Publishing can get messy. If you’ve been at it a while, perhaps you’ve experienced a little messiness yourself. Duplicate information on publishers, contributor profiles, series and books can create confusion and lead to wasted time in your publishing business. Sometimes, issues such as those mentioned above can occur inadvertently, and other times they can occur when transferring books or profile information into D2D from another publishing platform.

A cool side effect, or rather, a side benefit of the Smashwords-to-D2D migration project is the creation of several new merge tools to help you combine duplicate account assets into a single entity. Even before the D2D/Smashwords merger, many of you requested a simple way to combine the assets of multiple accounts. We’re pleased to tell you the first five merge tools are here with a sixth on the way.

We highly recommend that you work through each merge tool in the order they’re presented below. To access the tools, log into D2D, click ACCOUNT, then scroll down and click on Multi-Book Actions. If a particular merge tool doesn’t pertain to you, just skip that tool and move onto the next one. To guide you along the way, click on the hyperlinked tool name to find a brief D2D Walkthrough video on our YouTube Channel. Here’s a brief description of each tool and its intended use:

1.  Publisher Merge – Allows you to combine information from two existing publisher accounts into a single cohesive publisher profile. If you’re not sure about combining two publishers, Publisher Merge will present you with a detailed comparison of both publisher accounts so you can quickly see which information you want to keep and under which publisher name.

2. Contributor Name Merge – Allows you to combine information from two existing pen names into a single, cohesive contributor name. Why would you want to use this tool? If you discover that you’ve inadvertently created two different contributor names (e.g. “Jane Doe” and “Jane H. Doe”), but they’re for the same person, this is the tool for you. If you’ve recently migrated an account from Smashwords, you might find that you have multiple listings for the same contributor, but the contributor name from the Smashwords account was spelled differently (or had a typo) than what you have listed in your D2D account. This tool will help you clean that up. Contributor Name Merge also works great if you have duplicate contributor name listings and want to merge them into one.

4.  Series Merge – If you’ve somehow ended up with duplicate series or two identical series with different series names, then this tool is for you. Series Merge is the best and easiest way to get all the series information to be aligned under the series name you want to keep.

5.  Book Merge (video coming soon!) – This is a useful tool if, for example, you had a book project listed at Smashwords to hit all the channels that Smashwords reached and then added the book to D2D to reach remaining channels not distributed to by Smashwords. In this scenario, you may discover two books with the same name in your D2D catalog. With Book Merge, you can combine these two book projects into a single project, keeping all the channels you originally hit through Smashwords and the channels you added through D2D.

Keep an eye out for the Book Merge video walkthrough to hit our YouTube channel within the next several days, and for the sixth merge tool—Account Merge—to be added soon.