Publishing Wide

OK, it makes sense to publish first at Amazon because they are by far the biggest market for ebooks and books. They are not the only market though, there are others: 

• iBooks
• Barnes & Noble
• Rakuten Kobo
• Google Play Books
• Everand
• 24symbols
• Thalia.de
• Smashwords
• Walmart
• BajaLibros
• Blio
• Bookmate
• Brown Books for Students
• Casa del Libro
• Hive
• Bol.de
• DriveThruFiction
• Indego
• Angus & Robertson
• Buecher.de
• Fnac
• Hugendubel
• Libris
• Livraria Cultura
• Mondadori
• WHSmith
• Bol.com
• Easons
• ebook.de
• Ghandi
• LaFeltrinelli
• OverDrive
• Vivlio
• Hoopla
• Everand
• Booktopia ebooks
• Books a Million
• Empik
• Voxa
• Payhip
• Nextstory audio

Is that enough? There are more.

Obviously the more e-retailers your ebook is available through, the better your chances of a book sale. Now you could approach each of these e-retailers individually and submit your ebook to each for publication but that would take forever. The answer is to use a book aggregator to do the submissions. These are firms which take a small slice of your royalties, well worth it for the time saved. These are the three book aggregators I use:

1. Draft2Digital - This is by far the simplest publishing site I've ever come across. Not only do they clearly guide you through the publishing process for both ebooks and paper books but they also are excellent if you publish a series since they update the end matter of each ebook to include the latest book.
2. Smashwords - Now owned by parent company Draft2Digital but still operating as a book aggregator and as a retailer. Smashwords is notable for it's strong stance on DRM (anti-copy protection) and two excellent retailer features Coupons and Affiliate scheme. It's worthwhile using Smashwords rather than Draft2Digital since it gives you full control of coupons and affiliate scheme. These are both slowly transferred to Draft2Digital though.
3. PublishDrive - An English firm which is notable since it publishes to Google Play Books. You could publish directly to Google but they make the process so complicated that it's like trying to teach an elephant to hurdle. PublishDrive makes it simple. Google has a nasty habit of discounting the price you set. This causes problems when other retailers see the Google price and 'price match' it. This can play havoc with your royalties at Amazon if the price drops below $2.99. PublishDrive monitor prices and adjust yours so that the retail price remains constant.

If you decide to publish wide, remember you must NOT have your book in Kindle Select at Amazon. Amazon take a dim view of those who break their exclusive contract and your Amazon account will be terminated. That will severely limit your book sales and may even make it difficult to buy anything from Amazon.

If you decide to publish directly to Apple iBooks you must do so from an Apple computer. The way round this is to use an aggregator.

Using an aggregator usually involves submitting an epub2 file as the source file, but the three I list above will accept a MS Word doc/docx file. Draft2Digital have by far the simplest method submitting Word documents.

If you are using an aggregator you will probably need an ISBN number but they will provide a free one. That will make the aggregator the publisher.

You can tell the aggregator which e-retailers you wish and wish not to publish at. It's a good idea to restrict them from publishing at Amazon since you should already be publishing through Amazon KDP directly.

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