Most indie authors live entirely inside Amazon. The book sits on KDP, the royalties land in a single account, and the dashboard is the only one they ever check. For some authors, that's the right choice. For others, it's the publishing equivalent of putting all your savings in one bank because their app has the nicest icon.
If you've been wondering about going wide — getting your book onto Apple Books, Kobo, Barnes & Noble's Nook store, Tolino in Germany, and the various library and subscription platforms — there are two ways to do it. The hard way is to open an account with every retailer individually, upload your book in each of their preferred formats, and reconcile half a dozen separate dashboards each month. The easier way is to use an aggregator. And the aggregator most indie authors land on is Draft2Digital.
What Draft2Digital actually is
Draft2Digital — usually shortened to D2D — is a free distribution platform. You upload your manuscript and cover once, fill in your metadata once, and D2D pushes the book out to its network of retailers and library services. Royalties come back through D2D and land in your account as a single monthly payment.
The business model is the bit that surprises most authors. D2D doesn't charge an upload fee. There's no setup fee. There's no monthly subscription. They take a small cut of the retailer's net revenue — around ten percent — and pass everything else to you.
The maths is real. If Apple Books would pay you 70% royalty going direct, then through D2D you net roughly 63% — D2D keeps a tenth of what comes in and forwards the rest. Multiply that across a thousand sales and yes, you can see the gap. For most indie authors, the time saved is worth the rounding error. For authors selling at scale, going direct to the bigger retailers and using D2D only for the smaller ones is a perfectly sensible compromise.
In March 2022, D2D acquired Smashwords, which had been the original ebook aggregator going all the way back to 2008. The two are now run together, with the Smashwords store still operating as a direct retail outlet alongside the distribution side.
Where your book actually ends up
When you publish through D2D, the book is offered to a long list of retailers and library services. The exact mix changes from year to year, but the headline names are:
- Apple Books — the second-largest ebook market after Amazon for many genres, particularly strong in the US.
- Kobo — the major non-Amazon ebook retailer in Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Australia and parts of Europe.
- Barnes & Noble Nook — the US market that isn't Amazon. Smaller, but real.
- Tolino — the German bookseller consortium spanning Thalia, Hugendubel and Weltbild. The big non-Amazon ebook ecosystem in Germany.
- Vivlio — francophone European retailer covering France, Belgium and parts of the rest of the French-speaking market.
- Everand (formerly Scribd) — subscription reading platform.
- OverDrive / Libby, Hoopla, Borrowbox and Bibliotheca — the public library distribution channels.
- The Smashwords store — direct sales, including the long-running Smashwords promotional sales.
You can pick and choose. If you want to be on Apple Books and Kobo but skip the libraries, you can. If you've already got an account with Kobo Writing Life direct and you only want D2D for everything else, you untick Kobo and the rest goes through.
Why most authors face this choice at all
The reason this question keeps coming up is KDP Select. The thirty-thousand-foot version: Select is Amazon's exclusivity programme, and it forbids you from selling the ebook anywhere else for the duration of the enrolment. Print is fine, audio is fine, but the ebook has to be Amazon-only.
If you're in Select, you cannot use D2D for that title. The two are mutually exclusive by design. So the going-wide question is, ultimately, a question about whether you stay in Select or come out of it. Once you're out, D2D becomes available, alongside the freedom to sell direct from your own site as well.
What you get for the trade-off
The honest answer to "is D2D worth it" is that it's worth it for what you stop having to do.
- One upload, one dashboard, one monthly statement.
- Universal Book Links — D2D-generated short URLs that detect the reader's country and store and bounce them to the right edition automatically. Useful enough that authors not on D2D still occasionally use them.
- A free formatting tool that turns a clean Word document into a properly built EPUB. Not as good as Vellum, but free and decent.
- Series management that propagates across retailers more reliably than doing it by hand.
- A pre-order function that works across the whole network at once.
- D2D Print — their paperback print-on-demand service — for authors who want a single supplier covering extended distribution and bookshop returns. Whether you'd use this over KDP Print or IngramSpark depends on your goals.
What you give up is granular control. If something goes wrong on Apple Books — the cover thumbnail isn't refreshing, the price isn't matching what you set — you're going through D2D's support team, not Apple's directly. That's usually fine. Occasionally it's slow.
Who going wide actually suits
Going wide isn't automatically the right answer for every indie author. KDP Select pays Kindle Unlimited page reads, and for certain genres — notably romance, paranormal romance and litRPG — KU readers are a meaningful slice of the income. Coming out of Select to put your books on Apple Books, where your readers may not yet be, can mean trading a known income for an unknown one.
Wide tends to make sense if:
- Your genre has a clear non-Amazon readership. Crime fiction, literary fiction and non-fiction tend to do better wide than romance does.
- You're publishing in markets where Amazon isn't dominant — Germany, Canada, the Netherlands.
- You don't want all your eggs in Amazon's basket on principle, and you're prepared to accept slower initial growth in exchange for resilience.
- You want to sell direct from your own site, which Select rules out entirely.
Wide does not make sense if you're running paid ads aggressively into KU page reads and that's the whole engine of your launch. It also makes less sense if your one book is your test case, with no series and no backlist, because building a wide audience is slower than building a Select-fuelled debut.
The setup, in plain order
If you're going to do it, the sensible sequence is:
- Pull the book out of KDP Select at the end of its current 90-day term. Don't break the rules — Amazon checks.
- Sign up for D2D and complete their tax interview. The same W-8BEN logic that applies to KDP applies here.
- Upload your manuscript and cover. The free Conversion tool will build you an EPUB if you don't already have one.
- Fill in your metadata carefully. Categories and keywords are not the same on every retailer; Apple Books' category tree alone will surprise you the first time.
- Choose your retailers. If you're already on Kobo Writing Life direct, untick Kobo. Otherwise, leave the lot ticked.
- Set your prices. Apple Books has its own price tiers; Kobo doesn't. D2D will warn you when something doesn't match.
- Hit publish. Distribution to most retailers takes between 24 hours and a few days. Tolino is usually the slowest.
After that, the dashboard updates monthly rather than hourly. This will feel weird if you're used to KDP's minute-by-minute sales graph. On balance, it's healthier.
The honest summary
Draft2Digital is the path of least resistance for indie authors who want to be on more than just Amazon without managing six retailers manually. It costs you roughly a tenth of your net retailer revenue and saves you most of a working day each launch.
It is not magic. It will not, by itself, make Apple Books readers find your book. The same launch effort that gets a book moving on KDP is needed to get it moving on Kobo or Apple, just spread thinner across a wider audience. But for an author with a backlist, a series, or a genre where Amazon isn't the only game in town, it's how you stop being a one-platform indie.
If you're wrestling with whether to stay exclusive or go wide for your next launch — and what the launch plan looks like in either case — that's exactly the kind of decision WIPsage is built to walk you through.