In 2020 I posted an article entitled “Which Self-Publishing Platform – Or All Of Them?” in which I described my contemporary strategy of posting my books for sale via several self-publishing platforms simultaneously. The main benefits of this strategy, I argued then, was that I could reach more outlets internationally rather than limiting the distribution of my books to the reach of just one or two platforms.
In this follow-up article, I describe my subsequent findings, perhaps for your benefit as well as mine.
In the previous article, I mentioned the channels I was using at the time:
- Lulu.com
- Smashwords
- Ebooks2Go
I also subsequently added more channels, namely:
- Draft2Digital
- Streetlib
- KDP
As described in the original article I distributed certain of my books across all these platforms in a way that meant they would not clash with each other, in order to maximize their reach.
In some ways this strategy proved successful, and in others not so much. Let’s take a look at how. My books were accepted, published and distributed across international and multilingual platforms (Spanish, Italian, German etc.), and they appeared on numerous listing sites. Through Streetlib, I accessed Mexico and several South American Spanish-speaking markets, but even so I had no sales via those channels for the period I was with them, some 18 months or so. In retrospect, I feel it might have been two reasons why Streetlib didn’t work out for me – the first being that while they do include English titles in their network, they primarily serve non-English speaking countries, so the interest (I assume) in English titles would be marginal. Secondly, since my books were already available on Amazon, I had to exclude that destination for my books on Streetlib in order to avoid clashes that could get my books removed on Amazon. At the end of December 2021 I removed them and closed my Streetlib account.
Draft2Digital was a bit of a funky platform, meaning that its publishing mechanism was a bit clunky compared to some others. Their distribution channels were also not as extensive as some others, and although I had a few sales during the 18 months or so I was with them, they finally ran out of rope when they started demanding tax registration forms to process royalties. I closed my account with them in December 2021.
If you enjoyed this article, why not read “A Guide To Self-Publishing In South Africa” by the same author?
EBooks2Go seemed a fairly good platform at first, and I made a bit of good money from them for the first few years I made use of them – better than Draft2Digital as a matter of fact. The only real problem I had with EB2Go was that they had a tendency to allow buyers to “return” eBooks for refunds – which meant that while I had ten sales of one book for example, I only got paid for three of them. I have no idea how the actual fuck someone “returns” an eBook – but what I do know is that this idiocy allows ample opportunity for outright theft – where someone would keep a copy of the book and get it for free! The infuriating thing is that Ebooks2Go panders to this sort of racketeering, and so I parted ways with them as well.
Lulu.com… which was once the bright pearl of the free self-publishing industry and took center stage in my previous article, had since completely lost the plot. Where they had a perfectly balanced system for uploading and publishing manuscripts, later in 2020, they went totally bonkers and threw the whole lot away, replacing it with a whole new system. As if that wasn’t bad enough, then they added insult to injury by charging users for the first time to publish through them – even for eBooks! After being with them since 2005, I closed my account. This didn’t seem to end my problems with Lulu though, because even in 2022, two years after I asked them to close my account and take down all my books published through them, they still had 3 or 4 titles up on Amazon, and these had accumulated further royalties in the last few years – which on enquiry, Lulu subsequently refused to pay out to me. I’m very disappointed in Lulu for their betrayal of indie authors, and will never have anything to do with them again in future.
That left me with Smashwords. Pedantic though they may be with their styles, and though they don’t accept manuscripts containing images and nor do they publish to print, they are still one of the best in the field. Their distribution channels have good reach. In April of 2022 though – in a move I never saw coming, Smashwords announced that they were being absorbed by Draft2Digital. I’m still not sure how this will affect my publishing through them, but time will tell. I still get a few sales through them, and they don’t give me much trouble anymore since I’ve figured out their system.
I first created an account with KDP quite a few years ago – but at that time KDP still didn’t have suitable options available to authors from South Africa to be paid royalties. In April of 2022 I checked in again, and much to my surprise, they’d added South African banking and tax registration to their features. I added my bank account details and tax registration – it took me about ten minutes! But if I thought dealing with KDP – an Amazon subsidiary – was going to be plain sailing, I was in for a nasty shock!
Amazon’s help desk – and those of its subsidiaries – are run by bots. AI may be good in some people’s view, but after the sheer amount of needless drama I’ve experienced over the last two months, it isn’t in mine. I admit unashamedly that I absolutely HATE A.I. It is the very worst idea ever! If you’ve every tried to argue or reason with a fucking bot, then you might know what I mean! They are without a doubt the dumbest, most stupid entities I’ve had to deal with in my entire life – they will go on blindly making the same mistakes over and over again – no matter what you say or attach to substantiate your point. Being right doesn’t mean a damn thing to Amazon, being a dissatisfied customer with a real problem means even less. And if you demand to speak to a human supervisor, they will simply refer you to – you guessed it, another damned bot – one with a fake name like “Tatiana de Silva” for example, who will simply copy paste the exact same obnoxious, brainless message the previous one sent you, telling you they will do exactly nothing about your problem and to have a nice day.
Trying to get even the simplest problems solved this way has made dealing with KDP/Amazon the most stressful, infuriating and frustrating experience I’ve ever had to endure in my 17 year self-publishing experience. If Amazon wasn’t the be-all and end-all of the modern publishing industry, I’d cheerfully close that one down as well.
In the meantime I continue to deal with other issues, such as the fallout of the death of my publisher (Brandon Mullins, Moon Books Publishing) and the effects of the economic downturn on my South African publisher (Hally Park).
I may put up another update to this saga in future – stay tuned!
Read more:
- A Brief Introduction To Self-Publishing: A 5 part series of articles introducing the reader to the concept of self-publishing.
- Forewords, Prologues, Prefaces & Introductions Explained: this explains the differences and similarities and when it is appropriate to use them and for what.
- The Interrobang – What Is It?!: What is the interrobang, where and when should it be used? Should it be used at all?
- Asterism Or Dinkus – What’s In A Name?: Do you still write in actual chapters? For god’s sake – why?
- Afterwords & Epilogs Explained: this explains what afterwords and epilogs are for and when it is appropriate to use them.
- Word Length – When Is A Novel, A Novel?: This explains the word lengths for different categories of book or story.
- Which Self-Publishing Platform – Or All Of Them?: An article about experimenting with which self-publishing distribution platforms to use concurrently. Also read the follow-up article: More Isn’t Always Better – My Self-publishing Platform Strategy Revisited.
- A Guide To Self-Publishing In South Africa – a guide to being an indie author in spite of being stuck in South Africa by Christina Engela.
- Some Great Resources For Writers: A collection of useful tools and articles giving advice to new writers trying to make their way in a minefield of obstacles.
Wherever you find my books, please remember to leave a review! 
Cheers!
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All material copyright © Christina Engela, 2022.