Don’t feel like watching? Feel free to read the transcript below.
Aggregate publishing platform Draft2Digital (D2D) broke the news today about a major partnership with the online bookselling platform, Bookshop.org. What started as a mission-driven bookstore platform has turned into a major player, with Bookshop.org reaching over four million readers and directing online book sales back to local independent bookstores through profit sharing. By offering readers an alternative to buying books through Amazon, Bookshop.org has helped to somewhat stabilize and revive the independent bookstore scene, and this partnership now extends that same support to indie authors through Draft2Digital.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Draft2Digital CEO Chris Austin and Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter to break down why this partnership matters. We get into royalties, discoverability, realistic expectations, and why this move matters far more long term than most authors realize.
Let’s get into the interview.
What does this partnership between Draft2Digital and Bookshop.org mean for indie authors in practical terms?
Andy Hunter (Bookshop): Well, it means that for the first time in history, your local independent bookstore or local independent bookstores all over the US and UK can sell your eBooks as a independent ebook author.
So, prior to this, there was no avenue for a self-published author who wanted to work with a local bookstore who primarily produces and sells eBooks to work with their local bookstore to sell their books. And now there is, and so your distribution is as wide as our network. We have over 2,900 bookstores in the US we’ve got 500 bookstores in the UK.
They’ll all have your full catalog through Draft2Digital. And we think that this is the beginning of a long term bond and collaborative relationship that we really think deserves to be there. And it’s going to be really strong. Like indie authors and indie bookstores both have indie in their title because they are kindred spirits, and they’re producing and sustaining culture and creativity.
They should be natural allies and now we’re going to allow that to happen.
Kris Austin (D2D): Yeah, exactly what Andy said. Indie authors really want to reach as many readers as they can and they wanna support local bookstores and try to get all their eggs out of one basket.
And this is another way to really help diversify, and just reach more, more people and I’m just very excited for authors.
What kind of audience does Bookshop.org reach today and how does that audience differ from Amazon and other online retailers?
Andy: Yeah, well we’ve got about four million customers in the US right now. Our audiences are people who either love their local bookstores and want to go outside of their way to support them, or there are people that want to decouple from Amazon for whatever reason. You know, there’s a lot of political issues with supporting Amazon right now, and there are a lot of socially conscious customers that are like, “You know what? I don’t really want to do business or give my money to this company right now.”
And we’ve, we support either customer—basically anybody who wants to come to us. It’s all good for us because we really believe that local bookstores are extremely valuable to their communities—to keeping a literate society where books are a vital part of our culture. So we’ll support anybody that wants to support them.
And up until last year, we didn’t have eBooks. We launched our ebook platform almost exactly one year ago today, and we have been improving it ever since. We feel like now it’s in really good shape and it’s the perfect time to onboard. You know, hundreds of thousands of new authors and works through the Draft2Digital partnership.
What does this additional distribution mean for Draft2Digital? Why is this so different from what D2D currently offers?
Kris: Well, it’s a way that you can support your local bookstore. It sounds like wild, but with the way things have gone over the last decade, so much is moving online.
Most book purchases happen online. And for a while, your independent bookstores, they were all closing down and they were shutting down. They were just getting pushed out of the market and it’s very depressing. And because they serve important, roles in our culture and, um, seeing the resurgence of indie bookstores, um, over the last 10 years has been, has been really good to see.
And, uh, this is an opportunity for indie authors to directly. Help influence, um, that resurgence. This is, this is the way that they can help bring about a positive change, um, in the publishing industry. That’s good for everybody.
What can authors realistically expect when distributing through their books, through this Bookshop partnership?
Andy: Well, it means that any book that’s under Draft2Digital that’s opted in will appear on our search. You can create affiliate links so you can actually become a Bookshop affiliate and earn an extra 10% of every sale. So if you’re an author with a large catalog and you want to put a list of curated lists of all your books or maybe all the books that influenced you, you can make those lists.
We can feature them on Bookshop. You can also share those lists on social media. Anybody coming into Bookshop through those links will be affiliated with you and you’ll learn 10% from those sales. And a matching 10% will go to the local independent bookstores through a profit sharing pool. So everybody wins.
And beyond that, if your local bookstore sells a copy of your ebook, either in person or through social media or through a newsletter link, they will get a the entire profit margin for that purchase. Bookshop.org, because we’re a mission based company, we don’t take a cut.
So a local bookstore that’s selling a ton of your ebooks, they will if your retail margin is 50%, they will get 50% of every sale. If your retail margin is 30%, then they’ll get 30% of every sale. But we don’t cut take a cut. They benefit completely from that purchase.
How does Bookshop keep the lights on?
Andy: Well, we have a certain amount of direct sales. So, if it’s direct sale, then we take a third of the profit and put it in the profit sharing pool, and we keep two thirds to support the company.
And then we also sell advertising, mostly to publishers. And so ad revenue is a big part of how we stay in business too. But we kind of designed the company to provide maximum benefit to the local bookstores.
What types of authors benefit the most from this partnership?
Kris: The authors that are the most engaged with their readers are going to be the ones that are gonna benefit, the the earliest. Really, they can help drive that sort of traffic to Bookshop, and help support their local bookstores. Really raising awareness of BookShop is gonna help everybody.
And, so you’re the indie authors who are directly engaged with their readers, as you always tell them to do, and those are going to be the ones that are gonna be able to benefit the earliest and the quickest.
But over the long term, I would expect, really all, genres to benefit. Your readers are everywhere of all kinds. They want to read all kinds of books, and I would expect your early ones are gonna be romance authors because they’re gonna be jumping on pretty quick on promoting this new avenue. You would expect that all the other genre fiction books to do really well too.
And, your high quality nonfiction works are going to get lifted up pretty easily too, as readers are coming in looking for some good quality, indie produced nonfiction works.
What's the royalty structure in place for book sales through BookShop, and where does Draft2Digital come into that?
Kris: Andy earlier talked about how, when book sales are driven by the bookstore, or when a reader purchases a book and assigns it to a bookstore, that bookstore gets 30%. Draft2Digital then keeps its cut, like we normally do, at around 10%. The indie author receives the remaining 60%. It works like a retail sale at any other retailer.
As Andy mentioned, if it is a direct sale, that 30% is handled differently. A third of it goes into the profit-sharing pool, about 20% goes to Bookshop, and Draft2Digital still keeps its usual cut. We keep our share and pay the rest to the authors, so overall, it ends up looking very similar to how authors are paid elsewhere.
What can authors realistically expect from Bookshop?
Andy: I want to tell a little story. We launched on January 28, 2020, and I partnered with a really big podcast. They promoted something on Bookshop during our first month. At that point, we had almost no customers.
We sold about $6,000 worth of books for them, and I thought that was great. They asked how many we sold, and I said $6,000. Their response was, that’s nothing. I remember thinking, oh my god.
But when we looked at the full picture, we actually did $50,000 in sales that month. It was our very first month. Seven months later, we did $12,000,000 in sales in a single month.
It was insane. I do not have many memories of it because I did not sleep, and you need sleep to consolidate memories.
My point is that in the beginning this is not going to be a game changer, because we are nurturing something that diversifies the market. Right now, Bookshop is growing 50% year over year, and our ebook sales are growing fast.
But this is really about establishing a viable alternative to Amazon and making sure there is a diverse marketplace with strong alternative venues for books. You do not want a single player deciding who gets paid, who makes money, who gets to read which books, or what books get promoted.
Books are too important to our culture and human history to rely on a single retailer to shepherd them safely. You want a diverse marketplace.
Now we are bringing 3,000 bookstores to the table, and each one has its own iconoclastic tastes. That allows for a much more diverse marketplace. For that to succeed, and to truly act as a counterweight to Amazon’s power, we all need to invest in it and help it grow. This takes time.
We are a small team. We keep our expenses low so we can give the most back to local bookstores. That means we have a team of about five developers. Amazon has a team of 500 developers.
We need to grow this through community participation. That is why it is important for self-published authors to give this a shot, nurture it, let their fans know about it, and grow with us.
Kris: Our marketing teams and our sales teams want to sell more of your ebooks. You can reach out to us, figure out collaborations, and work with Draft2Digital.
In the beginning, expectations should be relatively reasonable. But long term, if you look at a five year plan, we should really be shooting for the moon. I think we can do incredible things and actually change the market.
What are some best practices to sell more books on Bookshop?
Kris: It is pretty much the normal evergreen information, Dale. You need to make sure your metadata is solid. That means clear titles, subtitles, descriptions, and properly applied genres.
Just like we do for all retailers, we send that information to Bookshop in a format they can actually use to categorize and market those titles in the right places.
You also cannot misrepresent your book. I do not know how many times I have to tell authors this, but most bad reviews happen because readers got a book they did not expect. Your representation has to be accurate. Your cover needs to match the kind of book readers think they are buying.
It sounds obvious, but it is just the evergreen stuff. Categorize your books correctly, give us clean metadata, and we will pass it along in a format Bookshop can use effectively so bookstores can find your title.
That is the first part.
The second part is pricing. Your books will be sold at the same price everywhere. You set the price, and that is what it sells for. There is price parity across all retailers, which is important.
We also recommend keeping your titles DRM free (digital rights management). I know DRM comes up a lot, and our system does allow authors to turn DRM on, but we recommend not doing it, especially for Bookshop.
Bookshop does not have many DRM free titles right now, so this partnership brings in a large number of them. That gives readers more flexibility. They can take those ebooks and read them on the devices they want.
You have readers who are actively looking for DRM free content, and that content is mostly indie. This makes Bookshop a really good space for indie authors to support that side of the readership.
Andy: That is huge for us because the biggest complaint we have gotten about our new ebook platform is that the books are not DRM free. Readers do not always understand that this decision is made by the publisher. We do not actually control whether a book is DRM free.
What we do know is that our customers want DRM free books. Because of that, we added a filter that lets readers shop only for DRM free titles. They can choose to see just those books when they browse.
Bringing in a large number of DRM free titles through this partnership is a big deal. It makes the platform more attractive to readers who do not want to be locked into DRM and gives them more confidence in buying ebooks through Bookshop.
What do you say to authors who are afraid their books will be stolen if they opt out of DRM?
Kris: This conversation has been going on for two decades. In the end, the data shows that piracy does not really impact your actual sales.
Think about it this way. Imagine someone who has already decided they do not want to pay for books. That person might find your DRM free title and read it. But they were never going to buy your book in the first place.
Now they have read your book, and they might think, I really liked that book. I should tell people about it. I wish they would buy books. They should buy books. But the reality is, they were never going to buy yours.
What you have now is someone who has read your book. And if your book is good, they might tell other people about it.
So you were never going to get that sale. It just was not going to happen. But now you may have gotten a little bit of marketing out of it, because they might go tell someone else about your book.
You’ve both done a lot of interviews about this partnership. What’s one question you’re surprised no one has asked yet?
Andy: I would say it is about discoverability. I have two motivations for bringing this up.
First, I want people to buy Draft2Digital ebooks, and I want Draft2Digital authors to tell their fans to buy on Bookshop. But I also want authors to understand how a book actually surfaces in search.
Sales over the past thirty days carry the most weight in determining whether a book shows up as number one, number two, or number three in our search results. We factor in a lot of things, like keywords, lifetime sales, and attention around the author. All of that matters.
But the single biggest factor is how many copies a book has sold in the last thirty days compared to other books with similar titles.
If you want your book to show up on the first page of search results, the best thing you can do is get a few people to buy it. It does not take many sales to move up the rankings.
That is a small tip, but it matters. It is obviously in our interest to sell more ebooks, but it is also good advice for self-published authors who have all their links pointing to Amazon. If you want to perform well on Bookshop, you need to point some customers there.
Kris: I just want to reiterate what Andy said earlier. This is a long game.
If the only way you are going to disrupt a market dominated by one player is by having a long-term vision, then you also have to assume that player has a long-term vision too. Thinking otherwise would be a mistake.
Real change takes a long-term view, and it takes the community working together to make it happen.
Ten years from now, when we look back at this partnership, why will this moment matter?
Andy: I think we are going to continue seeing this incredible boom in independent bookstores opening. Over the past five years, there has been about 50% growth in new bookstores.
In 2019, there were around 1,900 bookstores in the American Booksellers Association. Now there are over 3,000. That kind of turnaround was completely unexpected. If you had told people in 2019 that bookstores were about to start growing again, and that there would be almost twice as many in six years, nobody would have believed it.
This partnership is part of that movement, and it really matters.
In ten years, I think we are going to see 6,000 bookstores, maybe even 10,000. We might get back to the high point of bookselling in this country, which was in the early nineties when there were around 8,000 to 10,000 bookstores.
I also think we are going to have e-ink devices that are as good as, or better than, the Kindle. We will have a self-publishing platform that is as good as, or better than, KDP. And we will have communities and subscription models, similar to all-you-can-eat programs like Kindle Unlimited, but built for self-published authors.
The key difference is that this ecosystem will support the human beings on the ground who dedicate their lives to books, the booksellers. That makes it more democratic. It makes it a real community.
Overall, I think the entire system is going to be healthier. Amazon will still be a big player, but in ten years, we can match them.
Kris: We should remember how far indie authors have come. Fifteen years ago, or really about fourteen years ago when this all started, the stigma around self-publishing and indie authors was extremely high. It was difficult to even get major retailers to recognize the value of this content or the authors creating it.
That has changed. Today, there is very little stigma left most of the time, and the landscape looks completely different.
In ten years, I do not think there will be any real distinction between an indie author and a traditional author. There will just be authors.
And authors are going to be more important and more central to publishing than they have ever been before.
Special thanks to Kris Austin and Andy Hunter for taking time out of their day to speak with me about this partnership. You can set up a free account with Draft2Digital today when you visit my referral link at DaleLinks.com/D2D.
Till later, I’d love to know your honest thoughts about this new partnership. Drop them in the comments below and if you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing for more insights into self-publishing books.
