Karen’s Chat – Update on Publishing

Draft2Digital publishes to a wide range of retailers. Some I’d never heard of, but others include Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and even libraries. Imagine that, you can now borrow my books from your local library.

Google Books is another major retailer, and I’ve uploaded my books there too. Publishing usually takes around 24 hours, and sure enough, they’re all showing in the store now.

Draft2Digital takes a little longer, usually a week or two, to distribute books to all its retailers. I’ve been receiving emails letting me know where my books have gone live and which retailers are still processing them. I’m just waiting for the remaining stores to work their way through the system.

One of the great features of Draft2Digital is that it provides a single Books2Read link. You may have come across these before. The beauty of it is that you can add extra retailer links to it. For example, I can include my Google Books link, and if i was still on Amazon, I could add that too. It effectively becomes one universal link for all the places where my books are available. You can also link it to your paperback editions.

That’s something I’ll have to sort out later. I’ve heard that Draft2Digital paperbacks are very good quality, which is encouraging.

Until everything has been published everywhere, I’m not planning any promotion. So I was delighted to discover that I’ve already made eight sales.

One of the things I loved about Amazon was being able to see people actually reading my books. In the reporting section there was a chart showing how many pages had been read each day. It was always exciting to check.

Although I no longer have that feature, I can now see how many people have clicked my Books2Read link and which retailer they chose. That’s particularly useful if I want to see how effective a promotion or marketing campaign has been.

Here are a couple of examples of how they report.

This is for my free anthology, Butterfly Batts with the authors of Electric Eclectic. It’s interesting to see how many click-throughs there are for retailers I’d not heard of.

This is the ‘See More Analytics’ button on the top right above. You can choose any data range.

And finally, these are my books. I’ve two almost ready for publication and they are novels, whereas the majority are novellas. Another novel is off to the editor next week.

It will be nice to see the final books standing proud with these ones.

All my books are now 99/c or free.