A Discussion With PublishDrive
I had a chance to sit down with Kinga Jentetics, CEO of PublishDrive, and dig a little deeper about PublishDrive’s new pricing model.
This was one of three announcements PublishDrive made at this year’s Digital Book World: a new ebook conversion tool, a categorization tool with AI, and a new pricing option that allows authors to keep all of their royalties.
Kinga, you have had an exciting week with all the new features PublishDrive introduced. Let's start with this: could you please sum up what PublishDrive does?
K.J.: PublishDrive is a self-publishing platform for authors and indie publishers. We help them sell globally with easy-to-use tools and a support team. So far we allow our authors access to 400 stores and 240,000 digital libraries all over, including the US, China, Europe and India.
What is the new pricing option exactly and how much does it cost?
K.J.: We introduced a new monthly subscription option where no matter how much you sell, you pay only one monthly fee of $100 and keep all of your royalties -- all of your sales revenue. This way, authors can anticipate the cost of their distribution and also save way more time for writing or building their author brand. I want to mention that this is an optional choice. Authors can continue to use the previous option where PublishDrive takes 10% of all book sales, which might work better for new and up-and-coming authors.
How did the idea of the new pricing model come about?
K.J.: When PublishDrive was founded, I saw how self-publishing globally could be costly: either by spending a lot of time and energy dealing with operational tasks, or paying for those tasks and thereby giving up your earned royalties.
I didn’t like how either of them sounded, especially if you want to become a full time writer and run your business. You have no other choice than paying bills from your royalties! That’s why my team started prioritizing on finding out a better way to help authors reach a global audience. We talked to authors and figured out that for a reasonable monthly fixed fee, they would love to keep all of their titles, operations, sales data and analytics in one place -- instead of spending countless hours handling everything on their own. This past summer we took our findings and worked up a new pricing option that could be easily understandable and valuable for authors. Now they can choose to switch from different platforms easily -- authors can keep their Amazon reviews and rankings plus on top of that, receive extra marketing help.
I can see why authors and independent publishers would find this useful. Anything you or your team would like to achieve with this new option?
K.J.: Thanks! We are happy if our authors are happy. We’d like to see more writers become full time authors and we believe with the new pricing option, authors will not only lower their distribution costs, but also save way more precious time to focus on writing.
You mentioned more new features coming in the future. What’s next for PublishDrive?
K.J.: PublishDrive has great plans for the near and for the long-term future. We are working on smart marketing tools, and we’re looking at market trends such as POD and audiobooks. We want our authors to enjoy these smart features to understand their business better. Ultimately, like I mentioned before, we want to help authors go full time with their passion.
GLOBAL EBOOK PUBLISHING PLATFORM PUBLISHDRIVE ANNOUNCES
A GROUND-BREAKING FINANCIAL BOON FOR AUTHORS – SUBSCRIPTION PRICING.
PublishDrive is a free-to-use ebook publishing platform, now offering a Subscription Pricing option for authors earning above a $1,000 monthly threshold.
Under this new model, instead of sharing royalties authors will pay only a $100 flat fee each month. In exchange, PublishDrive will distribute their ebooks to all major retailers and many more — no matter how high their sales go.
This eliminates royalty sharing and pays authors the same royalties as if they published directly through major channels such as Google Books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and others.
At the moment, nothing in the marketplace combines this low-cost Subscription Pricing option with easy global ebook distribution, and robust, real-time sales analytics that is better than any book sales tracking tool.
PublishDrive’s Subscription Pricing also presents a huge value proposition to authors who are currently spending precious writing and marketing time uploading and managing each retail channel individually. At PublishDrive, authors simply check off the stores they want to sell through and it’s done! Everything under one roof for one small fee.
Authors who are selling books at the above-mentioned threshold and beyond are encouraged to contact PublishDrive’s friendly, knowledgeable, enthusiastic team with any questions or concerns about making the switch to this leading platform. This pricing option promises to put more royalties back in authors’ pockets and more time back on their calendars to do the things that matter: write, engage with their audience, and sell books!
About PublishDrive
PublishDrive is a global ebook distribution platform with teams in four countries, helping authors and independent publishers distribute books to 400 stores, 240,000 libraries, 70+ countries, and in 60+ languages. Major retailers include Amazon, iBooks, Google Books, and Dangdang. See the full list of retailers at www.publishdrive.com. Kinga Jentetics is the CEO and co-founder of PublishDrive. She was named a Forbes Top 30 entrepreneur under 30, and one of the top 100 female founders. In 2017, Google invested in PublishDrive as part of its Launchpad Accelerator program. Together with co-founders, Robert Csizmar and Adam Rendes, PublishDrive seeks to empower authors by providing an intuitive and robust user experience, excellent value and customer service, full sales transparency, and total control of the entire book publishing process.
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