Episode 120 - Draft2Digital Updates: Smashwords and Print with Kris Austin
February 15, 2022
Kris Austin, the CEO of Draft2Digital, discusses D2D's recent acquisition of Smashwords. We discuss the companies' similar philosophies, and how the combination of their different strengths will create better tools for indy authors. We discuss Smashwords’ authors biggest concerns—regarding money and the Meatgrinder—and how the path forward will address those concerns. And we discuss what steps authors don’t need to take to prepare for the transition. Kris also provides an update on the D2D Print beta, including the last piece of functionality he wants to finalize before a full rollout, and a comparison of how D2D Print compares with IngramSpark, now and into the future.
Kris Austin is the CEO and co-founder of Draft2Digital, a company offering online, author-assistance tools to enhance the business of publishing. Before taking this post with Draft2Digital, Kris worked for a private information technologies firm, where he managed the IT departments of dozens of Oklahoma City businesses. He received a B. S., Computer Science from Oklahoma Christian University in 2004.
"When Mark and I started talking about doing this, it became immediately clear to me that we basically are the same company in a lot of ways already, which has been fantastic. Mark Coker's a very nice guy, same philosophy for how he treats authors and retailers and his own employees as I have, and really it's all about respect and dignity and putting authors at the center of the universe has always been our goals." —Kris Austin
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[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Kris Austin. Hey Kris, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Kris: I'm doing great, thank you.
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Kris Austin is the CEO and co-founder of Draft2Digital. And I thought a good way of introducing Kris and D2D, would be to share this from the D2D homepage.
[00:00:20] "Your book is your priority. Our priority is you. We build tools and services that let you focus on writing how we take care of the layout, publishing, distribution, print-on-demand paperbacks and more. Keep writing. We're here for the rest."
[00:00:33] And we are recording this interview on February 10th, 2022, and on February 9th, D2D announced it was acquiring Smashwords and Smashwords' tagline is, "Your books. Your way." So I think it's already clear that there's some alignment there and we're going to be talking about that announcement today and how it would impact indy authors, and also talking a little bit about D2D's print beta.
[00:00:58] But before we dive into that, Kris, the other part of your bio includes the fact that you have a BS in computer science and that before founding Draft2Digital, you worked for a private information technologies firm and manage the IT departments of dozens of Oklahoma City businesses. So tell us how you made the transition from that to founding Draft2Digital.
[00:01:17] Kris: Sure. Yeah, my entire background, up to this company was all IT. So computers have always been my life, and got a computer science degree, and I'm working on IT stuff. And really, a couple of guys that I went to school with, went to university with, one's a developer and the other one's a writer. And they kind of got together and came up with this idea to help make it really easy to get books into digital format and sell them.
[00:01:46] So this could be about 2010 or so that they were working on this. And then they realized that this could probably be something that everybody could do, not just for one person. And so they asked me if I would want a business, which I had no history whatsoever doing, but I was like, yeah, sure, I think I can make this work.
[00:02:04] And so yeah, so 2012, we started the company and I learned everything there was about business around publishing. I was also writing a lot of the software myself at the time, and we released it, and it's been great. It's been, it's almost 10 years. So March 2012 is when we started. Basically, I'm the kind of person that likes to learn about everything like the research and learn all I can. So that's pretty much what I did.
[00:02:28] Matty: Yeah, it's exciting. I had made that connection that we're coming up on the 10-year anniversary. It is an exciting way to celebrate that.
[00:02:33] Kris: Yes.
[00:02:34] Matty: So let's talk about the Smashwords acquisition. So I had read those two snippets, one from the D2D website and one from Smashwords, so it does seem clear that there is a philosophical alignment there. I'm wondering if there are ways in which you're going to play on that, or if there are any aspects that are more different than those taglines would suggest that you're going to be working on aligning.
[00:03:00] Kris: That's a great question. So I would say that when Mark and I, Mark Coker, the founder and CEO of Smashwords, when Mark and I started talking about doing this, it became immediately clear to me that we basically are the same company in a lot of ways already, which has been fantastic. Mark Coker's a very nice guy, same philosophy for how he treats authors and retailers and his own employees as I have, and really, it's all about respect and dignity and putting authors at the center of the universe has always been our goals.
[00:03:34] And really that was it. Our differences are really just the way we've tackled the problems and executed on the problems from a more technical perspective. The Draft2Digital way has been trying to make it an extremely smooth and easy process, especially imagining if you're a brand-new author. If you're a new author, trying to get your book out there, we wanted to design an interface that would just make that intuitive and very easy, and you can get your book out there as soon as possible. And we just leaned really heavily into that experience.
[00:04:07] And Smashwords has a much longer history than we do. They started with the storefront first and then went into distribution. And we were able to just start with distribution and not bother with all the store stuff. So Smashwords has a lot of understanding of selling books in a storefront and selling a lot of content, reaching readers directly, which we don't have any experience with, and merging that will be really nice from a philosophy standpoint.
[00:04:32] But really philosophically, we're the same, we're like the same company as you just read, which is so exciting. Because Mark will have a lot of great ideas that I think Draft2Digital, that I'll be able to help execute on those ideas. And I think it's just a perfect marriage of two companies.
[00:04:49] Matty: And what will Mark's role with regard to the expanded Draft2Digital be?
[00:04:54] Kris: Yeah, he's going to be the Chief Strategy Officer, which of course titles are just titles, but the point is though he's going to be in the executive team part of the regular decision-making team, more as an advisor to me, in a lot of ways. And also, immediately he'll be in charge of the Smashwords storefront, to help us come up with what we want to execute there and to guide execution under that. So he'll be heavily involved, he's not going anywhere. So any anybody that likes Mark Coker, and everybody should like Mark Coker, he’s going to still be heavily involved.
[00:05:25] Matty: It does seem as if the storefront is the biggest difference between the two organizations. Can you talk a little bit about how that's going to play out in new world?
[00:05:37] Kris: Sure, yeah. So a big goal of Draft2Digital has always been to expand the size of books itself and the readership, and as much as we can, to get more and more readers into reading books. And we want to help do that by providing great content to retailers, as many retailers as possible, and the more the merrier. And the Smashwords store will allow us to have a way that we can reach groups of readers that we don't feel are getting picked up by the retailers.
[00:06:07] And so we can provide tools that authors might think that they really want for their readers. So maybe authors want to be able to offer sales on demand for their readers right away. And there's just a whole toolset at the Smashwords store that we can use that currently exist, but also build more tools that allow authors to more directly interact with their readership. And so the Smashwords store, the goal there is just to find readers that aren't currently reading a lot of indy content and help them find a lot of great content.
[00:06:40] Matty: Is it tricky to be both an aggregator distributor that's serving retailers and being a retailer yourself? How would you position a Draft2Digital retail store alongside those other retailers that you're feeding content to?
[00:06:57] Kris: Well, the first thing to remember is that it's always up to the author. So the authors will always have the choice to send their books where they want to send them. And so this is just creating one more option. There's not any way that we would elevate the Smashwords store above the other retailers, nor would we want to, because we think every place has their own readership. Apple has the types of people that read their books there, same for Barnes and Noble and Kobo and Amazon. And like I said, it's really about trying to grow the pie, and everybody should be happy about adding more readers. So giving more opportunity and more options for books to be sold in different places should be good for everybody.
[00:07:41] Matty: I know that very early on, so back in 2013, I guess when I was trying to decide what I wanted to do with my first book and I was looking across all the options, and I went to Smashwords. And trying to put myself back in that mindset, I think I got confused because I had looked at other platforms, Draft2Digital and so on, and it was clear what the mission was and I understood it and I felt comfortable loading my books there. But with Smashwords it was that odd combination of, we're an aggregator and a retail store. And I'm wondering if you hear that from other authors and how you might address that in the future iterations of that store?
[00:08:21] Kris: Yeah, no, that's fantastic. In fact, one of the number one thing that we'll be able to do actually is easily segregate that out and remove all those author portions that could confuse the Smashwords store, that can make it difficult to tell that this is a retail site that sells books. And so right now, the integration of the author stuff with the reader stuff, confuses it. At that makes that not great for either one. And this combination, what we'll be doing is bringing all the author tools and the author side of things into the Draft2Digital umbrella. And then we can make sure that store is much more a reader-focused storefront. And so you won't have the confusion you talk about, which is a common one, that I've heard about for years, and Smashwords is also fully aware of that.
[00:09:08] And that comes back from the origins of Smashwords and whenever they started. Trying to make basically, that's what it was, that was a place for authors to put books online that people could buy. And when they added distribution, it started to make some of that more confusing. So yeah, bringing all that over into the Draft2Digital environment will allow that to be focused, and then that won't be confusing to authors that are trying to figure out what to do.
[00:09:31] Matty: Or I imagine readers who go there and see some author stuff.
[00:09:33] Kris: Kind of like, I don't understand. Yeah, so the goal is to clean that up. Yeah.
[00:09:38] Matty: You had spoken about how each platform has their own readership. Is there a particular demographic that Smashwords particularly appeals to from a reader point of view?
[00:09:47] Kris: Obviously I don't have the data, I have a little bit of data, but Smashwords store hasn't been my thing. But from outside, I guess my perspective is, it's those that are looking to support indy contenting an open format. And one of the biggest things I'd say that readers there like is that there's no DRM. So that if when a reader buys a book, they can do what they want with it. They can move it from device to device and read it and readers like that flexibility, which is not something you can usually get at the major retailers.
[00:10:18] And the types of content will be about the same as most retailers, the author that readers are reading. There's a bit more, I would say, readers of the romance and erotic content at the Smashwords store. But overall, I don't know the specific demographics of the readers, but they're very worldwide. So that's one thing I do know is like some 50-60% are not US. So you do reach a lot of people around the world that you might not reach otherwise.
[00:10:47] Matty: I know that from an author point of view, that difference in the past between how Draft2Digital and Smashwords handled erotica has been a concern. Can you speak to what the plans are for that?
[00:10:57] Kris: Yeah, absolutely. So Smashwords, a couple of years ago developed a system they call the Erotica Certification System, which basically allows authors of erotica to categorize their books and to certify that it's a particular type of erotica. And this allows them to work with retailers to figure out exactly the type of content retailers want. And then the Smashwords store has its own rules as well about what kind of erotic content it will sell.
[00:11:27] Up to this point, Draft2Digital hasn't had a place to sell most of what would be called taboo erotica content type themes. So we haven't really built all those systems ourselves to do it at the level that Smashwords does. So this combination is great because it'll allow us to bring in that Smashwords know-how about this important category of books, to allow us to be able to treat, to get the retailers the content they want and not send them the content they don't want. And so we have no intention of changing Smashwords' store policies. In fact, we think this combination will allow us to be more accurate when it comes to categorizing this sort of content.
[00:12:07] Matty: That is one of the concerns I've heard from authors about what would happen going forward. What are some of the other common concerns? Let's start out with Smashwords authors. Are you hearing other common concerns from Smashwords authors about this?
[00:12:22] Kris: Yeah, good question. Yes, of course, people are understandably concerned about change, right? Something's going to change. There are these things that I like, what are you going to do to mess that up? And the common questions have been payment schedules. They're very concerned about payment and what I say to that group is, Draft2Digital offers more payment options than Smashwords. Smashwords does just PayPal, we offer PayPal plus direct deposit plus wire transfers plus Payoneer integration. And so that's going to just get better.
[00:12:55] They are concerned also about the uploading experience. So some authors do like the Meatgrinder, that's what it's called, which is a formatting tool. So if you follow the Smashwords style guide, which is required to use Smashwords, then their Meatgrinder will convert that book for you. And some authors really like that process. They like the Meatgrinder.
[00:13:18] Our process is a much more loose interpretation process, so authors can put whatever they want in there, and our system will always output a really nice-looking book, but a lot of times it's not what the authors intended.
[00:13:31] And so our system will kind of mess stuff up more in the author's mind sometimes, But the nice thing about it is that you also don't have to go through the process of manually formatting your own book. So the goal here though, is to basically support both systems. So as I move things over, we're already making a Smashwords mode or a Meatgrinder mode in the Draft2Digital system, so that authors that are used to using and formatting toward that system will be able to use their same books at our place and get the results they expect.
[00:14:05] Yeah, I would say those were the two common things, money, which is not surprising and how the book turns out.
[00:14:11] Matty: Two important topics.
[00:14:12] Kris: Yeah.
[00:14:13] Matty: And on the D2D author side, what are you hearing about common concerns there?
[00:14:18] Kris: I would say there are almost no concerns on the Draft2Digital side, which honestly isn't surprising because we are the ones acquiring Smashwords. So for the Draft2Digital authors, I think most of them feel that nothing's going to change. And that makes sense from their perspective, very little is going to change immediately. And I would say there's not really any concerns there.
[00:14:38] There's been a couple of authors that mentioned they don't want their books sold in the Smashwords store. And that's completely, they can make their own decisions, it won't be any different than all our other retailers. You'll be able to choose if you wanted to go to the Smashwords store, just like you can choose if you want us to send it to Apple.
[00:14:53] So there hasn't been a lot of negative feedback on that side, but it's not surprising. Like I said, if I were an author going to Smashwords and I've never used Draft2Digital, and you would tell me, hey, this company Draft2Digital, that you may or may not know about, is buying us, I would be nervous about that. It makes perfect sense to be nervous about that.
[00:15:11] And what I can say is, we're currently two successful companies, which means we can take our time and do this integration properly. We can do it in incremental steps and inform the authors all along the way exactly what we're doing, and to make sure it's as little disruption as possible. So this is not like we're going to just flip a switch, and tomorrow you have to use Draft2Digital's interface. It's going to happen over months.
[00:15:37] Matty: And it does sound as if with the alignment and philosophies that we had talked about before, and especially with your background in tech, that a lot of the work that's associated with the acquisition will be technical synergies, aligning technical synergies. Is that true?
[00:15:52] Kris: Yeah, as you can imagine, we have a lot of duplicated stuff, right? We both have ingestions systems that can bring content in from authors, and we both have distribution systems that send content to the retailers. The hope here is to reduce that to just one system that does ingestion and distribution, and basically, that's a consolidation of technology. So we find the best of both worlds, we pick what we like the best, and we keep that, and we get rid of the other one.
[00:16:19] And the nice thing is, now you've freed up development resources that we can use for other purposes, to build better tools, to make those systems better, but also to focus on some work at the Smashwords store, like we already talked about. And so yeah, just being able to just get rid of duplication will be huge.
[00:16:36] Like these systems took millions of dollars to create at both companies. There's sophisticated software that's been built up over a decade, and being able to no longer have to maintain one of them will free up a lot of people so we can do better things.
[00:16:50] Matty: And if I am either a Draft2Digital or Smashwords author and I'm listening to this, are there action items I should definitely take or should definitely not take as a result of the acquisition?
[00:17:02] Kris: Yeah, as far as actions you should take is just keep doing what you're currently doing. The process workflow you're happy with, stick with that. Do what you already know and are happy with. There's no reason to change that at this time. What I would say don't do is I wouldn't bother using up your time moving books to Draft2Digital on your own. Because if you did that, you'll start losing your reviews at retailers, especially Apple who can't move reviews between accounts. And you're going to just make your life worse, you're using a lot of time and resources of your own moving books yourself. So eventually, we'll automate all that for you. So don't do that, don't preemptively do that.
[00:17:41] But if you aren't familiar with the Draft2Digital interface, by all means, create an account at the Draft2Digital website, play around with the interface. There's a page called the Publish Page, where you choose your price and where you want us to send it. As long as you don't click Publish on that page, it won't go anywhere and you're not like stuck doing anything. So you can play with our formatting tools. We give you real-time previews, so you can see our templates and how your book converts and how it turns out. You can play with all of these things if it'll help you feel more comfortable with where things will eventually end up.
[00:18:15] Matty: Just a quick break from the interview. Are you getting value from the podcast? Please consider supporting it and all the work I do at The Indy Author by becoming a patron. To pledge a monthly contribution, go to patreon.com/theindyauthor, or to make an occasional contribution, perhaps indicate the value that a specific episode or resource provided to you on your creative voyage, scroll to the bottom of any page at TheIndyAuthor.com and click Buy Me a Coffee. And now back to the interview!
[00:18:43] Matty: As a very happy Draft2Digital customer, I'm very interested to see, especially the inclusion of the Smashwords store, I think that's going to be very interesting. And I'm going to use that as an entree to our second topic, which is the Draft2Digital print beta. Can you give us a little update on how things stand with the print beta as of mid-February 2022?
[00:19:04] Kris: Yes, oh, man, I'm so excited about print. It's been like three years since we first told anybody else out it. And it's been a challenge. There's a lot of technical problems that we had to work through, a lot of relationship issues with partners to be able to get books in print distribution. But I would say now it's in a great position. And so the phase we're in now is what I like to call is that we're just scaling up. We're just trying to scale up and make sure we can handle the volume that we expect.
[00:19:37] So there's over 11,000 titles live now, is almost 12,000 titles live for making live about 500 books a month. And we have about 3,500 people in the beta waitlist. And we are at the stage where we're going to start bringing a lot of people in from the wait list, like on purpose, just throw a whole lot of people in there so we can see if y'all can break it. Because what I don't want to do is just suddenly say, okay, everybody you can get in. And then we can't keep up. And it's not just we can't keep up our print partner, maybe they can't keep up. And so we're at that part now it's just, we're stress testing basically. And just last week we added 500 people off that waitlist. And so we're waiting for them to upload books and just to try to see, can our processes handle the volume of books we anticipate. And so far, everything's going great. So I'm hopeful we'll be able to do a full release in the coming months.
[00:20:36] But there is one more thing I want to add before we do a full release and that is allowing Australian authors, New Zealand authors, UK authors, and others in Europe to be able to order author copies. So our print system allows authors to order their own copies of their books at the price of the unit cost to price. It cost to print them plus shipping obviously. And right now that's only available to the US and Canada. And we tested printing in Australia and in the UK and that it has worked. So now we have to build the currency related interfaces and stuff on our website to allow those groups to order those things. So that's a requirement that I have that I want to support those authors abilities to do that before we go to a full release.
[00:21:27] So for now, if anybody is not in US and Canada that's in the beta, they can do that, but they can't order a print proof and they can't order author copies. We can still sell it for them. No problem. But you can't hold a physical version and I think that's a limitation I don't want to release with.
[00:21:42] Matty: Can you describe who you're partnering with for the actual print process or who beyond Draft2Digital is involved in that?
[00:21:49] Kris: Yeah, so unfortunately, these sorts of things are under confidentiality agreements and things like that, for various reasons. But I can tell you that it's a large print partner who can handle practically unlimited volumes. They're very fast. and they're very technically minded and easy to work with and their distribution network, which is the most important part, where do they sell books, is the largest in the world. They can get books everywhere.
[00:22:15] Matty: And how do you see this working long-term with IngramSpark? So I have to say that it's very attractive to me to think about consolidating my author administration efforts onto one platform. And so if I could be supplying the platforms that I currently supply through IngramSpark via Draft2Digital Print, I'd be happy to do that. But currently, what are the similarities and differences there, and and long-term what would the similarities and differences be?
[00:22:44] Kris: Sure. Obviously the first big differences will be our upload experience is very different. The way IngramSpark's system works is very different than ours. We help you build your interior layout automatically from your ebook, and we also create, we can create you a cover image, we call it the wraparound cover image, which is the front, spine, and back of the book, we create that automatically for you, from your ebook cover and description. And you can customize it. That's a big difference. Just the, what we call the ingestion experience, and you'll get a real time preview and all of that. And we like ours. Obviously when we created it and we want it to be really easy.
[00:23:21] IngramSpark has an interface that you can, but you have to send them, I think most time completed files or very near completed. Where Ingram really shines, IngramSpark shines, is you can currently do a lot more formats. We only support right now what they call perfect bound books, which are just your standard paperback books, that with the spine is basically glued to the cover. The normal paperback. And we support several sizes. Six or so sizes IngramSpark, supports hardcovers, dust jackets. That they support a lot of really cool formats. And so if you were in all those formats, then obviously IngramSpark is where you're going to want to go. They have the best in the industry as far as possible ways to print your book.
[00:24:06] Going forward, we do plan to expand beyond just the perfect bound paperbacks. But it's one of those things where you don't want to offer too much too early because we make things too complicated. And so after we get fully released and paperbacks are working smoothly, then we'll look at adding hardcovers. and different formats and things like that.
[00:24:27] As far as distribution network goes, the networks are very similar. They're being sold all the same places. IngramSpark and D2D Print is what we call our products, are all sold everywhere the same. IngramSpark lets you choose your discount, which is the amount that you are willing to offer retailers, really, you're offering Ingram, to sell the book for. But they let you choose from 30% discount to 60%, I think maybe. And so they have a wide range.
[00:24:58] Because of the way the business model works for us at the moment, because we're still really small, we're not IngramSpark size. right now we can only offer one discount, and that's the 55% discount. So you give us 45% and then we have to eat all the rest of the costs down the chain. So our partner plus the retail store, they all want cuts to make this work. And I'm hoping in the future to allow authors to choose a discount rate.
[00:25:25] But those get into really esoteric parts of how retail works and the print industry work when it comes to discount rates versus online sales and in store sales. And for now we want the system to be less complicated. So IngramSpark, more powerful, more confusing and more complicated. Draft2Digital is meant to be just easier, fewer decisions need to be made cause would make reasonable decisions for you. And our unit costs are a little bit lower, about 10% cheaper than IngramSpark. So if you use us, then we'll like for author copies, they're a little cheaper than if you got them at Ingram. But we think most people will get maybe 80, 90% of authors will get all the services they need from D2D print.
[00:26:13] Matty: What about charging for uploading revisions as IngramSpark does?
[00:26:18] Kris: Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up. So IngramSpark charges for revisions. Every time you upload new con. or make a cover change. They charge you for that. We offer one free change every quarter. So if you do need to make a change, you can do that for free with our service every quarter. So every three months, if you want to make a change, then you can. If you want to do it more often than that, you can buy what we call a change token. It's a $25 change token and that allow you to make a change earlier than that three-month period.
[00:26:50] So generally with print, it's a bit of a change for indy authors because they're used to the ebook side where you just, you can change stuff whenever you want, how often you want. And that was my original goal with print as well. but in the end, the industry can't handle that. There's too much overhead downstream to allow changes just constantly on books like we do on eBooks. I think we'll get there. I think the future will bring us there. But at the moment it puts too much downward pressure, there's still too many manual processes and systems have to be integrated properly, that they have to charge to slow you down.
[00:27:30] Indy authors love to change things and try different things and do different things. And I think that's fantastic. It's the best part about the industry. But it's a bit incompatible with how the print world works. So that's why we had the one free every three months that instead of authors that might do one change every single day, when we can spread it out so it's once every 90 days.
[00:27:51] Matty: And this may be a little more detailed than you're involved with, but with IngramSpark, there are many writers' organizations that will enable you on some metered level to upload free. So I don't remember if The Alliance of Independent Authors as a member every month there's a code, I can use to do free uploads. Is there's something similar with Draft2Digital Print tokens?
[00:28:15] Kris: No. We think that giving you one a free automatically every few months is probably better. You don't have to go hunt down codes. You don't have to find the agreements. Don't have to pay. I mean, ALLi is great. We're a member of ALLi as well, but we think the free every quarter is more than adequate, especially at the rate you should be changing your print book anyway.
[00:28:34] Matty: I did want to ask one more question about reach of D2D Print. Bookstores are tough because with any other platform, I can get both the author and the reader experience just by signing onto the platform as a reader or a customer. With bookstores, the only way that I can tell what the bookstore is seeing is to get in touch with some friendly bookstore and say, I think my book should be available to you. Can you go check? Do you have insight into, from a bookstore owner point of view, what they're seeing with IngramSpark and how that would differ from Draft2Digital Print?
[00:29:12] Kris: The experiences will be very similar. So that's, and that's where print gets more complicated than e-book because there's this complicated supply chain for print. So you have us sending it to a wholesaler who sells that to retail locations. All those retail locations, they make agreements with different wholesalers to buy those print books and so Baker and Taylor's one, Ingram is one, and there's a few others. And then each retailer negotiates with that wholesaler different discount rates.
[00:29:43] And so that causes strange availability things, because in this case, the author chooses the discount and then the wholesaler chooses a discount to pass on to the retailer, and you have a lot of moving parts. But I would say I would expect D2D Print and IngramSpark to be a very similar experience, except for the fact that you cannot change the discount rate that we currently offer the wholesaler. And like I said, I'm hoping to give you more control of that later.
[00:30:12] But at the most, what you're going to have as a bookstore owner, pull up their software, Baker and Taylor or Ingram or whatever, and they're going to look for the book and it's going to tell them the terms that book is going to be sold at. Is it going to be sold to them at a certain discount rate? Maybe it's 30%, maybe it's 55%. And also is a book returnable? So is the author of this book or the publisher of this book going to allow this book to be returned? So if for some reason I can't sell this book that I buy, will I be able to give it back and get my money back?
[00:30:45] So our system right now, we don't let allow things to be set return. You can set them that way on IngramSpark, but bookstores are more likely to take a risk if they can buy a book, but the problem is they might buy a hundred of them and maybe they only sell one of them and they send back 99. IngramSpark, we'll charge you $2 for every one of those 99 books, and that's just to destroy those books. You have to be very careful with print when dealing with returnability. But bookstore owner though will see these choices that have been made by the publisher and that will affect their choice to stock a book, or sometimes it'll affect their choice just to buy a copy of a book.
[00:31:22] Most of the time, our experience is, if a reader walks into a bookstore and asks for a specific book, the terms won't matter that much because it's a guaranteed sale. So they'll go ahead, and they'll order the book and you'd come back in the next day, the next few days and pick up the book from that bookstore. So generally most bookstores aren't too worried about that when they have a guaranteed sale.
[00:31:45] Matty: So that brings me to the last question I had about print and that is with the disruption in supply chain and supplies and the increasing costs of paper, the print process. I found a couple of times as someone who distributes through IngramSpark, that I'll get a notice that one of my books is going to result in a negative compensation, I'm assuming because of these changes that are happening in the industry, and I have to go and adjust it so that now I'm making 7 cents a book or whatever. This is one of the reasons I've deprioritized print my business strategy. What is D2D Print doing in terms of accommodating these changes in the print supply and industry?
[00:32:25] Kris: Yeah, absolutely. So what we do right now, so price changes have happened twice in the last six months, because of supply chain issues, like you mentioned, it's not just paper. The labor is a problem for a lot of these places, and it is causing the cost per unit to go up. So what we do is alert you 30 days in advance of a price change. And if you don't adjust your price in time, and we calculate that you're going to go negative royalties, like you just described, so that the cost to print the book is more than you're going to get paid for that book, then we will automatically adjust the price of the book for you, so you don't have to bother.
[00:33:08] And what we do is we adjust to a rounded number, so it looks nice. So say you were selling it for $19.99 and now we calculate you need to sell it for, $20.99. That's what we'll do. We'll bump it up a whole dollar and then you'll probably make a little bit of money now. And that's just to bring everybody up. No one wants to lose money when they sell a book. So we basically don't allow that to happen. We try to alert you to go adjust your prices if you want. If you don't, we're going to move them up for you.
[00:33:34] Matty: Well, there's all sorts of fascinating stuff going on at Draft2Digital, and, Kris, I appreciate so much you taking the time to talk with me knowing that you've probably doing a lot of these interviews these days. So please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and Draft2Digital and everything you do online.
[00:33:55] Kris: Sure. Yeah, our website is Draft2Digital.com. And we're on Facebook at Draft2Digital. We're on TikTok these days at Draft2Digital. We have a Twitter account, also at Draft2Digital. So you should be able to find us usually in those three places. The TikTok stuff's been fun to watch. A lot of our team's been having a good time on that channel. So if you're into TikTok, I recommend hopping on. You'll see Mark Lefebvre do some funny stuff with wigs and other great times. So it's a fun place.
[00:34:19] Matty: I haven't done TikTok yet, but now I'm going to have to.
[00:34:22] Kris: Yeah, you need at least look at Mark's videos. So yeah, we try to be everywhere we can. And then of course, if you ever need any help or you have questions in general, you can email us, which is just [email protected]. And our team is the best customer support in the industry.
[00:34:36] Matty: I second that. I am, as I said, a happy customer, and I'm very excited to see what you and Smashwords are going to do together.
[00:34:44] Kris: Thank you very much, Matty.
[00:34:46] Matty: Thank you, Kris.
[00:00:06] Kris: I'm doing great, thank you.
[00:00:09] Matty: To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Kris Austin is the CEO and co-founder of Draft2Digital. And I thought a good way of introducing Kris and D2D, would be to share this from the D2D homepage.
[00:00:20] "Your book is your priority. Our priority is you. We build tools and services that let you focus on writing how we take care of the layout, publishing, distribution, print-on-demand paperbacks and more. Keep writing. We're here for the rest."
[00:00:33] And we are recording this interview on February 10th, 2022, and on February 9th, D2D announced it was acquiring Smashwords and Smashwords' tagline is, "Your books. Your way." So I think it's already clear that there's some alignment there and we're going to be talking about that announcement today and how it would impact indy authors, and also talking a little bit about D2D's print beta.
[00:00:58] But before we dive into that, Kris, the other part of your bio includes the fact that you have a BS in computer science and that before founding Draft2Digital, you worked for a private information technologies firm and manage the IT departments of dozens of Oklahoma City businesses. So tell us how you made the transition from that to founding Draft2Digital.
[00:01:17] Kris: Sure. Yeah, my entire background, up to this company was all IT. So computers have always been my life, and got a computer science degree, and I'm working on IT stuff. And really, a couple of guys that I went to school with, went to university with, one's a developer and the other one's a writer. And they kind of got together and came up with this idea to help make it really easy to get books into digital format and sell them.
[00:01:46] So this could be about 2010 or so that they were working on this. And then they realized that this could probably be something that everybody could do, not just for one person. And so they asked me if I would want a business, which I had no history whatsoever doing, but I was like, yeah, sure, I think I can make this work.
[00:02:04] And so yeah, so 2012, we started the company and I learned everything there was about business around publishing. I was also writing a lot of the software myself at the time, and we released it, and it's been great. It's been, it's almost 10 years. So March 2012 is when we started. Basically, I'm the kind of person that likes to learn about everything like the research and learn all I can. So that's pretty much what I did.
[00:02:28] Matty: Yeah, it's exciting. I had made that connection that we're coming up on the 10-year anniversary. It is an exciting way to celebrate that.
[00:02:33] Kris: Yes.
[00:02:34] Matty: So let's talk about the Smashwords acquisition. So I had read those two snippets, one from the D2D website and one from Smashwords, so it does seem clear that there is a philosophical alignment there. I'm wondering if there are ways in which you're going to play on that, or if there are any aspects that are more different than those taglines would suggest that you're going to be working on aligning.
[00:03:00] Kris: That's a great question. So I would say that when Mark and I, Mark Coker, the founder and CEO of Smashwords, when Mark and I started talking about doing this, it became immediately clear to me that we basically are the same company in a lot of ways already, which has been fantastic. Mark Coker's a very nice guy, same philosophy for how he treats authors and retailers and his own employees as I have, and really, it's all about respect and dignity and putting authors at the center of the universe has always been our goals.
[00:03:34] And really that was it. Our differences are really just the way we've tackled the problems and executed on the problems from a more technical perspective. The Draft2Digital way has been trying to make it an extremely smooth and easy process, especially imagining if you're a brand-new author. If you're a new author, trying to get your book out there, we wanted to design an interface that would just make that intuitive and very easy, and you can get your book out there as soon as possible. And we just leaned really heavily into that experience.
[00:04:07] And Smashwords has a much longer history than we do. They started with the storefront first and then went into distribution. And we were able to just start with distribution and not bother with all the store stuff. So Smashwords has a lot of understanding of selling books in a storefront and selling a lot of content, reaching readers directly, which we don't have any experience with, and merging that will be really nice from a philosophy standpoint.
[00:04:32] But really philosophically, we're the same, we're like the same company as you just read, which is so exciting. Because Mark will have a lot of great ideas that I think Draft2Digital, that I'll be able to help execute on those ideas. And I think it's just a perfect marriage of two companies.
[00:04:49] Matty: And what will Mark's role with regard to the expanded Draft2Digital be?
[00:04:54] Kris: Yeah, he's going to be the Chief Strategy Officer, which of course titles are just titles, but the point is though he's going to be in the executive team part of the regular decision-making team, more as an advisor to me, in a lot of ways. And also, immediately he'll be in charge of the Smashwords storefront, to help us come up with what we want to execute there and to guide execution under that. So he'll be heavily involved, he's not going anywhere. So any anybody that likes Mark Coker, and everybody should like Mark Coker, he’s going to still be heavily involved.
[00:05:25] Matty: It does seem as if the storefront is the biggest difference between the two organizations. Can you talk a little bit about how that's going to play out in new world?
[00:05:37] Kris: Sure, yeah. So a big goal of Draft2Digital has always been to expand the size of books itself and the readership, and as much as we can, to get more and more readers into reading books. And we want to help do that by providing great content to retailers, as many retailers as possible, and the more the merrier. And the Smashwords store will allow us to have a way that we can reach groups of readers that we don't feel are getting picked up by the retailers.
[00:06:07] And so we can provide tools that authors might think that they really want for their readers. So maybe authors want to be able to offer sales on demand for their readers right away. And there's just a whole toolset at the Smashwords store that we can use that currently exist, but also build more tools that allow authors to more directly interact with their readership. And so the Smashwords store, the goal there is just to find readers that aren't currently reading a lot of indy content and help them find a lot of great content.
[00:06:40] Matty: Is it tricky to be both an aggregator distributor that's serving retailers and being a retailer yourself? How would you position a Draft2Digital retail store alongside those other retailers that you're feeding content to?
[00:06:57] Kris: Well, the first thing to remember is that it's always up to the author. So the authors will always have the choice to send their books where they want to send them. And so this is just creating one more option. There's not any way that we would elevate the Smashwords store above the other retailers, nor would we want to, because we think every place has their own readership. Apple has the types of people that read their books there, same for Barnes and Noble and Kobo and Amazon. And like I said, it's really about trying to grow the pie, and everybody should be happy about adding more readers. So giving more opportunity and more options for books to be sold in different places should be good for everybody.
[00:07:41] Matty: I know that very early on, so back in 2013, I guess when I was trying to decide what I wanted to do with my first book and I was looking across all the options, and I went to Smashwords. And trying to put myself back in that mindset, I think I got confused because I had looked at other platforms, Draft2Digital and so on, and it was clear what the mission was and I understood it and I felt comfortable loading my books there. But with Smashwords it was that odd combination of, we're an aggregator and a retail store. And I'm wondering if you hear that from other authors and how you might address that in the future iterations of that store?
[00:08:21] Kris: Yeah, no, that's fantastic. In fact, one of the number one thing that we'll be able to do actually is easily segregate that out and remove all those author portions that could confuse the Smashwords store, that can make it difficult to tell that this is a retail site that sells books. And so right now, the integration of the author stuff with the reader stuff, confuses it. At that makes that not great for either one. And this combination, what we'll be doing is bringing all the author tools and the author side of things into the Draft2Digital umbrella. And then we can make sure that store is much more a reader-focused storefront. And so you won't have the confusion you talk about, which is a common one, that I've heard about for years, and Smashwords is also fully aware of that.
[00:09:08] And that comes back from the origins of Smashwords and whenever they started. Trying to make basically, that's what it was, that was a place for authors to put books online that people could buy. And when they added distribution, it started to make some of that more confusing. So yeah, bringing all that over into the Draft2Digital environment will allow that to be focused, and then that won't be confusing to authors that are trying to figure out what to do.
[00:09:31] Matty: Or I imagine readers who go there and see some author stuff.
[00:09:33] Kris: Kind of like, I don't understand. Yeah, so the goal is to clean that up. Yeah.
[00:09:38] Matty: You had spoken about how each platform has their own readership. Is there a particular demographic that Smashwords particularly appeals to from a reader point of view?
[00:09:47] Kris: Obviously I don't have the data, I have a little bit of data, but Smashwords store hasn't been my thing. But from outside, I guess my perspective is, it's those that are looking to support indy contenting an open format. And one of the biggest things I'd say that readers there like is that there's no DRM. So that if when a reader buys a book, they can do what they want with it. They can move it from device to device and read it and readers like that flexibility, which is not something you can usually get at the major retailers.
[00:10:18] And the types of content will be about the same as most retailers, the author that readers are reading. There's a bit more, I would say, readers of the romance and erotic content at the Smashwords store. But overall, I don't know the specific demographics of the readers, but they're very worldwide. So that's one thing I do know is like some 50-60% are not US. So you do reach a lot of people around the world that you might not reach otherwise.
[00:10:47] Matty: I know that from an author point of view, that difference in the past between how Draft2Digital and Smashwords handled erotica has been a concern. Can you speak to what the plans are for that?
[00:10:57] Kris: Yeah, absolutely. So Smashwords, a couple of years ago developed a system they call the Erotica Certification System, which basically allows authors of erotica to categorize their books and to certify that it's a particular type of erotica. And this allows them to work with retailers to figure out exactly the type of content retailers want. And then the Smashwords store has its own rules as well about what kind of erotic content it will sell.
[00:11:27] Up to this point, Draft2Digital hasn't had a place to sell most of what would be called taboo erotica content type themes. So we haven't really built all those systems ourselves to do it at the level that Smashwords does. So this combination is great because it'll allow us to bring in that Smashwords know-how about this important category of books, to allow us to be able to treat, to get the retailers the content they want and not send them the content they don't want. And so we have no intention of changing Smashwords' store policies. In fact, we think this combination will allow us to be more accurate when it comes to categorizing this sort of content.
[00:12:07] Matty: That is one of the concerns I've heard from authors about what would happen going forward. What are some of the other common concerns? Let's start out with Smashwords authors. Are you hearing other common concerns from Smashwords authors about this?
[00:12:22] Kris: Yeah, good question. Yes, of course, people are understandably concerned about change, right? Something's going to change. There are these things that I like, what are you going to do to mess that up? And the common questions have been payment schedules. They're very concerned about payment and what I say to that group is, Draft2Digital offers more payment options than Smashwords. Smashwords does just PayPal, we offer PayPal plus direct deposit plus wire transfers plus Payoneer integration. And so that's going to just get better.
[00:12:55] They are concerned also about the uploading experience. So some authors do like the Meatgrinder, that's what it's called, which is a formatting tool. So if you follow the Smashwords style guide, which is required to use Smashwords, then their Meatgrinder will convert that book for you. And some authors really like that process. They like the Meatgrinder.
[00:13:18] Our process is a much more loose interpretation process, so authors can put whatever they want in there, and our system will always output a really nice-looking book, but a lot of times it's not what the authors intended.
[00:13:31] And so our system will kind of mess stuff up more in the author's mind sometimes, But the nice thing about it is that you also don't have to go through the process of manually formatting your own book. So the goal here though, is to basically support both systems. So as I move things over, we're already making a Smashwords mode or a Meatgrinder mode in the Draft2Digital system, so that authors that are used to using and formatting toward that system will be able to use their same books at our place and get the results they expect.
[00:14:05] Yeah, I would say those were the two common things, money, which is not surprising and how the book turns out.
[00:14:11] Matty: Two important topics.
[00:14:12] Kris: Yeah.
[00:14:13] Matty: And on the D2D author side, what are you hearing about common concerns there?
[00:14:18] Kris: I would say there are almost no concerns on the Draft2Digital side, which honestly isn't surprising because we are the ones acquiring Smashwords. So for the Draft2Digital authors, I think most of them feel that nothing's going to change. And that makes sense from their perspective, very little is going to change immediately. And I would say there's not really any concerns there.
[00:14:38] There's been a couple of authors that mentioned they don't want their books sold in the Smashwords store. And that's completely, they can make their own decisions, it won't be any different than all our other retailers. You'll be able to choose if you wanted to go to the Smashwords store, just like you can choose if you want us to send it to Apple.
[00:14:53] So there hasn't been a lot of negative feedback on that side, but it's not surprising. Like I said, if I were an author going to Smashwords and I've never used Draft2Digital, and you would tell me, hey, this company Draft2Digital, that you may or may not know about, is buying us, I would be nervous about that. It makes perfect sense to be nervous about that.
[00:15:11] And what I can say is, we're currently two successful companies, which means we can take our time and do this integration properly. We can do it in incremental steps and inform the authors all along the way exactly what we're doing, and to make sure it's as little disruption as possible. So this is not like we're going to just flip a switch, and tomorrow you have to use Draft2Digital's interface. It's going to happen over months.
[00:15:37] Matty: And it does sound as if with the alignment and philosophies that we had talked about before, and especially with your background in tech, that a lot of the work that's associated with the acquisition will be technical synergies, aligning technical synergies. Is that true?
[00:15:52] Kris: Yeah, as you can imagine, we have a lot of duplicated stuff, right? We both have ingestions systems that can bring content in from authors, and we both have distribution systems that send content to the retailers. The hope here is to reduce that to just one system that does ingestion and distribution, and basically, that's a consolidation of technology. So we find the best of both worlds, we pick what we like the best, and we keep that, and we get rid of the other one.
[00:16:19] And the nice thing is, now you've freed up development resources that we can use for other purposes, to build better tools, to make those systems better, but also to focus on some work at the Smashwords store, like we already talked about. And so yeah, just being able to just get rid of duplication will be huge.
[00:16:36] Like these systems took millions of dollars to create at both companies. There's sophisticated software that's been built up over a decade, and being able to no longer have to maintain one of them will free up a lot of people so we can do better things.
[00:16:50] Matty: And if I am either a Draft2Digital or Smashwords author and I'm listening to this, are there action items I should definitely take or should definitely not take as a result of the acquisition?
[00:17:02] Kris: Yeah, as far as actions you should take is just keep doing what you're currently doing. The process workflow you're happy with, stick with that. Do what you already know and are happy with. There's no reason to change that at this time. What I would say don't do is I wouldn't bother using up your time moving books to Draft2Digital on your own. Because if you did that, you'll start losing your reviews at retailers, especially Apple who can't move reviews between accounts. And you're going to just make your life worse, you're using a lot of time and resources of your own moving books yourself. So eventually, we'll automate all that for you. So don't do that, don't preemptively do that.
[00:17:41] But if you aren't familiar with the Draft2Digital interface, by all means, create an account at the Draft2Digital website, play around with the interface. There's a page called the Publish Page, where you choose your price and where you want us to send it. As long as you don't click Publish on that page, it won't go anywhere and you're not like stuck doing anything. So you can play with our formatting tools. We give you real-time previews, so you can see our templates and how your book converts and how it turns out. You can play with all of these things if it'll help you feel more comfortable with where things will eventually end up.
[00:18:15] Matty: Just a quick break from the interview. Are you getting value from the podcast? Please consider supporting it and all the work I do at The Indy Author by becoming a patron. To pledge a monthly contribution, go to patreon.com/theindyauthor, or to make an occasional contribution, perhaps indicate the value that a specific episode or resource provided to you on your creative voyage, scroll to the bottom of any page at TheIndyAuthor.com and click Buy Me a Coffee. And now back to the interview!
[00:18:43] Matty: As a very happy Draft2Digital customer, I'm very interested to see, especially the inclusion of the Smashwords store, I think that's going to be very interesting. And I'm going to use that as an entree to our second topic, which is the Draft2Digital print beta. Can you give us a little update on how things stand with the print beta as of mid-February 2022?
[00:19:04] Kris: Yes, oh, man, I'm so excited about print. It's been like three years since we first told anybody else out it. And it's been a challenge. There's a lot of technical problems that we had to work through, a lot of relationship issues with partners to be able to get books in print distribution. But I would say now it's in a great position. And so the phase we're in now is what I like to call is that we're just scaling up. We're just trying to scale up and make sure we can handle the volume that we expect.
[00:19:37] So there's over 11,000 titles live now, is almost 12,000 titles live for making live about 500 books a month. And we have about 3,500 people in the beta waitlist. And we are at the stage where we're going to start bringing a lot of people in from the wait list, like on purpose, just throw a whole lot of people in there so we can see if y'all can break it. Because what I don't want to do is just suddenly say, okay, everybody you can get in. And then we can't keep up. And it's not just we can't keep up our print partner, maybe they can't keep up. And so we're at that part now it's just, we're stress testing basically. And just last week we added 500 people off that waitlist. And so we're waiting for them to upload books and just to try to see, can our processes handle the volume of books we anticipate. And so far, everything's going great. So I'm hopeful we'll be able to do a full release in the coming months.
[00:20:36] But there is one more thing I want to add before we do a full release and that is allowing Australian authors, New Zealand authors, UK authors, and others in Europe to be able to order author copies. So our print system allows authors to order their own copies of their books at the price of the unit cost to price. It cost to print them plus shipping obviously. And right now that's only available to the US and Canada. And we tested printing in Australia and in the UK and that it has worked. So now we have to build the currency related interfaces and stuff on our website to allow those groups to order those things. So that's a requirement that I have that I want to support those authors abilities to do that before we go to a full release.
[00:21:27] So for now, if anybody is not in US and Canada that's in the beta, they can do that, but they can't order a print proof and they can't order author copies. We can still sell it for them. No problem. But you can't hold a physical version and I think that's a limitation I don't want to release with.
[00:21:42] Matty: Can you describe who you're partnering with for the actual print process or who beyond Draft2Digital is involved in that?
[00:21:49] Kris: Yeah, so unfortunately, these sorts of things are under confidentiality agreements and things like that, for various reasons. But I can tell you that it's a large print partner who can handle practically unlimited volumes. They're very fast. and they're very technically minded and easy to work with and their distribution network, which is the most important part, where do they sell books, is the largest in the world. They can get books everywhere.
[00:22:15] Matty: And how do you see this working long-term with IngramSpark? So I have to say that it's very attractive to me to think about consolidating my author administration efforts onto one platform. And so if I could be supplying the platforms that I currently supply through IngramSpark via Draft2Digital Print, I'd be happy to do that. But currently, what are the similarities and differences there, and and long-term what would the similarities and differences be?
[00:22:44] Kris: Sure. Obviously the first big differences will be our upload experience is very different. The way IngramSpark's system works is very different than ours. We help you build your interior layout automatically from your ebook, and we also create, we can create you a cover image, we call it the wraparound cover image, which is the front, spine, and back of the book, we create that automatically for you, from your ebook cover and description. And you can customize it. That's a big difference. Just the, what we call the ingestion experience, and you'll get a real time preview and all of that. And we like ours. Obviously when we created it and we want it to be really easy.
[00:23:21] IngramSpark has an interface that you can, but you have to send them, I think most time completed files or very near completed. Where Ingram really shines, IngramSpark shines, is you can currently do a lot more formats. We only support right now what they call perfect bound books, which are just your standard paperback books, that with the spine is basically glued to the cover. The normal paperback. And we support several sizes. Six or so sizes IngramSpark, supports hardcovers, dust jackets. That they support a lot of really cool formats. And so if you were in all those formats, then obviously IngramSpark is where you're going to want to go. They have the best in the industry as far as possible ways to print your book.
[00:24:06] Going forward, we do plan to expand beyond just the perfect bound paperbacks. But it's one of those things where you don't want to offer too much too early because we make things too complicated. And so after we get fully released and paperbacks are working smoothly, then we'll look at adding hardcovers. and different formats and things like that.
[00:24:27] As far as distribution network goes, the networks are very similar. They're being sold all the same places. IngramSpark and D2D Print is what we call our products, are all sold everywhere the same. IngramSpark lets you choose your discount, which is the amount that you are willing to offer retailers, really, you're offering Ingram, to sell the book for. But they let you choose from 30% discount to 60%, I think maybe. And so they have a wide range.
[00:24:58] Because of the way the business model works for us at the moment, because we're still really small, we're not IngramSpark size. right now we can only offer one discount, and that's the 55% discount. So you give us 45% and then we have to eat all the rest of the costs down the chain. So our partner plus the retail store, they all want cuts to make this work. And I'm hoping in the future to allow authors to choose a discount rate.
[00:25:25] But those get into really esoteric parts of how retail works and the print industry work when it comes to discount rates versus online sales and in store sales. And for now we want the system to be less complicated. So IngramSpark, more powerful, more confusing and more complicated. Draft2Digital is meant to be just easier, fewer decisions need to be made cause would make reasonable decisions for you. And our unit costs are a little bit lower, about 10% cheaper than IngramSpark. So if you use us, then we'll like for author copies, they're a little cheaper than if you got them at Ingram. But we think most people will get maybe 80, 90% of authors will get all the services they need from D2D print.
[00:26:13] Matty: What about charging for uploading revisions as IngramSpark does?
[00:26:18] Kris: Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up. So IngramSpark charges for revisions. Every time you upload new con. or make a cover change. They charge you for that. We offer one free change every quarter. So if you do need to make a change, you can do that for free with our service every quarter. So every three months, if you want to make a change, then you can. If you want to do it more often than that, you can buy what we call a change token. It's a $25 change token and that allow you to make a change earlier than that three-month period.
[00:26:50] So generally with print, it's a bit of a change for indy authors because they're used to the ebook side where you just, you can change stuff whenever you want, how often you want. And that was my original goal with print as well. but in the end, the industry can't handle that. There's too much overhead downstream to allow changes just constantly on books like we do on eBooks. I think we'll get there. I think the future will bring us there. But at the moment it puts too much downward pressure, there's still too many manual processes and systems have to be integrated properly, that they have to charge to slow you down.
[00:27:30] Indy authors love to change things and try different things and do different things. And I think that's fantastic. It's the best part about the industry. But it's a bit incompatible with how the print world works. So that's why we had the one free every three months that instead of authors that might do one change every single day, when we can spread it out so it's once every 90 days.
[00:27:51] Matty: And this may be a little more detailed than you're involved with, but with IngramSpark, there are many writers' organizations that will enable you on some metered level to upload free. So I don't remember if The Alliance of Independent Authors as a member every month there's a code, I can use to do free uploads. Is there's something similar with Draft2Digital Print tokens?
[00:28:15] Kris: No. We think that giving you one a free automatically every few months is probably better. You don't have to go hunt down codes. You don't have to find the agreements. Don't have to pay. I mean, ALLi is great. We're a member of ALLi as well, but we think the free every quarter is more than adequate, especially at the rate you should be changing your print book anyway.
[00:28:34] Matty: I did want to ask one more question about reach of D2D Print. Bookstores are tough because with any other platform, I can get both the author and the reader experience just by signing onto the platform as a reader or a customer. With bookstores, the only way that I can tell what the bookstore is seeing is to get in touch with some friendly bookstore and say, I think my book should be available to you. Can you go check? Do you have insight into, from a bookstore owner point of view, what they're seeing with IngramSpark and how that would differ from Draft2Digital Print?
[00:29:12] Kris: The experiences will be very similar. So that's, and that's where print gets more complicated than e-book because there's this complicated supply chain for print. So you have us sending it to a wholesaler who sells that to retail locations. All those retail locations, they make agreements with different wholesalers to buy those print books and so Baker and Taylor's one, Ingram is one, and there's a few others. And then each retailer negotiates with that wholesaler different discount rates.
[00:29:43] And so that causes strange availability things, because in this case, the author chooses the discount and then the wholesaler chooses a discount to pass on to the retailer, and you have a lot of moving parts. But I would say I would expect D2D Print and IngramSpark to be a very similar experience, except for the fact that you cannot change the discount rate that we currently offer the wholesaler. And like I said, I'm hoping to give you more control of that later.
[00:30:12] But at the most, what you're going to have as a bookstore owner, pull up their software, Baker and Taylor or Ingram or whatever, and they're going to look for the book and it's going to tell them the terms that book is going to be sold at. Is it going to be sold to them at a certain discount rate? Maybe it's 30%, maybe it's 55%. And also is a book returnable? So is the author of this book or the publisher of this book going to allow this book to be returned? So if for some reason I can't sell this book that I buy, will I be able to give it back and get my money back?
[00:30:45] So our system right now, we don't let allow things to be set return. You can set them that way on IngramSpark, but bookstores are more likely to take a risk if they can buy a book, but the problem is they might buy a hundred of them and maybe they only sell one of them and they send back 99. IngramSpark, we'll charge you $2 for every one of those 99 books, and that's just to destroy those books. You have to be very careful with print when dealing with returnability. But bookstore owner though will see these choices that have been made by the publisher and that will affect their choice to stock a book, or sometimes it'll affect their choice just to buy a copy of a book.
[00:31:22] Most of the time, our experience is, if a reader walks into a bookstore and asks for a specific book, the terms won't matter that much because it's a guaranteed sale. So they'll go ahead, and they'll order the book and you'd come back in the next day, the next few days and pick up the book from that bookstore. So generally most bookstores aren't too worried about that when they have a guaranteed sale.
[00:31:45] Matty: So that brings me to the last question I had about print and that is with the disruption in supply chain and supplies and the increasing costs of paper, the print process. I found a couple of times as someone who distributes through IngramSpark, that I'll get a notice that one of my books is going to result in a negative compensation, I'm assuming because of these changes that are happening in the industry, and I have to go and adjust it so that now I'm making 7 cents a book or whatever. This is one of the reasons I've deprioritized print my business strategy. What is D2D Print doing in terms of accommodating these changes in the print supply and industry?
[00:32:25] Kris: Yeah, absolutely. So what we do right now, so price changes have happened twice in the last six months, because of supply chain issues, like you mentioned, it's not just paper. The labor is a problem for a lot of these places, and it is causing the cost per unit to go up. So what we do is alert you 30 days in advance of a price change. And if you don't adjust your price in time, and we calculate that you're going to go negative royalties, like you just described, so that the cost to print the book is more than you're going to get paid for that book, then we will automatically adjust the price of the book for you, so you don't have to bother.
[00:33:08] And what we do is we adjust to a rounded number, so it looks nice. So say you were selling it for $19.99 and now we calculate you need to sell it for, $20.99. That's what we'll do. We'll bump it up a whole dollar and then you'll probably make a little bit of money now. And that's just to bring everybody up. No one wants to lose money when they sell a book. So we basically don't allow that to happen. We try to alert you to go adjust your prices if you want. If you don't, we're going to move them up for you.
[00:33:34] Matty: Well, there's all sorts of fascinating stuff going on at Draft2Digital, and, Kris, I appreciate so much you taking the time to talk with me knowing that you've probably doing a lot of these interviews these days. So please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and Draft2Digital and everything you do online.
[00:33:55] Kris: Sure. Yeah, our website is Draft2Digital.com. And we're on Facebook at Draft2Digital. We're on TikTok these days at Draft2Digital. We have a Twitter account, also at Draft2Digital. So you should be able to find us usually in those three places. The TikTok stuff's been fun to watch. A lot of our team's been having a good time on that channel. So if you're into TikTok, I recommend hopping on. You'll see Mark Lefebvre do some funny stuff with wigs and other great times. So it's a fun place.
[00:34:19] Matty: I haven't done TikTok yet, but now I'm going to have to.
[00:34:22] Kris: Yeah, you need at least look at Mark's videos. So yeah, we try to be everywhere we can. And then of course, if you ever need any help or you have questions in general, you can email us, which is just [email protected]. And our team is the best customer support in the industry.
[00:34:36] Matty: I second that. I am, as I said, a happy customer, and I'm very excited to see what you and Smashwords are going to do together.
[00:34:44] Kris: Thank you very much, Matty.
[00:34:46] Matty: Thank you, Kris.
Links
Twitter: @Draft2Digital
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Draft2Digital
Website: Draft2Digital.com
For links to Matty's upcoming and recent events, click here.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Draft2Digital
Website: Draft2Digital.com
For links to Matty's upcoming and recent events, click here.
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