Oklahoma Christian University alumni Aaron Pogue, Kris Austin and Toby Nance co-founded a start-up company called Draft2Digital for authors seeking to be published without having to work through traditional publishing companies.
Draft2Digital works as a digital publishing and distribution service. Draft2Digital started with Nance and Pogue as a side project of Pogue’s interest in being able to self-publish his novels.
“It was my passion to be a writer from the time I was 12 years old,” Pogue said.
Pogue, who earned an English writing degree at Oklahoma Christian, asked Austin and Nance, who both earned degrees in computer science at Oklahoma Christian, to help him with his desire to self-publish during an “indie self-revolution.”
Pogue said it was tough to convince Nance and Austin to leave their day jobs to work on this idea, but he’s glad he was able to because he could not run the company on his own.
“It’s rewarding that we get to do this as our job,” Austin said. “I take pride in the fact that daily I know we’re helping authors get their work out to the public. Taking risk is necessary if you want to do something extraordinary, you can’t succeed if you don’t actually try.”
Austin and Nance, along with Pogue’s help as an author, created a program that would enable Pogue to convert his documents into an electronic publication format. By December 2012, their document conversion software was ready to launch for use by the general public.
“What’s unique about our company is that we support any author that’s written their own work,” Austin said. “We don’t discriminate, which is exactly why our business is unlike traditional publishing – where they pick and choose which authors’ books are going to make them money.”
According to Austin, Draft2Digital has 22,000 authors publishing 78,000 books. The result is the company publishing almost 3,000 new books per month, predicting 100,000 books by the end of the year.
“As a writing major, I’ve heard time and time again that getting published is ridiculously hard,” senior Paige Brown said. “People constantly tell me to make sure I get a real job, because my chances of being published are slim to none. I think Draft2Digital is extremely encouraging to writers because it creates more opportunity to get published.”
The company’s aim is to make its website easy for authors to use and make sure it works properly. Before becoming a novelist, Pogue was a technical writer and he said that user experience was not considered enough by publishers.
The company’s major competitor when entering the field was Smashwords, which offered a 120-page instruction manual. Draft2Digital initially did not have a manual, but then created a three-paragraph style guide for their users.
According to the co-founders of Draft2Digital, the decision to become entrepreneurs was not about being able to make money; it was about allowing other people to pursue their dreams.
“We get emails on a daily basis from authors who are enthusiastic about being able to get their books published,” Nance said. “It’s great to watch their books find an audience that wants to read them. Traditional publishing companies would not typically pick up and produce their books because they’re focused on finding novels and authors that are going to generate revenue for their business.”
Draft2Digital allows authors to be able to get their writings directly to those buying – their readers- which also helps writers make a living from their writing. One of its current authors generated revenue of $800,000.
Draft2Digital allows its authors to set the price of their books and see daily sales reports on their creations while providing monthly payments and letting authors maintain full rights to their stories. Draft2Digital maintains 10 percent of the sales price of any book published through the site.
Once an author’s manuscript is formatted to an electronically publishable version, the author is able to select into which market they want his or her eBook to be distributed. Draft2Digital distributes to various channels for public access, including Barnes & Noble, iBooks and Kobo.
“Ultimately, writers will have to give up their dream of seeing their name in print, but since the world is moving towards e-readers, this seems like a small price to pay,” Brown said.
According to Nance, Draft2Digital does offer to produce a paperback copy for authors through an automated system, should they want them, at the cost of the price of the book.
Draft2Digital is managed by 15 full-time employees, the business is fully self-supporting, and is operating without receiving outside funding.
“We have one percent of authors that makes up fifty percent of our revenue and we know them by name,” Pogue said. “But there is also 10,000 other authors that only sell four copies of their book, they still were able to sell copies of their book. Before self-publishing that wouldn’t have been possible because publishing companies want books that are going to sell thousands of copies, not just four. Our business is all about those people who get to sell a few of their books.”
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