Introduction
This guide will teach you how to use Draft2Digital to turn your story into a professionally-formatted eBook and make it available for sale through all the most popular online retailers, including Amazon’s Kindle store, Apple’s iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and more!
It’s not a very long guide. That’s because publishing at Draft2Digital is such a simple process. It should probably take about ten minutes to read the whole book. And by complete coincidence, that’s about how long it takes to publish a book, too!
Note: I’m going to take it for granted that you already have a story to publish—written, edited, and ready to go. I won’t spend much time on writing or marketing advice in this guide, just the actual publishing process at Draft2Digital.
If you need help with any of that other stuff, feel free to take a look at UnstressedSyllables.com. That site is packed with everything you need to know to take your story from inspiration to publication.
1
Doing Your Research
Before you start publishing your book, you might want to do some careful research. After all, this is a serious business venture. Head to the front pages at Draft2Digital.com and look for the pages:
· www.Draft2Digital.com/howitworks/ provides a brief overview of the information this guide is trying to explain in detail.
· www.Draft2Digital.com/pricing/ explains Draft2Digital’s fees, which are simple: Whenever you sell books published through Draft2Digital, Draft2Digital will keep 15% of the money they receive for the book. That’s it. Conversion is free. Changes are free. Listing is free. They only make money when you do.
· www.Draft2Digital.com/whychoose/ examines the benefits of Draft2Digital’s service. Check them out, and compare their features to leading competitors.
· www.Draft2Digital.com/faq/ is probably the most useful page, packed with detailed information about how the service works. I recommend reading it through top-to-bottom, but you can always skim for topics that actually interest you.
It’s not in the main navigation menu, but you can also access the Terms of Service (www.Draft2Digital.com/termsofservice/) from the front page (or from the footer on any page in the site). This is the most important page while you’re doing your research. Here’s the executive summary:
These Terms of Service are a contract between you and Draft2Digital LLC. Under these Terms of Service, Draft2Digital will:
1. Convert your manuscript into common eBook formats.
2. Deploy your eBooks to leading online bookstores.
3. Provide online reports to you concerning sales of your eBooks.
4. After deducting a 15% commission, pay you the remainder of your royalties each month after receiving royalties from online bookstores.
You, the author:
1. Are and will remain the owner of your books and all rights to them. Draft2Digital has a right to commissions on sales under the Terms of Service, but has no claim to the copyrights or any other rights pertaining to your books. You are the owner of the eBook files Draft2Digital creates.
2. Set the sales price of your eBooks and write the description that appears in online bookstores. You can change either the price or description at any time.
3. Can delist any of your eBooks from Draft2Digital or terminate the Agreement at any time. Draft2Digital is entitled to its 15% commission on sales of your books prior to delisting. Thereafter, Draft2Digital has no further rights to any income from your books. You are free to do whatever you like with your books.
But you’ll want to read the whole thing. It defines the legal relationship between you and Draft2Digital.
The good news is that D2D’s Terms of Service are about as author-friendly as they get. You keep all copyright to your works, you get paid your share of any royalties received no matter what, and you can even use the Draft2Digital-generated eBook however you want.
But don’t take my word for it! Read the Terms of Service, and you’ll be ready to sign up for an account of your own.
2
Signing Up
At the time I’m writing this, Draft2Digital is still in a limited beta. While it’s in beta, you’ll need a special activation code before you can sign up for an account. Luckily, these codes are pretty easy to get. Just go to the signup page (www.Draft2Digital.com/beta) and provide your email address.
As soon as an activation code becomes available, they’ll email it to you and you can get started. Some users have had to wait a few days to get a code, but others have gotten one almost immediately. The longest anyone has had to wait (so far) has been a week, so it’s not too hard to get in.
When you get your code, you can enter it at the same beta page to get to the signup page (www.Draft2Digital.com/register). Once the beta ends, everyone will be able to access that form just by clicking the link.
To sign up for an account, this is all you need:
· A name (which can be your legal name or a pen name)
· An email address (which becomes your username)
· A password
If you have a Publisher name, you can enter that here, too. If you don’t, Draft2Digital will just use your author name as the Publisher, too. Don’t worry, either way you can make lots of changes to your author name and Publisher name once you’re logged in.
Signing up is easy, but once you’re signed in…well, everything else is easy, too.
3
Preparing Your Document (Style Guide)
For many writers, the worst part of self-publishing is the technical aspect of (re)formatting their manuscripts. We all have slightly different habits (and slightly different inherited settings on our word processors), so it can be a challenge to “clean up” a document enough that an eBook retailer will even accept it (let alone make it look good).
Digital publishing platforms address this problem with long, often tedious instructions for preparing books that will work in their systems. These manuals are called style guides, and when it comes right down to it, automated conversion systems basically require them.
The guys at Draft2Digital like to claim they don’t have a style guide. They say, “Give us whatever you’ve got, just use your style guide, and we’ll teach our system to work with it.” That’s a pretty generous attitude (and they’re surprisingly good at coming through), but for writers who don’t want to wait for the system to learn, the developers have prepared an (unofficial) style guide for their system, too.
Brace yourself, because things are about to get technical. Sorry, that’s just the nature of the game. If you want to get the best possible results out of Draft2Digital’s conversion process, you should really do all of the following things:
- Make your chapter titles bold.
- Use a larger font for them than you use for the body text.
That’s…that’s basically it. You can make block quotes by setting narrower left and right margins. You can save yourself a lot of time (and get a much cleaner document) by leaving off the title page, copyright page, and other endmatter and just letting Draft2Digital build those for you. You can….
Nope. I don’t really have any more tips. The Draft2Digital conversion process is surprisingly good. Try it out and see for yourself.
4
Starting a Project (Acquisitions)
To start a new project with Draft2Digital, all you have to do is click the giant orange button on your dashboard that says “Add New Book.”
NOTE: Don’t feel too shy about starting a new book project. The worst that will happen is that it’ll clutter up your dashboard. There’s no limit to the number of book projects you can create, and a new project won’t be published anywhere until you give the order.
The Edit Book process consists of three major phases: Acquisitions, Layout, and Publishing. The Acquisitions page requires some very basic information about your book.
The first thing you’ll do here is upload your document. Then provide title information (including series and volume number if you have them), a release date, and a product description (which is basically the back-cover text).
You’ll also have to name at least one “Contributor.” That’s probably you, the author. In fact, Draft2Digital will automatically fill in your author name for you. If you’re publishing someone else’s book (or if you want to use a different pen name), just click the drop-down arrow and enter a new name.
You can type in Search Terms to help readers find your book. You’re allowed to put in up to 15 different words or phrases, but make sure you put the most important ones at the top of the list. Every retailer has a different limit, so Draft2Digital just gives them as many as they can, starting at the beginning.
It might not be obvious, but you can drag and drop the search terms with your mouse to reorder them. Pretty snazzy. You can do the same thing with the BISAC Categories, which we’ll discuss next.
BISAC Categories are a pain. These are a group of standard labels used to describe book categories—whether it’s Historical Romance or Epic Fantasy or Non-Fiction Gardening How-To. All of the sales channels ask you to label your book based on BISAC categories, and then all of the sales channels take your choices and best-guess them into a different set of categories they’ll show on their websites.
There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s weird voodoo magic. Your best move is just to pick the right BISAC categories, cross your fingers, and not care too much when Amazon gets it wrong.
The only good news here is that the Draft2Digital interface does everything possible to simplify that process. They have a search bar that will let you narrow down the hundreds of BISAC categories so it’ll only show the ones with “Fantasy” in the title. (Or you could do a quick search for “New Adult” and learn right away that it doesn’t exist, instead of trying to find it among all the different leaves and branches.)
Once you’ve finished with that, you’re ready to see the magic. Click “Save & Continue” and Draft2Digital will convert your document into an eBook, saving all this extra information into their database for future use.
5
Adding Endmatter and Reviewing Proofs (Layout)
Once you’ve finished Acquisitions, the next step in your publishing process is Layout. On the Layout page, you’ll upload your cover art, review the chapter list that Draft2Digital detected in your manuscript, and then choose which endmatter you want Draft2Digital to put in your book.
This is where you find out whether or not Draft2Digital lived up to the promise I mentioned back in Chapter 4. If they display your chapter titles here, chances are good that your style guide worked perfectly.
Of course, there’s always a chance your document threw them a curve ball. If the “Chapter Layout” list contains things that are clearly not chapter titles, or if it’s missing ones that should be there, there’s another big orange button to help you out. Just click “Help! These aren’t my Chapters!” and you’ll find some helpful feedback.
I’m surprised how often my chapters come through perfectly, though. Once you’ve gotten the hang of it, reviewing the chapter layout is just a quick glance, and then you can turn your attention to the real fun.
Generated endmatter is easily my favorite feature of Draft2Digital. Back before I used this service, I managed all these things myself—Copyright page, Also by This Author, About the Author, and I always wanted to include a teaser or ad for one of our other books in the back of the ones I published.
But that was a lot of copy-paste work, and even more effort to maintain. The benefit of using Draft2Digital is that they’re storing all that information in their database. So adding an About the Author page is as easy as typing in my bio once, and then just clicking the checkbox “Generate an About the Author page” for any book I want to publish after that.
I’ve checked every single box for this book, so you can skip to the beginning or the end to see how the generated endmatter looks on the page. Of course, you can just as easily make one of your own, and that’s a lot more fun.
So once you’ve verified your chapters and made your endmatter selections on the Layout page, click “Save & Continue” and Draft2Digital will build a finished, validated, and professionally-formatted eBook out of your story, with all the new endmatter baked right in.
That part only takes a moment, and then you get the chance to see what your new book looks like. Draft2Digital will provide you download links to get your book in different formats for the different types of eBook readers, and they even provide download links for the previewer software if you don’t have it already.
Grab a copy of your Amazon book, open it up in the Kindle app, and bask in the magnificence of your creative handiwork. Once you’ve done that, you can approve the proof copy and move on to Publishing.
6
Choosing Your Sales Channels (Publishing)
Now that we get to the final stage, Publishing is actually the easiest of them all. Choose where you want Draft2Digital to sell your book, pick a target price, and click “Publish.” Done! Depending which sales channels you choose, you should start getting emails within a few hours letting you know the book is available for readers to buy.
That’s a fun feeling. And now that your book is available for purchase, it’s time to start obsessing over sales reports!
7
Using Your Dashboard
Once you have some books in your Draft2Digital account, you’ll discover a much more interesting dashboard. This page shows you a list of all the books you’ve published (or started on) through Draft2Digital.