Graft and Digital -- Susan Price

I've been self-publishing for over eleven years now. 😲 For most of that time, most of my books have been exclusive to Amazon, first as ebooks, and then as paperbacks too.

I did try one or two books on Nook, but never seemed to sell much and, frankly, couldn't be bothered to put in the amount of work necessary to publish across the board, even with the help of Draft2Digital.

But this year, I decided to give it a go. And it has been just as much hard graft as I feared. Although I don't suppose I'm telling most of you anything you don't already know. Sorry, Grandma. Sorry, Grandad.

 D2D ebooks aren't too bad. After some experimentation and the usual hiccups, I find that transforming a book already published as a ebook with Amazon is fairly straightforward.

You make the whole book a long, uninterrupted stream of text, except for chapter ends, where you insert nothing more fancy than a page-break.

Draft2Digital advise you to use Word's 'Heading 1' for all the chapter headings. It's best, I found, to put every heading right at the top of the page (none of your stylish 'halfway down the page' nonsense.) If you do this, the D2D 'bot will find them all and add them to the 'Contents' page.

You can give your chapters a little decorative scroll or picture, providing that it's between lines of text and 'in line with text'. That is, make sure it goes: Chapter Whatever -- Picture -- Chapter Title. Or you can put the picture under the chapter title, just before the chapter's text begins. Just so long as it's sandwiched between text.

Chapter heading from 'Ghost Song' by Susan Price

Provided you do this (rather tedious) work, Draft2Digital sends its 'bot through your book, collects up all the headings and produce a title page, copyright page, contents, etc. You can tick little boxes to tell it which of these things you want the bot to do, and which you'd prefer to do yourself.

What you don't want to do, I found, is put the picture at the top of the chapter page, above the chapter heading. This drives the D2D 'bot wild and rubbishes all its chapter dividing skills. You end with a mess of text randomly interrupted with blank pages and blank half-pages.

Once I'd discovered the 'bot's strong feelings about picture positioning re chapter headings, I was able to move on to the review stage pretty quickly and I've added twelve books: most of my folk-tale retellings and two of my ghost story anthologies. (They refused to publish Overheard in a Graveyard because I'd overlooked that Amazon have exclusive rights to it until February. Darn! I thought I'd checked that. -- I've been round the back of Amazon (again) and cancelled their option to once more sign the book up exclusively in February. Until then, the book will just have to sit, in draft, on D2D's dashboard.)

 Above, a look at my D2D dashboard. See all those pretty little coloured squares under the  books? They're all the different platforms each book is being sold on. Or could be. Not every square is 'live.' Hover your mouse over them and, if they're live, the cursor appears as a pointing hand. If not, it's a mere arrow. (Though only on the D2D site, natch. The one below is just a jpeg.)

 Left to right: Apple, Baker & Taylor, Barnes and Noble, Bibliotheca, BorrowBox, Hoopla, Kobo, Overdrive, Smashwords, Tolino, Vivlio. (Hoopla is just being slow, according to D2D, but will go live, eventually.)

The thought of having to update my website with all those different links for each of those books made me come over quite faint and feel like a lie down. But, luckily, as I was having a bit of a poke around on the D2D site, I discovered that I didn't have to. Thank goodness.

Draft2Digital, bless their cotton socks, provide a universal link for each book, which takes a would-be buyer to Books2Read.

The universal for my book, Ghost Song, is https://books2read.com/u/4ENA1Y

But if you don't want to be bothered hopping over there, this is what it looks like.

 All very good so far -- but none of the books above have much in the way of illustrations, apart from the odd decoration for a chapter page.

Things didn't go so well when I tried it with my The Wolf's Footprint.

It's my best-sellers, so if I was going to put books up on D2D, I thought Footprint should be one of them. But it has several illustrations: a paw-print at each chapter, full page illustrations and half-page illustrations.

Illustrations never work very well in an e-book, where the whole idea is that the reader can change the print size and font to the one they prefer. It's something I like about ebooks but it plays merry hell with illustration placement. I did eventually-- after many, many uploads and rejigs-- battle it to something that worked more or less as D2D ebook, give or take the occasional blank half-page.

The Wolf's Footprint by Susan Price

 

 

The Wolf's Footprint at Amazon

 

The Wolf's Footprint at Books2Read

 

 

 

 

So then I thought about trying the D2D paperbacks. They say that they can turn your ebook file into a paperback -- but warn you that their paperback publishing is still a 'beta model.' Enter here at your own risk.

I'm afraid D2D stumbled with The Wolf's Footprint.

I clicked the button that was supposed to transform my book into a paperback and it transformed it into a right old mess. It was the illustrations making difficulties again.  I made three attempts to format the book so that D2D's paperback robot could handle it but, so far, with no success.

But, to be fair, Amazon have had longer to tweak and perfect their KDP, and they aren't trying to suit several different platforms at once.

Out of interest, I tried the 'just click this button and convert your ebook to a paperback' with another of my books, Ghost Song. This book has little decorations at each chapter heading, but no other illustrations. And though, as I write, it's still at the review stage, it seems to have converted perfectly into a paperback. So I'll go ahead and make the other Ghost World books into paperbacks.

And if you're a slowcoach like me and haven't yet tried D2D-- and provided your book has no illustrations-- you could have your book up on multiple platforms, as a paperback and ebook... Well, I was going to say, 'in no time at all,' but it will take you a little time.

Ghost Song by Susan Price

 

Ghost Song at Amazon 

 

 

Ghost Song at Books2Read

Although the Books2Read page shows an outdated cover instead of the one on the right. I don't know why.

The first book in the series, Ghost Drum, won't be going up on D2D, though-- and will be coming down from Amazon in the near(ish) future.

The reason? -- Its original publisher, Faber, are going to re-print it as a 'Faber classic.' They've agreed, though, to let me keep it up on Amazon until that happens. Which is nice of them.

But I shall already have to press one button, to unpublish Ghost Drum from Amazon -- so why put it up on D2D and have to press two buttons? No point in making work.

I'm going for that lie down now.

 Ghost Drum by Susan Price

Winner of Carnegie medal