The story behind subscription pricing of PublishDrive

Bradley Matrock from Score Publishing and Digital Book World asks Kinga Jentetics, CEO of PublishDrive about PublishDrive’s new pricing model.

PublishDrive announced three new features at this year’s Digital Book World: a new ebook conversion tool, a categorization tool with AI, and a new pricing option that allows authors to keep all of their royalties.

Kinga Jentetics shares how the new pricing option works and the inspiration behind it.

B.M: Kinga, you have had an exciting week with all the new features PublishDrive introduced. Could you please sum up what PublishDrive does?

K.J.: PublishDrive is a self-publishing platform for authors and indie publishers. We help them sell globally with easy-to-use tools and a support team. So far we allow our authors access to 400 stores and 240,000 digital libraries all over, including the US, China, Europe and India.

B.M.: What is the new pricing option exactly and how much does it cost authors?

K.J.: We introduced a new monthly subscription option where no matter how much you sell, you pay only one monthly fee of $100 and keep all of your royalties — all of your sales revenue. This way, authors can anticipate the cost of their distribution and also save way more time for writing or building their author brand. I want to mention that this is an optional choice. Authors can continue to use the previous option where PublishDrive takes 10% of all book sales, which might work better for new and up-and-coming authors.

See the difference between the two pricing options.

B.M.: How did the idea of the new pricing model come about?

K.J.: When PublishDrive was founded, I saw how self-publishing globally could be costly: either by spending a lot of time and energy dealing with operational tasks, or paying for those tasks and thereby giving up your earned royalties.

I didn’t like how either of them sounded, especially if you want to become a full time writer and run your business. You have no other choice than paying bills from your royalties! That’s why my team started prioritizing on finding out a better way to help authors reach a global audience. We talked to authors and figured out that for a reasonable monthly fixed fee, they would love to keep all of their titles, operations, sales data and analytics in one place — instead of spending countless hours handling everything on their own. This past summer we took our findings and worked up a new pricing option that could be easily understandable and valuable for authors. Now they can choose to switch from different platforms easily — authors can keep their Amazon reviews and rankings plus on top of that, receive extra marketing help.

Check out the free Amazon Advertising marketing credit and more marketing options.

B.M.: I can see why authors would find this highly useful. Anything you or your team would like to achieve with this new option?

K.J.: Thanks! We are happy if our authors are happy. We’d like to see more writers become full time authors and we believe with the new pricing option, authors will not only lower their distribution costs, but also save way more precious time to focus on writing.

B.M.: You mentioned more new features coming in the future. What’s next for PublishDrive?

K.J.: PublishDrive has great plans for the near and for the long-term future. We are working on smart marketing tools, and we’re looking at market trends such as POD and audiobooks. We want our authors to enjoy these smart features to understand their business better. Ultimately, like I mentioned before, we want to help authors go full time with their passion.

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