Episode 136 - Looking Forward in Indy Publishing with Mark Coker
May 31, 2022
Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords and Chief Strategy Officer at Draft2Digital, discusses LOOKING FORWARD IN INDY PUBLISHING. He discusses how platforms like Facebook are the new gatekeepers, the rise of subscription models (and why he likes Scribd), the importance of implementing best practices, why we should be excited about AI narration, and how indy authors are the future of publishing.
Do any of those topics pique your interest? Check out 2 MINUTES OF INDY https://bit.ly/2MinutesOfIndy, where over the week following the airing of the episode, you'll find brief video clips from the interview on each of those topics. You can also catch up on some highlights of previous episodes there.
Do any of those topics pique your interest? Check out 2 MINUTES OF INDY https://bit.ly/2MinutesOfIndy, where over the week following the airing of the episode, you'll find brief video clips from the interview on each of those topics. You can also catch up on some highlights of previous episodes there.
Mark Coker serves as Chief Strategy Officer at Draft2Digital, the world’s leading publishing platform for indie authors. Mark is the founder of indie ebook pioneer Smashwords, which was acquired by Draft2Digital on March 1, 2022. Mark is an outspoken advocate for self-published authors, a former contributing columnist for Publishers Weekly, and the host of the SMART AUTHOR podcast where he teaches evergreen best practices to help authors publish ebooks with pride, professionalism, and success.
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"Recognize that indy authors are the future of publishing. Not New York publishers, not London publishers, not Amazon, not the retailers. Authors are the center of the universe. And authors need to recognize that and hold on to that and protect that. You need to be wary of anyone who seeks to take your power away. So your power to publish, your power to distribute widely, your power to price your books as you see fit." —Mark Coker
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Links
Mark's Links:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/markcoker
Facebook: https://facebook.com/markcoker
Mark blogs at https://blog.smashwords.com
https://draft2digital.com
Referenced Podcast Episodes:
Episode 120 - Draft2Digital Updates: Smashwords and Print with Kris Austin
Episode 124 - The Rise of Subscription Models with Tara Cremin
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
Twitter: https://twitter.com/markcoker
Facebook: https://facebook.com/markcoker
Mark blogs at https://blog.smashwords.com
https://draft2digital.com
Referenced Podcast Episodes:
Episode 120 - Draft2Digital Updates: Smashwords and Print with Kris Austin
Episode 124 - The Rise of Subscription Models with Tara Cremin
Matty's Links:
Affiliate links
Events
Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello, and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Mark Coker. Hey, Mark, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Mark: Hi Matty, great! Nice to be here.
[00:00:07] Matty: I am very happy to have you here. To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Mark Coker serves as the Chief Strategy Officer at Draft2Digital, the world's leading publishing platform for indy authors. Mark is the founder of indy ebook pioneer Smashwords, which was acquired by Draft2Digital on March 1st, 2022. Mark is an outspoken advocate for self-published authors, a former contributing columnist for "Publishers Weekly," and the host of the Smart Author Podcast where he teaches evergreen best practices to help authors publish eBooks with pride, professionalism, and success.
[00:00:38] And I had invited Mark on the podcast to talk about the next X years for indy, and I don't think ever before, have I put out as all-encompassing topic to any guests before, and I'm also going into this with no notes. So we're just going to see where the conversation takes us.
The acquisition by Draft2Digital
[00:00:55] Matty: But I thought that a good way to start would be to talk about the fairly recent acquisition of Smashwords by Draft2Digital. And on February 15th, I recorded a podcast episode that went out as 120, Draft2Digital Updates: Smashwords and Print with Kris Austin, the CEO of Draft2Digital, and I was just wondering if you have any updates you can give us about how that is going?
[00:01:18] I got to say, I think things are going really well. The teams are meshing really well together. We're getting to know one another. The teams are already working together and moving forward and doing things. And I'm really pleased with how things are falling into place so quickly. Communication is really important within Draft2Digital, and Kris Austin does a really great job of encouraging communication, cross-team communication. We're making progress and we're already making progress on some of the promises that we made in terms of what people would start to see from the combination.
What's the most imminent promise?
[00:01:54] Matty: What is the promise you're most imminent on delivering on?
[00:01:59] Mark: As a lot of listeners probably know, there was a lot of concern in the erotica community about, would Smashwords' policies change, because Smashwords' always been more permissive on erotica than just about anybody else. And as part of that merger, Draft2Digital committed to adopt our erotica certification system, so that authors can self-certify the presence or the lack thereof of certain taboo topics in erotica, so that we can accurately distribute those titles to the retailers that will accept them and block those titles from retailers that won't.
[00:02:39] So that system is already pretty much developed and done. I don't know what the timeline is for when we're going to launch it, but it was great to see them fulfill that commitment very early on.
[00:02:49] Earlier this morning, we had a meeting to talk about getting D2D books into the Smashwords store, because I know that's what a lot of D2D authors are excited about. So we were finalizing a plan around that and how we're going to stage, probably in different iterative steps, how we're going to do that.
[00:03:10] Mark: So the first step is going to be to just get those books into the store so that they can start selling, and then follow-on steps down the line we'll incrementally add support for the Smashwords coupon capabilities and some of the unique merchandising tools that are within the Smashwords store that aren't available at other retailers. So that's great. I'm happy with how things are going so far.
The Smashwords Storefront
[00:03:34] Matty: Yeah, as a Draft2Digital user for many years, and someone who admittedly was not that familiar with Smashwords, I am very excited about the storefront. And I'm wondering if you can speak about the Smashwords storefront, what readers it reaches that maybe haven't been as available to people who are not using that platform, and how it works with other platforms, including things like PayHip, which I think a lot of people are using as their more around the retailer entree to some readers.
[00:04:04] It might be helpful to talk about the background of the store. So when we first launched Smashwords in 2008, the idea was to create a free self-publishing platform that would allow any writer anywhere in the world to self-publish a book at no cost, and then sell that book directly to readers over the Smashwords website. And so that was the beginnings of the store. That was 2008. In 2009, I had this crazy idea to become the Ingram of e-book distribution. Because at the time, Ingram was not able to support the distribution of self-published authors. So it was impossible for self-published authors to get their books into the major retailers.
[00:04:47] Mark: So I recognized that there was a void, that we needed a distributor that would focus on self-published authors. And so we turned our focus in that direction, and then our books started selling really well, and then that's been our focus. That's been our primary focus for the last 13 years, is building out our distribution systems and helping authors get their books into major retailers, opening up library platforms for self-published authors.
How to get promoted on Smashwords
[00:05:15] Mark: So the Smashwords store always took a back seat to the rest of our business, the distribution side. But along the way, we did continue to update some of the capabilities there, such as the Smashwords coupon capabilities. We've got the broadest suite of couponing and promotion tools available at any retailer. We have self-serve merchandising, so authors can often get their books featured on the homepage. Self-serve. Just using our tools.
[00:05:46] Matty: And how do they go about doing that?
[00:05:48] At Smashwords you use the public coupon feature. So we have coupons that are public and private. So a private coupon means that your coupon code is only available to the people that you give it to, like maybe the people on your private mailing list. The public coupon puts your book publicly for sale in the Smashwords store. And then if your book exhibits certain characteristics, our algorithms will automatically feature your book right on the homepage.
[00:06:15] Mark: And that's not even the most important feature to get in at Smashwords, because a lot of customers of the Smashwords store are going to visit the homepage, and then they're going to start filtering by genre or category. So drilling down. Drill down to paranormal romance or paranormal fantasy or whatever it is that the reader is interested in. And as you drill down, the featured selection changes, and it becomes even easier for authors to have their books appear in the first five or six listings there, as books that are on sale and being featured.
[00:06:50] And that featuring is completely automated based on our algorithms. And our algorithms look to basically identify titles that readers are already reacting favorably to. So we look at a number of different characteristics to discern that, so fully automated. And so a lot of our authors are using that, to do that self-serve merchandising within our store.
How are Smashwords customers different?
[00:07:14] Mark: So you asked about, how the Smashwords store customers may be different than others, in general, our customers are the same. So the audience for the Smashwords store is international. About 60%, maybe a little bit less, of our customers are coming from the United States, the other 40%, anywhere in the world that has an internet connection and where people have either access to PayPal or credit cards.
[00:07:37] We do probably have one of the largest collections anywhere of erotica. And so we do get a lot of erotica customers. Readers who enjoy erotica and know that they're going to find more erotica at Smashwords, a broader selection of quality erotica, than they'll find just about anywhere else. I would say today that the store sales are, there's a big chunk of erotica there.
[00:08:00] Now that mix is going to change, especially as we bring in the Draft2Digital books. And so I think what you're going to see is, what all customers are going to see is, just a broader, deeper, more amazing collection of indy authored titles on any subject that interests you. Right now, we've got close to 600,000 books in the Smashwords store. With Draft2Digital books coming online into the store, hopefully over the next few months, the title count is going to approach 900,000 titles. So really, we serve everyone.
Metadata and Content Customization
[00:08:39] Matty: I'm thinking of a question, I'm formulating it a little bit as we talk, but what you were saying before about you drill down into categories and they become more and more specific, and the system is curating or presenting the books that are meeting the criteria that the person puts in.
[00:08:59] And that combined with the fact that you're going to get a whole slew of new books through Draft2Digital, I'm wondering if there's, and this is like maybe veering a little bit more into the futuristic side, is there going to be a difference in how the Smashwords store in combination with Draft2Digital uses metadata?
[00:09:18] And the reason I thought of that is that if I'm writing nonfiction about building a boat and I go on there and somehow I'm presented with erotica, like it's an issue that I think indy authors don't have to deal with on that many other platforms, because they're more restrictive. And so is the combined Smashwords Draft2Digital looking at innovative ways of using metadata to make sure that the readers are getting to the books they want in this new expanded selection?
[00:09:46] Mark: I think this is a great question that you're asking, and it's a question that we've already addressed, years ago. So when you visit the Smashwords store, just as a guest before you've even registered and we know who you are, we automatically block the erotica from the homepage. And then when you sign up for an account, you have the ability to configure what types of erotica that you want to see in your search results. So do you want just mainstream erotica, no erotica, or do you want to see erotica with taboo themes?
[00:10:22] So the idea is that we want the store to be customizable by the reader so that the reader is only viewing what they want to view as part of their shopping experience, and I think we're going to be doing more of that in the future. We've got a lot of ideas on the roadmap for how we can add more personalization to the store.
AI or Author-generated Metadata?
[00:10:45] Matty: It's interesting because I'm realizing that probably the only other representative of an online retailer site that I've spoken to is Tara Cremin from Kobo. I don't think I've ever spoken to anybody from Amazon or Apple. And so it's bringing to mind all these questions that I haven't had an opportunity to ask someone who has this retail insight like, beyond the erotica certification system, are you relying on author-provided data to help your customers navigate the site? Or is there any kind of backend AI going on that's helping readers find what they want?
[00:11:20] Mark: Just about everything we do is based on what the author is providing us. And that's important to us, that the author defines their own metadata because they know their book the best. And so we do leverage that metadata, in terms of how we display the books and the categories that we display the books. Does that answer your question on that?
AI can be creepy
[00:11:40] Matty: Yes, it does. I can imagine that, for looking many years down the road, not just at Draft2Digital Smashwords, but at the industry in general, and my hope is always that, that the creation of the metadata will become more automated. I think authors are often the worst judge of their own work, even in selecting a genre, for example, or keywords and things like that. And I'm looking forward to the day when there will be a machine that will do that for me.
[00:12:05] Mark: Oh, the machines are coming and it's scary. When we start talking about AI, definitely we are going to see AI touch many pieces of the book industry in the future, from publishing to writing, to marketing.
[00:12:22] Just last week, I got a really strangely oddly worded email from a company that turns out to be, it looks like some kind of slimy vanity publishing company in Florida. I'm not going to mention their name, I've forgotten it.
[00:12:38] But what caught my eye about that email is that it did attract my attention because it was personalized. So it was addressed to me, and then I could quickly see in the second paragraph, it was talking about information that I had published years ago on the ideal pricing for eBooks. And so that kind of told me, oh, this is coming from a real person, they've actually taken the time to write me an email rather than spam me.
[00:13:05] Then going through the email, I realized that the language was off. It didn't quite make sense. And then at the bottom of the email, it made some offhanded comment about some restaurant in Florida, which has no relevance to me, only relevance to the fact that it was near that publisher, that publishing company.
[00:13:27] And then I looked down at the bottom of the email and it said that this email was automatically generated via AI, using some service that I'm not going to mention because I conveniently forgot their name. I would not encourage any authors to do this. But they're supposedly drawing upon thousands, hundreds of thousands of bits of data out there on the internet about me, to send me a targeted email to get my attention, so I want to go publish a book with them.
[00:13:57] Matty: And evidently eat in that restaurant.
[00:13:59] Mark: That obviously was dropped in to be chatty and conversational and look real. But it was made by a machine, not by a person, which is why it was so obviously odd, and then ultimately off-putting and creepy.
Why Be Excited About AI?
[00:14:17] Mark: Because imagine, imagine what bad marketers can do with this kind of technology. That's a scary dystopian future there when it comes to AI and marketing, but there are other aspects of AI that I'm really excited about.
[00:14:32] I'm really excited about AI coming to audio books and audio book creation and synthetic voices, because that technology has really improved over the last few years. And I see an opportunity for these automatically generated audio books based on e-books, you push a couple buttons, and your ebook is now an audio book, and the voice quality is getting better and better. And I'm starting to see that as that's going to be like a new format for books, just like paperbacks. Low-cost paperbacks were a new format for trade paperbacks or for hardcovers. This is an opportunity to make more books more accessible to more readers, to make audio book publishing more accessible to more authors, at less cost or no cost.
[00:15:25] Mark: In any time that you can do that, anytime that you can lower the barriers to entry so that authors and creatives can get their content out into the world to be enjoyed by consumers at much lower costs, magic happens. That's basically what we saw 14 years ago when we launched Smashwords, because when we launched Smashwords, there was nothing like us at the time. It was a crazy idea, a free publishing platform. So no cost, no barrier to entry for an author to publish a book. And because there was no cost, it allowed the authors to offer their books at much lower prices.
[00:16:04] And so readers for the first time were presented with a lot of high-quality books at really low prices, and the market for indy publishing just exploded. And it was a win for authors, it was a win for readers, it was a win for the culture of books. So I think we're going to see the same thing happen in audio books, thanks to AI.
[00:16:23] I've been excited about the idea of audio books. I hire professional performers to perform my fiction audio books, but I would love to have an option to generate an audio book for my non-fiction in my voice, which I'm experimenting with Descript, which is the program I use to edit the transcript and the audio and video of the podcast.
[00:16:47] We are many years away from me wanting to listen to an AI read a fiction book where I'm in it for the experience as opposed to a non-fiction book where I'm in it for the information. If I want information, I'm happy to have Siri read it to me or whoever, but I don't think that audio book narrators are going to be losing their jobs anytime soon because they're still bringing a perspective, a skill to it that AI hasn't met yet.
[00:17:10] Mark: Yeah, yeah, AI can't do what a professional voice talent can do, but what I think we're going to see is some bifurcation in the market. The professionally narrated audio books or audio books narrated by the author are going to be seen as premium audio books, and then you're going to see the synthetically generated ones from AI are going to be a lower end.
[00:17:31] But the quality is really improving. And if it means that an author can offer a synthetic audio book to their readers for 99 cents, as opposed to $19.99, that starts to become transformative. And it starts to allow more authors and more books to become more accessible, and I think ultimately, it's going to enable more authors to graduate to that premium level. For a lot of authors who are first starting out or even established authors, the cost of professional audio book narration is just, it makes it inaccessible.
[00:18:10] Matty: Yeah, as a consumer of content, I would be very happy for the 99-cent alternative when I wasn't looking for the full experience, but having the premium human narrated one available too is the perfect scenario.
What's coming next for D2D?
[00:18:24] Matty: In addition to things like AI audio book narration, what other things do you see coming down the pike, let's just say, in the next year or two, looking pretty close to where we are now. What do you see coming down the pike strategy-wise that is interesting to you?
[00:18:39] I've been spending most of the last month working on D2D's long-term roadmap. So there's not a lot I can talk about there yet, but you know, in general there are some things that get me excited and directions that I think that the world is going to move.
The New Gatekeepers
[00:18:57] One of the challenges I see right now facing authors, is that the relationship with your reader is being mediated by a new form of gatekeeper. So everyone is aware of publishers acting as gatekeepers or literary agents acting as gatekeepers and self-publishing helped eliminate those gatekeepers, at least as a barrier to reaching your readers.
[00:19:24] Mark: But we've seen new gatekeepers arise. So for example, a lot of authors are advertising on Facebook. That makes Facebook a gatekeeper. Facebook is the intermediary between you and your prospective reader. We've seen online retailers. They are the gatekeeper; they are mediating the relationship with your reader. You don't know who your customer is.
[00:19:47] And it was actually a Smashwords author about a year and a half ago that helped me arrive to this epiphany. So she's a multi-time New York Times bestseller. She was getting ready to release a new book. And like many big best-sellers over the last 10 years, a lot of best-sellers are no longer selling what they used to. And there are a lot of reasons for that. And she said something to me, really simple. She said, if only I could tell my prior readers about this new book, they'd want to read it. But she couldn't.
[00:20:19] Yeah, she has a couple thousand people on her mailing list and a few thousand people on her private Facebook group, but this is an author with hundreds of thousands of readers out there in the world that she has no way to access.
[00:20:31] And that's because the retailers are mediating that relationship with the reader, the retailers aren't willing to share that. And some retailers are adding additional gatekeeping tolls on top of that, to allow you to even get closer to these former readers, these people that want to buy your next book, if only they could know about it.
[00:20:52] And so this idea of mediated reader relationships, I see that as a big problem, and I'm all about trying to solve problems for authors. And a neat thing about D2D is they're the same way. I've always had this philosophy at Smashwords, here's a big problem, and there'll be people say, oh, that's just a really big problem. That's just too difficult to fix. And my attitude's always been, well, we should fix it because it's a big problem and because it's difficult to fix. That's a reason for us to do that because we've got the talent, we've got the people, we've got the developers. Let's try to solve, let's try to crack that nut so that we can solve that problem for our authors. So that's one of the problems that I want to solve. I want to help authors get closer to their readers.
Don't Abuse Your Mailing List
[00:21:41] Matty: One of the things that I find really appealing about that is that I'm always trying to comply with the, you need to have an email list because, that's the only customer reader contact that you own. And I just hate that, because as a consumer of other people's email newsletters, I basically want to know when an author I like has a new book coming out, and that's pretty much it. I don't really need to hear week by week what their family life is doing and things like that. I just, I really struggle with finding content that I feel like I want to share. But if there was that platform where I could have that relationship, that was just based on the books that I know they want to read, as you're saying, that would address a big problem and a big frustration, I think, for a lot of authors.
[00:22:23] Mark: Yeah, so now luckily, those simple tools are already available. So at the Smashwords store, we've had that capability for, I don't know, four or five years with something called Smashwords Alerts. So you can subscribe to be automatically notified when one of your favorite authors releases a new book.
[00:22:40] And D2D has their Books2Read tool and Universal Book Links, and they can do some of that as well. But definitely, I think that's a really good point. And it raises the question about email best practices, because I do know that a lot of authors tend to abuse their email lists and give the readers information that readers don't necessarily want. And then that becomes a negative.
Keep an Eye on Subscriptions
[00:23:06] What are some other things that you're seeing, maybe let's step out a little further in the timeline, but something that's mid-range in the future that you think we should be keeping an eye on?
[00:23:15] Keep an eye on subscriptions. I don't think this will be a surprise to anyone who's been publishing for a couple of years, but the subscription model is really hot. And I'm not just talking about Kindle Unlimited or Kobo Plus. Scribd is on fire in a good way. We just had an amazing month in March at Scribd. They're growing like gangbusters, from what we can tell.
What is the Scribd Model?
[00:23:38] Matty: Can you give a little bit more background about what Scribd is and what its model is?
[00:23:44] Mark: Sure. It's important to recognize that not all subscription models are the same. So Scribd has a really unique, author-friendly model for doing subscriptions. So at Scribd, I think customers pay $9.99 a month and they get access to a virtually unlimited catalog of titles within the Scribd ecosystem. And you can basically read whatever you want to read at no cost, no additional cost.
[00:24:14] And the way Scribd works on the business side, is that after that reader reads past the first, I think it's the first 12 or 13% of that book, it triggers the equivalent of a full sale for you. And we negotiated the same terms with Scribd that we negotiated with all the major agency retailers. So the author is making good money on that.
[00:24:39] Matty: And that's one of the platforms that Draft2Digital reaches, correct?
[00:24:41] Mark: Yes, definitely. So we both distribute into Scribd. So the author gets 60% of the list price, once that trigger is made.
[00:24:51] And then Scribd also pays for just partial reads that don't reach that threshold. The reason I like the Scribd model is that it doesn't put the same downward devaluation pressure on books that other subscription models tend to do. Because I'm always thinking about devaluation. I'm always thinking about how can authors set their own price for their books and how can authors decide, you know, I believe authors should be in control of everything. Authors should decide what their book costs.
[00:25:21] So at Scribd, you decide what your book costs and your royalty is going to be based on a percentage of what your book's list price is.
The Pool-based Model Devalues Books
[00:25:28] Mark: That's a completely different model than what Kindle Unlimited is doing and what Kobo Plus are doing. So those other two subscription services pay out of a pool. So there's a certain pot of money that gets divided up among the authors whose books are read, whether it's the number of pages read or the number of minutes read. And the pool models, depending on the retailer, have the tendency to put more devaluation pressure on the author, and also strip the author of pricing control.
[00:26:01] So if you're being compensated based on the number of minutes that your book is read, if you write a children's book that only has 300 words in it, yet your book sells single copies at $4.99, that subscription model is really going to devalue your work. You're going to get a fraction, or if you write short fiction, or if you write erotica, we were talking about erotica earlier. Erotica authors typically command higher prices for shorter works, because it's a different type of product for the reader.
[00:26:35] And so, some of these pool-based models do have the potential to disadvantage certain authors and certain types of content. Whereas if you look at the Scribd model, which is not the pool-based model, it forces Scribd to be accountable to the author and the author's expectations for what they feel like they deserve to be paid.
[00:26:54] But even Scribd has its own little quirks. If your book is priced too high in certain categories like romance, your book may not appear within the Scribd catalog. So that's something that some authors have to struggle with.
Scribd's Target Audience
[00:27:09] Matty: Is Scribd targeting a particular audience or demographic?
[00:27:13] Mark: I think they're targeting every reader in the world, if you ask them what their ultimate objective is. Yeah, the Scribd I think would consider themselves the future of reading, at least of subscription reading.
Which Model is Winning in the Market?
[00:27:27] Matty: Do you see the market taking a leaning toward one or the other of those models longer-term?
[00:27:33] Mark: Well, I think Scribd's model is great. We'll see if it changes over time. I think Scribd's model is author and publisher friendly. And we were talking today about the best interest of authors. I think everyone should be at Scribd, because they're not going to devalue your book and you'll be paid, compensated well when your book is consumed,
The Problems with Kindle
[00:27:54] Mark: There are other issues going on with Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. I don't know if you want me to talk about that.
[00:28:01] Matty: Sure.
[00:28:02] I do get tired sometimes of listening to myself talking about Amazon. I've never been a fan of Kindle Unlimited. First of all, it requires that you make your book exclusive to Amazon. When you make your book exclusive to Amazon, it means you can't sell it to the other retailers. That means all these other retailers that want to support indy authors can't. It means, all of your fans have to shift their buying over to this other retailer. So it makes it difficult for the other retailers to support the entire indy community when their customers are being pulled away because of exclusivity, because the books that their customers want to read are only available at Amazon.
[00:28:43] Mark: And Amazon has the market power to coerce authors to make their books exclusive. So I've always had big problems with KDP Select exclusivity. I think it's counterproductive to the long-term best interests of every single indy author.
[00:29:00] But I also understand that it's very tempting for authors to enroll in that, because what Amazon does is that they hold back some of their best marketing and merchandising tools and make those tools only available to authors that are exclusive. Which puts authors in an awkward position, even authors who in their heart hate exclusivity and want to make their books available to readers at all the different platforms all around the world.
[00:29:28] Amazon's got 70, 80% of the world's ebook readers, if you're selling eBooks. And so it's difficult to say no to Amazon. And with the pool-based model, there's not a lot of transparency, so I don't think I've ever seen Amazon disclose what percentage of that pool they're paying to authors. So it's quite likely that the effective royalty rate that authors are earning, it's not 70%. It's probably not 60%. It might not even be 50%. I don't know what it is, but there's no transparency there. So as an author, you don't really know how much of that money is going to the authors.
[00:30:08] Mark: Now if Amazon were to say, 70% of the pool is being paid to authors, you know, it's like, oh, well, okay, that's fair. That's more fair, and maybe we can be excited about that, but we don't know. As an author, you want to know.
[00:30:57] Matty: I don't want to take you too far down the tedious Amazon rabbit hole, so I'm going to switch to a more interesting topic that I think will steer us away from that. And it's a wide distribution strategy topic. And I was thinking of it because of what we were talking about with Scribd, because Scribd is one of the options.
Leave it to Aggregators vs Understanding Each Marketplace
[00:31:12] Matty: I use Draft2Digital, I check them all off except for Amazon and Kobo. I go to Amazon and Kobo direct. And I do it because it's not worth it to me to have to upload the book to all those places individually, and I also love Draft2Digitals front end, very easy to use, great customer service.
[00:31:30] What I realized, though, using Scribd as an example, is that I know pretty much nothing about Scribd, even though my books are out there. And Kobo's an interesting counterexample, because I decided to go direct to Kobo and I'm much more attentive to what's going on in Kobo and much more feeling tied in with the promotions. And I totally recognize that might be a false sense on my part, but I feel more engaged because I'm going direct.
[00:31:57] Matty: And I realize that there's this opportunity that people may be missing when they're using an aggregator like Draft2Digital, that at some point it's just like a bunch of boxes you're checking off and not checking off, but maybe missing opportunities to more fully understand the ecosystem into which the aggregator is distributing your books, so that when there are opportunities, maybe there are Apple promos or something like that.
[00:32:18] Do you have advice for people who are weighing that, the convenience of an aggregator versus understanding the market, the platforms into which that aggregator is distributing your books?
Advantages of Aggregators
[00:32:29] Mark: Sure. Great question. I know there are a lot of authors out there who think that you need to be working directly with a retailer if you're going to get access to the promotions. And that's not really true. Every single week for many years, the last don’t know, 6, 7, 8 years at Smashwords, every single week we've been, we still are, sending out weekly merchandising recommendations to the merchandising teams at the major retailers that we serve, helping them identify titles that are worthy of feature promotion.
[00:33:02] And we can identify those titles because we have a unique perspective. We can see how these titles are performing across all the different retailers. If a book is on pre-order, we can see which books are accumulating the most pre-orders, which is a good indication of which books are the most highly anticipated. And we can share that data with the retailers.
[00:33:22] So often, a lot of authors are getting free merchandising for doing nothing other than just distributing with us. For example, if we see a book is performing really well at Barnes and Noble, that'll give us the confidence to promote it to Apple or to Kobo or vice versa. And because we're aggregating the sales, maybe a book is doing reasonably well at multiple retailers, but in the aggregate, it's way above average for all the other books, and so we'll promote that.
[00:33:50] D2D has been doing the same thing with their merchandising programs. Their merchandising team is even, I would say, even better resourced and staffed than our team was. And they're surfacing all kinds of really exciting opportunities for authors, including opportunities that authors that are working direct aren't going to get.
[00:34:09] When authors are weighing the decision, do I want to upload direct to a retailer or do I want to work through an aggregator, obviously if you upload direct, the aggregator is cut out of the pie, and you don't have to pay the aggregator that 10% of the list price as their commission.
[00:34:25] But as you start publishing more books, aggregators become more and more important to the success of your career, because it can be very time-consuming once you've got 2, 3, 4, 10, 20, 30, 50 books, if you want to run a promotion on all those different books, if you want to mark them all down by 10% for a while, or for a sale, if you want to update the cover images or update the back matter, that's a lot of time to do that.
[00:34:56] Now it's not difficult work to do, but it's tedious and time consuming. And this is time that you could better spend writing. Writing is the unique product of every single author. That's the one thing that you're putting out into the world, your writing, that no one else can copy. No one else can write the book that you can.
[00:35:16] And from a time management perspective, that's your unique contribution to the world. And if you can spend more time writing and less time wasted trying to save 10%, if that's what the motivation is, I understand everyone's got a different motivation. It pretty quickly, it becomes apparent that, you can be more successful working through an aggregator, because from a single dashboard, you can manage multiple titles.
[00:35:43] And so you're a D2D author, so you know how cool their automated end matter is. If you're a series writer and you're getting ready to publish the 20th book in your series, wouldn't it be cool if the first 19 books could have their end matter automatically updated to recognize that you've just published the 20th book in your series? That happens automatically at D2D. That saves you hours and hours and hours of time.
[00:36:09] So there are the time-savings. And the time-savings don't just go to publishing, but to managing your metadata. You make one change, it propagates out to everyone instantly or near instantly. There's end of year tax reporting, tax compliance, so you don't have to gather up tax forms from five or six different retailers. You just get it from one source. It makes your annual tax filings much simpler, much more accurate.
[00:36:40] You've got all your consolidated data in a single dashboard. You can do your analytics, you can compare retailers more easily, how you're performing. So there are a lot of really powerful tools that you're not going to get necessarily if you're just uploading direct.
[00:36:58] Matty: Yeah, I think that even the learning curve of understanding little oddities of each of those platforms on its own makes it well worth the 10%, in my opinion, to have one nice place to go to.
[00:37:10] Which actually, I have two more questions for you. One is going to be D2D-related, and then I'm going to ask you to just look out as far as you'd like on something that indy authors should be keeping an eye on.
Draft2Digital Print Beta
[00:37:20] Matty: But I wanted to hit Draft2Digital print beta and find out what the current status of that is. We got an update from Kris in February, but here it is, it's almost two months later, might as well check in again. because that is something that I'm very excited about.
[00:37:34] Mark: I am very excited about print as well, and that was certainly one of the factors that I considered when Kris and I first started talking about merging. I'm really excited about what they're going to do with print. I think what they're doing with print will be just as disruptive to print on demand publishing as Smashwords was to ebook publishing 14 years ago. They're going to make print publishing less expensive, more accessible, and less complex than anyone else in the industry.
[00:38:03] And the beta is proceeding really well. They continually add people on the waitlist into the beta, so although we're still calling it a beta, it is live. If authors haven't signed up for it, then go sign up for it now, and then they'll get dropped into the beta. I know there's been a lot of work going on behind the scenes to make print more accessible to authors internationally outside the US, and so they're making progress there, and pulling all those systems together so that they can accurately communicate to authors what shipping costs are going to be, things like that. Yeah, we're all really excited about how print is progressing. It's going to be big.
Things Indy Authors Should Look Out For
[00:38:42] So the last question I want to ask is just to say, looking as far out as you would like to, what do you see coming down the pike that maybe indy authors can't take advantage of now, but they should be thinking about, they should be preparing themselves, practically or mentally or however, to make sure they're ready for it when it comes along?
Indy Authors are the Future of Publishing
[00:39:01] I talked about AI and audio books, I'm excited about that. I'm going to give you an answer that maybe is not what you expected. I think more important than what's coming, because the further out in the future that we try to predict, the less accurate we're going to be, I think it's more important for the community to recognize that as an indy author, you are a publisher, you're running a business, and your business will be more successful if you think long-term. And long-term thinking is difficult for a lot of people, because you've got your needs for today versus your needs for tomorrow and your aspirations for tomorrow. So whenever you make any publishing decisions, think long-term.
[00:39:44] Mark: Also recognize that indy authors are the future of publishing. That's how we think it Draft2Digital, and we've oriented every single aspect of our businesses around that idea, that indy authors deserve to be the center of publishing. So not New York publishers, not London publishers, not Amazon, not the retailers. Authors are the center of the universe. That's what we're building our business around. And authors need to recognize that and hold on to that and protect that.
[00:40:19] So as an indy author, indy means independent. Your independence is precious, and you need to protect it. And you need to be wary of anyone who seeks to take your power away. So your power to publish, your power to distribute widely, your power to price your books as you see fit. The authors should always have the power to decide what their book is worth and let the marketplace decide if that price is too high or too low.
[00:40:51] So when I look ahead, I see a very bright future for indy authors, but to achieve the greatest promise of that bright future, indy authors need to recognize that they are the center of the publishing universe. And it requires a mental leap. Most of us don't think that way. Most of us, most authors think, I’m at the mercy of some higher power, the gatekeeper, the advertising, the whatever. So as you make your plans for the future, always just orient yourself in the middle. What is best for me? What's best for my business? What's best for my readers?
[00:41:32] And if you can orient yourself around that mindset, then it makes future publishing decisions much easier. So when new opportunities come down the pike, you'll be able to discern which opportunities are true opportunities and which opportunities are really traps, which opportunities might take you in the wrong direction.
Recommended Mindset
[00:41:54] Matty: If we're providing an approach authors can take to those two combined things that, indy authors are the center of the publishing universe and we have to look long-term, is there a way you can frame that up, like asking the question, what will be best for me, my work and my readers in X number of years? Or is there some other mindset that you would recommend indy authors take to accommodate those two strategic approaches that you described?
[00:42:19] Mark: Imagine the future that you would like to see. What do you want the publishing world to look like? Do you want there to be only one retailer? What would that world look like, and how would the world change? Obviously, that would be a bad thing, if only one retailer was competing for the privilege to sell your book, it would mean that you're at their mercy and that they can dictate how they compensate you.
[00:42:44] That's a fast track to a slippery slope, to the point where publishing becomes pay to play, and the only authors who are read are the authors who are willing to pay to be read. So that would be a dark, dystopian future that none of us want.
[00:42:58] So then imagine the future that we all want, that I think every author can agree that we want. The more booksellers in the world, the more people waking up every morning thinking about how can I connect more readers with your books. That's the world we want. So that's a world of more retailers, more booksellers, more people who are out there passionate about books, selling books, connecting readers with books.
[00:43:23] So when you start looking at it that way, it starts making decisions easier for you. So you want to support as many different retailers as you can with your books. You want to give your readers as many different options as you can to purchase your books or to discover your books. You want to avoid options where the only way to get into that store is to drop your drawers and lower the royalty rate that you'll accept.
[00:43:48] And to a certain extent, I'm oversimplifying here, because every decision needs to be made in isolation. There will be times where it makes really great sense to just drop your book to free for some opportunity, and other times where it might not make sense.
[00:44:04] Matty: I like the sort of overarching theme of value the outlets that you're using to get your books to your readers. i.e., not just one, and also value of your own work, what you were saying about the indy author is going to be the center of the universe. And I think that goes to pricing reasonably, not giving your work away, the creative work deserves a financial return.
[00:44:21] When I was preparing for my interview with Kris, it was interesting because I read the Smashwords business home page and I read the Draft2Digital homepage and I was like, oh man, it was like the same person wrote these two mission statements, implied mission statements on those pages. So it obviously seems like a marriage made in heaven, at least from the point of view of the authors you're serving.
[00:44:42] We evolved really from the same seed. So both of our companies were founded by authors. I'm an author. One of the D2D's co-founders is an author. So both of us came at this business from the perspective of, what do authors need and how should authors be treated?
[00:45:00] Mark: And so that's why neither one of our companies have ever charged money for services. We're just like vehemently against that. You know, that in many ways, our model is more typical of traditional publishers. We don't pay advances, but the money only flows one way. The money should only flow to the author. That's our philosophy.
[00:45:23] So yeah, I do think it is a marriage made in heaven. Our companies are much more alike than they were different. We both attacked this opportunity with the same philosophy, the same author friendly philosophy. And we both developed tools that the other didn't. And now we have the opportunity to combine these tools so that we can do more together so that we can do more innovation for authors.
[00:45:50] And that's what I'm working on right now, I'm working on a roadmap, where D2D should be in five years, in 10 years, and what are we going to do for authors? What can we do for authors, leveraging the strengths that we have? And I'm really excited about what we can do for authors.
[00:46:06] I think we're going to surprise a lot of people. I think D2D is going to become an essential publishing partner for every single author in the world. And certainly, that's the challenge that I'm giving myself. That's what I want, because I know what good are companies want to put into the world. You've spent time with the D2D people and the more time you spend with them, it's just very clear, they want to put good into the world. They want to do good for authors.
[00:46:36] And they know, and we know that there are a lot of shortcuts to making lots of money off of authors, selling you stuff that you don't need. And we just will not go there. That's against our philosophy because we have a long-term philosophy. We want to be your publishing partner 20 years from now. We want to be the publishing partner for your children and grandchildren. That's the kind of company that we're creating.
[00:47:03] That's what we're trying to create here, is a company, that's going to be here for a long time. That is going to serve authors, protect authors, advocate for the indy author community. We're really talking about the, when we're talking about indy authors, people aren't really, probably don't realize it yet, but what we've witnessed over the last 14 years is an emergence of a subculture. Indy authors speak their own language. Your neighbors don't understand you, but your fellow indy authors do, right? And so we want to protect the subculture, develop it, help it reach its full potential. And so in the years ahead, I think everything that we do will be guided by that philosophy,
[00:47:49] So I'm excited about it. I think the future for indy authors is more promising than it's ever been. It doesn't mean that we're going to be without challenges. There are tremendous challenges that every indy author faces. Just looking in the ebook world, books don't go to print anymore, which means that every single day from this day forward, you are competing against more books out there in the market. That creates new challenges.
Not everyone adopts best practices
[00:48:15] Mark: But here's a piece of good news, which is also bad news. The vast majority of indy authors don't adopt best practices. So there are simple little things that you can do that most authors aren't doing that will give you a huge advantage in the marketplace.
[00:48:29] Like pre-orders. Only about 15% of indy authors release their book as a pre-order. Yet when we look at the data, the authors who are releasing their books at pre-orders, when we look at like the books that were released over the last 12 months and the percentage of sales volume that went to new books released as pre-orders, versus new books that were just uploaded the day of release, the pre-order authors are vacuuming up the lion's share of the sales, even though they only represent a minority of the books. So best practices.
[00:49:06] So I understand that it can be really intimidating for a lot of authors saying, oh, I'm competing against 2 million other books. And next year it's going to be 2.2 million or 2.5 million. And that can feel discouraging.
[00:49:19] But be encouraged that there are simple things you can do that just put you above the fray. Things like pre-orders, things like professional cover design. Veteran indy authors, that's a no-brainer they know that you don't try to design your own cover unless you are a professional cover designer. Yet why do so many indy authors continue to make homemade covers that look homemade, that look amateur? And so the secret to the future is best practices.
Mark's Books [00:49:51] I've written books on it and all of my books have the ridiculous price of free. So I would suggest you could check out the "Smashwords Book Marketing Guide," it's the 2020 edition.
[00:50:04] Mark: So I've had that book out for over 10 years, but it had a major revision in 2019, and then a minor revision in 2020. That identifies tons of best practices that are all free for you to implement.
[00:50:18] And you can use that as just a checklist as a guide, look at it every few months and I can guarantee you, you're going to get some ideas of things that you can do today that move your career forward.
[00:50:30] I wrote another book which is available for free everywhere, called "The Secrets to E-book Publishing Success." In there, I identified about 30 best practices that I observed from the most successful Smashwords authors. So there's a lot of good stuff in there, although that book is due for a revision. It's starting to get out of date.
Mark's Podcast
[00:50:51] Mark: There's my podcast, the Smart Author Podcast. And the Smart Author Podcast is like a master class in best practices. And I created that originally with the intention of it just serving as a masterclass. It was going to have a limited run of 10 or 12 episodes, focused on evergreen best practices. So the things that are going to work just as well today as they will work 10 years from now, the foundational stuff that every author needs to get right, that most authors don't get right. So you can check that out.
[00:51:25] That actually turned out to be 12 or 13 episodes. I haven't done any new episodes lately, because I haven't identified any new evergreen best practices that really needed to be in there.
[00:51:37] So, it can be tempting for a lot of authors to think that I've got to monitor all the news and all the trends that are happening all the time, and that can get overwhelming. Step back and focus on the evergreen foundational best practices. If you do that, you will be so much more successful. And then yes, if you have time, you can go after the shiny things too.
[00:52:00] But there's a start for some people that I think would be helpful.
[00:52:03] Matty: Great. Well, Mark, thank you so much for, not only coming on the podcast, but also being such a good sport about our widely varied topics that we covered.
[00:52:11] I'd love to have you back once you can share more about what Smashwords and Draft2Digital are doing, would love to have you back to hear about those details. And please let the listeners and viewers know where they can find out more about you and your work.
[00:52:23] Mark: My books are everywhere, on all the major retailers, priced it free so you can check them out. I would encourage everyone to go sign up for Draft2Digital if you haven't already. And come work with us, we want to work with you. We want to partner with you. We want to help your business be a success because when your business is successful, our business is successful.
[00:52:43] Matty: Great Mark. Thank you so much.
[00:52:44] Mark: Thanks, Matty.
[00:00:05] Mark: Hi Matty, great! Nice to be here.
[00:00:07] Matty: I am very happy to have you here. To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you, Mark Coker serves as the Chief Strategy Officer at Draft2Digital, the world's leading publishing platform for indy authors. Mark is the founder of indy ebook pioneer Smashwords, which was acquired by Draft2Digital on March 1st, 2022. Mark is an outspoken advocate for self-published authors, a former contributing columnist for "Publishers Weekly," and the host of the Smart Author Podcast where he teaches evergreen best practices to help authors publish eBooks with pride, professionalism, and success.
[00:00:38] And I had invited Mark on the podcast to talk about the next X years for indy, and I don't think ever before, have I put out as all-encompassing topic to any guests before, and I'm also going into this with no notes. So we're just going to see where the conversation takes us.
The acquisition by Draft2Digital
[00:00:55] Matty: But I thought that a good way to start would be to talk about the fairly recent acquisition of Smashwords by Draft2Digital. And on February 15th, I recorded a podcast episode that went out as 120, Draft2Digital Updates: Smashwords and Print with Kris Austin, the CEO of Draft2Digital, and I was just wondering if you have any updates you can give us about how that is going?
[00:01:18] I got to say, I think things are going really well. The teams are meshing really well together. We're getting to know one another. The teams are already working together and moving forward and doing things. And I'm really pleased with how things are falling into place so quickly. Communication is really important within Draft2Digital, and Kris Austin does a really great job of encouraging communication, cross-team communication. We're making progress and we're already making progress on some of the promises that we made in terms of what people would start to see from the combination.
What's the most imminent promise?
[00:01:54] Matty: What is the promise you're most imminent on delivering on?
[00:01:59] Mark: As a lot of listeners probably know, there was a lot of concern in the erotica community about, would Smashwords' policies change, because Smashwords' always been more permissive on erotica than just about anybody else. And as part of that merger, Draft2Digital committed to adopt our erotica certification system, so that authors can self-certify the presence or the lack thereof of certain taboo topics in erotica, so that we can accurately distribute those titles to the retailers that will accept them and block those titles from retailers that won't.
[00:02:39] So that system is already pretty much developed and done. I don't know what the timeline is for when we're going to launch it, but it was great to see them fulfill that commitment very early on.
[00:02:49] Earlier this morning, we had a meeting to talk about getting D2D books into the Smashwords store, because I know that's what a lot of D2D authors are excited about. So we were finalizing a plan around that and how we're going to stage, probably in different iterative steps, how we're going to do that.
[00:03:10] Mark: So the first step is going to be to just get those books into the store so that they can start selling, and then follow-on steps down the line we'll incrementally add support for the Smashwords coupon capabilities and some of the unique merchandising tools that are within the Smashwords store that aren't available at other retailers. So that's great. I'm happy with how things are going so far.
The Smashwords Storefront
[00:03:34] Matty: Yeah, as a Draft2Digital user for many years, and someone who admittedly was not that familiar with Smashwords, I am very excited about the storefront. And I'm wondering if you can speak about the Smashwords storefront, what readers it reaches that maybe haven't been as available to people who are not using that platform, and how it works with other platforms, including things like PayHip, which I think a lot of people are using as their more around the retailer entree to some readers.
[00:04:04] It might be helpful to talk about the background of the store. So when we first launched Smashwords in 2008, the idea was to create a free self-publishing platform that would allow any writer anywhere in the world to self-publish a book at no cost, and then sell that book directly to readers over the Smashwords website. And so that was the beginnings of the store. That was 2008. In 2009, I had this crazy idea to become the Ingram of e-book distribution. Because at the time, Ingram was not able to support the distribution of self-published authors. So it was impossible for self-published authors to get their books into the major retailers.
[00:04:47] Mark: So I recognized that there was a void, that we needed a distributor that would focus on self-published authors. And so we turned our focus in that direction, and then our books started selling really well, and then that's been our focus. That's been our primary focus for the last 13 years, is building out our distribution systems and helping authors get their books into major retailers, opening up library platforms for self-published authors.
How to get promoted on Smashwords
[00:05:15] Mark: So the Smashwords store always took a back seat to the rest of our business, the distribution side. But along the way, we did continue to update some of the capabilities there, such as the Smashwords coupon capabilities. We've got the broadest suite of couponing and promotion tools available at any retailer. We have self-serve merchandising, so authors can often get their books featured on the homepage. Self-serve. Just using our tools.
[00:05:46] Matty: And how do they go about doing that?
[00:05:48] At Smashwords you use the public coupon feature. So we have coupons that are public and private. So a private coupon means that your coupon code is only available to the people that you give it to, like maybe the people on your private mailing list. The public coupon puts your book publicly for sale in the Smashwords store. And then if your book exhibits certain characteristics, our algorithms will automatically feature your book right on the homepage.
[00:06:15] Mark: And that's not even the most important feature to get in at Smashwords, because a lot of customers of the Smashwords store are going to visit the homepage, and then they're going to start filtering by genre or category. So drilling down. Drill down to paranormal romance or paranormal fantasy or whatever it is that the reader is interested in. And as you drill down, the featured selection changes, and it becomes even easier for authors to have their books appear in the first five or six listings there, as books that are on sale and being featured.
[00:06:50] And that featuring is completely automated based on our algorithms. And our algorithms look to basically identify titles that readers are already reacting favorably to. So we look at a number of different characteristics to discern that, so fully automated. And so a lot of our authors are using that, to do that self-serve merchandising within our store.
How are Smashwords customers different?
[00:07:14] Mark: So you asked about, how the Smashwords store customers may be different than others, in general, our customers are the same. So the audience for the Smashwords store is international. About 60%, maybe a little bit less, of our customers are coming from the United States, the other 40%, anywhere in the world that has an internet connection and where people have either access to PayPal or credit cards.
[00:07:37] We do probably have one of the largest collections anywhere of erotica. And so we do get a lot of erotica customers. Readers who enjoy erotica and know that they're going to find more erotica at Smashwords, a broader selection of quality erotica, than they'll find just about anywhere else. I would say today that the store sales are, there's a big chunk of erotica there.
[00:08:00] Now that mix is going to change, especially as we bring in the Draft2Digital books. And so I think what you're going to see is, what all customers are going to see is, just a broader, deeper, more amazing collection of indy authored titles on any subject that interests you. Right now, we've got close to 600,000 books in the Smashwords store. With Draft2Digital books coming online into the store, hopefully over the next few months, the title count is going to approach 900,000 titles. So really, we serve everyone.
Metadata and Content Customization
[00:08:39] Matty: I'm thinking of a question, I'm formulating it a little bit as we talk, but what you were saying before about you drill down into categories and they become more and more specific, and the system is curating or presenting the books that are meeting the criteria that the person puts in.
[00:08:59] And that combined with the fact that you're going to get a whole slew of new books through Draft2Digital, I'm wondering if there's, and this is like maybe veering a little bit more into the futuristic side, is there going to be a difference in how the Smashwords store in combination with Draft2Digital uses metadata?
[00:09:18] And the reason I thought of that is that if I'm writing nonfiction about building a boat and I go on there and somehow I'm presented with erotica, like it's an issue that I think indy authors don't have to deal with on that many other platforms, because they're more restrictive. And so is the combined Smashwords Draft2Digital looking at innovative ways of using metadata to make sure that the readers are getting to the books they want in this new expanded selection?
[00:09:46] Mark: I think this is a great question that you're asking, and it's a question that we've already addressed, years ago. So when you visit the Smashwords store, just as a guest before you've even registered and we know who you are, we automatically block the erotica from the homepage. And then when you sign up for an account, you have the ability to configure what types of erotica that you want to see in your search results. So do you want just mainstream erotica, no erotica, or do you want to see erotica with taboo themes?
[00:10:22] So the idea is that we want the store to be customizable by the reader so that the reader is only viewing what they want to view as part of their shopping experience, and I think we're going to be doing more of that in the future. We've got a lot of ideas on the roadmap for how we can add more personalization to the store.
AI or Author-generated Metadata?
[00:10:45] Matty: It's interesting because I'm realizing that probably the only other representative of an online retailer site that I've spoken to is Tara Cremin from Kobo. I don't think I've ever spoken to anybody from Amazon or Apple. And so it's bringing to mind all these questions that I haven't had an opportunity to ask someone who has this retail insight like, beyond the erotica certification system, are you relying on author-provided data to help your customers navigate the site? Or is there any kind of backend AI going on that's helping readers find what they want?
[00:11:20] Mark: Just about everything we do is based on what the author is providing us. And that's important to us, that the author defines their own metadata because they know their book the best. And so we do leverage that metadata, in terms of how we display the books and the categories that we display the books. Does that answer your question on that?
AI can be creepy
[00:11:40] Matty: Yes, it does. I can imagine that, for looking many years down the road, not just at Draft2Digital Smashwords, but at the industry in general, and my hope is always that, that the creation of the metadata will become more automated. I think authors are often the worst judge of their own work, even in selecting a genre, for example, or keywords and things like that. And I'm looking forward to the day when there will be a machine that will do that for me.
[00:12:05] Mark: Oh, the machines are coming and it's scary. When we start talking about AI, definitely we are going to see AI touch many pieces of the book industry in the future, from publishing to writing, to marketing.
[00:12:22] Just last week, I got a really strangely oddly worded email from a company that turns out to be, it looks like some kind of slimy vanity publishing company in Florida. I'm not going to mention their name, I've forgotten it.
[00:12:38] But what caught my eye about that email is that it did attract my attention because it was personalized. So it was addressed to me, and then I could quickly see in the second paragraph, it was talking about information that I had published years ago on the ideal pricing for eBooks. And so that kind of told me, oh, this is coming from a real person, they've actually taken the time to write me an email rather than spam me.
[00:13:05] Then going through the email, I realized that the language was off. It didn't quite make sense. And then at the bottom of the email, it made some offhanded comment about some restaurant in Florida, which has no relevance to me, only relevance to the fact that it was near that publisher, that publishing company.
[00:13:27] And then I looked down at the bottom of the email and it said that this email was automatically generated via AI, using some service that I'm not going to mention because I conveniently forgot their name. I would not encourage any authors to do this. But they're supposedly drawing upon thousands, hundreds of thousands of bits of data out there on the internet about me, to send me a targeted email to get my attention, so I want to go publish a book with them.
[00:13:57] Matty: And evidently eat in that restaurant.
[00:13:59] Mark: That obviously was dropped in to be chatty and conversational and look real. But it was made by a machine, not by a person, which is why it was so obviously odd, and then ultimately off-putting and creepy.
Why Be Excited About AI?
[00:14:17] Mark: Because imagine, imagine what bad marketers can do with this kind of technology. That's a scary dystopian future there when it comes to AI and marketing, but there are other aspects of AI that I'm really excited about.
[00:14:32] I'm really excited about AI coming to audio books and audio book creation and synthetic voices, because that technology has really improved over the last few years. And I see an opportunity for these automatically generated audio books based on e-books, you push a couple buttons, and your ebook is now an audio book, and the voice quality is getting better and better. And I'm starting to see that as that's going to be like a new format for books, just like paperbacks. Low-cost paperbacks were a new format for trade paperbacks or for hardcovers. This is an opportunity to make more books more accessible to more readers, to make audio book publishing more accessible to more authors, at less cost or no cost.
[00:15:25] Mark: In any time that you can do that, anytime that you can lower the barriers to entry so that authors and creatives can get their content out into the world to be enjoyed by consumers at much lower costs, magic happens. That's basically what we saw 14 years ago when we launched Smashwords, because when we launched Smashwords, there was nothing like us at the time. It was a crazy idea, a free publishing platform. So no cost, no barrier to entry for an author to publish a book. And because there was no cost, it allowed the authors to offer their books at much lower prices.
[00:16:04] And so readers for the first time were presented with a lot of high-quality books at really low prices, and the market for indy publishing just exploded. And it was a win for authors, it was a win for readers, it was a win for the culture of books. So I think we're going to see the same thing happen in audio books, thanks to AI.
[00:16:23] I've been excited about the idea of audio books. I hire professional performers to perform my fiction audio books, but I would love to have an option to generate an audio book for my non-fiction in my voice, which I'm experimenting with Descript, which is the program I use to edit the transcript and the audio and video of the podcast.
[00:16:47] We are many years away from me wanting to listen to an AI read a fiction book where I'm in it for the experience as opposed to a non-fiction book where I'm in it for the information. If I want information, I'm happy to have Siri read it to me or whoever, but I don't think that audio book narrators are going to be losing their jobs anytime soon because they're still bringing a perspective, a skill to it that AI hasn't met yet.
[00:17:10] Mark: Yeah, yeah, AI can't do what a professional voice talent can do, but what I think we're going to see is some bifurcation in the market. The professionally narrated audio books or audio books narrated by the author are going to be seen as premium audio books, and then you're going to see the synthetically generated ones from AI are going to be a lower end.
[00:17:31] But the quality is really improving. And if it means that an author can offer a synthetic audio book to their readers for 99 cents, as opposed to $19.99, that starts to become transformative. And it starts to allow more authors and more books to become more accessible, and I think ultimately, it's going to enable more authors to graduate to that premium level. For a lot of authors who are first starting out or even established authors, the cost of professional audio book narration is just, it makes it inaccessible.
[00:18:10] Matty: Yeah, as a consumer of content, I would be very happy for the 99-cent alternative when I wasn't looking for the full experience, but having the premium human narrated one available too is the perfect scenario.
What's coming next for D2D?
[00:18:24] Matty: In addition to things like AI audio book narration, what other things do you see coming down the pike, let's just say, in the next year or two, looking pretty close to where we are now. What do you see coming down the pike strategy-wise that is interesting to you?
[00:18:39] I've been spending most of the last month working on D2D's long-term roadmap. So there's not a lot I can talk about there yet, but you know, in general there are some things that get me excited and directions that I think that the world is going to move.
The New Gatekeepers
[00:18:57] One of the challenges I see right now facing authors, is that the relationship with your reader is being mediated by a new form of gatekeeper. So everyone is aware of publishers acting as gatekeepers or literary agents acting as gatekeepers and self-publishing helped eliminate those gatekeepers, at least as a barrier to reaching your readers.
[00:19:24] Mark: But we've seen new gatekeepers arise. So for example, a lot of authors are advertising on Facebook. That makes Facebook a gatekeeper. Facebook is the intermediary between you and your prospective reader. We've seen online retailers. They are the gatekeeper; they are mediating the relationship with your reader. You don't know who your customer is.
[00:19:47] And it was actually a Smashwords author about a year and a half ago that helped me arrive to this epiphany. So she's a multi-time New York Times bestseller. She was getting ready to release a new book. And like many big best-sellers over the last 10 years, a lot of best-sellers are no longer selling what they used to. And there are a lot of reasons for that. And she said something to me, really simple. She said, if only I could tell my prior readers about this new book, they'd want to read it. But she couldn't.
[00:20:19] Yeah, she has a couple thousand people on her mailing list and a few thousand people on her private Facebook group, but this is an author with hundreds of thousands of readers out there in the world that she has no way to access.
[00:20:31] And that's because the retailers are mediating that relationship with the reader, the retailers aren't willing to share that. And some retailers are adding additional gatekeeping tolls on top of that, to allow you to even get closer to these former readers, these people that want to buy your next book, if only they could know about it.
[00:20:52] And so this idea of mediated reader relationships, I see that as a big problem, and I'm all about trying to solve problems for authors. And a neat thing about D2D is they're the same way. I've always had this philosophy at Smashwords, here's a big problem, and there'll be people say, oh, that's just a really big problem. That's just too difficult to fix. And my attitude's always been, well, we should fix it because it's a big problem and because it's difficult to fix. That's a reason for us to do that because we've got the talent, we've got the people, we've got the developers. Let's try to solve, let's try to crack that nut so that we can solve that problem for our authors. So that's one of the problems that I want to solve. I want to help authors get closer to their readers.
Don't Abuse Your Mailing List
[00:21:41] Matty: One of the things that I find really appealing about that is that I'm always trying to comply with the, you need to have an email list because, that's the only customer reader contact that you own. And I just hate that, because as a consumer of other people's email newsletters, I basically want to know when an author I like has a new book coming out, and that's pretty much it. I don't really need to hear week by week what their family life is doing and things like that. I just, I really struggle with finding content that I feel like I want to share. But if there was that platform where I could have that relationship, that was just based on the books that I know they want to read, as you're saying, that would address a big problem and a big frustration, I think, for a lot of authors.
[00:22:23] Mark: Yeah, so now luckily, those simple tools are already available. So at the Smashwords store, we've had that capability for, I don't know, four or five years with something called Smashwords Alerts. So you can subscribe to be automatically notified when one of your favorite authors releases a new book.
[00:22:40] And D2D has their Books2Read tool and Universal Book Links, and they can do some of that as well. But definitely, I think that's a really good point. And it raises the question about email best practices, because I do know that a lot of authors tend to abuse their email lists and give the readers information that readers don't necessarily want. And then that becomes a negative.
Keep an Eye on Subscriptions
[00:23:06] What are some other things that you're seeing, maybe let's step out a little further in the timeline, but something that's mid-range in the future that you think we should be keeping an eye on?
[00:23:15] Keep an eye on subscriptions. I don't think this will be a surprise to anyone who's been publishing for a couple of years, but the subscription model is really hot. And I'm not just talking about Kindle Unlimited or Kobo Plus. Scribd is on fire in a good way. We just had an amazing month in March at Scribd. They're growing like gangbusters, from what we can tell.
What is the Scribd Model?
[00:23:38] Matty: Can you give a little bit more background about what Scribd is and what its model is?
[00:23:44] Mark: Sure. It's important to recognize that not all subscription models are the same. So Scribd has a really unique, author-friendly model for doing subscriptions. So at Scribd, I think customers pay $9.99 a month and they get access to a virtually unlimited catalog of titles within the Scribd ecosystem. And you can basically read whatever you want to read at no cost, no additional cost.
[00:24:14] And the way Scribd works on the business side, is that after that reader reads past the first, I think it's the first 12 or 13% of that book, it triggers the equivalent of a full sale for you. And we negotiated the same terms with Scribd that we negotiated with all the major agency retailers. So the author is making good money on that.
[00:24:39] Matty: And that's one of the platforms that Draft2Digital reaches, correct?
[00:24:41] Mark: Yes, definitely. So we both distribute into Scribd. So the author gets 60% of the list price, once that trigger is made.
[00:24:51] And then Scribd also pays for just partial reads that don't reach that threshold. The reason I like the Scribd model is that it doesn't put the same downward devaluation pressure on books that other subscription models tend to do. Because I'm always thinking about devaluation. I'm always thinking about how can authors set their own price for their books and how can authors decide, you know, I believe authors should be in control of everything. Authors should decide what their book costs.
[00:25:21] So at Scribd, you decide what your book costs and your royalty is going to be based on a percentage of what your book's list price is.
The Pool-based Model Devalues Books
[00:25:28] Mark: That's a completely different model than what Kindle Unlimited is doing and what Kobo Plus are doing. So those other two subscription services pay out of a pool. So there's a certain pot of money that gets divided up among the authors whose books are read, whether it's the number of pages read or the number of minutes read. And the pool models, depending on the retailer, have the tendency to put more devaluation pressure on the author, and also strip the author of pricing control.
[00:26:01] So if you're being compensated based on the number of minutes that your book is read, if you write a children's book that only has 300 words in it, yet your book sells single copies at $4.99, that subscription model is really going to devalue your work. You're going to get a fraction, or if you write short fiction, or if you write erotica, we were talking about erotica earlier. Erotica authors typically command higher prices for shorter works, because it's a different type of product for the reader.
[00:26:35] And so, some of these pool-based models do have the potential to disadvantage certain authors and certain types of content. Whereas if you look at the Scribd model, which is not the pool-based model, it forces Scribd to be accountable to the author and the author's expectations for what they feel like they deserve to be paid.
[00:26:54] But even Scribd has its own little quirks. If your book is priced too high in certain categories like romance, your book may not appear within the Scribd catalog. So that's something that some authors have to struggle with.
Scribd's Target Audience
[00:27:09] Matty: Is Scribd targeting a particular audience or demographic?
[00:27:13] Mark: I think they're targeting every reader in the world, if you ask them what their ultimate objective is. Yeah, the Scribd I think would consider themselves the future of reading, at least of subscription reading.
Which Model is Winning in the Market?
[00:27:27] Matty: Do you see the market taking a leaning toward one or the other of those models longer-term?
[00:27:33] Mark: Well, I think Scribd's model is great. We'll see if it changes over time. I think Scribd's model is author and publisher friendly. And we were talking today about the best interest of authors. I think everyone should be at Scribd, because they're not going to devalue your book and you'll be paid, compensated well when your book is consumed,
The Problems with Kindle
[00:27:54] Mark: There are other issues going on with Amazon and Kindle Unlimited. I don't know if you want me to talk about that.
[00:28:01] Matty: Sure.
[00:28:02] I do get tired sometimes of listening to myself talking about Amazon. I've never been a fan of Kindle Unlimited. First of all, it requires that you make your book exclusive to Amazon. When you make your book exclusive to Amazon, it means you can't sell it to the other retailers. That means all these other retailers that want to support indy authors can't. It means, all of your fans have to shift their buying over to this other retailer. So it makes it difficult for the other retailers to support the entire indy community when their customers are being pulled away because of exclusivity, because the books that their customers want to read are only available at Amazon.
[00:28:43] Mark: And Amazon has the market power to coerce authors to make their books exclusive. So I've always had big problems with KDP Select exclusivity. I think it's counterproductive to the long-term best interests of every single indy author.
[00:29:00] But I also understand that it's very tempting for authors to enroll in that, because what Amazon does is that they hold back some of their best marketing and merchandising tools and make those tools only available to authors that are exclusive. Which puts authors in an awkward position, even authors who in their heart hate exclusivity and want to make their books available to readers at all the different platforms all around the world.
[00:29:28] Amazon's got 70, 80% of the world's ebook readers, if you're selling eBooks. And so it's difficult to say no to Amazon. And with the pool-based model, there's not a lot of transparency, so I don't think I've ever seen Amazon disclose what percentage of that pool they're paying to authors. So it's quite likely that the effective royalty rate that authors are earning, it's not 70%. It's probably not 60%. It might not even be 50%. I don't know what it is, but there's no transparency there. So as an author, you don't really know how much of that money is going to the authors.
[00:30:08] Mark: Now if Amazon were to say, 70% of the pool is being paid to authors, you know, it's like, oh, well, okay, that's fair. That's more fair, and maybe we can be excited about that, but we don't know. As an author, you want to know.
[00:30:57] Matty: I don't want to take you too far down the tedious Amazon rabbit hole, so I'm going to switch to a more interesting topic that I think will steer us away from that. And it's a wide distribution strategy topic. And I was thinking of it because of what we were talking about with Scribd, because Scribd is one of the options.
Leave it to Aggregators vs Understanding Each Marketplace
[00:31:12] Matty: I use Draft2Digital, I check them all off except for Amazon and Kobo. I go to Amazon and Kobo direct. And I do it because it's not worth it to me to have to upload the book to all those places individually, and I also love Draft2Digitals front end, very easy to use, great customer service.
[00:31:30] What I realized, though, using Scribd as an example, is that I know pretty much nothing about Scribd, even though my books are out there. And Kobo's an interesting counterexample, because I decided to go direct to Kobo and I'm much more attentive to what's going on in Kobo and much more feeling tied in with the promotions. And I totally recognize that might be a false sense on my part, but I feel more engaged because I'm going direct.
[00:31:57] Matty: And I realize that there's this opportunity that people may be missing when they're using an aggregator like Draft2Digital, that at some point it's just like a bunch of boxes you're checking off and not checking off, but maybe missing opportunities to more fully understand the ecosystem into which the aggregator is distributing your books, so that when there are opportunities, maybe there are Apple promos or something like that.
[00:32:18] Do you have advice for people who are weighing that, the convenience of an aggregator versus understanding the market, the platforms into which that aggregator is distributing your books?
Advantages of Aggregators
[00:32:29] Mark: Sure. Great question. I know there are a lot of authors out there who think that you need to be working directly with a retailer if you're going to get access to the promotions. And that's not really true. Every single week for many years, the last don’t know, 6, 7, 8 years at Smashwords, every single week we've been, we still are, sending out weekly merchandising recommendations to the merchandising teams at the major retailers that we serve, helping them identify titles that are worthy of feature promotion.
[00:33:02] And we can identify those titles because we have a unique perspective. We can see how these titles are performing across all the different retailers. If a book is on pre-order, we can see which books are accumulating the most pre-orders, which is a good indication of which books are the most highly anticipated. And we can share that data with the retailers.
[00:33:22] So often, a lot of authors are getting free merchandising for doing nothing other than just distributing with us. For example, if we see a book is performing really well at Barnes and Noble, that'll give us the confidence to promote it to Apple or to Kobo or vice versa. And because we're aggregating the sales, maybe a book is doing reasonably well at multiple retailers, but in the aggregate, it's way above average for all the other books, and so we'll promote that.
[00:33:50] D2D has been doing the same thing with their merchandising programs. Their merchandising team is even, I would say, even better resourced and staffed than our team was. And they're surfacing all kinds of really exciting opportunities for authors, including opportunities that authors that are working direct aren't going to get.
[00:34:09] When authors are weighing the decision, do I want to upload direct to a retailer or do I want to work through an aggregator, obviously if you upload direct, the aggregator is cut out of the pie, and you don't have to pay the aggregator that 10% of the list price as their commission.
[00:34:25] But as you start publishing more books, aggregators become more and more important to the success of your career, because it can be very time-consuming once you've got 2, 3, 4, 10, 20, 30, 50 books, if you want to run a promotion on all those different books, if you want to mark them all down by 10% for a while, or for a sale, if you want to update the cover images or update the back matter, that's a lot of time to do that.
[00:34:56] Now it's not difficult work to do, but it's tedious and time consuming. And this is time that you could better spend writing. Writing is the unique product of every single author. That's the one thing that you're putting out into the world, your writing, that no one else can copy. No one else can write the book that you can.
[00:35:16] And from a time management perspective, that's your unique contribution to the world. And if you can spend more time writing and less time wasted trying to save 10%, if that's what the motivation is, I understand everyone's got a different motivation. It pretty quickly, it becomes apparent that, you can be more successful working through an aggregator, because from a single dashboard, you can manage multiple titles.
[00:35:43] And so you're a D2D author, so you know how cool their automated end matter is. If you're a series writer and you're getting ready to publish the 20th book in your series, wouldn't it be cool if the first 19 books could have their end matter automatically updated to recognize that you've just published the 20th book in your series? That happens automatically at D2D. That saves you hours and hours and hours of time.
[00:36:09] So there are the time-savings. And the time-savings don't just go to publishing, but to managing your metadata. You make one change, it propagates out to everyone instantly or near instantly. There's end of year tax reporting, tax compliance, so you don't have to gather up tax forms from five or six different retailers. You just get it from one source. It makes your annual tax filings much simpler, much more accurate.
[00:36:40] You've got all your consolidated data in a single dashboard. You can do your analytics, you can compare retailers more easily, how you're performing. So there are a lot of really powerful tools that you're not going to get necessarily if you're just uploading direct.
[00:36:58] Matty: Yeah, I think that even the learning curve of understanding little oddities of each of those platforms on its own makes it well worth the 10%, in my opinion, to have one nice place to go to.
[00:37:10] Which actually, I have two more questions for you. One is going to be D2D-related, and then I'm going to ask you to just look out as far as you'd like on something that indy authors should be keeping an eye on.
Draft2Digital Print Beta
[00:37:20] Matty: But I wanted to hit Draft2Digital print beta and find out what the current status of that is. We got an update from Kris in February, but here it is, it's almost two months later, might as well check in again. because that is something that I'm very excited about.
[00:37:34] Mark: I am very excited about print as well, and that was certainly one of the factors that I considered when Kris and I first started talking about merging. I'm really excited about what they're going to do with print. I think what they're doing with print will be just as disruptive to print on demand publishing as Smashwords was to ebook publishing 14 years ago. They're going to make print publishing less expensive, more accessible, and less complex than anyone else in the industry.
[00:38:03] And the beta is proceeding really well. They continually add people on the waitlist into the beta, so although we're still calling it a beta, it is live. If authors haven't signed up for it, then go sign up for it now, and then they'll get dropped into the beta. I know there's been a lot of work going on behind the scenes to make print more accessible to authors internationally outside the US, and so they're making progress there, and pulling all those systems together so that they can accurately communicate to authors what shipping costs are going to be, things like that. Yeah, we're all really excited about how print is progressing. It's going to be big.
Things Indy Authors Should Look Out For
[00:38:42] So the last question I want to ask is just to say, looking as far out as you would like to, what do you see coming down the pike that maybe indy authors can't take advantage of now, but they should be thinking about, they should be preparing themselves, practically or mentally or however, to make sure they're ready for it when it comes along?
Indy Authors are the Future of Publishing
[00:39:01] I talked about AI and audio books, I'm excited about that. I'm going to give you an answer that maybe is not what you expected. I think more important than what's coming, because the further out in the future that we try to predict, the less accurate we're going to be, I think it's more important for the community to recognize that as an indy author, you are a publisher, you're running a business, and your business will be more successful if you think long-term. And long-term thinking is difficult for a lot of people, because you've got your needs for today versus your needs for tomorrow and your aspirations for tomorrow. So whenever you make any publishing decisions, think long-term.
[00:39:44] Mark: Also recognize that indy authors are the future of publishing. That's how we think it Draft2Digital, and we've oriented every single aspect of our businesses around that idea, that indy authors deserve to be the center of publishing. So not New York publishers, not London publishers, not Amazon, not the retailers. Authors are the center of the universe. That's what we're building our business around. And authors need to recognize that and hold on to that and protect that.
[00:40:19] So as an indy author, indy means independent. Your independence is precious, and you need to protect it. And you need to be wary of anyone who seeks to take your power away. So your power to publish, your power to distribute widely, your power to price your books as you see fit. The authors should always have the power to decide what their book is worth and let the marketplace decide if that price is too high or too low.
[00:40:51] So when I look ahead, I see a very bright future for indy authors, but to achieve the greatest promise of that bright future, indy authors need to recognize that they are the center of the publishing universe. And it requires a mental leap. Most of us don't think that way. Most of us, most authors think, I’m at the mercy of some higher power, the gatekeeper, the advertising, the whatever. So as you make your plans for the future, always just orient yourself in the middle. What is best for me? What's best for my business? What's best for my readers?
[00:41:32] And if you can orient yourself around that mindset, then it makes future publishing decisions much easier. So when new opportunities come down the pike, you'll be able to discern which opportunities are true opportunities and which opportunities are really traps, which opportunities might take you in the wrong direction.
Recommended Mindset
[00:41:54] Matty: If we're providing an approach authors can take to those two combined things that, indy authors are the center of the publishing universe and we have to look long-term, is there a way you can frame that up, like asking the question, what will be best for me, my work and my readers in X number of years? Or is there some other mindset that you would recommend indy authors take to accommodate those two strategic approaches that you described?
[00:42:19] Mark: Imagine the future that you would like to see. What do you want the publishing world to look like? Do you want there to be only one retailer? What would that world look like, and how would the world change? Obviously, that would be a bad thing, if only one retailer was competing for the privilege to sell your book, it would mean that you're at their mercy and that they can dictate how they compensate you.
[00:42:44] That's a fast track to a slippery slope, to the point where publishing becomes pay to play, and the only authors who are read are the authors who are willing to pay to be read. So that would be a dark, dystopian future that none of us want.
[00:42:58] So then imagine the future that we all want, that I think every author can agree that we want. The more booksellers in the world, the more people waking up every morning thinking about how can I connect more readers with your books. That's the world we want. So that's a world of more retailers, more booksellers, more people who are out there passionate about books, selling books, connecting readers with books.
[00:43:23] So when you start looking at it that way, it starts making decisions easier for you. So you want to support as many different retailers as you can with your books. You want to give your readers as many different options as you can to purchase your books or to discover your books. You want to avoid options where the only way to get into that store is to drop your drawers and lower the royalty rate that you'll accept.
[00:43:48] And to a certain extent, I'm oversimplifying here, because every decision needs to be made in isolation. There will be times where it makes really great sense to just drop your book to free for some opportunity, and other times where it might not make sense.
[00:44:04] Matty: I like the sort of overarching theme of value the outlets that you're using to get your books to your readers. i.e., not just one, and also value of your own work, what you were saying about the indy author is going to be the center of the universe. And I think that goes to pricing reasonably, not giving your work away, the creative work deserves a financial return.
[00:44:21] When I was preparing for my interview with Kris, it was interesting because I read the Smashwords business home page and I read the Draft2Digital homepage and I was like, oh man, it was like the same person wrote these two mission statements, implied mission statements on those pages. So it obviously seems like a marriage made in heaven, at least from the point of view of the authors you're serving.
[00:44:42] We evolved really from the same seed. So both of our companies were founded by authors. I'm an author. One of the D2D's co-founders is an author. So both of us came at this business from the perspective of, what do authors need and how should authors be treated?
[00:45:00] Mark: And so that's why neither one of our companies have ever charged money for services. We're just like vehemently against that. You know, that in many ways, our model is more typical of traditional publishers. We don't pay advances, but the money only flows one way. The money should only flow to the author. That's our philosophy.
[00:45:23] So yeah, I do think it is a marriage made in heaven. Our companies are much more alike than they were different. We both attacked this opportunity with the same philosophy, the same author friendly philosophy. And we both developed tools that the other didn't. And now we have the opportunity to combine these tools so that we can do more together so that we can do more innovation for authors.
[00:45:50] And that's what I'm working on right now, I'm working on a roadmap, where D2D should be in five years, in 10 years, and what are we going to do for authors? What can we do for authors, leveraging the strengths that we have? And I'm really excited about what we can do for authors.
[00:46:06] I think we're going to surprise a lot of people. I think D2D is going to become an essential publishing partner for every single author in the world. And certainly, that's the challenge that I'm giving myself. That's what I want, because I know what good are companies want to put into the world. You've spent time with the D2D people and the more time you spend with them, it's just very clear, they want to put good into the world. They want to do good for authors.
[00:46:36] And they know, and we know that there are a lot of shortcuts to making lots of money off of authors, selling you stuff that you don't need. And we just will not go there. That's against our philosophy because we have a long-term philosophy. We want to be your publishing partner 20 years from now. We want to be the publishing partner for your children and grandchildren. That's the kind of company that we're creating.
[00:47:03] That's what we're trying to create here, is a company, that's going to be here for a long time. That is going to serve authors, protect authors, advocate for the indy author community. We're really talking about the, when we're talking about indy authors, people aren't really, probably don't realize it yet, but what we've witnessed over the last 14 years is an emergence of a subculture. Indy authors speak their own language. Your neighbors don't understand you, but your fellow indy authors do, right? And so we want to protect the subculture, develop it, help it reach its full potential. And so in the years ahead, I think everything that we do will be guided by that philosophy,
[00:47:49] So I'm excited about it. I think the future for indy authors is more promising than it's ever been. It doesn't mean that we're going to be without challenges. There are tremendous challenges that every indy author faces. Just looking in the ebook world, books don't go to print anymore, which means that every single day from this day forward, you are competing against more books out there in the market. That creates new challenges.
Not everyone adopts best practices
[00:48:15] Mark: But here's a piece of good news, which is also bad news. The vast majority of indy authors don't adopt best practices. So there are simple little things that you can do that most authors aren't doing that will give you a huge advantage in the marketplace.
[00:48:29] Like pre-orders. Only about 15% of indy authors release their book as a pre-order. Yet when we look at the data, the authors who are releasing their books at pre-orders, when we look at like the books that were released over the last 12 months and the percentage of sales volume that went to new books released as pre-orders, versus new books that were just uploaded the day of release, the pre-order authors are vacuuming up the lion's share of the sales, even though they only represent a minority of the books. So best practices.
[00:49:06] So I understand that it can be really intimidating for a lot of authors saying, oh, I'm competing against 2 million other books. And next year it's going to be 2.2 million or 2.5 million. And that can feel discouraging.
[00:49:19] But be encouraged that there are simple things you can do that just put you above the fray. Things like pre-orders, things like professional cover design. Veteran indy authors, that's a no-brainer they know that you don't try to design your own cover unless you are a professional cover designer. Yet why do so many indy authors continue to make homemade covers that look homemade, that look amateur? And so the secret to the future is best practices.
Mark's Books [00:49:51] I've written books on it and all of my books have the ridiculous price of free. So I would suggest you could check out the "Smashwords Book Marketing Guide," it's the 2020 edition.
[00:50:04] Mark: So I've had that book out for over 10 years, but it had a major revision in 2019, and then a minor revision in 2020. That identifies tons of best practices that are all free for you to implement.
[00:50:18] And you can use that as just a checklist as a guide, look at it every few months and I can guarantee you, you're going to get some ideas of things that you can do today that move your career forward.
[00:50:30] I wrote another book which is available for free everywhere, called "The Secrets to E-book Publishing Success." In there, I identified about 30 best practices that I observed from the most successful Smashwords authors. So there's a lot of good stuff in there, although that book is due for a revision. It's starting to get out of date.
Mark's Podcast
[00:50:51] Mark: There's my podcast, the Smart Author Podcast. And the Smart Author Podcast is like a master class in best practices. And I created that originally with the intention of it just serving as a masterclass. It was going to have a limited run of 10 or 12 episodes, focused on evergreen best practices. So the things that are going to work just as well today as they will work 10 years from now, the foundational stuff that every author needs to get right, that most authors don't get right. So you can check that out.
[00:51:25] That actually turned out to be 12 or 13 episodes. I haven't done any new episodes lately, because I haven't identified any new evergreen best practices that really needed to be in there.
[00:51:37] So, it can be tempting for a lot of authors to think that I've got to monitor all the news and all the trends that are happening all the time, and that can get overwhelming. Step back and focus on the evergreen foundational best practices. If you do that, you will be so much more successful. And then yes, if you have time, you can go after the shiny things too.
[00:52:00] But there's a start for some people that I think would be helpful.
[00:52:03] Matty: Great. Well, Mark, thank you so much for, not only coming on the podcast, but also being such a good sport about our widely varied topics that we covered.
[00:52:11] I'd love to have you back once you can share more about what Smashwords and Draft2Digital are doing, would love to have you back to hear about those details. And please let the listeners and viewers know where they can find out more about you and your work.
[00:52:23] Mark: My books are everywhere, on all the major retailers, priced it free so you can check them out. I would encourage everyone to go sign up for Draft2Digital if you haven't already. And come work with us, we want to work with you. We want to partner with you. We want to help your business be a success because when your business is successful, our business is successful.
[00:52:43] Matty: Great Mark. Thank you so much.
[00:52:44] Mark: Thanks, Matty.
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Mark! I love hearing the perspective of someone who is as steeped in the indy world as Mark is, and I’m really looking forward to where he takes Draft2Digital as its Chief Strategy Officer. I’d love to hear your thoughts on Mark’s forecast for the coming years in indy publishing!
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