For most indie authors, the words "library distribution" trigger the same vague mental image: a kindly librarian shelving your paperback between Hilary Mantel and Sally Rooney, then watching a queue form at the desk. In reality, public library lending is now overwhelmingly digital. Most loans go through an app, the librarian never sees your book, and you've probably already used the system yourself without realising it had anything to do with self-publishing at all.
If you've ever borrowed an ebook on Libby, you've used OverDrive. If you've ever borrowed on Hoopla, you've used the closest thing the library world has to Spotify. Both accept indie titles. Neither will let you upload one directly. And the rules around all of this changed quietly but significantly in late 2025 — including, finally, for KDP Select books.
So this is the plumbing diagram. How indie ebooks actually reach library readers, who pays whom, and whether any of it is worth your time.
The two platforms that matter
Public library digital lending is dominated by two companies that work in fundamentally different ways.
OverDrive is the giant. It powers Libby, the app most people use to borrow ebooks from their local library, and serves around 88,000 libraries and schools globally. It uses a "one copy, one user" model — the library buys a digital licence for your book, and that licence can be lent to one reader at a time, exactly like a physical book. If three people want it, two are queueing.
Hoopla is the Netflix-of-libraries upstart. There are no waitlists. Anyone with a library card at a participating library can borrow your book the moment they want it. The catch is on the library's end: Hoopla operates on a cost-per-circulation model, meaning the library pays Hoopla every time a patron borrows the book, with monthly limits that vary library by library. From the author's perspective, that's a different kind of plumbing — you get paid each time the book is actually checked out, not when a library buys a copy.
Both ecosystems include indie titles. Neither lets you walk in the front door.
The aggregator question (or: how you actually get in)
OverDrive doesn't take submissions from individual authors. Hoopla doesn't either. To reach them, you need to go through an aggregator — a third party that already has a wholesale relationship with the library platforms and can list your book on your behalf in exchange for a slice of the royalty.
The biggest player in indie library distribution is Draft2Digital. Since absorbing Smashwords in 2022, D2D is effectively the default route for an English-language indie author who wants their book in libraries. They distribute to OverDrive, Hoopla, BorrowBox, cloudLibrary, Baker & Taylor, and the Palace Marketplace, all through one upload.
D2D takes 10% of the royalty on each sale, which sounds painful until you discover that they've negotiated a 46.75% royalty rate on OverDrive — meaningfully higher than what most other partners can offer. Other aggregators worth knowing about are PublishDrive, StreetLib, and Kobo Writing Life, each with slightly different reach and fee structures. For most authors most of the time, D2D is the simplest answer.
The royalty maths, in plain English
This is where library distribution starts to look surprisingly attractive, provided you don't expect Amazon-scale volume.
For OverDrive, the standard recommendation from D2D is to set your library price at roughly two to three times your retail ebook price. So a £4.99 ebook gets a library price of around £12 to £15. Librarians, by the way, are used to this — they routinely pay £20 to £70 for individual digital titles, because the licence is durable and lends repeatedly to their patrons.
On a £12 OverDrive sale, after D2D's cut, you keep something like £5 to £6. That's more per copy than KDP pays you on the same book at retail. You're not going to sell hundreds of OverDrive copies a month, but each one that does sell pays better than its Amazon equivalent.
For Hoopla, the model is different. You're paid each time the book is actually borrowed, on a smaller per-circulation rate, but without the gatekeeping of a library having to commit budget up front. Authors with backlists report a slow steady trickle from Hoopla rather than the lumpy "library X just bought five" pattern OverDrive produces.
The KDP Select change you might have missed
For years, library distribution was the obvious reason to skip KDP Select. Exclusivity meant exclusivity, full stop. If you wanted Libby readers, you had to be wide.
That changed on 9 September 2025. Amazon updated the KDP Select terms to add three small but consequential words: "and public libraries". The new wording is that during your 90-day enrolment, the Kindle ebook can only be distributed through KDP and public libraries. The approved library partners are explicitly listed: OverDrive, Hoopla, BorrowBox, Odilo, cloudLibrary, Baker & Taylor, and Palace Marketplace.
What this means in practice is that KU authors no longer have to choose between Kindle Unlimited's per-page payouts and library income. You can keep your KENP earnings and still appear in Libby. The catch is that you still can't upload directly to OverDrive or Hoopla — you go through an aggregator like D2D, and you specifically opt in to the library channels only, not the wider retail channels that would breach exclusivity.
It's a meaningful change, particularly for series authors in KU who've been quietly losing the library audience for years.
The honest bit: when does this actually pay off?
Library distribution is rarely a top-line revenue move. For most indies, it's somewhere between "found money" and a slow, additional channel that pays for itself over years rather than months.
The authors who do well from libraries tend to share a few things. They write series, because library readers binge once they discover you. They write in genres librarians actively curate for — cosy mysteries, historical fiction, romance, literary fiction with book-club appeal. They have a backlist of three or four books minimum, because OverDrive shows librarians your full catalogue when they buy one title. And they price their library editions sensibly rather than insisting on parity with the £2.99 Kindle copy.
If you have a single debut, library distribution will earn you a few quid a month if you're lucky. If you have a five-book backlist, it can become a slow but legitimate income stream — and one that doesn't require you to do anything once it's set up.
The pitch-the-librarian myth
You'll see plenty of advice about cold-emailing librarians and sending review copies to library journals. Some of it works. Most of it scales poorly.
The thing librarians actually respond to is patron requests. If your readers ask their local library to stock your book, and the book exists in OverDrive's catalogue at a sensible price, the library will frequently buy it. You don't need to convince librarians to discover you in a sea of self-published titles. You need to make sure that when one of your readers drops your title into the "request a book" form on their library's website, the librarian can find it and order it in two clicks.
That's why being on OverDrive matters even if you sell zero copies through it directly. It's the catalogue librarians are looking at when readers ask.
The setup, in order
- Decide whether you're going wide or staying in KDP Select with the new library exception. Both routes work; the maths depends on how much you earn from KU pages.
- Open a Draft2Digital account and upload your ebook (EPUB preferred, but they'll convert from Word).
- In the distribution settings, opt into the library partners you want — OverDrive at minimum, Hoopla if you don't mind the cost-per-circ model.
- Set a sensible library price. D2D will suggest one. Two to three times your retail price is the sane default.
- Tell your existing readers, on your newsletter or your website, that they can request the book through their library if they want a free legitimate copy. That's the lever that actually drives sales.
The whole setup takes an afternoon and then runs itself.
One last thing
Library income will never be the engine of an indie career. It is a quiet, slow channel that rewards a backlist and patient readers. But it costs you almost nothing to set up, it pays better per copy than retail, and it puts your book in front of a category of reader — the library borrower — who would otherwise never have bought it on Amazon.
Worth half an afternoon? Almost certainly. Worth obsessing about? Almost certainly not. Get the launch right, build the catalogue, and library distribution becomes one of the small reliable streams that compound over time. If you'd like a sane plan for getting that launch right in the first place, the WIPsage book launch tool is built for exactly that — the timeline, the checklists, and the bits new indies forget. Build the audience first, then let libraries top up the income for years afterwards.