This Friday, I recommend checking out PublishDrive if you’re selling your books in ebook format or plan to.
Selling In Multiple Stores And Countries
PublishDrive offers a way to upload an ebook once and sell it in over 400 stores worldwide.
The stores includes ones you’ve likely heard of, like Apple iBooks, Kobo, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble, and also hundreds of others.
What I like about PublishDrive is that chance to reach readers–many outside the U.S. and Canada–who might not have access to Amazon, Kobo, or other well-known companies, and to do it without needing to upload separately in hundreds of stores.
Books Already Published Elsewhere
If you’ve already published your books on other platforms, you can still use PublishDrive.
I recently listed all four books in my Awakening supernatural thriller series. Because those are already available on Kobo and other platforms, I simply unchecked those boxes, targeting only stores I hadn’t already published in.
I don’t know how much I’ll get in sales as I haven’t yet figured out how to advertise for all the stores, but I didn’t see any downside to making the books available through more sites.
The Price
There were no upfront costs to publish. As of right now (January 2018), PublishDrive gets 10% of the digital list price.
Again, this seems like a no-brainer. If there are zero sales, it costs me no money out of pocket. I spent time setting up the books to publish, which is a cost, but it was only a few hours. That seems worth it for the chance of future sales.
Caveat – Book Descriptions
I hope to write more about PublishDrive down the road once I’ve had my books published there for some time.
So far I’ve found one downside.
The book description section appears to allow using basic html codes (such as for bold, italics, headlines, etc.) to make the description look appealing, which I wrote more about here.
At least one platform, though, dropped all formatting, including headers and paragraph spacing, resulting in this run-together, awkward-looking sales copy:
To deal with this, I revamped all my descriptions into simple paragraphs that I feel more confident will be readable on all platforms.
And now a word about Writing As A Second Career:
A Change Going Forward
Last Sunday I wrote an article More Than Writing a/k/a Goals For The New Year.
After writing it, I created my author business goals and started scheduling the next few months’ time to pursue them. In the process, I discovered I have far less time than tasks to do.
One of my major goals is to write a series of articles on my author website answering questions about what is truth and what is fiction in the background mythology of my Awakening series. Ultimately, I hope to compile the articles with additional material into a Readers’ Guide.
Going forward, to make room in my schedule to do that, I’ll be skipping Sundays and limiting my writing on this site to every Friday.
I hope you’ll stay with me!
If there area any particular topics you’d like me to address please post them in the comments or email me [email protected].
Until next Friday–
Hi, Zsofia from PublishDrive here. Thank you so much for the mention! I have tried to comment earlier but it seems to have gotten lost somehow… Anyway, I just really wanted to say thanks for taking the time to review PublishDrive and share your experience. I hope we can live up to your expectations. Please let us know where you have shot the screenshot and we’ll check in with the shop to see if there is anything to be done regarding formatting.
Hi Zsofia, thanks so much for your comment and follow up. I found the listing through a link on PublishDrive’s site, but now there are so many for all the stores where you publish that I’m having a hard time finding it again. When I do, I’ll check the formatting and check in with you. I really appreciate your offer to help! And I’m sorry your earlier comment didn’t get through. It may have been caught in the Spam filter. I’m looking forward to working with PublishDrive.