Episode 114 - Making Smart Decisions about Your Distribution Strategy with Erin Wright
January 11, 2022
"I've been throwing up the praise hands for this entire interview!!! So epic!" —Mary K.
Erin Wright of Wide for the Win talks about some of the criteria that indy authors should consider when selecting your distribution platforms, using PublishDrive as an example. She talks about the dangers of putting all your eggs in one distribution basket, and the fact that an author can’t really claim to be wide if they rely on one distribution platform for their author business. Erin shares some insights into the choice of IngramSpark or the Draft2Digital print beta as a distribution option for your print books. And she also talks about how her experiment with being a creator on the road in her RV worked out for her and her husband, and the importance of the lesson that your creative adventures might take a different direction than you think they're going to when you start out.
USA Today Bestselling author Erin Wright has worked as a library director, barista, teacher, website designer, and ranch hand helping brand cattle, before settling into the career she’s always dreamed about: Author. As she’s also paying it forward to the author community as the founder and admin of the Wide for the Win Facebook Group.
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"I'm not anti-Amazon, I'm not anti-PublishDrive, I'm not anti-BookBub. What I am anti- is being really reliant upon any one place, any one company, because if that one company goes down, then you're in trouble." —Erin Wright
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[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Erin Wright. Hey, Erin, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Erin: Hello? Good, how are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, USA Today bestselling author Erin Wright has worked as a library director, barista, teacher, website designer, and ranch hand helping brand cattle, before settling into the career she's always dreamed about, author. And she's also paying it forward to the author community as the founder and admin of the Wide for the Win Facebook group, which I'm a member of and can highly recommend, and at one time, her bio included the intriguing note that she had embarked on the adventure of a lifetime traveling the country full-time in an RV.
[00:00:39] So the reason I invited Erin on the podcast is, we're going to be talking about determining a distribution strategy. But when I saw that about the RV, I had to ask about that because I have Chiclet, the mobile writing retreat that I created in my Ford Transit Connect. So anything about anyone living in a tiny home or RV or camper, I just think it's fascinating. So I wanted to start out our conversation asking you about your RV life and to what extent you've found it to be a help or hindrance to your author life, either from a creative point of view or from a business publishing point of view.
[00:01:14] Erin: Yeah. So, my husband and I thought it would be fun, since I write full time, doesn't matter where you live at, as long as you have the internet, you can be an author. And so we remodeled a trailer and hit the road and we're traveling full time. And we lasted about a year and then we came home, we'd had a bunch of breakdowns, whee, and had run through all of our savings.
[00:01:39] And so it was like, all right, let's go back to my parents' home, which is a farm in Idaho and rest up, get the repairs done, or save back up from having done the repairs and I hit the road again. And we were there when COVID hit, and all of the campgrounds shut down. And it was actually a really big problem within the RV and travel community that all of a sudden, if you were at a campground, you could stay there, but otherwise they wouldn't let anybody new in, and you couldn't travel from campground to campground. It causes really big ruckus, there were a lot of people who ended up homeless in their RV, which usually you can just move to the next spot, but nobody was accepting, and they shut down all the national parks, all the state parks, and so if you didn't have a home base to go to, you were in big trouble.
[00:02:27] And so luckily, my husband and I had my parents' farm. And so we were staying here and hanging out. And it’s funny that you ask about how well did it work for us? We enjoy traveling, but my husband at that point was doing a paid newsletter, like a BookBub, but on a very tiny scale, right? Like miniature version of BookBub, it was like $5 for a promotion, that sort of thing. And so he had that to do every day, but then after that it was like, what do I do?
[00:03:02] And so I don't know how it never really occurred to us, how it would be that he would keep himself occupied, I don't know, go for a walk, go fishing, he loves to go fishing, you know? And that worked okay, but he's kind of young to be in kind of a retirement status, and he was working 30 minutes a day, and then I was working full-time. I was working more than full-time because I was trying to write books and get things going and blah, blah, blah, and make money, and so he got actually kind of lonely. Like, I'm just traveling in the US and my wife stays in the camper and I'm out here staring at the trees. It really didn't work as well as we thought it was going to. Fascinating.
[00:03:43] So we come here, and my husband is very talented with his hands, like he can blacksmith and weld and cook and anything you can imagine, he's just really good with his hands. And so it's a farm, it's got lots of broken down, whatever, lots of old wood, and he starts making all these fun things out of it as something to do, to pass the time because he still doesn't have a job. And then he starts selling them at craft fairs and he starts making some pretty good money, because he's very talented. And after a while I was like, we're not going back on the road, are we? We're staying here!
[00:04:20] So yeah, I'm at my parents' house. My parents are actually quite religious and have left for a mission, and they will be back in April, so they will have been gone 18 months at that point, and we'd been watching over the family farm while they were gone, and then, when they come back, I'm going to be getting my inheritance early, so they are going to be splitting off part of the family farm and giving it to my husband and I now, rather than waiting for them to croak, which is good because we're in quite good shape. And I rather like them alive, turns out, and so we're going to get the property now so that we can build a house on it now. And then we will be here and as my parents get a little bit older, we'll be able to help take care of them and such.
[00:05:01] So it just really works out all the way around, we are now building a house, and we are definitely not traveling full-time. That bio was accurate at one point, and it's out in the world, but it's not accurate any longer.
[00:05:12] Matty: Well, it's interesting from a creativity point of view, that it sounds as if it really didn't make a difference to you from your own creative work whether you were on the road or in your house, but for your husband, when his creativity is tied to a welding shop or a smithy or piles of wood, understandably being mobile, unless you tow along a giant tractor trailer of a workshop.
[00:05:35] Erin: And we thought about like, how can we do something where you can do like mobile blacksmithing, and maybe he could go to Renaissance fairs and show people how to blacksmith or we were like trying to think of things to do.
[00:05:46] But yeah, you know what, it's funny, creativity for me, I don't need to be in any particular place or looking at the particular thing. Honestly, I'm more creative when I'm not stressed, and when my husband is happy, I'm much, much more relaxed. So it works better for us to have him have something to do, because that was really all it was, him being bored.
[00:06:09] And it's hard because then I feel like I should be off doing stuff with him, which is fun, but does not pay the bills. People think when you hit the road, when they go into an RV and drive around, they're on vacation. And so, there was kind of an expectation of, we're on the road, let's just have a good time all the time and you still need to pay bills and write and edit and all the admin stuff. And it just didn't work very well for us. So, it was definitely an adventure and I'm glad we did it. I'm glad we experienced it, but it's not really where our hearts are at full time.
[00:06:47] Matty: I always challenge myself to find some connection and transition between any two topics. And I think the one here is that you had this sort of safety net of your parents' place to go to. So you were venturing out on this very exciting adventure, but you had a place to go back to if things didn't work out, which I think there are lots of analogies in The Indy Author community about that.
[00:07:09] What you think you're going to be doing with your exciting new adventure isn't always what you end up doing with your exciting new adventure.
[00:07:14] But just be aware that your adventures might take a different direction than you think they're going to when you start out.
[00:07:20] Erin: Yeah, definitely, and I feel like that is absolutely true with the indy world and publishing. When I first started publishing, I was in KU, I was exclusive. In fact, when I very first started writing, I was actually ghostwriting for someone else. And so I don't know if anybody cares about that story or not, but that's actually how I got into writing, I was proofreading for authors. I had joined an author forum and I wasn't writing myself, because I don't know if you know this, but you have to be super cool to be an author and amazing, and I was not that. I mean, I would never actually write myself, but I could proofread, I was really good at that.
[00:07:58] And so I was proofreading, and I got this really terrible manuscript. I finally told the guy who sent it to me, I was like, this is so bad that it needs to be printed off and the pages set on fire before you delete the file.
[00:08:15] Matty: You didn't really say that to him!
[00:08:17] Erin: I did, but he didn't write it. He had hired a ghostwriter to write this. Yeah, I would never tell the author that. That would have been terrible. No, he did not write this. He wrote the outline and then he hired this gal to write this first half of the book. And when he got it back from her, it was so bad that he was like, I'm going to pay for the first half, but I'm not paying you for anything else because it's terrible. And then he gave it to me, wanting me to clean it up. And I was like, no. I was like, you know, what you should really do is I saw this and this and that and we came up with this totally different plot and he's well, you want to write it?
[00:08:52] And I'm like, me? I mean, I'm not an author, but I guess, if you give me a really detailed outline, which I had already plotted the book myself, I don't know what my deal was, but anyway, I was like, I could do that. Yeah, I could do that. I ended up making it a trilogy. And so the first three books that I ever wrote were not under my name and you can't find them, because I signed an NDA and so I can't tell you where to find them.
[00:09:20] But anyway, it's just kind of random, so I finish up this series for him and at the time I was going to school to get my degree to become a full-fledged teacher. I was a paraprofessional at that point, but I had my own classroom. And so I basically was a teacher, but I was going to school to become a real teacher, and then doing this on the side to make money. And my husband, God bless my husband, he looks at me one day and he's Erin, you're so stupid. I'm like, what? Why? Yeah, excuse me? And he's like, you are going to school, spending all this money in student loans so that you can make no money at all as a teacher and be super stressed out, because everybody knows how hard it is to be a teacher and all the testing, it's just really a rough profession to be in. He's like, so you're incurring all of this debt to become a teacher, when you could just write. You're making all this money for this random guy, why are you not writing yourself?
[00:10:19] I'm like, I can't be an author. Had three books published, I can't be an author. And so I was like, all right, fine, you're right. So, I quit school and quit teaching and became an author. And then funnily enough, I became a teacher anyway. So now I teach and I'm an author, it turns out I can do all of it, dammit.
[00:10:41] Matty: It's so interesting that in both those circumstances where you were teaching, but you wanted to become a real teacher or you were writing, but you wanted to become a real author and you were looking for the certificate that was going to prove that you could do it. It's such an interesting lesson to think about and barriers that people can put up themselves to those kinds of goals.
[00:10:59] Matty: So the topic I had posed was determining a distribution strategy and I think our initial contact was triggered by the fact that you had posted a caution against putting all your eggs in one basket.
[00:11:10] And it's an interesting topic because by definition, you had to be talking about the distributors that might be members of this community that you were sending this message out to.
[00:11:21] And so I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about your philosophy about not putting all your eggs in one basket. I think a lot of people would say, oh, they're wide. So they're by definition, not putting all their eggs in one basket, but what was the background of that piece of advice? And then how did you manage that, knowing that you had vendors and suppliers and service providers in that mix of the conversation?
[00:11:45] Erin: Yeah, specifically, the post that you're talking about is in reference to a distributor called PublishDrive. So there are four main distributors, Draft2Digital, Smashwords, StreetLib, PublishDrive. There are some other random, small ones out there, Fire and some other ones, but these are by far the most common ones.
[00:12:05] PublishDrive is out of Hungary, and they have reps in the group because I specifically invited them in there. And so, I absolutely know that there are reps in the group, because I was the one who was like, hey, come on down and join us, the water is fine. And that does make interesting, sometimes of, I am going to be saying something where the company is maybe not going to be as happy with me. They would rather that I say something else. But my philosophy is, I am there for the authors a hundred percent, I want the author to succeed. And if I feel like a company is offering something that is not as good for the authors, I will not advocate for it. I don't care which company I piss off.
[00:12:55] I mean, I am actually very, I don't know if you know, Becca Syme in Clifton Strengths and all of that, but I'm very high, I think I'm number two harmony. So I really have a hard time making people unhappy, like I just want everybody to be happy and kumbaya all their way through life, but I am very much an advocate for authors. And so if I have to make a company unhappy, then I will, because my primary goal and reason for being is to protect the author, not the companies. That is a very interesting walk to navigate sometimes, I will be honest with you.
[00:13:32] So what was going on is, PublishDrive reached out to AppSumo. And I imagine most authors know about AppSumo, if only because they do the Depositphotos special every year, and everybody gets super cheap photos, their social media graphics. But in case you don't know what AppSumo is, it's a company where they basically offer super limited, really good deals on products, company whatevers, apps that you can buy that could help you. And it's really just for the business community as a whole, not necessarily authors. So they'll have lots of things of like, buy this product and it will optimize your website or buy this product and it will help you find the perfect keywords for running Google Ads or whatever. So they have lots of these deals going on all the time.
[00:14:23] And they set one up with PublishDrive. And what made me nervous, and what made me post about this deal in Wide for the Win is the fact that PublishDrive is different. I said that there are four main distributors. PublishDrive is different than any of the rest of them in some pretty significant ways. These three distributors, Smashwords, Draft2Digital, StreetLib, operate in basically the same way. And then you've got PublishDrive over here, that's wildly in its own realm.
[00:14:53] Some of the reasons for that is that they get to a lot of storefronts. The only other distributor out there that is close to PublishDrive in terms of how many storefronts they reach is StreetLib. Smashwords and Draft2Digital reach significantly less storefronts, okay? So there's that.
[00:15:09] PublishDrive also wants to distribute all of the different versions of your book. So you do not just upload your ebook to them. I mean, you can, but what they would prefer that you do is use them for ebook, paperback, print of all kinds, audio, and all the translations that you do. They want to do all of it.
[00:15:30] So if you think about, if you were to use PublishDrive as your only source to distribute all of the different versions of your books out into the world, then there's a bottleneck in the system because you might think, I'm published wide. I'm on Barnes and Noble and Google Play and Amazon, and I've got my audiobooks on Audible and Chirp and all these other places. Oh, and I've got all my print books are out. So it's yeah, I'm totally as wide and as diversified as you can be.
[00:16:06] And what happens though, if your funnel, if that weak point right there, something happens to that company, and I'm not saying something's going to happen to PublishDrive. I'm just saying that if you were to use them for everything, you're actually not as wide as you think you are, because if there is an issue with that one, you got one weak spot, and if there's an issue with that, you have nothing, you have no career.
[00:16:33] Matty: And I think this came up if I recall, the post was right after the big Facebook downtime or around that time. So I think there were plenty of people who had built a business relying on Facebook and suddenly nada.
[00:16:48] Erin: Yes. Yeah, exactly. So you start to realize how you have a weak point, and that could get you into a lot of trouble. And it's actually true, no matter what your weak point is. So we talk in Wide for the Win about being wide and being diversified. But some people may rely on BookBub's featured deals. Like they get one every month, I actually know a gal who was getting them every month and she was doing great, and they make really good money. And then she went through a dry spell, and it was like 18 months, two years, something like that, where BookBub would not pick her at all for anything. And all of a sudden, her entire advertising strategy just got killed because she was completely reliant upon one company.
[00:17:38] And so, I'm not anti-Amazon, I'm not anti PublishDrive, I'm not anti BookBub. I just had a BookBub. I love BookBub, love you guys, you're the best! What I am anti is being really reliant upon any one place, any one company, because if that one company goes down, then you're in trouble. And so, Facebook ads is a really good example of that. When Facebook nose-dived, face-planted that day, and nothing worked, Facebook messenger didn't work, Facebook itself didn't work, I mean, that's like, ooh, my whole publishing life just flashed before my eyes. What am I going to do if this doesn't come back up?
[00:18:21] The other thing that PublishDrive is that, not only do they want all the different versions of your books, but they want you to use them for every single storefront. And Smashwords, StreetLib, and Draft2Digital technically will allow you to publish to Amazon. They'll do it, but you can talk to any of those vendors and ask them how much of their sales come from authors using them to get to Amazon. The answer is going to be very negligible. Most authors go direct to Amazon, and then will use a distributor for all the rest. You can do AMS ads through PublishDrive. You can actually go into KU through PublishDrive. No other distributor allows that. If you're using that distributor, you have to be wide, you cannot enroll your books into KU if you're using the other distributors. PublishDrive will allow you to do that. They really want every ounce of your business, your author publishing, to go through them. And that is scary, to me that's just terrifying.
[00:19:23] Matty: It's also a little bit odd, I know at one point PublishDrive was offering an option where it was more like a flat fee, which immediately made me nervous because I like platforms that when they earn more money, I earn more money and vice versa. So anything that say, pay me a flat fee and we'll help you sell stuff, I would rather give up some percentage because I feel like everybody's motivations are driving toward the same goal.
[00:19:53] Erin: Yeah, so that was several years ago now, I want to say, and if you were on PublishDrive previous to that, you could keep your grandfathered account. And that's what I did, so I still have10% of all sales goes to PublishDrive. I don't have a flat fee account.
[00:20:07] Nobody at PublishDrive told me this part. So you know, this is just me thinking my own thoughts. PublishDrive was the last of the four companies to come onto the scene. So Smashwords was first, Draft2Digital was second, then StreetLib, then PublishDrive. You already had these other options to get to all of these storefronts. So what ended up happening was, is a lot of people used PublishDrive to sign up for the really obscure storefronts out there that you couldn't get to from any other source. And they're well-known, they really publicize the fact that they can get you into China. I mean, that is kind of questionable, because it really depends on what you write because of course they've got censorship there and whatever, but they are the only distributor that will even attempt it, basically.
[00:20:54] If you look at how much income an author makes from selling through a distribution company, the vast majority of it, vast majority is going to be to the four wide storefronts, Amazon excluded, because like I said, everybody goes direct to Amazon pretty much, but Apple, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, and Kobo, is going to make up the vast majority of the income that distribution company is going to make from their authors, because that's where the vast majority of authors make their money.
[00:21:24] So if you are already either going direct or using another distribution company to get to one of those storefronts, and then you have kind of the major-minor leagues, like Scribd, Overdrive, places like that, that are not obscure, but not going to be one of your main drivers, all of those you can get to through one of the other distribution companies.
[00:21:47] So really all PublishDrive had left was like random companies nobody has ever heard of. Lots in Hungary because they're from Hungary, and China, and if you get one sale a year on these storefronts you are like kicking butt and taking names, right? That was the vast majority of their sales. They have to pay for hosting for all the files, employees to help with any customer service problems, the distribution and interactions with the companies that they're distributing to, cloud, electricity, it's quite expensive to be a distributor and you are going to make a 10% cut on some really tiny storefronts out there, and that's it. Nobody's using you for anything else because they've already picked their other distributors to use. And so they were getting the, I'm going to say the dregs of the publishing and they were probably losing money hand over fist.
[00:22:50] I mean, again, this is just conjecture, right? Nobody at PublishDrive told me any of this. If somebody at PublishDrive is listening to this, they're probably yelling at their screen, shut up! I mean, I think they're great people, I have nothing against the company, I'm just telling you what I'm seeing from the outside, is that they were most likely being used for a bunch of tiny storefronts. But your costs are the same, whether somebody uses you to distribute to one storefront or all the storefronts. You still have to host all those files. You still have to pay for all that electricity. Your costs are the same.
[00:23:23] One storefront makes you very little money, all of the storefronts make you a lot more money. And so I think that they were just struggling in terms of, we didn't take over the publishing world. Like I think they thought they were going to get a lot of people switching distribution companies. But people were pretty happy with where they were at right now. Why switch away, lose all your reviews, have to reset all of your URLs, redo all of that stuff, just to have exactly the same options that you had before? You're still losing the same amount in royalties to the distribution company. Why would you do that?
[00:23:55] And so I think that's when they decided to do the flat fee, because then it will encourage people to only use them if they're actually going to upload and use them for lots of storefronts. Because the flat fee can be anywhere, I want to say $10 a month to $100 a month that you pay, whether you make any money or not. So, if you were going to use PublishDrive and you upload a hundred books to them, and you would have to pay the $100 a month or whatever, you're not going to do that unless you're actually using them for lots of storefronts, because who's going to pay $100 a month to distribute all their ebooks to some random company, some random bookstore in Hungary nobody's ever heard of?
[00:24:39] So by putting a flat fee structure in place, and then they started weeding out all of the authors who were just going to use them for the random bits of stores out there that weren't making PublishDrive any money anyway. So that's why they ended up in this wildly different world than the other three, who still just do a flat percentage. They are the only ones who do this flat fee thing.
[00:25:03] And to bring it back around, they did this offer with AppSumo. And they said, we will give you so many uploads, so many books that you can sell through us for just one flat fee that you pay right now, and you never have to pay again. Because their normal structure is a flat fee per month. As long as you're using them, you're having to pay this flat fee through AppSumo.
[00:25:28] Erin: You were paying $100 and then you could use PublishDrive for forever and never pay any more distribution fees, never pay another flat fee for it, and they just distribute you for forever. And so I was just worried that someone would go and buy the AppSumo, use them for everything, and then if something were to happen to PublishDrive, then they would be in trouble. And so that's what encouraged or got me writing that post about, you really do need to be wide, not just pretend wide. And it's nothing against PublishDrive. I would have said the same thing ifDraft2Digital were doing that, SmashWords were doing that, StreetLib, and I still would have been like, don't do this. You don't want to lose that diversity and potentially put yourself into a bad situation.
[00:26:21] Matty: I really appreciate, not only what you just said about being very careful about the partners you're picking, but also the fact that wide doesn't necessarily mean the wider the better. And so, the reason I haven't pursued StreetLib for example, is that I would sort of use it the way you were talking about to get to the platforms that aren't being served by Draft2Digital. So I distribute direct to Amazon, I distribute direct to Kobo and Google Play, and to everybody else, I distribute through Draft2Digital.
[00:26:49] And even there, I mean, I forget how many markets Draft2Digital gets to, I don't know, 12, let's just say for giggles, 15, I don't know. And so, I'll have the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, so when I look at that, I think, do I really want to go to more countries? Not really, because if I make an extra 3 cents in Egypt, because I'm going through some other platform, do I care? No, because, and I know that listeners are going to get sick of hearing me say this, but you can't just say, oh well okay, 3 cents, why not? I'll do it, but you know, allocate some value to your time because it's going to take time and effort to get that.
[00:27:32] And so at some point you're seeing that a law of diminishing returns, and so any platform you consider going to, there's the mechanics of it, like the contractual mechanics of is there a royalty split, is a percentage or a flat fee or whatever, and then beyond that, is it even worth it? And again, I think that as you had mentioned, it is sometimes genre-specific, sometimes book-specific or author-specific, but wide is good, but wider is not necessarily better.
[00:28:02] Erin: And you're right, absolutely. It very much depends on you and your situation. I personally use StreetLib, and I make a fair amount of money from them, but that is because I use them for a company called Dreame, which is a serial app. And Dreame does best with romance, but they actually will do all fiction genres, okay? So if you write mysteries or thrillers or whatever, you can upload to Dreame too. And I'm only assuming that you've pronounced it Dreame. I've never actually had anybody tell me, but it's the word dream with the letter E at the end. If you just say dream then, why did you put the E at the end? So I'm thinking you're supposed to say Dreame, but you've been saying that wrong all this year or whatever.
[00:28:49] Anyway, they're another serial app. And I use StreetLib to get to Dreame for several reasons. I don't think your listeners really want to hear all the guts and glory of that, but basically, you don't want to go direct to Dreame. Okay, you just, you do not want to go direct to Dreame, period. And so I use StreetLib to get to Dreame, and I make on average $200 to $300 a month from Dreame. And some months when I do in-house promotions, I make upwards of $800 a month. So for me it's absolutely worth it.
[00:29:23] But for other people, it would be like, eh, my genre isn't really hot to trot on serial apps, I'm not going to get much traction, it's not worth my time.
[00:29:33] But the other time that I recommend StreetLib actually is, if you were doing Italian translations, because StreetLib is out of Italy, they are based in Italy and then they have an overseas headquarters in the US. But you'll still, at least I do, randomly we'll get emails from StreetLib in Italian, or I'll find like a part of their website is still in Italian and I have to use Google Translate to figure out what was going on. Like they've done most of it, but every once in a while, something will slip through and you're like, I don't speak Italian.
[00:30:09] But if you were to get your books translated into Italian, they distribute to a bunch of mom-and-pop stores in Italy, and they can get you some great in-house promotions for your Italian translated books in these Italian storefronts that no other distributor gets to, not even PublishDrive. And so you can have that extra oomph using them to distribute your Italian translations. So that's another time that I recommend using StreetLib. And if you were to ever get into Hungarian translations, you should use PublishDrive because they have the same thing, they'll get you into Hungarian storefronts that nobody else will get you into, so there's always those things.
[00:30:51] Matty: Should anyone be interested in translations, I can point people to episode 23, way back, REACHING NEW READERS THROUGH TRANSLATIONS with Emma Prince. That was mainly focused on German translations, but it's a good overview of what you have to have in place in order to think that translations are a good path to follow.
[00:31:08] And just generally, as we're talking about distribution, I want to point people to two recent episodes, which were 104 which was THE FOURTH OF THE SEVEN PROCESSES OF PUBLISHING with Orna Ross. That was specific to distribution, and also in episode 109, I talked about WIDE RETAILERS AND AGGREGATORS, NOT THE USUAL SUSPECTS with MK Williams, and that's where we had quite a bit of conversation about StreetLib, if anyone is interested in that. And I also posted an excerpt that referenced StreetLib on Twitter, and pretty soon StreetLib responded in Italian, so I had to get the Google Translate to see what they, they were very happy that I posted it though. When I saw the translation, it was nice.
[00:32:18] Matty: So I had another question, I know we're kind of all over the place a little bit, but one of the things that I really like about Wide for the Win is the sort of slogan bank over rank. And I'm wondering if you can talk about what you mean by bank over rank.
[00:32:34] Erin: Yeah. It's so funny because I somehow thought that maybe I come up with that, but I recently watched a presentation where part of her bio was, she had invented that phrase and I was like, huh, I must've just read it somewhere, and like stuck in the back of my brain and then came back out at useful time. So I did not invent that phrase, I just appropriated it.
[00:32:56] Matty: You absorbed it.
[00:32:58] Erin: I did, and spit it back out at the right spot. Good librarian.
[00:33:01] So, bank over rank is when you are in KU, KDP Select to be specific, you can have a strategy where you dump a lot of money into advertising, specifically, either AMS ads or Facebook ads. And that will drive up your rankings on Amazon, because you're just on Amazon. Drive up your rankings there, and that will help in terms of visibility, because it gets the Amazon algorithms ticking over and they start showing you in Also bought sections and they start showing you on all the lists and they start doing all of the internal algorithms.
[00:33:42] So putting a lot of money into advertising can equal a big payout if you get enough page reads that you then hit like all-star bonuses, right? There's actually a strategy from what I understand, I am definitely not the expert on this one, but a strategy out there where the whole thing is, you are going to break even between sales and page reads versus how much you're dumping into advertising, right? You make 20,000, you've put 20,000 into advertising. Where your profits actually come from is the all-star bonuses. So these are people who are playing in big leagues, where they will spend 20,000 or 100,000 in a month on advertising, which is completely insane to me. I have not, I've not spent a hundred thousand dollars on advertising since I became an author all the way up till today, and I've been an author for over five years now. So the idea of spending that much in one month gives me heart palpitations, makes me go over in the corner, hyperventilating, don't make me do it. I'm just not, I'm not a big risk taker, to put it mildly.
[00:34:53] So that is definitely the other side of that coin of rank over bank. It isn't so much how much you are making; it is how high in the store are you ranking. And then the idea being that you will eventually make that bank because you are so high. It will just naturally follow, because you'll get the all-star bonuses, sales and paid reads. And as a wide author, I'm here to break every wide author's heart, okay, look deeply into the camera and say it with me you guys, your rank is going to suck on Amazon, okay? It's just going to, and that's okay. Because no bank in the history of the universe has ever allowed you to print off your rank on Amazon, walk into the bank and hand to a teller, but look, I'm number five on amazon.com right now, surely I don't have to pay my rent this month. That's not a thing, it does not happen. It does not actually matter what your ranking is on Amazon. And that's really good for wide authors because Amazon weights books, they're very open about this. They weight a book whether it is in Kindle Unlimited or not. So if you're in Kindle Unlimited, your ranking in the storefront skyrockets. If you are out of Kindle Unlimited and you're wide, your ranking on Amazon drops, so you will have a terrible ranking.
[00:36:23] I mean, go and look at my catalog. I promise you, I will have books in the hundreds of thousands, and it just doesn't matter.
[00:36:33] As human beings are like, but look, it's so pretty, it's so high, whee! But it doesn't do anything because Amazon so heavily weights against wide authors in terms of showing you less in Also boughts, showing you lower in search results. The algorithms just do not work in the same way if you are wide.
[00:36:54] And so even if you do manage to get a really high ranking, despite having this bias against you on Amazon, it doesn't actually translate to income because you don't have those page reads to help make up and you don't have the all-star bonuses to help make up. So you're going to be high in the Amazon storefront and not making money, woo!
[00:37:13] So let's not do it. Yeah, so bank over rank is just the idea of, as human beings, we tend to be competitive. I want to be ranking well, and looking good, and so it's hard for us to ignore those ranking numbers because it's a pat on the back, it's a psychological pat on the back of, I'm doing great. But it doesn't honestly matter. So focus on what does matter, which are the ones and zeros hitting your bank account. Can you actually pay your electric bill this month? That would be exciting. So you know, that is where your emphasis really should be, and don't let your caveman brain get sidetracked by this ranking on the storefront that really just doesn't matter at all.
[00:38:04] Matty: well, I appreciate you being so kind and talking with me so long and I just had one other very specific question as a favor to a friend of mine. because just this morning, a friend got in touch with me and we were talking about, she had gone to Ingram. She had gotten what I think was incorrect information from a rep at Ingram that kind of ground her to a halt. And she had just did, getting on Ingram had never bubbled to the top of her list again. And so I said to her, well, Draft2Digital has a print. I'm not actually sure if it's out of beta yet, but it's been beta so long, they must've worked out many of the kinks. And, so I said, you could try that. And she said, oh, well, will that get me to all the same outlets that Ingram would. So I said, let me look it up. So I looked it up and I found out Draft2Digital, "Your D2D print book will be made available to Amazon and to all distribution channels served by Ingram, including Barnes and Noble and most independent bookstores in the US." So does that mean that a bookstore could go onto their catalog if they use Ingram and see your book? Or do they need to go somewhere else to see a book on Draft2Digital print?
[00:39:12] Erin: Yes. So a fantastic question. Draft2Digital uses IngramSpark to distribute their books. They're just an intermediary. So it's just like uploading to Draft2Digital to get to Apple. You do that. You're on Apple now, right? If you Draft2Digital print, you are using IngramSpark. There's just that intermediary between you two. And there are definitely reasons to do that. And there are definitely reasons not to do that. So again, it's back to the one-on-one discussions of like, in your case, is this a good idea or not?
[00:39:43] And so you could make a pretty strong case either direction, depending on the author's situation of whether using Draft2Digital beta print is a good plan for them, or if it's really a terrible idea, really depends on the author, but they are using IngramSpark, period. Or Ingram, excuse me, I think Ingram, if I understand correctly and I don't know that this really matters, but Ingram in IngramSpark. Technically two different companies, Ingram, spark works with Ingram. These kinds of like detailed business stuff just makes my head kind of hurts. So will I believe that they work with Ingram, but honestly, in terms of distribution does not matter at all.
[00:40:23] Matty: Well, Erin, thank you so much. This has been not only very, very educational, but also super fun. And I want to thank you for being on the podcast and please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you, your work, and Wide for the Win online.
[00:40:39] Erin: Oh, sure. If you really like steamy contemporary cowboys and firemen, you can find that at Erinwright.net, in otherwise, the author side of my life is all basically in the Facebook group. So you just go to Facebook and do a search for Wide for the Win, because I like alliteration, and join in there and start learning from all the other Widelings. There's so much information in that group. And lots of really cool people. It is one of the best places on the internet to hang out. So not that I'm biased or anything.
[00:41:15] Matty: Well, I'm a happy member, so I will second that. Yay. Thank you, Erin.
[00:41:21] Erin: Of course.
[00:00:05] Erin: Hello? Good, how are you?
[00:00:07] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, USA Today bestselling author Erin Wright has worked as a library director, barista, teacher, website designer, and ranch hand helping brand cattle, before settling into the career she's always dreamed about, author. And she's also paying it forward to the author community as the founder and admin of the Wide for the Win Facebook group, which I'm a member of and can highly recommend, and at one time, her bio included the intriguing note that she had embarked on the adventure of a lifetime traveling the country full-time in an RV.
[00:00:39] So the reason I invited Erin on the podcast is, we're going to be talking about determining a distribution strategy. But when I saw that about the RV, I had to ask about that because I have Chiclet, the mobile writing retreat that I created in my Ford Transit Connect. So anything about anyone living in a tiny home or RV or camper, I just think it's fascinating. So I wanted to start out our conversation asking you about your RV life and to what extent you've found it to be a help or hindrance to your author life, either from a creative point of view or from a business publishing point of view.
[00:01:14] Erin: Yeah. So, my husband and I thought it would be fun, since I write full time, doesn't matter where you live at, as long as you have the internet, you can be an author. And so we remodeled a trailer and hit the road and we're traveling full time. And we lasted about a year and then we came home, we'd had a bunch of breakdowns, whee, and had run through all of our savings.
[00:01:39] And so it was like, all right, let's go back to my parents' home, which is a farm in Idaho and rest up, get the repairs done, or save back up from having done the repairs and I hit the road again. And we were there when COVID hit, and all of the campgrounds shut down. And it was actually a really big problem within the RV and travel community that all of a sudden, if you were at a campground, you could stay there, but otherwise they wouldn't let anybody new in, and you couldn't travel from campground to campground. It causes really big ruckus, there were a lot of people who ended up homeless in their RV, which usually you can just move to the next spot, but nobody was accepting, and they shut down all the national parks, all the state parks, and so if you didn't have a home base to go to, you were in big trouble.
[00:02:27] And so luckily, my husband and I had my parents' farm. And so we were staying here and hanging out. And it’s funny that you ask about how well did it work for us? We enjoy traveling, but my husband at that point was doing a paid newsletter, like a BookBub, but on a very tiny scale, right? Like miniature version of BookBub, it was like $5 for a promotion, that sort of thing. And so he had that to do every day, but then after that it was like, what do I do?
[00:03:02] And so I don't know how it never really occurred to us, how it would be that he would keep himself occupied, I don't know, go for a walk, go fishing, he loves to go fishing, you know? And that worked okay, but he's kind of young to be in kind of a retirement status, and he was working 30 minutes a day, and then I was working full-time. I was working more than full-time because I was trying to write books and get things going and blah, blah, blah, and make money, and so he got actually kind of lonely. Like, I'm just traveling in the US and my wife stays in the camper and I'm out here staring at the trees. It really didn't work as well as we thought it was going to. Fascinating.
[00:03:43] So we come here, and my husband is very talented with his hands, like he can blacksmith and weld and cook and anything you can imagine, he's just really good with his hands. And so it's a farm, it's got lots of broken down, whatever, lots of old wood, and he starts making all these fun things out of it as something to do, to pass the time because he still doesn't have a job. And then he starts selling them at craft fairs and he starts making some pretty good money, because he's very talented. And after a while I was like, we're not going back on the road, are we? We're staying here!
[00:04:20] So yeah, I'm at my parents' house. My parents are actually quite religious and have left for a mission, and they will be back in April, so they will have been gone 18 months at that point, and we'd been watching over the family farm while they were gone, and then, when they come back, I'm going to be getting my inheritance early, so they are going to be splitting off part of the family farm and giving it to my husband and I now, rather than waiting for them to croak, which is good because we're in quite good shape. And I rather like them alive, turns out, and so we're going to get the property now so that we can build a house on it now. And then we will be here and as my parents get a little bit older, we'll be able to help take care of them and such.
[00:05:01] So it just really works out all the way around, we are now building a house, and we are definitely not traveling full-time. That bio was accurate at one point, and it's out in the world, but it's not accurate any longer.
[00:05:12] Matty: Well, it's interesting from a creativity point of view, that it sounds as if it really didn't make a difference to you from your own creative work whether you were on the road or in your house, but for your husband, when his creativity is tied to a welding shop or a smithy or piles of wood, understandably being mobile, unless you tow along a giant tractor trailer of a workshop.
[00:05:35] Erin: And we thought about like, how can we do something where you can do like mobile blacksmithing, and maybe he could go to Renaissance fairs and show people how to blacksmith or we were like trying to think of things to do.
[00:05:46] But yeah, you know what, it's funny, creativity for me, I don't need to be in any particular place or looking at the particular thing. Honestly, I'm more creative when I'm not stressed, and when my husband is happy, I'm much, much more relaxed. So it works better for us to have him have something to do, because that was really all it was, him being bored.
[00:06:09] And it's hard because then I feel like I should be off doing stuff with him, which is fun, but does not pay the bills. People think when you hit the road, when they go into an RV and drive around, they're on vacation. And so, there was kind of an expectation of, we're on the road, let's just have a good time all the time and you still need to pay bills and write and edit and all the admin stuff. And it just didn't work very well for us. So, it was definitely an adventure and I'm glad we did it. I'm glad we experienced it, but it's not really where our hearts are at full time.
[00:06:47] Matty: I always challenge myself to find some connection and transition between any two topics. And I think the one here is that you had this sort of safety net of your parents' place to go to. So you were venturing out on this very exciting adventure, but you had a place to go back to if things didn't work out, which I think there are lots of analogies in The Indy Author community about that.
[00:07:09] What you think you're going to be doing with your exciting new adventure isn't always what you end up doing with your exciting new adventure.
[00:07:14] But just be aware that your adventures might take a different direction than you think they're going to when you start out.
[00:07:20] Erin: Yeah, definitely, and I feel like that is absolutely true with the indy world and publishing. When I first started publishing, I was in KU, I was exclusive. In fact, when I very first started writing, I was actually ghostwriting for someone else. And so I don't know if anybody cares about that story or not, but that's actually how I got into writing, I was proofreading for authors. I had joined an author forum and I wasn't writing myself, because I don't know if you know this, but you have to be super cool to be an author and amazing, and I was not that. I mean, I would never actually write myself, but I could proofread, I was really good at that.
[00:07:58] And so I was proofreading, and I got this really terrible manuscript. I finally told the guy who sent it to me, I was like, this is so bad that it needs to be printed off and the pages set on fire before you delete the file.
[00:08:15] Matty: You didn't really say that to him!
[00:08:17] Erin: I did, but he didn't write it. He had hired a ghostwriter to write this. Yeah, I would never tell the author that. That would have been terrible. No, he did not write this. He wrote the outline and then he hired this gal to write this first half of the book. And when he got it back from her, it was so bad that he was like, I'm going to pay for the first half, but I'm not paying you for anything else because it's terrible. And then he gave it to me, wanting me to clean it up. And I was like, no. I was like, you know, what you should really do is I saw this and this and that and we came up with this totally different plot and he's well, you want to write it?
[00:08:52] And I'm like, me? I mean, I'm not an author, but I guess, if you give me a really detailed outline, which I had already plotted the book myself, I don't know what my deal was, but anyway, I was like, I could do that. Yeah, I could do that. I ended up making it a trilogy. And so the first three books that I ever wrote were not under my name and you can't find them, because I signed an NDA and so I can't tell you where to find them.
[00:09:20] But anyway, it's just kind of random, so I finish up this series for him and at the time I was going to school to get my degree to become a full-fledged teacher. I was a paraprofessional at that point, but I had my own classroom. And so I basically was a teacher, but I was going to school to become a real teacher, and then doing this on the side to make money. And my husband, God bless my husband, he looks at me one day and he's Erin, you're so stupid. I'm like, what? Why? Yeah, excuse me? And he's like, you are going to school, spending all this money in student loans so that you can make no money at all as a teacher and be super stressed out, because everybody knows how hard it is to be a teacher and all the testing, it's just really a rough profession to be in. He's like, so you're incurring all of this debt to become a teacher, when you could just write. You're making all this money for this random guy, why are you not writing yourself?
[00:10:19] I'm like, I can't be an author. Had three books published, I can't be an author. And so I was like, all right, fine, you're right. So, I quit school and quit teaching and became an author. And then funnily enough, I became a teacher anyway. So now I teach and I'm an author, it turns out I can do all of it, dammit.
[00:10:41] Matty: It's so interesting that in both those circumstances where you were teaching, but you wanted to become a real teacher or you were writing, but you wanted to become a real author and you were looking for the certificate that was going to prove that you could do it. It's such an interesting lesson to think about and barriers that people can put up themselves to those kinds of goals.
[00:10:59] Matty: So the topic I had posed was determining a distribution strategy and I think our initial contact was triggered by the fact that you had posted a caution against putting all your eggs in one basket.
[00:11:10] And it's an interesting topic because by definition, you had to be talking about the distributors that might be members of this community that you were sending this message out to.
[00:11:21] And so I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about your philosophy about not putting all your eggs in one basket. I think a lot of people would say, oh, they're wide. So they're by definition, not putting all their eggs in one basket, but what was the background of that piece of advice? And then how did you manage that, knowing that you had vendors and suppliers and service providers in that mix of the conversation?
[00:11:45] Erin: Yeah, specifically, the post that you're talking about is in reference to a distributor called PublishDrive. So there are four main distributors, Draft2Digital, Smashwords, StreetLib, PublishDrive. There are some other random, small ones out there, Fire and some other ones, but these are by far the most common ones.
[00:12:05] PublishDrive is out of Hungary, and they have reps in the group because I specifically invited them in there. And so, I absolutely know that there are reps in the group, because I was the one who was like, hey, come on down and join us, the water is fine. And that does make interesting, sometimes of, I am going to be saying something where the company is maybe not going to be as happy with me. They would rather that I say something else. But my philosophy is, I am there for the authors a hundred percent, I want the author to succeed. And if I feel like a company is offering something that is not as good for the authors, I will not advocate for it. I don't care which company I piss off.
[00:12:55] I mean, I am actually very, I don't know if you know, Becca Syme in Clifton Strengths and all of that, but I'm very high, I think I'm number two harmony. So I really have a hard time making people unhappy, like I just want everybody to be happy and kumbaya all their way through life, but I am very much an advocate for authors. And so if I have to make a company unhappy, then I will, because my primary goal and reason for being is to protect the author, not the companies. That is a very interesting walk to navigate sometimes, I will be honest with you.
[00:13:32] So what was going on is, PublishDrive reached out to AppSumo. And I imagine most authors know about AppSumo, if only because they do the Depositphotos special every year, and everybody gets super cheap photos, their social media graphics. But in case you don't know what AppSumo is, it's a company where they basically offer super limited, really good deals on products, company whatevers, apps that you can buy that could help you. And it's really just for the business community as a whole, not necessarily authors. So they'll have lots of things of like, buy this product and it will optimize your website or buy this product and it will help you find the perfect keywords for running Google Ads or whatever. So they have lots of these deals going on all the time.
[00:14:23] And they set one up with PublishDrive. And what made me nervous, and what made me post about this deal in Wide for the Win is the fact that PublishDrive is different. I said that there are four main distributors. PublishDrive is different than any of the rest of them in some pretty significant ways. These three distributors, Smashwords, Draft2Digital, StreetLib, operate in basically the same way. And then you've got PublishDrive over here, that's wildly in its own realm.
[00:14:53] Some of the reasons for that is that they get to a lot of storefronts. The only other distributor out there that is close to PublishDrive in terms of how many storefronts they reach is StreetLib. Smashwords and Draft2Digital reach significantly less storefronts, okay? So there's that.
[00:15:09] PublishDrive also wants to distribute all of the different versions of your book. So you do not just upload your ebook to them. I mean, you can, but what they would prefer that you do is use them for ebook, paperback, print of all kinds, audio, and all the translations that you do. They want to do all of it.
[00:15:30] So if you think about, if you were to use PublishDrive as your only source to distribute all of the different versions of your books out into the world, then there's a bottleneck in the system because you might think, I'm published wide. I'm on Barnes and Noble and Google Play and Amazon, and I've got my audiobooks on Audible and Chirp and all these other places. Oh, and I've got all my print books are out. So it's yeah, I'm totally as wide and as diversified as you can be.
[00:16:06] And what happens though, if your funnel, if that weak point right there, something happens to that company, and I'm not saying something's going to happen to PublishDrive. I'm just saying that if you were to use them for everything, you're actually not as wide as you think you are, because if there is an issue with that one, you got one weak spot, and if there's an issue with that, you have nothing, you have no career.
[00:16:33] Matty: And I think this came up if I recall, the post was right after the big Facebook downtime or around that time. So I think there were plenty of people who had built a business relying on Facebook and suddenly nada.
[00:16:48] Erin: Yes. Yeah, exactly. So you start to realize how you have a weak point, and that could get you into a lot of trouble. And it's actually true, no matter what your weak point is. So we talk in Wide for the Win about being wide and being diversified. But some people may rely on BookBub's featured deals. Like they get one every month, I actually know a gal who was getting them every month and she was doing great, and they make really good money. And then she went through a dry spell, and it was like 18 months, two years, something like that, where BookBub would not pick her at all for anything. And all of a sudden, her entire advertising strategy just got killed because she was completely reliant upon one company.
[00:17:38] And so, I'm not anti-Amazon, I'm not anti PublishDrive, I'm not anti BookBub. I just had a BookBub. I love BookBub, love you guys, you're the best! What I am anti is being really reliant upon any one place, any one company, because if that one company goes down, then you're in trouble. And so, Facebook ads is a really good example of that. When Facebook nose-dived, face-planted that day, and nothing worked, Facebook messenger didn't work, Facebook itself didn't work, I mean, that's like, ooh, my whole publishing life just flashed before my eyes. What am I going to do if this doesn't come back up?
[00:18:21] The other thing that PublishDrive is that, not only do they want all the different versions of your books, but they want you to use them for every single storefront. And Smashwords, StreetLib, and Draft2Digital technically will allow you to publish to Amazon. They'll do it, but you can talk to any of those vendors and ask them how much of their sales come from authors using them to get to Amazon. The answer is going to be very negligible. Most authors go direct to Amazon, and then will use a distributor for all the rest. You can do AMS ads through PublishDrive. You can actually go into KU through PublishDrive. No other distributor allows that. If you're using that distributor, you have to be wide, you cannot enroll your books into KU if you're using the other distributors. PublishDrive will allow you to do that. They really want every ounce of your business, your author publishing, to go through them. And that is scary, to me that's just terrifying.
[00:19:23] Matty: It's also a little bit odd, I know at one point PublishDrive was offering an option where it was more like a flat fee, which immediately made me nervous because I like platforms that when they earn more money, I earn more money and vice versa. So anything that say, pay me a flat fee and we'll help you sell stuff, I would rather give up some percentage because I feel like everybody's motivations are driving toward the same goal.
[00:19:53] Erin: Yeah, so that was several years ago now, I want to say, and if you were on PublishDrive previous to that, you could keep your grandfathered account. And that's what I did, so I still have10% of all sales goes to PublishDrive. I don't have a flat fee account.
[00:20:07] Nobody at PublishDrive told me this part. So you know, this is just me thinking my own thoughts. PublishDrive was the last of the four companies to come onto the scene. So Smashwords was first, Draft2Digital was second, then StreetLib, then PublishDrive. You already had these other options to get to all of these storefronts. So what ended up happening was, is a lot of people used PublishDrive to sign up for the really obscure storefronts out there that you couldn't get to from any other source. And they're well-known, they really publicize the fact that they can get you into China. I mean, that is kind of questionable, because it really depends on what you write because of course they've got censorship there and whatever, but they are the only distributor that will even attempt it, basically.
[00:20:54] If you look at how much income an author makes from selling through a distribution company, the vast majority of it, vast majority is going to be to the four wide storefronts, Amazon excluded, because like I said, everybody goes direct to Amazon pretty much, but Apple, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, and Kobo, is going to make up the vast majority of the income that distribution company is going to make from their authors, because that's where the vast majority of authors make their money.
[00:21:24] So if you are already either going direct or using another distribution company to get to one of those storefronts, and then you have kind of the major-minor leagues, like Scribd, Overdrive, places like that, that are not obscure, but not going to be one of your main drivers, all of those you can get to through one of the other distribution companies.
[00:21:47] So really all PublishDrive had left was like random companies nobody has ever heard of. Lots in Hungary because they're from Hungary, and China, and if you get one sale a year on these storefronts you are like kicking butt and taking names, right? That was the vast majority of their sales. They have to pay for hosting for all the files, employees to help with any customer service problems, the distribution and interactions with the companies that they're distributing to, cloud, electricity, it's quite expensive to be a distributor and you are going to make a 10% cut on some really tiny storefronts out there, and that's it. Nobody's using you for anything else because they've already picked their other distributors to use. And so they were getting the, I'm going to say the dregs of the publishing and they were probably losing money hand over fist.
[00:22:50] I mean, again, this is just conjecture, right? Nobody at PublishDrive told me any of this. If somebody at PublishDrive is listening to this, they're probably yelling at their screen, shut up! I mean, I think they're great people, I have nothing against the company, I'm just telling you what I'm seeing from the outside, is that they were most likely being used for a bunch of tiny storefronts. But your costs are the same, whether somebody uses you to distribute to one storefront or all the storefronts. You still have to host all those files. You still have to pay for all that electricity. Your costs are the same.
[00:23:23] One storefront makes you very little money, all of the storefronts make you a lot more money. And so I think that they were just struggling in terms of, we didn't take over the publishing world. Like I think they thought they were going to get a lot of people switching distribution companies. But people were pretty happy with where they were at right now. Why switch away, lose all your reviews, have to reset all of your URLs, redo all of that stuff, just to have exactly the same options that you had before? You're still losing the same amount in royalties to the distribution company. Why would you do that?
[00:23:55] And so I think that's when they decided to do the flat fee, because then it will encourage people to only use them if they're actually going to upload and use them for lots of storefronts. Because the flat fee can be anywhere, I want to say $10 a month to $100 a month that you pay, whether you make any money or not. So, if you were going to use PublishDrive and you upload a hundred books to them, and you would have to pay the $100 a month or whatever, you're not going to do that unless you're actually using them for lots of storefronts, because who's going to pay $100 a month to distribute all their ebooks to some random company, some random bookstore in Hungary nobody's ever heard of?
[00:24:39] So by putting a flat fee structure in place, and then they started weeding out all of the authors who were just going to use them for the random bits of stores out there that weren't making PublishDrive any money anyway. So that's why they ended up in this wildly different world than the other three, who still just do a flat percentage. They are the only ones who do this flat fee thing.
[00:25:03] And to bring it back around, they did this offer with AppSumo. And they said, we will give you so many uploads, so many books that you can sell through us for just one flat fee that you pay right now, and you never have to pay again. Because their normal structure is a flat fee per month. As long as you're using them, you're having to pay this flat fee through AppSumo.
[00:25:28] Erin: You were paying $100 and then you could use PublishDrive for forever and never pay any more distribution fees, never pay another flat fee for it, and they just distribute you for forever. And so I was just worried that someone would go and buy the AppSumo, use them for everything, and then if something were to happen to PublishDrive, then they would be in trouble. And so that's what encouraged or got me writing that post about, you really do need to be wide, not just pretend wide. And it's nothing against PublishDrive. I would have said the same thing ifDraft2Digital were doing that, SmashWords were doing that, StreetLib, and I still would have been like, don't do this. You don't want to lose that diversity and potentially put yourself into a bad situation.
[00:26:21] Matty: I really appreciate, not only what you just said about being very careful about the partners you're picking, but also the fact that wide doesn't necessarily mean the wider the better. And so, the reason I haven't pursued StreetLib for example, is that I would sort of use it the way you were talking about to get to the platforms that aren't being served by Draft2Digital. So I distribute direct to Amazon, I distribute direct to Kobo and Google Play, and to everybody else, I distribute through Draft2Digital.
[00:26:49] And even there, I mean, I forget how many markets Draft2Digital gets to, I don't know, 12, let's just say for giggles, 15, I don't know. And so, I'll have the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, so when I look at that, I think, do I really want to go to more countries? Not really, because if I make an extra 3 cents in Egypt, because I'm going through some other platform, do I care? No, because, and I know that listeners are going to get sick of hearing me say this, but you can't just say, oh well okay, 3 cents, why not? I'll do it, but you know, allocate some value to your time because it's going to take time and effort to get that.
[00:27:32] And so at some point you're seeing that a law of diminishing returns, and so any platform you consider going to, there's the mechanics of it, like the contractual mechanics of is there a royalty split, is a percentage or a flat fee or whatever, and then beyond that, is it even worth it? And again, I think that as you had mentioned, it is sometimes genre-specific, sometimes book-specific or author-specific, but wide is good, but wider is not necessarily better.
[00:28:02] Erin: And you're right, absolutely. It very much depends on you and your situation. I personally use StreetLib, and I make a fair amount of money from them, but that is because I use them for a company called Dreame, which is a serial app. And Dreame does best with romance, but they actually will do all fiction genres, okay? So if you write mysteries or thrillers or whatever, you can upload to Dreame too. And I'm only assuming that you've pronounced it Dreame. I've never actually had anybody tell me, but it's the word dream with the letter E at the end. If you just say dream then, why did you put the E at the end? So I'm thinking you're supposed to say Dreame, but you've been saying that wrong all this year or whatever.
[00:28:49] Anyway, they're another serial app. And I use StreetLib to get to Dreame for several reasons. I don't think your listeners really want to hear all the guts and glory of that, but basically, you don't want to go direct to Dreame. Okay, you just, you do not want to go direct to Dreame, period. And so I use StreetLib to get to Dreame, and I make on average $200 to $300 a month from Dreame. And some months when I do in-house promotions, I make upwards of $800 a month. So for me it's absolutely worth it.
[00:29:23] But for other people, it would be like, eh, my genre isn't really hot to trot on serial apps, I'm not going to get much traction, it's not worth my time.
[00:29:33] But the other time that I recommend StreetLib actually is, if you were doing Italian translations, because StreetLib is out of Italy, they are based in Italy and then they have an overseas headquarters in the US. But you'll still, at least I do, randomly we'll get emails from StreetLib in Italian, or I'll find like a part of their website is still in Italian and I have to use Google Translate to figure out what was going on. Like they've done most of it, but every once in a while, something will slip through and you're like, I don't speak Italian.
[00:30:09] But if you were to get your books translated into Italian, they distribute to a bunch of mom-and-pop stores in Italy, and they can get you some great in-house promotions for your Italian translated books in these Italian storefronts that no other distributor gets to, not even PublishDrive. And so you can have that extra oomph using them to distribute your Italian translations. So that's another time that I recommend using StreetLib. And if you were to ever get into Hungarian translations, you should use PublishDrive because they have the same thing, they'll get you into Hungarian storefronts that nobody else will get you into, so there's always those things.
[00:30:51] Matty: Should anyone be interested in translations, I can point people to episode 23, way back, REACHING NEW READERS THROUGH TRANSLATIONS with Emma Prince. That was mainly focused on German translations, but it's a good overview of what you have to have in place in order to think that translations are a good path to follow.
[00:31:08] And just generally, as we're talking about distribution, I want to point people to two recent episodes, which were 104 which was THE FOURTH OF THE SEVEN PROCESSES OF PUBLISHING with Orna Ross. That was specific to distribution, and also in episode 109, I talked about WIDE RETAILERS AND AGGREGATORS, NOT THE USUAL SUSPECTS with MK Williams, and that's where we had quite a bit of conversation about StreetLib, if anyone is interested in that. And I also posted an excerpt that referenced StreetLib on Twitter, and pretty soon StreetLib responded in Italian, so I had to get the Google Translate to see what they, they were very happy that I posted it though. When I saw the translation, it was nice.
[00:32:18] Matty: So I had another question, I know we're kind of all over the place a little bit, but one of the things that I really like about Wide for the Win is the sort of slogan bank over rank. And I'm wondering if you can talk about what you mean by bank over rank.
[00:32:34] Erin: Yeah. It's so funny because I somehow thought that maybe I come up with that, but I recently watched a presentation where part of her bio was, she had invented that phrase and I was like, huh, I must've just read it somewhere, and like stuck in the back of my brain and then came back out at useful time. So I did not invent that phrase, I just appropriated it.
[00:32:56] Matty: You absorbed it.
[00:32:58] Erin: I did, and spit it back out at the right spot. Good librarian.
[00:33:01] So, bank over rank is when you are in KU, KDP Select to be specific, you can have a strategy where you dump a lot of money into advertising, specifically, either AMS ads or Facebook ads. And that will drive up your rankings on Amazon, because you're just on Amazon. Drive up your rankings there, and that will help in terms of visibility, because it gets the Amazon algorithms ticking over and they start showing you in Also bought sections and they start showing you on all the lists and they start doing all of the internal algorithms.
[00:33:42] So putting a lot of money into advertising can equal a big payout if you get enough page reads that you then hit like all-star bonuses, right? There's actually a strategy from what I understand, I am definitely not the expert on this one, but a strategy out there where the whole thing is, you are going to break even between sales and page reads versus how much you're dumping into advertising, right? You make 20,000, you've put 20,000 into advertising. Where your profits actually come from is the all-star bonuses. So these are people who are playing in big leagues, where they will spend 20,000 or 100,000 in a month on advertising, which is completely insane to me. I have not, I've not spent a hundred thousand dollars on advertising since I became an author all the way up till today, and I've been an author for over five years now. So the idea of spending that much in one month gives me heart palpitations, makes me go over in the corner, hyperventilating, don't make me do it. I'm just not, I'm not a big risk taker, to put it mildly.
[00:34:53] So that is definitely the other side of that coin of rank over bank. It isn't so much how much you are making; it is how high in the store are you ranking. And then the idea being that you will eventually make that bank because you are so high. It will just naturally follow, because you'll get the all-star bonuses, sales and paid reads. And as a wide author, I'm here to break every wide author's heart, okay, look deeply into the camera and say it with me you guys, your rank is going to suck on Amazon, okay? It's just going to, and that's okay. Because no bank in the history of the universe has ever allowed you to print off your rank on Amazon, walk into the bank and hand to a teller, but look, I'm number five on amazon.com right now, surely I don't have to pay my rent this month. That's not a thing, it does not happen. It does not actually matter what your ranking is on Amazon. And that's really good for wide authors because Amazon weights books, they're very open about this. They weight a book whether it is in Kindle Unlimited or not. So if you're in Kindle Unlimited, your ranking in the storefront skyrockets. If you are out of Kindle Unlimited and you're wide, your ranking on Amazon drops, so you will have a terrible ranking.
[00:36:23] I mean, go and look at my catalog. I promise you, I will have books in the hundreds of thousands, and it just doesn't matter.
[00:36:33] As human beings are like, but look, it's so pretty, it's so high, whee! But it doesn't do anything because Amazon so heavily weights against wide authors in terms of showing you less in Also boughts, showing you lower in search results. The algorithms just do not work in the same way if you are wide.
[00:36:54] And so even if you do manage to get a really high ranking, despite having this bias against you on Amazon, it doesn't actually translate to income because you don't have those page reads to help make up and you don't have the all-star bonuses to help make up. So you're going to be high in the Amazon storefront and not making money, woo!
[00:37:13] So let's not do it. Yeah, so bank over rank is just the idea of, as human beings, we tend to be competitive. I want to be ranking well, and looking good, and so it's hard for us to ignore those ranking numbers because it's a pat on the back, it's a psychological pat on the back of, I'm doing great. But it doesn't honestly matter. So focus on what does matter, which are the ones and zeros hitting your bank account. Can you actually pay your electric bill this month? That would be exciting. So you know, that is where your emphasis really should be, and don't let your caveman brain get sidetracked by this ranking on the storefront that really just doesn't matter at all.
[00:38:04] Matty: well, I appreciate you being so kind and talking with me so long and I just had one other very specific question as a favor to a friend of mine. because just this morning, a friend got in touch with me and we were talking about, she had gone to Ingram. She had gotten what I think was incorrect information from a rep at Ingram that kind of ground her to a halt. And she had just did, getting on Ingram had never bubbled to the top of her list again. And so I said to her, well, Draft2Digital has a print. I'm not actually sure if it's out of beta yet, but it's been beta so long, they must've worked out many of the kinks. And, so I said, you could try that. And she said, oh, well, will that get me to all the same outlets that Ingram would. So I said, let me look it up. So I looked it up and I found out Draft2Digital, "Your D2D print book will be made available to Amazon and to all distribution channels served by Ingram, including Barnes and Noble and most independent bookstores in the US." So does that mean that a bookstore could go onto their catalog if they use Ingram and see your book? Or do they need to go somewhere else to see a book on Draft2Digital print?
[00:39:12] Erin: Yes. So a fantastic question. Draft2Digital uses IngramSpark to distribute their books. They're just an intermediary. So it's just like uploading to Draft2Digital to get to Apple. You do that. You're on Apple now, right? If you Draft2Digital print, you are using IngramSpark. There's just that intermediary between you two. And there are definitely reasons to do that. And there are definitely reasons not to do that. So again, it's back to the one-on-one discussions of like, in your case, is this a good idea or not?
[00:39:43] And so you could make a pretty strong case either direction, depending on the author's situation of whether using Draft2Digital beta print is a good plan for them, or if it's really a terrible idea, really depends on the author, but they are using IngramSpark, period. Or Ingram, excuse me, I think Ingram, if I understand correctly and I don't know that this really matters, but Ingram in IngramSpark. Technically two different companies, Ingram, spark works with Ingram. These kinds of like detailed business stuff just makes my head kind of hurts. So will I believe that they work with Ingram, but honestly, in terms of distribution does not matter at all.
[00:40:23] Matty: Well, Erin, thank you so much. This has been not only very, very educational, but also super fun. And I want to thank you for being on the podcast and please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you, your work, and Wide for the Win online.
[00:40:39] Erin: Oh, sure. If you really like steamy contemporary cowboys and firemen, you can find that at Erinwright.net, in otherwise, the author side of my life is all basically in the Facebook group. So you just go to Facebook and do a search for Wide for the Win, because I like alliteration, and join in there and start learning from all the other Widelings. There's so much information in that group. And lots of really cool people. It is one of the best places on the internet to hang out. So not that I'm biased or anything.
[00:41:15] Matty: Well, I'm a happy member, so I will second that. Yay. Thank you, Erin.
[00:41:21] Erin: Of course.
Links
Personal update:
The Writer's Mindset Book Launch Tips for 2022
For links to Matty's upcoming and recent events, click here.
Interview:
Wide for the Win Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/556186621558858
Website: https://erinwright.net/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorErinWright/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/authorerinwright/
Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/erin-wright
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/erinwright
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Erin-Wright/e/B01M0CEXYM/
Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/WrightsRomanceReads
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/erinwrightbooks/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV1BK4ouI-qfTWvcHVg56tA
Twitter: https://twitter.com/erinwrightlv
Episode 104 - The Fourth Process of Publishing: Distribution with Orna Ross
The Writer's Mindset Book Launch Tips for 2022
For links to Matty's upcoming and recent events, click here.
Interview:
Wide for the Win Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/556186621558858
Website: https://erinwright.net/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorErinWright/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/authorerinwright/
Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/erin-wright
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/erinwright
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Erin-Wright/e/B01M0CEXYM/
Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/WrightsRomanceReads
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/erinwrightbooks/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV1BK4ouI-qfTWvcHVg56tA
Twitter: https://twitter.com/erinwrightlv
Episode 104 - The Fourth Process of Publishing: Distribution with Orna Ross
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