Has anyone used an aggregator to publish wide?

[Ray]

Has anyone used an aggregator to publish across several platforms like Amazon and Barnes and Noble? As I get closer to publishing, I'm doing more and more research, and aggregators like Draft2digital make it sound so simple. They'll format my book and cover for free, send it to the digital store fronts I select, and send me royalties (after they take their 15%). Easy. But is it really? If you've used an aggregator, what was your experience? Worth it? Not worth it? Would you recommend it? Why or why not?

Thanks!

Rayne

[Helen]

My information is that Draft2Digital require exclusivity, but if you don't mind that, fine. I haven't used it, but a friend has, and seems really happy with it - she likes the fact that she doesn't have to do the posting and other technical parts because she doesn't feel confident using technology herself. It just depends on what you want. Hope this helps.

[[deleted user]]

Smashbooks and Ingramspark are both very popular.

[Lance]

Rayne wrote: "Has anyone used an aggregator to publish across several platforms like Amazon and Barnes and Noble? ..."

I use D2D to get to places like Scribd, Apple Books, Overdrive, and so on. They don't require exclusivity, though having several distributors hitting the same channel would be messy. The service works pretty well.

However, it doesn't make sense to use aggregators to get to the major marketplaces (Amazon and Kobo). Having someone get between you and the 'Zon or Kobo means more complexity and a better chance that something will fall into the cracks. If you don't have a Kobo Writing Life account, you can't get access to the marketing tab that is essentially the only way to target Kobo users directly. I'd also steer away from using D2D's ePub-to-print utility; you're much better off building your own text block and working directly with KDP Print and something like IngramSpark.

Think of the aggregator as someone who can get you into the second-tier marketplaces so you don't have to deal with it. The big ones are too important to work with by remote control.