If you’re reading this, you deserve a huge pat on the back. You survived the holidays, the new year, and the decade that 2025 seemed to be. We’re so happy you’re here with us. The following is a recap of some of the more noteworthy items D2D shared with you in 2025 to help maximize your publishing potential.
Smashwords Migration: When D2D acquired Smashwords in March 2022, we were giddy with excitement over what our teams could accomplish together. We knew migrating close to 200,000 dynamic author and publisher accounts from Smashwords to Draft2Digital would be hard. We just didn’t know how hard. We’re pleased to tell you that other than some minor clean-up, for all intents and purposes, the migration of Smashwords author and publisher accounts into D2D is complete. Now all the people, time, and resources that were integral to a successful migration project can be reallocated to innovative new projects and publishing tools.
Merge Tools: Speaking of the D2D/Smashwords merger, the migration project led to some really cool Merge Tools to help you combine duplicate account assets into a single entity. Even before the D2D/Smashwords merger, many authors requested a simple way to combine the assets of multiple accounts. Sometimes duplications occur inadvertently, and other times they can occur when transferring books or profile information into D2D from another publishing platform. The Merge Tools, which include Publisher Merge, Contributor Name Merge, Contributor Profile Merge, Series Merge, and Book Merge, help mitigate the challenge of combining duplicated assets. Click on each hyperlinked Merge Tool name above to watch a short walk-through video for each tool. To learn more about the purpose of the merge tools and to read a short description of each, check out our blog post from November of last year.
Smashwords Store Smashes Expectations: 2025 was a standout year! Smashwords completed its ninth consecutive year of sales growth, and if that weren’t enough, all three annual site-wide super sales broke previous sales records. That’s exciting, but we have data that’s even more exciting than sales growth.
What could be more exciting than sales growth? Customer growth! First-time purchasers—not just new customer accounts, but new customers who bought books during our 2025 sales—increased by double digits for all three sales. We attribute this growth to three factors: 1) The quality of books you are publishing; 2) The determination that you and your fellow authors have shown when celebrating Smashwords sitewide super sales with your readers; and 3) The growing indie reader movement, where today's literary tastemakers are seeking fresh and diverse voices--like yours!
The next Smashwords super sale is the Read An Ebook Week sale, March 1-7. Don’t miss it!
BookCovers.com Goes Live: Following D2D’s acquisition of SelfPubBookCovers.com, the pioneering book cover marketplace in 2023, the completely redesigned BookCovers.com officially went live in June. Authors can now choose from over 60,000 high-quality, low-cost, professionally designed covers that are all customizable. The marketplace is ideal for professional cover artists who are seeking a platform to showcase their work.
D2D Promotions Team: We’ve been talking a lot more about D2D promotions lately. There’s good reason for this. With D2D promotions, we present you with dozens of FREE opportunities every year to have your books placed in front of merchandising managers at retailers and libraries. Merchandising managers are the people who create those eye-catching banners and sales displays when you visit your favorite online bookstores and library apps. That’s some pretty cool visibility, right? All you need to do to have your books considered for these promotional opportunities is log into your D2D account and fill out the D2D promotions form.
Does it work? Absolutely! Last year D2D worked with our global retail and library partners on 46 promotional opportunities and submitted 29,450 of your titles for consideration. Of the titles that were submitted, 18,750 were placed in promotions. That’s a 63% success rate! Oh, and these figures don't include the several one-off requests from merchandising managers who trust us to give them title suggestions for promotions when they’re on a deadline. Nor do these figures include the multiple promotional opportunities at the Smashwords store. Did we mention these opportunities are FREE? They’re another example of the tireless work we do for you behind the scenes.
Amazon Loosens KDP Select Exclusivity: Okay, we didn’t have much to do with this one, but it was still exciting news. Ordinarily, when there’s a rule change to Amazon’s publishing platform, you hear a collective groan that reverberates across the indie author world and back again. In this case, however, there was a collective jaw drop because Amazon loosened their restrictions on their KDP Select exclusivity program. For the first time since the inception of the KDP Select program in 2011, Amazon began allowing ebook distribution to libraries. If you have some of your ebooks in KDP Select (Kindle Unlimited), now you can distribute those ebooks to libraries. If you need a refresher on how to opt-in your books to library distribution, this short walk-through video has you covered. If you missed the news when it first appeared, this blog post will get you up to speed.
