Drivethru is connected to RPG.now and Drivethrurpg.com. I've been with them for years now. They are great people. But the thing with Drivethrufiction is that the audiences leans heavily toward the core genres of horror, fantasy, and sci-fi (because the audience comes from the gaming community). I sell well there, but I am also an RPG publisher and I know that audience well. If your books are not firmly in those core genres, you make struggle to sell anything there.
Things I love about Drivethrurpg:
1. If I have a problem, I can talk to a real person who actually knows what he is talking about. Their customer service people know the site and don't delivery stock answers. They will work to solve the problem.
2. Ability to set sale prices without altering my retail price.
3. Ability to offer coupons.
4. Ability to send comp copies through their system.
5. Ability to build a huge opt-in mailing list. Customers through the system can set their preferences to allow you to send them regular emails. Generally, you can only send emails to your customers, but this includes people who download freebies. So you can send customized sales offers to people who want to get them. Whenever I issue a new release, I'm sending out an email to thousands of customers through their system.
6. Bundles, including cross-publisher bundles. Want to do a special promotion with another author? You can set up cross-publisher bundles. I've done this in the past with some publishers I am friendly with and it is a great way to cross promote.
7. On site promotions. Each publisher gets a set number of promotion points each month, depending on your sales volume. You can use these points to buy banner ads, front page display ads, etc.
The customer base is much smaller than Amazon, or even Smashwords. But it is a loyal customer base. Once they find publishers they like, they tend to stick with them and buy everything that publisher puts out. It is also a customer base, however, that still prefers PDF and want to be able to print their files to read. This is the "old school" digital market where people are use to buying PDFs and reading from their computers or printing the pages to put in a binder to read. So you want to offer the PDF format along with other formats.
Things I love about Drivethrurpg:
1. If I have a problem, I can talk to a real person who actually knows what he is talking about. Their customer service people know the site and don't delivery stock answers. They will work to solve the problem.
2. Ability to set sale prices without altering my retail price.
3. Ability to offer coupons.
4. Ability to send comp copies through their system.
5. Ability to build a huge opt-in mailing list. Customers through the system can set their preferences to allow you to send them regular emails. Generally, you can only send emails to your customers, but this includes people who download freebies. So you can send customized sales offers to people who want to get them. Whenever I issue a new release, I'm sending out an email to thousands of customers through their system.
6. Bundles, including cross-publisher bundles. Want to do a special promotion with another author? You can set up cross-publisher bundles. I've done this in the past with some publishers I am friendly with and it is a great way to cross promote.
7. On site promotions. Each publisher gets a set number of promotion points each month, depending on your sales volume. You can use these points to buy banner ads, front page display ads, etc.
The customer base is much smaller than Amazon, or even Smashwords. But it is a loyal customer base. Once they find publishers they like, they tend to stick with them and buy everything that publisher puts out. It is also a customer base, however, that still prefers PDF and want to be able to print their files to read. This is the "old school" digital market where people are use to buying PDFs and reading from their computers or printing the pages to put in a binder to read. So you want to offer the PDF format along with other formats.
