There are a huge number of E-book stores outside Amazon. Outside the US and the UK, Amazon are not the dominant player in E-book distribution, so to limit yourself to Amazon is not a good idea from an international perspective.
In this episode I talk about two “aggregators”, Draft2Digital and Smashwords and the relative merits of each. You will learn how to self-publish your eBook on stores apart from Amazon.
The general consensus is that Draft2Digital is easier to use (I have used it and it is considerably easier even than the KDP interface to use) but Smashwords allows you to access more stores, including the large Indian retailer FlipKart.
Draft2Digital currently (at 28th June 2014) can deliver to:
iBooks
Barnes & Noble
Kobo
Page Foundry
Scribd
Oyster (recently added)
Tolino
and CreateSpace (for paper books)
(Bolded stores not available on Smashwords)
Smashwords can deliver to:
Apple iBooks
Barnes & Noble
Kobo
Page Foundry
Scribd
Oyster
OverDrive
Flipkart
Baker & Taylor’s Blio
Axis360
(Bolded stores not available on Draft2Digital. I may have missed Smashwords stores, as their complete store list is not entirely clear from their website.)
So Smashwords goes to more places (though not to Tolino, a point I didn’t appreciate when I recorded the podcast, yet another reason to use Draft2Digital instead of or as well as Smashwords).
I take you through the steps needed to release a book via the Draft2Digital store, and my ambition to release to Smashwords in the next few weeks as well.