Kill Well, Book One of The Steep Climes Quartet, is out in ePub via Draft2Digital Next Week
We’re a bit bleary-eyed, but our efforts to get an ePub version of Kill Well has succeeded, and that success is mainly due to Draft2Digital, and, well, a bit of homework.
ePub is an ebook format we want to have for Kill Well so that this book will be available on other ebook platforms in addition to Kindle. Another benefit in having the book in ePub format is that we can send out to reviewers–sticking only with Kindle would have some potential reviewers not ask for the book. A funny thing is that Amazon’s Kindle has recently moved to ePub-only ebook format, finally throwing over their MOBI format for the industry standard ePub. The other funny thing, though, is that there is still a lot of proprietary requirements that limit its ePub format to Kindle devices and thus limit Kindle ePub format as a generally accessible ebook platform. This is hardly the first time Amazon has used its market position to its own advantage, and, yes, even when it comes to standards.
The final reason for having an ePub format ebook is that the version can be sold (i.e., distributed) through many non-Amazon channels, including Apple, Barnes and Noble, Kobi, and many others, including library distributors. Even in this area Draft2Digital makes it easy for its publishers to choose any number of ebook distributors (and thus sellers), including Kindle. Since we have Kill Well in Amazon’s Kindle already in pre-release, and we wouldn’t want to confuse Amazon, we avoided this sort of double-dipping and didn’t include Amazon distribution through Draft2Digital.
This ePub endeavor started with a couple of false turs, mainly exploring PDF-to-ePub conversion software, but all the options looked at offered lousy user interfaces. We decided to scrap that angle and explore Word-to-ebook production platforms that are offered by ebook and POD (print on demand of paperbacks) distribution companies, and Draft2Digital kept coming up with strong plusses as we narrowed down choices. The Word-to-ePub process went smoothly enough, although that may be because we did my homework, finding guidance that mostly consisted of specific ways to prepare the Word manuscript file.
The release of the ePub version of Kill Well is scheduled for next week and after more time has passed and enough sales have been made, we’ll get to see how well the Draft2Digital sales reports go and how well—and how quickly—“royalty” payments happen. We’ve placed “royalty” is quotes because the business arrangement is something different than a traditional publishing royalty arrangement. There are the typical discounts to sellers and with Draft2Digital takes a small percent of each sale, but the ebook industry seems fond of the term even if it isn’t accurate.
We’ll post an updating list of other ebook channels as distributors choose to accept Kill Well, but even after just a day of setting the book up through Draft2Digital, we are already up—still pre-order for August 18—on Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, Tolino, and Vivlio.