Last
week, I talked about publishing in Amazon and Ingram Spark. But, if for some
reason, you don't want to publish there, these are the next top six book-
publishing sites to consider:
Apple
Books
Barnes and Noble
Rakuten Kobo
Draft2Digital
Smashwords
And
Publish Drive.
All
of these sites are free to get started, but they do offer different fee
structures for each book sold.
Apple
gives a 70% royalty on most books. Barnes and Noble (formerly known as Nook
Press) offers 65% on books $2.99 and $9.99 or 40% books priced below $2.99 while
Rakuten
Kobo gives 70% on books priced more than $2.99 in the U.S. or 45% on books below
$2.99.
Smashwords
charges 15% of the retail price on Smashwords and 10% on other platforms per
copy sold, while Draft2Digital and PublishDrive charges 10% of the book's retail
price per copy sold or you can get subscription pricing in PublishDrive; pay
$100 a month and you can keep all of your royalties, which could be a good deal
for some established authors. And Publish Drive is the ONLY site with this
option of the sites mentioned here. Also, they calculate co-author royalties,
which is a nice feature to have.
Apple
and Rakuten Kobo focus on ebooks and audiobooks and Smashwords specializes in
ebooks while Draft2digital carries ebooks and books
and Barnes and Noble carries books and ebooks as well
as some in audio.
The downside to
Apple is that you have to have an Apple Computer or you have to use a
third-party site that distributes to Apple (known as an aggregator). The upside
is that you can publish directly from Pages (Apple's doc creator) to Apple
Books, so it makes publishing very easy to do.
Smashwords
and Draft2Digital are both aggregators (as is Ingram Spark, which we discussed
last week) and are similar except that Smashwords has a
slightly bigger distribution network than
Draft2Digital.
In
fact, according to Google, Smashwords is now the largest distributors or ebooks
to libraries and it also helps you sell more ebooks to other retailers except
for Amazon. The downside is that they do NOT distribute to Amazon and they do
not format ebooks for you.
Draft2Digital,
on the other hand does. And the cool thing about that is that you can set the
price of your book to zero if you want to give it away all the time. And when
you do that, you can then ask Amazon to match it. This is the only way that you
can always have a free book on Amazon.
To
determine which site is best for you, you'll have to decide what your goal is
and which site can best serve your needs. Or, you can publish in Amazon and/or
Ingram Spark as I suggested to get started, so you don't get caught up in the
minutia and get overwhelmed by all the choices and then, if you feel you need to
check out other sites, go for it and adjust later. But don't let this decision
become the one that gets you so stuck that you don't publish your book.
If
you have publishing questions, you are welcome to post them in our Facebook
Group and I'm happy to answer them. www.facebook.com/groups/booksopendoors
If
you need help publishing your book, we offer a complete publishing package at:
www.booksopendoors.com/coaching Check it out and then send an
email to me at ellen@booksopendoors.com and we can set up a time to
talk.