If you publish paperback books and ebooks, you’ll want to consider all the most popular and effective options for both formats. Here’s a view into how this works.
I first started publishing my 13 low carb books back around 2000, when I began writing online about my experiences with the low carb diet system. At the time Lulu was a big part of the self-publishing market, so I published the physical paperbacks through Lulu. Those paperbacks then distributed to Amazon and the other markets.
On the ebook side, I posted the ebooks directly on every system available, including GooglePlay, Lulu, Kobo, and of course Amazon. I also used the distributor systems of Draft2Digital and Smashwords to reach other markets like Barnes & Noble and Apple iTunes.
Over the years, Amazon has become dominant, and being optimized for the Amazon market has become a key to high sales. It’s critical to have the key words, categories, and everything just right with Amazon’s options. A third-party vendor won’t necessarily have all of those fields updated or even available. Third-party vendors reduce to the ‘lowest common denominator’ across all publishers they work with.
In addition, Lulu now has a policy that you have to PAY for a proof copy EVERY TIME you make any change at all to your paperback book. Since I have 13 low carb books, and tweak them multiple times a year, this quickly becomes unreasonable. For that reason my updates have stalled, which isn’t great for my marketing and sales.
So I’m at the point of preparing to move my paperback books out of Lulu and into Amazon as their primary source location. This became a massive project to organize where all of my low carb paperback books and ebooks were even available. Because it turns out:
* SmashWords was no longer a live ebook publishing system. SmashWords auto-migrated all my books into Draft2Digital, into a separate account from my regular Draft2Digital one. I now had two sets of all my low carb ebooks feeding out from two Draft2Digital accounts into 12 different vendors’ systems.
* Lulu was supposed to be distributing my Lulu ebooks out to Apple and to Barnes & Noble. It turns out that at some point Barnes & Noble stopped displaying Lulu ebooks. So those Barnes & Noble ebooks were simply not visible.
* Kobo was hanging in there. Still, did I really want to deal with updating 13 ebooks regularly in Kobo when I could just do that updating in Draft2Digital and have the ebooks auto-distribute to Kobo along with the 12 other vendors?
So my plan of action going forward with my low carb paperback books is:
* Migrate, one at a time, each paperback book from Lulu to Amazon. This is a process that needs to be done DELIBERATELY SLOWLY in order to maintain the books’ reviews and connections to existing locations on Amazon. Each book needs to be added as-is (no changes) to Amazon so it can “take the place” in the Amazon listing of the original Lulu book. It needs to get tied to the matching ebook. I would then LEAVE the Lulu listing alone. That Lulu page’s existence in search engines and links still provides value to me. If people see the old date on its cover, they might think ‘I wonder if there’s an updated version somewhere’ and find the Amazon one. Try to avoid ever deleting pages or links that promote your products.
* Once Amazon is fully populated with my paperback books, I will edit each one and bring it up to a 2024 version.
My plan of action for my low carb ebooks is:
* Shut down all the Kobo entries for my low carb ebooks. In Draft2Digital, turn on the Kobo distribution option. Once the ebooks are distributing into the Kobo system, I can write Kobo and they will move the reviews I had earned for those ebooks onto the new entries. I’m shutting down the Kobo direct entries simply because it is a lot of hassle to maintain book descriptions / contents / covers in so many systems manually.
* Shut down all the low carb ebooks in my SECONDARY Draft2Digital account that was auto-created by the migration from SmashWords. This SmashWords-to-Draft2Digital account migration became a gigantic mess. It turns out the secondary account had my ‘cocktails’ ebook and my main account didn’t. I asked Draft2Digital if they could move my cocktails ebook over to my main account. Draft2Digital said nope, it is stuck in the migrated account. So I will delete that cocktails ebook wholly from the migrated account and create it fresh in my regular Draft2Digital account. It’s the only way to have everything in one main Draft2Digital account.
* Shut down any distribution options in the Lulu ebook area. Apparently those distributions are having issues anyway. Only have the Lulu ebooks on Lulu itself. Those ebooks, at least, I can update without needing to pay for it.
* Whittle this down so the only places I have to maintain the ebooks are: Amazon, GooglePlay, Lulu, and Draft2Digital. Draft2Digital then broadcasts out to about 12 other sites. Note that I *could* have Draft2Digital broadcast out to Amazon, but for reasons explained earlier, I only ever want to work on Amazon books from within the Amazon system itself. Draft2Digital does not distribute to Lulu nor to GooglePlay.
I know this is a lot of information about a variety of different systems. I hope this will help people who are planning out their paperback or ebook distribution plan. The details should also help people who have been with a publisher and are looking to move their content to be in a different or additional publisher.
Please let me know if you have any questions!