#publishdrive

From Forbes.com

E-commerce giant Dangdang and self-publishing platform PublishDrive announced a partnership that, for the first time, allows authors in the West to make their self-published e-books available on the website.

Dangdang, whose competitors are Amazon (Dangdang, like Amazon, just got into the physical bookstore game, opening its first store in January of this year; it also launched an e-reader, like Amazon, in 2012) and JD.com, launched its e-book platform in late 2011, but, until now, that platform had not been usable by Western authors.

Beyond the fact that this partnership is important because of the fact that many books in China are the product of state-sponsored publishers, the Chinese e-book market is expected to grow around 30% annually for the next three years. That means a lot of potential eyeballs for writers in the West.

Photo above: Peggy Yu Yu, co-founder and chairman of Dangdang, left, and Guoqing Li, co-founder and chief executive officer of Dangdang, right. in New York in 2010. Photographer: Jin Lee/Bloomberg

Ellen Duffer is managing editor of Ploughshares, the literary journal and publisher based in Boston, and a marketing consultant at Lennia Consulting Group.

From the Bookworks: The Self-Publishers Association blog, by Carla King.

There are a lot of eBook platforms out there—how many do you know? I bet you haven’t heard of Kbuuk, PublishDrive, Scribl, or StreetLib but I’ll also bet you’ll want to try at least one of them by the end of this post. Don’t worry, you don’t have to give up your existing service (IngramSpark, Smashwords, Amazon KDP), but add one or more of these to the mix. Just remember to exclude distribution to retailers you’re already reaching. Here's the rundown in alphabetical order:

Kbuuk

Strength: Book analytics tools for author insights and platform building.

Kbuuk is an eBook platform and subscription service based in Houston, Texas. The monthly fee is $0 (2 books), $5 (unlimited books), and $10 (unlimited books) per month. Upload a doc file, and they export it to EPUB and MOBI for distribution conversion, sales in the Kbuuk store, and distribution to Amazon.com, iBookstore, Kobo bookstore, and Barnes and Noble’s Nook. You get 80% royalty, even at the $0/mo level. Premium and Pro plans include a book web page, in-store sales, comprehensive reader analytics, book sales analytics, and a channel tracking service that helps you build your author platform by showing you how customers read your book and how many sales you made.

PublishDrive

Strength: Distribution to Spanish and Asian online book retailers and libraries.

PublishDrive is a Hungarian company that will publish your eBook in more than 400 stores including Apple iBooks, Google Play Books, Kindle, Scribd, Barnes & Noble, plus 240k digital libraries (schools, universities, public libraries) for 10% after net sales. You get paid monthly. You can upload an EPUB, or they’ll convert your book for you. Use them to reach the Spanish subscription service 24Symbols, TookBook, Casa De Libro, RedShelf, eSentral in SE Asia, and India’s Rockstand, as well as access to the OverDrive libraries and the Ciando libraries. If you don’t have an EPUB they’ll convert your Word doc to EPUB. Using their calculator, I figure conversion costs to be around $125 for a 60,000-word book, which is about right for a very simple eBook.

Scribl

Strength: Author discovery using a CrowdPricing model. GoodReads-like “similar titles” search for readers. Audiobook distribution with Podiobook.

Scribl was “founded by authors and aspiring authors to solve the core discovery challenges new authors face.” Though still in beta, they are open for business and can distribute your eBook to Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and hundreds of others.

They offer your eBook and audiobook (and podcasts, too), in their store and others, to customers hungry for free and low-cost books using a CrowdPricing ($CP) system. $CP encourages readers to take a chance on a new, undiscovered authors with initial pricing at free or almost-free. Your book will be free for a brief promotional period, then rise in price along with its ratings. (Look out, KDP Select!)

Scribl claims that $CP produces 30 times more total revenue for content than with conventional pricing. They also report that most downloads are paid downloads—unlike conventional systems, where most of the downloads are free.

Their CrowdPricing Everywhere system distributes to retailers with your bookmarked as $CP. You earn 70% royalty on distribution, and in their store, you earn 75% (or 85% if you also provide an audiobook version) of gross revenue (not net), minus PayPal fees. You are paid every 48 hours.

StreetLib

Strength: Cloud-based book creation tool with formatting for comics, cookbooks, and poetry. Partnership with Perlego reader subscription books for professional and academic books. Book page and opportunity to create revenue via curation. Sales widget to embed on your website. Book translation services.

StreetLib is an eBook platform based in Italy (also in Turkey and Latin America, and just announced a deal with Libreka! reaching hundreds of new stores in Germany, Austria and Switzerland) with some unique offerings that any author, anywhere, will be intrigued with. But first, the basics. StreetLib Write is their free cloud-based book creation tool, with formatting for comics, cookbooks, and poetry. You can export to EPUB, MOBI, fixed layout, and PDF for print. Choose from a la carte formatting, editing, cover design, EPUB correction and validation. They distribute to Amazon Kindle, Google Play, Apple iBooks, Kobo, and hundreds of other stores and charge 7%-10% of the cover price to US authors.

StreetLib has a partnership with Perlego, a subscription eBook platform that gives readers access to over 90,000 professional and academic books. You get paid depending on the number of pages read based on 55% of the membership revenues. (StreetLib keeps 65%.)

As an author on StreetLib, you can claim your book page, edit the content, and earn 15% of sales revenues. You can add other books from their large catalog to sell, also for a 15% commission. (Similar to Aerio.) This is a great way to offer a curated bookstore to make additional income.

A sales widget (similar to Gumroad) is also included to embed in your website, so you can ask your customers to buy direct.

Book translation services are available via a partnership with Babelcube. They don’t charge for translation but take a percentage of your translated book’s sales revenue.

Twists and Turns Ahead #books #bookreview #reading #readerviews

Death at the Crossroads P.J. DonisonPublishDrive (2024)ISBN: 978-1778038723Reviewed by Kathy Stickles for Reader Views (06/2024) “Death at the Crossroads: A Camelia Belmont Mystery” by P.J. Donison is a fabulous book and one that I highly recommend to all mystery lovers out there. I cannot believe I missed the first in this amazing series, but I assure you that I will be running right out to…

A Page-turning Mission #books #bookreview #reading #readerviews

Woodland. Family Portrait Art LionsonPublishdrive (2023)ISBN: 979-8988414339Reviewed by Rachel Dehning for Reader Views (07/2023) In 2043 things may not be as different as one might think. Jason and Eddie Woodland live with their parents and two younger siblings, Cody and Mia, in a decent house with enough food and the skills and drive to obtain any job; however, like individuals and families…

Book Sales COVID-19 Increase

Since March 2020, PublishDrive has been generating digital book sales reports, compiling hard-to-find data from various outlets, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play Books, libraries, regional stores, and more. They have now published their stats for April and May, months that saw much of the world’s population in lockdown.

The graph below presents the increase in sales in April (red…

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This blog post is part of a recurring series of blog posts titled Product Review, in which I review goods and services that I’ve used.

Earlier this month, I used a service called PublishDrive to publish my eBook. PublishDrive claims to be able to allow publishers to self-publish eBooks to major eBook sellers like Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Google…