Founded three years ago in Oklahoma City, the self-publishing e-book platform Draft2Digital has reached an agreement with Tolino, a German bookselling alliance, to distribute its titles in the German book market.
Draft2Digital offers 40,000 self-published e-books and its list is growing by about 3,000 titles a month, according to D2D CEO Kris Austin and D2D director of operations Dan Wood. Austin said the platform recorded “more than 1 million paid sales,” of e-books in December 2014.
Wood credited the venture’s growth to an “easy to use platform for authors, for formatting and distribution,” and compared Draft2Digital to another e-book self-publishing platform, Smashwords. “There’s no pre-formatting required, an author can upload a word document and our technology will format it and convert,” Wood said. Austin also cited the company’s customer service, “there’s email and a phone number with real people available to help.”
The service is free to use and D2D makes money by taking a 10% cut of the e-book’s price, which is determined by authors. The company distributes to all the major e-book retailers, except for Amazon, though they are in talks with the company. Austin noted that D2D also offers its authors the ability to set different prices around the world
“We feel international markets are the next big opportunity for self-published authors,” said Austin. “We work with so many Canadians and Australians finding success in the American market that American authors distributing globally just makes sense.” The agreement with Tolino, a giant bookselling alliance between four major German booksellers and one tech company, which claims to have more than 40% of the German book marketplace, is a step to expand self-published authors reach internationally, Austin said.
