a change in the industry or it's just a change in my awareness, but I distribute to many platforms through Draft2Digital, on Amazon, on Google Play, and on Kobo. Google Play and Kobo and Amazon direct to those platforms. And I realized that there were certain themes, like the one that springs to mind is Kobo readers really do like box sets. And so I don't know if Kobo readers always loved box sets and I've just recently heard about it and seen it play out in my own sales. But do you feel like the different retailers are starting to stake out specialties like that, that authors should be aware of?
[00:42:48] Dan: Yeah. I've noticed that since the very beginning at Draft2Digital and like when I give a workshop at the different conferences, I always mention that you want to make sure you have bundles, especially for Kobo. I think part of that is that places like Barnes and Noble and Kobo and Apple, you're not limited on the upper price in the way the Amazon tells you you can't price anything above 9.99 without taking a huge hit. So we've seen a lot of authors that make box sets and don't even list them on Amazon because the financial aspect of it wouldn't make sense. But you can put together, if you had a whole series, it was like 10 books, you could sell that on Kobo for 29.99, 39.99. It's possible.
[00:43:30] Matty: And when you're saying about taking the hit, that on Amazon, if a book is an e-book is priced over 9.99, you're only getting 35% rather than 70% royalties.
[00:43:39] Dan: Correct. Same thing with under 2.99 on Amazon you're penalized, and you make less. Which that's still the case at Kobo. I believe if you're under 2.99 they reduce your royalty rate. With Draft2Digital, we've negotiated everything to be the same. And so if it's 99 cents or 39.99, you're making the same amount. Apple's always been that way. And I wish some of the other vendors would follow suit. And maybe as Amazon goes through all this antitrust litigation, maybe they'll change their mind on that too.
[00:44:12] But yeah, from the very beginning, our outliers, like I have a list of outliers I look at every day of sales. Consistently at Kobo, box sets are like five out of 10, if not eight out of 10, which is not the same with the other retailers. Like we do have box sets hit the outliers at some of the other, but not that consistently. So that's been really interesting to watch. I know like Barnes and Noble even has a special page that they dedicate to bundles. And so we've got a lot of different bundles and box sets featured there. I've never noticed on Kobo, they have a specific place to advertise them. So I think it's just like a Canadian reader thing.
[00:44:51] There are differences in the demographics of the different platforms. For like Kobo and for Barnes and Noble, it's very much an empty nester, like 50, 60 plus dominant age for the people that buy the books. And so that affects what genres do well there. Apple seems to have captured a much younger crowd. Primarily I'd say female and somewhere in mid-twenties to early forties seems to be the Apple demographic. And so stuff like YA does better there. And like a lot of the different romance, like stuff I knew adult romance really took Apple by storm. Amazon seems to have a lot more of the male readers. And so like for some of the like hard sci-fi it seems like there's just a lot more men are using Amazon for their ebook purchases than some of the other platforms.
[00:45:36] But yeah, the whole bundle thing, we've seen that too. It's a phenomenon. I've always encouraged people to have them. Not only does it give you more products to sell and it looks better on like your various author pages where retailers have them. But there's places like Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and Apple do you have promotions that are exclusive to a box sets and bundles, and so if you don't have one, you can't apply for it.
[00:46:02] Matty: The last area I wanted to hit was discoverability platforms and approaches. So if you, again, look back through your history with indy publishing, what can you tap into in terms of experience you've seen in that evolution that people should be keeping in mind going forward?
[00:46:18] Dan: I'd say the number one thing I've seen is everyone should have an email list. Like you should, from the very beginning of your first book, start asking people at the end of your book, ask people to leave a review and ask people to join your newsletter. How you handle your newsletter, if it's just informational and you let them know when you have a new release, or if you keep in contact with them every few weeks and talk about your life, that's up to you and figuring out what your readers want. But you should be building that email list right from the very beginning, because it's the only platform you can control.
[00:46:49] If you build a big readership on Facebook, if you get people following your page on Facebook, we've seen Facebook has cut the organic visibility. So unless you're paying for your posts to reach all the people that are following you only like less than 5% of the people are seeing what you post on a page that your readers tell a Facebook they want to hear about, but Facebook wants money.
[00:47:12] So email you control, you can do a lot of stuff with email, lets you reach out to them like when you have a new release because the same thing with Amazon, Amazon lets readers follow an author. And supposedly you would think that being, I would get an email when the author has a new release, but it doesn't work that way.
[00:47:29] Amazon has rules about how often do they touch base with customers. And generally they're going to send them emails about much more expensive products with better margins than books. And so you'll hit or miss if Amazon will notify people when you've got a new release of going out there. So have an email list.
[00:47:48] I would say from my perspective, the second-best thing is apply for BookBub Feature Deals as often as possible. They've gotten certain rules, but I haven't seen any tool with a better ROI or reach more people. So like anytime someone's coming out of Amazon K U unlimited and wondering how to kick off their finding readers on the other platforms, BookBub does better than anything else. And so I highly recommend it.
[00:48:15] After that, I would say Amazon ads because with Amazon ads, the people that are looking at Amazon are on Amazon to buy something. And if they're seeing book ads are likely looking at books so those can be very highly effective. Facebook ads for certain genres worked very well. And then BookBub ads. I've seen a lot more authors having success with the BookBub ads that aren't the Featured Deal, where you are showing an ad at the end of their Featured Deal newsletter, and it's targeted to readers that are likely to enjoy hearing about your genre. I think those are all the big ones that I would encourage people to do.
[00:48:52] With email, you've got the opportunity. not only of reaching out to people, but you can use it to help you build a lookalike lists for doing Facebook ads. You can use your email lists to do an email swap with other authors within your genre. And so it gives you a host of different opportunities. I know a lot of people use some of the opportunities that BookFunnel offers to help them build their email list.
[00:49:17] Matty: Well, Dan, this has been such a great overview of what you've learned in the last eight years spent at Draft2Digital. And I just wanted to also mention that, and I wish I could have looked this up. I probably could have if I had spent enough time, but years ago you spent, I think, an hour with me on one of the Draft2Digital consults.
[00:49:38] So I think it was when you guys were doing live events and you can sign up for a consult. And I just thought that was so super generous of you and the other folks who were offering that and valued it so much. And so I'm happy to be able to tap into and share all your information with a wider audience than just me.
[00:49:57] Dan: We saw a competitor that was charging for those, and we were like, why would you charge people? Yeah, it bothered us. And so me, Mark, and Kevin carved some time out of our schedules to talk to people. Because we know it's daunting, like the sheer amount of things out there. Like I said, we've gotten really good at conferences, so people that are connected to the conference world and going to conferences and can afford going to conferences get to talk to us one-on-one, get to hear us in workshops. But we know there's a whole huge group of people that just for whatever reason, can't go to the conferences. And so we wanted to make ourselves open, much more open to them. And I'm really glad we did that because it's I really did get a chance to talk with people I never would have before. And it was great.
[00:50:40] Matty: Does Draft2Digital offer anything like that currently?
[00:50:44] Dan: So we went over to the format of doing more of the live streams. Like we do an ask us anything. Just about every month, we'll do one where we're streaming it to both YouTube and Facebook. Primarily just timewise it became where it was a little bit daunting as is using up a lot of time for us. So we've been looking at the things that are a little bit less that give us content that we can reuse elsewhere. We take all those live streams and make them into blog posts, podcasts, other videos. And so I think we'll probably do it again sometimes. We have done it around conferences.
[00:51:19] And so before the Australia romance writers conference, we've done those one-on-one consults. I think we'll probably do stuff like that where for certain events, like we're doing a lot more virtual events, I think some of the conferences that were physical we'll go to virtual for the near future.
[00:51:35] So we'll probably do that because I learned a lot from it, especially just hearing from people that were new to us. Because getting the same circle of like kind of an echo chamber of the people that are always at all the conferences. And so you think, what's going on in the author world and you're like, oh, there's something new over here that we didn't know about.
[00:51:54] Matty: I will clip this part out of this seems like a no starter, but would you be willing to offer, let's say a 20 minute consult with one listener of the podcast who leaves a comment on the episode?
Dan: Yeah, definitely.
Matty: That would be fantastic. Because I got so much good out of being able to talk to you one-on-one about that, and I know there's going to be an enthusiastic listener who would benefit from that.
[00:52:18] Dan: Definitely. That's a good idea.
[00:52:20] Matty: Thank you. And thank you just in general for sharing your insights. Please let the listeners know where they can find out more about you and Draft2Digital online.
[00:52:30] Dan: Well, you can follow me on Twitter. I share nearly all publishing news, a little bit of weird tech stuff, because I come from like a tech background, but it's a @DanWoodOk. Really, I follow a lot of people that I think everyone in the author community should be following. And people like Joanna Penn and Lindsay Buroker and some of the people that really have a good eye for what's going on in the industry. Kristine Kathryn Rusch. So I like to think that my Twitter can be helpful to people.
[00:52:56] And then I've been encouraging people lately to go to our blog is Draft2Digital.com/blog. We share like all those different interviews that we've done in video, we share those on the blog. You can read it, you can watch it, or you can listen to it as a podcast. And so that's a good way to learn a little bit more about Draft2Digital. And most of the interviews really aren't, they're not just about Draft2Digital. We talked to people about a little bit of everything. A lot of people I've mentioned today and the companies I mentioned, like BookBub and BookFunnel, we've had the owners or the reps from them on and just talk to them about what's going on in the industry. So I think those can be a good learning spot for people.
[00:53:36] Matty: Great. Well, we've given people plenty of food for thought in the conversation, so thank you again, Dan. This has been great.
[00:53:43] Dan: You're very welcome. Thanks for having me.
Links
What did you think of this episode? Leave a comment and let us know!
