By now if you’re an indie publisher, author or hoping to pursue independent publishing in one way or another – you’ve probably heard of Draft2Digital. But just in case you haven’t, Draft2Digital.com is a publishing platform like Smashwords’ infamous meat grinder in that Draft2Digital (D2D) lets you take your unpublished manuscript, format it for various stores.

What makes D2D different from all the other publishing platforms? You get access to all the markets at once! That means you can publish on the Kindle, Apple devices, Nook, various other ebook readers and even Createspace from one simple website. Not even Smashwords allows you to publish paperback books at the same time as your ebook and Smashwords’ method of taking your carefully crafted manuscript and placing it on all those platforms is, to be horribly frank, nothing short of putting your work in a mangler and hoping it comes out the other end in a legible format.

D2D’s biggest advantage is that it can take your cleaned manuscript – straight from a doc file and easily create a pretty nice representation on all devices from just that. You can then download copies of your work in the various formats and make any tweaks to the formatting you deem necessary. Making it easy for you to choose how much or how little you want to format your work.

At the time I wrote this article I had only used D2D once, for a short story ‘test’ of the system but I’ve since used it for a second story as well and will shortly be using it for a novel. I haven’t yet tried it’s digital to print option and I know that the amount of work that goes into formatting a book for print is leaps and bounds above what goes into formatting a book for ereaders.

That said, I was simply blown away with how quick and easy it was to publish using D2D. Usually I set aside a full week for formatting, testing and uploading a formatted product to Amazon alone, more if I plan on using Smashwords as well but with D2D it was all over and done with in a single day! No headaches, few bits so out of place that I had to ‘nuke’ my entire manuscript, no need to format as html and go through it line by line removing unnecessary and intrusive code.

Draft2Digital makes publishing so much easier that for the first time I’m inclined to publish more short stories and vignettes rather than sticking strictly to only full length novels so as to avoid the slowdown of formatting everything for the various programs. I couldn’t recommend it enough as your new go to aggregate publication platform.