Yesterday was the official launch party for the new International Anthology, Short and Happy (Or Not), that contains my short story To Love Again. The book was just released this week on Amazon and already has 9 reviews. One reviewer wrote: “A sampling in all the right ways. Overall one of my favorite reads in the past couple of months. I had a lot of fun stepping inside the minds of somany diverse and engaging authors.”
I also want to announce that my mystery, Boxes for Beds, which was a Kindle exclusive for almost a year, is now available for Kobo, Nook, iTunes, Inktera. Of course it is still available for Kindle readers, too. I just decided to open distribution and used Draft2Digital, a terrific company that helps indie authors who don’t want to take the time to create all the different formats for all of these retail outlets.
The folks at D2D will convert a Word document into an ebook, create clean chapter breaks and a functioning table of contents. It is a quick and easy process from the author end and I highly recommend the service. There is no upfront charge and D2D only takes 10% of the retail price.
And now, so this isn’t just about me, here is an interview with Laura Parker on Regan Walker’s blog Historical Romance Review. Laura is the best-selling author of 40 books, many of them historical romances, and her Rose Trilogy is being offered as a boxed set through Untreed Reads. I read all three books in the series that started with Rose of the Mists and they are terrific stories. The new release has a different cover, but here is the original from that first book.
Since books make great gifts, it is not too soon to think about some of the written treasures for folks on your gift list.
I urge caution: for a job which takes very little time, compared to the writing of a book, the D2D folk will have 15% of your earnings forever.
It makes sense if you don’t think there will be many sales – the conversion is a fixed cost, and they wouldn’t get many ‘commissions’ – but if you sell a lot they will continue to make money without doing any more work.
The publishing economics depend on the volume.
Not saying no – just saying do some calculations, and see what is best for YOU.
The other option is to pay for the conversion as a one-time cost.
My $.02.
Good points, Alicia, and of course every author needs to weigh the pros and cons. For me, because technology is such a challenge, I would rather give a small percentage to D2D than spend hours and hours trying to do all that formatting and submitting to each outlet. To me, it is the same principle as giving an agent a percentage to do all the marketing for a new book. And I do believe they take 10%. At least that is what their FAQs says, and what my last statement reflected.