In Today’s Journal
* Website vs. Substack
* A Note re Draft2Digital
* A Note re Become A Successful Indie Author
* A New Nonfiction Project
* Of Interest
Website vs. Substack
Can I just ask? If you view TNDJ at the Journal website vs. Substack, please take a moment to let me know that. Leave a comment or email me.
Yesterday the servers at my ISP went down for a while. As a consequence, I initially posted TNDJ only to Substack. That was a learning curve since I usually copy/paste it from the .txt boilerplate to the Journal website, then from there to Substack.
Roughly an hour later when the servers were up again, I posted to the website.
In case you missed yesterday’s post, I’ve opened up some mentorship slots. If you’re at all interested, read “Mentorship Slots”.
A Note re Draft2Digital
If you have an account at D2D you’ve already received a notice about a one-time activation fee ($20) for new accounts going forward. They’re also now levying account maintenance fees ($12 per year) but only on some accounts.
According to the notice, the one-time $20 activation fee,
“combined with our verification tools and human reviewers, will help us maintain a secure, high-integrity publishing environment.”
In other words, they’re doing this as a way to diminish the number of AI-generated publications. I wish them luck.
The news came as a shock to some because the aggregator has never charged any up front fees before. Until now, all their operating costs have come from the small royalty slice D2D receives from their publishing partners.
However, they earn royalties only on books that sell through their partners (Kobo, Apple, Hoopla, etc.). So now, for authors who don’t have very many sales, D2D is instituting the “account maintenance” fees to offset that loss of royalties. Makes perfect sense to me.
The activation fee (only $12 per year)
“will apply to accounts whose earnings from book sales, meaning your net proceeds after D2D’s commission, total less than $100 over the preceding 12-month period. If you earn $100 or more from your book sales over 12 months, you will not be charged this fee.”
Face it. If you’re writing your own books, and if you’re doing even minimal free promotion, you’ll easily make $100 in a year. And of course the more books you write and publish, the more easily you’ll make at least $100 per year.
So I’m saying, don’t panic. This is not a big deal.
In fact, all of the other major aggregator services, for example
have always charged up-front fees in addition to a royalty split for distributing authors’ books.
Smashwords belonged on that list too until they were absorbed by D2D. Smashwords never charged a fee but their user interface was clunky to the point of distraction.
But as I said, they’re now part of D2D, so if you use D2D as an aggregator, your books will also be listed in the Smashwords store without having to use the clunky user interface.
If you’re shopping around, you’ll want to study each of those in the list above.
Back in the day I checked out all of the above aggregators, and I found them all lacking or disadvantageous in one way or another.
That’s why I eventually signed-on with (and still STRONGLY recommend) D2D. Then again, your results might vary.
But in addition to the up-front fee(s), be sure to check for their royalty rate (or commission), ease of use, upload requirements, etc., and where in the world they distribute your books. For example, back in the day, XinXii distributed only in India, China, and the Far East.
Wherever you look, always ALWAYS read the Terms of Service, especially as those terms address copyright, licensing.
If you haven’t signed up for a D2D account yet, I guess you’ll now be charged that one-time setup fee. If it were me in that situation, I think I’d just shrug and consider it a penalty for waiting so long to sign up. (grin)
It’s also possible to use more than one aggregator. For example, I (like many authors) publish to Amazon to reach that worldwide market AND to D2D to reach Kobo, Apple, Hoopla, and all the other sellers with whom they have partnerships.
Also note I’m not talking here about pay-to-play vanity publishers.
As the appellation indicates, vanity (or subsidy) publishers play on your ego and charge always-exorbitant up-front fees (usually in the thousands of dollars) plus royalty splits for various publishing “services,” most of which you can easily do yourself, like setting up social media accounts. All vanity/subsidy publishers are scams, and I advise you to avoid them.
Hope this helps.
A Note re Become A Successful Indie Author
Recently another writer sent me the following YouTube link to the audio version of Craig Martelle’s book, Become A Successful Indie Author. Martelle is an accomplished author.
If you learn via audio books, check it out, but set aside a whole morning or afternoon. The audio book lasts just under five hours. The first chapter begins at about 11 minutes in.
If you’d rather read it yourself, here are
- the paperback version ($12.99) and
- the Kindle version ($4.99)
A New Nonfiction Project
I’ve been copyediting since the early 1990s. From experience I culled during all those years, back in the mid-2000s I wrote an article for a popular writers magazine. The article was titled “The Top 7 Mistakes Writers Make.”
In 2022 I posted the same article in the Journal, then posted it again in 2024. Sometime along in there, I also wrote another article titled “10 Lesser Mistakes Writers Make.”
But some of my mentorship sessions have illustrated to me that I didn’t go into enough depth on the individual mistakes I listed in those articles.
So I’ve decided to put together another nonfiction book, expanding on each of the “mistakes” listed in those articles and providing in-depth examples of each.
I might publish some of the chapters of the new book here. But if you’d like a quick but informative overview, I’ve posted links to the four original posts in Of Interest. Those will serve as an annotated table of contents for the book.
Yeah I know it probably won’t sell, but I’m a teacher and the idea has a death grip on me so I’m gonna do it anyway. Besides, it will make an excellent companion volume to Quiet the Critical Voice and Write Fiction and Writing Better Fiction.
If only we could wrap fish with ebooks, eh? (grin)
Talk with you again soon.
Of Interest
The Top 7 Mistakes Writers Make, Part 1
The Top 7 Mistakes Writers Make, Part 2
10 Lesser Mistakes Writers Make: 1
10 Lesser Mistakes Writers Make: 2