Draft2Digital and Bookshop

Bookshop.org has just partnered with Draft2Digital to offer ebooks to its customers. The stated benefit of this integration is that it'll help independent bookstores, which is great. I like a small, cozy bookstore as much as the next guy. Well, I like its ambience anyway. Its prices, not so much.

For authors who publish through D2D, they'll need to opt in on the D2D site in order to make their books available to Bookshop (and to other retailers). For Amazon-published authors who've chosen KDP Select, well, that's a bit more complicated. They'll either need to wait for the end of any 90-day enrollment period and cancel, or for newly published books, not choose KDP select in the first place. 

I've thought about whether it would be worth it to me to go through the whole uploading to D2D process and filling out all the requisite fields associated with each book, and I'm not going to do it. Because I'm not seeing any upside. The only time I ever published "wide" was at the beginning of my career, when I made my first two novels available in places like iBooks and Kobo and B&N. I think Smashwords was the book aggregator back then, with its clunky process that was designed to drive new authors nuts (I'm guessing). I don't know when D2D came along, but I hadn't heard of it back then. I never sold one copy of either book through those sites, but you know...I barely sell any copies on Amazon, either. Nevertheless.

At some point I read an article that touted making one's physical books available on Bookshop.org, so I looked into it, found that I could go into KDP and check "expanded distribution", then upload my book to D2D, and voila. And to be honest, I didn't research Bookshop at all; I just knew it was purportedly popular.

As it turns out, Bookshop is basically the NPR of the book world. It's haughty, socially liberal, disdains genre novels. In other words, not the place for me. But I'd already made Running From Herself available on the site, not that I've ever sold a copy, and I see no point in removing it. (I don't go looking for new needless tasks.) 

I'm the wrong person to ask about this, but do indie publishers really sell books via sites other than Amazon? I don't mean "make available for sale"; I'm talking about actually making money that way. Apparently, there's a contingent of authors/consumers who hate Amazon and actively avoid it. I have no idea how big that contingent is, but I'm guessing it's not as vast as media wants us to believe. I'm a realist. 99% of people who are looking to purchase a book online are heading straight for Amazon. If an author wants to shoot himself in the foot by eschewing KDP, fine. Stupid, but fine.

I have a D2D account, but only for library distribution. Perhaps if I'd started out publishing through D2D, that would be a different story, but then I wouldn't have access to Kindle Unlimited, which is my main source of income (such as it is).

In essence, I don't think this partnership announcement is a big deal for most authors, but if your book(s) hit the right notes, ones that a certain segment of society would approve of, there's certainly no harm in participating.