I bought Tier 2 when it was available and moved most of our books from Draft2Digital or Smashwords to PublishDrive (save the percentage they were charging). I left Amazon as is and you can easily choose which stores PublishDrive pushes too.
Over the past two years, it has been great, and the software keeps getting better. The recent UI uplift is nice too. We get paid on time and the reporting is as good as can be expected (they are at the mercy of the distributors--as are Smashwords and D2D)
WHO IS THIS FOR? If you already make money from book sales, it's a no brainer. A lifetime offer where you keep 100% of the royalties makes it easy to calculate when you start saving money. If you are currently using Smashwords or D2D, there are no on-going costs, but they take a cut of the royalties.
We publish a monthly magazine as well as many books on learning Japanese. As a result, we have a ton of ebooks to sell. PublishDrive made sense to us.
But! If you are just starting out and you don't know if your book will sell even a single copy, maybe Draft2Digital would be better. There is no cost until there is a sale.
I haven't had a bad experience with customer service, although I haven't had to use it much. But questions were answered in a timely manner, and I've experienced no major hiccups despite moving dozens of eBooks from other services over the years.
So, PublishDrive--come back! I'd love to buy a few more. :)
Terrible Customer Service and Poor Quality Product: My Unbearable Experience with this Company
The customer service of this company is a true nightmare. Not only do they never respond to their support, but they send useless automated messages and redirecting articles that just send you to other pages without helping you solve your problems. And even if you manage to contact them, they barely show any interest in your situation and do nothing to help or accompany you. In fact, I even feel like they don't want to deal with my problems, because I haven't received any news from them regarding the issues we've encountered with our library of books as publishers.
Unfortunately, I've been subjected to this unbearable experience for over 6 months, and I've never seen worse customer service in my life, even compared to French companies SFR and Free, which have a reputation for being bad at customer service.
In conclusion, the customer service of this company is absolutely dreadful and doesn't deserve any credit. Until they show more professionalism and properly address the issues we've encountered, I won't change my opinion or rating in my online reviews. I'm open to a change if it happens, but for now, I can only strongly advise against this company.
I was very optimistic and bought this to help launch my first book. A very simple 16 page children's book. I had illustrations and cover made by a professional designer who has lots of experience publishing. When I submit the book I get an error that the page size is wrong. Searching the support site, I see 3 different explanations for best practices of PDF's. None of them work and all give the same error. I have written support and have been waiting days for a response. They just say "looking into it. I will update my review if this gets resolved quickly. But so far it's not looking good.
Founder Team
Reka_PublishDrive
May 9, 2024
Hi there,
Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback with us!
We are sorry to hear about your negative experience with PublishDrive. The policy about the minimum page number for both ebooks and print books doesn't come from us but our store partners. Even if we accepted books with lower page numbers, our store partners would still reject them. This is why we make sure to include it in...
Great product to get into smaller stores! But I specifically got it on the recommendation it had profit splitting for co-authors + Amazon pre-orders. However, that’s only manual splitting. Automatic costs an extra $19.99/month which isn’t really feasible indefinitely. So if this deal comes back, and you’re looking to use it for co-authors, unfortunately there’s still not a good ebook aggregator for Amazon specifically.
Extremely pleased with the software and the service
This was a no-brainer for our business. If you're in the publishing world (or hope to be), this is the perfect tool to help you get distribution to all the major retails and in all the major book formats. I hope someday they can bring the ability to purchase bulk/discounted barcodes. Beyond that, very happy so far.
Founder Team
Reka_PublishDrive
May 9, 2024
Hello there,
We appreciate that you took the time to share your feedback with us :)
Verified purchaser
Excellent and hope they come back to AppSumo
I bought Tier 2 when it was available and moved most of our books from Draft2Digital or Smashwords to PublishDrive (save the percentage they were charging). I left Amazon as is and you can easily choose which stores PublishDrive pushes too.
Over the past two years, it has been great, and the software keeps getting better. The recent UI uplift is nice too. We get paid on time and the reporting is as good as can be expected (they are at the mercy of the distributors--as are Smashwords and D2D)
WHO IS THIS FOR?
If you already make money from book sales, it's a no brainer. A lifetime offer where you keep 100% of the royalties makes it easy to calculate when you start saving money. If you are currently using Smashwords or D2D, there are no on-going costs, but they take a cut of the royalties.
We publish a monthly magazine as well as many books on learning Japanese. As a result, we have a ton of ebooks to sell. PublishDrive made sense to us.
But! If you are just starting out and you don't know if your book will sell even a single copy, maybe Draft2Digital would be better. There is no cost until there is a sale.
I haven't had a bad experience with customer service, although I haven't had to use it much. But questions were answered in a timely manner, and I've experienced no major hiccups despite moving dozens of eBooks from other services over the years.
So, PublishDrive--come back! I'd love to buy a few more. :)
Share PublishDrive
Verified purchaser
Terrible Customer Service and Poor Quality Product: My Unbearable Experience with this Company
The customer service of this company is a true nightmare. Not only do they never respond to their support, but they send useless automated messages and redirecting articles that just send you to other pages without helping you solve your problems. And even if you manage to contact them, they barely show any interest in your situation and do nothing to help or accompany you. In fact, I even feel like they don't want to deal with my problems, because I haven't received any news from them regarding the issues we've encountered with our library of books as publishers.
Unfortunately, I've been subjected to this unbearable experience for over 6 months, and I've never seen worse customer service in my life, even compared to French companies SFR and Free, which have a reputation for being bad at customer service.
In conclusion, the customer service of this company is absolutely dreadful and doesn't deserve any credit. Until they show more professionalism and properly address the issues we've encountered, I won't change my opinion or rating in my online reviews. I'm open to a change if it happens, but for now, I can only strongly advise against this company.
Share PublishDrive
Verified purchaser
So far, it's not working
I was very optimistic and bought this to help launch my first book. A very simple 16 page children's book. I had illustrations and cover made by a professional designer who has lots of experience publishing. When I submit the book I get an error that the page size is wrong. Searching the support site, I see 3 different explanations for best practices of PDF's. None of them work and all give the same error.
I have written support and have been waiting days for a response. They just say "looking into it.
I will update my review if this gets resolved quickly. But so far it's not looking good.
Reka_PublishDrive
May 9, 2024Hi there,
Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback with us!
We are sorry to hear about your negative experience with PublishDrive. The policy about the minimum page number for both ebooks and print books doesn't come from us but our store partners. Even if we accepted books with lower page numbers, our store partners would still reject them. This is why we make sure to include it in...
Share PublishDrive
Verified purchaser
Good Solution but Lacking with Co-Authors
Great product to get into smaller stores! But I specifically got it on the recommendation it had profit splitting for co-authors + Amazon pre-orders. However, that’s only manual splitting. Automatic costs an extra $19.99/month which isn’t really feasible indefinitely. So if this deal comes back, and you’re looking to use it for co-authors, unfortunately there’s still not a good ebook aggregator for Amazon specifically.
Share PublishDrive
Verified purchaser
Extremely pleased with the software and the service
This was a no-brainer for our business. If you're in the publishing world (or hope to be), this is the perfect tool to help you get distribution to all the major retails and in all the major book formats. I hope someday they can bring the ability to purchase bulk/discounted barcodes. Beyond that, very happy so far.
Reka_PublishDrive
May 9, 2024Hello there,
We appreciate that you took the time to share your feedback with us :)
Share PublishDrive