Okay, so it’s time the rubber met the road.
The choices for going wide are:
- Do it myself everywhere. This unquestionably gives me the most control. It’s also the most work–from having to upload to five major platforms, maintain the same changes on all platforms, and deal with accounting from all five platforms. Add to that that it’s very difficult to impossible to get onto GooglePlay this way at all. And, again, very difficult to upload to Apple iBooks at all without a Mac. So, this one’s a non-starter.
- Smashwords. This one would be easy. About half my books are already there, where I unpublished them when I decided to give Kindle Unlimited a try. Smashwords would get me in everywhere but GooglePlay with one click, plus a host of smaller retailers and potentially libraries (ebooks). But, you can’t get around the meatgrinder. And I’ve been trying to do more professional formatting for my ebooks, most of which would likely be lost.
- Pronoun. Pronoun currently only distributes to the five biggest retailers–Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple iBooks, GooglePlay, and Kobo (no particular order, except Amazon is still top dog in this market). They can even get better royalties for ebooks priced outside Amazon’s preferred $2.99 – $9.99 price range.
- Draft2Digital. D2D distributes to all the major markets except GooglePlay and a few of the smaller ones (though not as many as Smashwords). Unlike either Smashwords or Pronoun, they will pay by direct deposit rather than through PayPal. (I had a bad experience with PayPal years ago and I’ve been a little leery of it ever since. I have an account, but it is very deliberately not linked to my bank account. I’d probably have to change that if I start making more than nominal money in those other markets–unless I use D2D, of course.)
In the end, the only real way to tell is probably to give it a try. So, I started yesterday trying to publish BECOME: BROTHERS
through Pronoun (because it’ll probably always be priced lower than the level at which Amazon allows 70% royalties–except through Pronoun.) At first, of course, I’d have to publish everywhere but Amazon through Pronoun and eventually switch over there, too.
I still haven’t managed that. A certain amount of reformatting was to be expected. At the very least, I expected to have to remove all links to Amazon. Pronoun wants to supply your title page, copyright page and table of contents themselves. They provide all of six “professional” formats to choose from. None of which really fit epic fantasy and none of them appear to support a two-level table of contents, either. They do, however, allow you to bypass this by uploading your own .epub and .mobi files.
There was an unexpected blip when their processor objected to the file name of the embedded font I used for chapter headings (the same font I used on the cover) because it had spaces in it. With some help from Facebook friends, I got past that. But I have no idea what they are doing–or not doing–with the .mobi file. Only that they don’t acknowledge that I’ve uploaded it–five times–and won’t let me publish without it, even though they won’t be publishing to Amazon through them initially. And, there’s no support until Tuesday, because this is a holiday weekend.
Say what you like about the zon, I don’t care what day it is or what time of day, you can get support from someone. Might not be the most senior person, but there’s someone there. And, once, I had a technical problem with Smashwords on a holiday weekend. I sent an email through the contact form and got an answer from the president of the company, since everyone else was out of the office. So . . . there’s that.
I’m more than a tiny bit frustrated. The next step appears to be to take the next book on the conveyor belt, BLOOD WILL TELL,
give it that promised brush up, and see what happens with D2D. Then I can fairly make a choice between the two.
At the least, I’ve now got universal links for all my current books. So, I accomplished that much. (By the way, that service, Books2Read, is offered by D2D.)
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That’s page reads as a percent of my royalty income (in the U.S. only). For months the number stayed in a small range. The upward swing corresponds to the release of 
Meredith Mansfield, Author 