Let's take a look at Pronoun

Pronoun is a new entrant into the Indie publishing market, a similar product to Smashwords and Draft 2 Digital, which formats ebooks and distributes them to retail sites. I've been very happy with D2D, but Pronoun can load books to Amazon, and what's more Pronoun doesn't charge authors a fee, AND offers a better return, especially on books priced at under $2.99. Amazon pays 35% - but Pronoun pays 70%. How can that work? Pronoun is owned by Macmillan, which obviously has a deal with Amazon.

Pronoun retails to Amazon, B&N, Kobo, iBooks, and Google, and it pays to Paypal. I've not yet been asked for my EIN, but I expect that will happen when payments are due. This is their author agreement, written in English (not legalise).

D2D and Smashwords distribute to a number of additional sites, such as Tolino, and there is no reason why I can't still distribute to those sites via D2D or Smashwords. But (understandably) Pronoun doesn't want authors duplicating books from different distributors at one site. Which is, dumb, anyway.

Pronoun has an easy to use workflow for authors to follow when creating a book file.

Author details

First, you enter your name and contact information (website, Twitter, Facebook, mailing list). At the moment, you have to enter the data manually for each book. Perhaps at some stage the system will recognise a default, and fill it all in for you. Time will tell. Then you add any contributors such as cover designers, editors and the like.

Cover

You load your cover if you have one (jpg, pdf, tiff, png), or you can create a cover via Canva. Once your cover is loaded, you can elect to compare your masterpiece with those in a category you select (eg paranormal romance) This will give you a visual clue if what you're putting up is in the ballpark.

Book file

Your book file must be either an epub you already created, or a docx. Note: a docx. Not a doc, rtf, txt, pdf. It has to be a docx. The docx must adhere to the formatting guidelines. In summary, you must use Word's styles. You leave off the title page (which Pronoun will create for you) and you can elect (a little later) for the program to create your copyright page. For my Dryden Universe books the copyright isn't standard, so I used my own copyright page for those books.

I always use Word's styles anyway, so the formatting guidelines were no drama. For those not so confident, there are good instructions in the formatting guidelines. The only issue that I encountered was that while Word has no problem with me changing Heading 1 from numbered to not numbered here and there, Pronoun wasn't happy.

To explain further, I had chapters numbered from 1 to (say) 10, then I had 'About the author', which was given number 11. In Word I took the number off, which didn't affect the table of contents. But Pronoun ignored the chapters and only showed the non-numbered items. For me, the work-around was to remove the numbering and type in a manual header for each chapter. These days, with Amazon insisting on a TOC, I'm going to use chapter headings (eg. Whispers in the dark) rather than 'chapter 2'.

You'll need to add your 'about the author' section, and 'also by this author'. D2D does these things extremely well, even setting up links with a retailer's site for each title. Pronoun doesn't. But… it's early days.

Processing

Once the document has been saved, Pronoun can create a mobi and an epub. You're given a choice of six layouts to choose from – all very classy IMO.

When the conversion is complete, you're sent an email telling you the proof is ready for checking. If you're not happy, make your changes in your docx and try again.

If you load an epub it is checked for compliance. Mine was fine. If not, I expect you'll be told to go and fix it.

Marketing

Next, you select two categories. Mine are obvious – romance > science fiction, and science fiction > space opera. But the system helps you to choose. Type in 'romance' and it will show you a list of options for you to choose from.

After that, you pick seven search terms. You can type in your own, but Pronoun will use what you type to find commonly used terms on Amazon, with an idea of how high on that list your book might appear. This is very, very nifty, and gives you a chance to get to a high ranking in a smaller category.

Now enter your blurb. I found I had to refresh the page before I could paste the pre-written blurb in another document.

From there you put in your price, which must end in .99. You're not given an option here. Pronoun will show you a graphic of how your price compares with other books in the same category – another very useful tool. You can set the price to FREE. Simple.

Pronoun will give you an ISBN, or you can enter your own.

Set your release date (so you can do pre-orders).

Sign the author agreement.

Select which of the five retailers you want to send your book to…

And you're good to go. Pronoun will produce final proofs for you to review. If you're happy – launch your new creation into the internet sea.

Observations

I've only been using Pronoun for a couple of weeks. When I put the first book up (Ella and the Admiral) within a couple of days I was informed I'd sold 13 copies in one day! That was huge for me. I put up the rest of my Dryden books, and I've loaded my latest book, The Stuff of Legend. But I'm not getting the hourly confirmation of success one gets from a direct input to KDP. I KNOW the book has sold, because I can see the ranking. I'm certain I've sold more than 1 on Amazon. But there is a delay in receiving the information on Pronoun. Mind you, it's probably not a bad thing. One can become obsessed with checking numbers on Amazon.

The system does inform you about rankings, and sales, in emails you can elect to turn off. The 'your books' page shows at a glance how many you sold where, and what you earned. And it will also suggest categories where your book might rank higher. Along with the help in selecting key words, comparisons with book covers, and the graph comparing sales price, there's a lot to like about Pronoun. 

That said, I haven't switched everything. You know the story about eggs and baskets.

A new way to publish - Pronoun

As I've been doing another round of edits on my new book, I've heard about a new website for publishing to the market. It's called Pronoun. It sounded rather like the excellent Draft 2 Digital site, although it's offering higher royalties at Amazon, it's not charging authors, and it's making payments to Paypal.

I have dipped my toe in the water so I can give you a few impressions. The first one (which amuses and annoys me) is that the site truncated my surname  to 'G. Van'. That's on the pages of the website, not the author field. Over the years, I've had this often - a badly constructed program written by somebody who doesn't understand that people really do have spaces in their names and that truncating at the first space isn't always correct. I even got that from the bank!

The site asked for feedback and that's the first suggestion they got from me! I think it's sloppy at best and actually, quite rude. The solution is a surname field. Simples.

The user interface is pretty intuitive. I uploaded a Word .docx which uses styles. I wasn't impressed with the format of the resulting epub. I complained about that and received a prompt response. This software doesn't want you to add title pages, copyright and the like (it adds those for you), but does expect you to use styles. So please do read the guidelines before loading. It also offers a number of different layouts from which you select the one you like.

If you'd rather, you can use your own epub and mobi files.

Entering the blurb was a trial because it was impossible to cut-and-paste from a document. I was asked to clear my cache and reload the page, which worked. So that's easy.

And then there's adding the categories and key words. Choose your categories by typing in a word or two. The software does a targeted search. For keywords, the software will show you key phrases which match your categories, or once again, try to filter whatever you enter. Good stuff.

Prices must end in .99. You don't even have to type that in.

There is provision for an author page to which you can link all your books, provided they are on  Amazon. That went pretty well - but I did hit a glitch. The cover for The Iron Admiral: Conspiracy was the current one, but the cover for  The Iron Admiral: Deception was several versions old. On this one, I was told the cover would update in time. If it was still wrong in 24 hours, I was asked to provide details. It has updated to the correct cover.

I cannot fault the customer support. It was prompt, friendly, and accurate.

A few things you should know: Pronoun is owned by Macmillan, so if you put a book through them it will say Macmillan is the publisher. But you own all the rights. It's explained in simple English in their contract. One significant item caught my eye. You MUST have your book on Amazon, either through Pronoun, or by some other means. So that suggests there's some interplay here between Amazon and Macmillan. I received an email the other day stating that Pronoun would pay 70% royalties for books at under $2.99, which is Amazon's threshold for 70% royalties. Here's a press release explaining.

I have asked the company how they make their money and this was the response.
"As for how we make money, Pronoun is part of Macmillan Publishers, and we offer paid ebook services to large media companies like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes. We also plan to start offering optional paid services down the road (such as cover design or editing -- we trust authors to tell us what they want)."

Anyway, I'll put a foot in the water and see what happens. I've loaded two books with them - both times using my own epub and mobi files. Next time, I'll use a Word docx.

By the way, The Stuff of Legend is nearly here. Myths, legends, action, adventure, romance... what's not to like?