Draft2Digital for Distribution and More

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethspanncraig.com

I use Draft2Digital for a lot of different things: formatting, distributing to multiple retailers, and entering promo opportunities. What I love most is that it handles all the behind-the-scenes work without upfront fees. It’s become my go-to tool for getting books where readers can find them, no matter which store they prefer.

Edit note: Thanks to Russell Phillips for the correction! Draft2Digital recently introduced new fees: a $20 one-time activation fee for new accounts, and a $12 annual maintenance fee for accounts earning less than $100 in royalties over 12 months. Established authors with regular sales won’t see these fees, but it’s a change from the “no upfront cost” model I just described. More details here.

Draft2Digital for Distribution

The platform distributes to Amazon, Apple Books, Kobo, libraries, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and dozens of other retailers worldwide. I do go to Amazon directly, but using D2D for my dashboard for the other retailers is a big time-saver. Instead of uploading to each store individually, you upload once to Draft2Digital and they handle the rest. There’s no upfront cost, although they take a percentage of your royalties. I could manually upload to every retailer, but that would eat up hours every time I release a book. Draft2Digital saves me that time while ensuring consistent formatting across all platforms.

Books2Read: A Universal Book Link Solution

When you share a link to your book, readers shouldn’t have to navigate to find their preferred store. That’s where Books2Read comes in—it’s a Draft2Digital feature that creates a single, smart link for your book. When someone clicks it, they’re automatically directed to the correct version for their country and currency. So a reader in the UK gets sent to Amazon UK in British pounds, while a reader in Australia gets their local retailer. You get one link to share everywhere—your newsletter, social media, your website—and readers land exactly where they need to be. The system handles all the geo-tagging automatically, which means less work for you and a better experience for your readers.

Formatting and Distribution Together

I format my books there (formatting is free, even if you don’t publish the book through them), upload them, then distribute them to all my retailers. When readers find my books across different stores, they’re seeing consistent, professional formatting. There’s no scrambling to reformat for different platforms or worrying about whether my Apple version looks different from my Amazon version. Everything goes out clean and ready. The tools Draft2Digital offers are straightforward and don’t require upgrades to access.

Have you explored Draft2Digital’s distribution or Books2Read links yet?