Publish Drive Aims to Do It All

The Platform’s Range of Features Aids Authors through Four Stages of Publishing

In an indie author’s career, writing is only one piece of a large pie. The other slices of the pie consist of all the administrative, marketing, and publishing tasks that go into running an author business. Those tasks can often be time consuming, but getting them right is just as important to your success as the writing. Publish Drive (https://publishdrive.com) is an online publishing and distribution platform that aims to make many of those non-writing tasks faster, easier, and more fun.

Publish Drive allows users to upload and publish their first book for free, so authors can get a feel for what the platform has to offer. It’s a broad range of features—to make it easier to view them all at a glance, the company organizes them on the Publish Drive website into four stages of the publishing process: “Prepare Your Book,” “Publish Your Book,” “Promote Your Book,” and “Track Your Sales.” The platform provides a suite of tools to accomplish each step. 

Prepare Your Book

One area in which Publish Drive shines and where authors can have fun flexing their creative muscles is in the program’s suite of book production tools. “It starts with a simple upload of your manuscript and cover files,” according to the website. “Then we help you put everything together from book formatting to metadata.” This includes several AI capabilities incorporated into Publish Drive’s “Publishing Assistant,” which launched in 2024.

To activate Publish Drive’s AI Publishing Assistant, click on the Apps menu at the upper right corner of the screen, choose “Publishing Assistant,” and find yourself face-to-screen with your new personal publishing assistant, “Alexandra,” who cheerily informs you that you make the decisions; she’ll show you the opportunities that lie ahead. 

Alexandra guides users through a range of AI features and tools offered by the site. Publish Drive’s Publishing Assistant can help you in a number of areas, including:

• Crafting and Optimizing Your Metadata: Alexandra can help you optimize your book’s metadata for improved visibility and sales across multiple channels by focusing on the eight types of metadata that are important to book sales—title, subtitle, series title, pen name, description, BISAC categories, keywords, and price—and providing suggestions to improve them.
• Creating Cover Images: Publish Drive’s AI can analyze your book and pick eight key scenes to provide you with three AI-generated potential cover designs for your project. You can then modify the images, request more, or create all new images. 

Pro Tip: Covers can be downloaded in ebook or audiobook format, and Alexandra can help ensure your cover aligns with the current cover trends for your genre.

• Crafting Descriptions, Blurbs, and Titles: Alexandra can help you craft search-engine-friendly descriptions, blurbs, and titles to increase your book’s visibility and expand your reader base.
• Generating Keywords, Amazon Categories, and BISAC Categories: Alexandra is programmed to help wide authors pick keywords, Amazon categories, and BISAC categories that best fit their book’s plot and help boost its visibility in online stores.

Publish Your Book 

Publish Drive was founded in 2014 with the primary purpose of helping simplify the process of publishing books wide to several retailers. Now, “It takes a few clicks to publish ebook, audiobook, and print book formats” in more than four hundred bookstores and 240,000 libraries across more than one hundred countries, according to the platform’s website.

Distribution channels include: Amazon, Apple, Audible, Google Books, Ingram, Barnes & Noble, Baker & Taylor, Dreame, Scribd, and OverDrive. The platform also offers a free ebook conversion tool that can convert DOCX manuscripts to reflowable EPUB files. Authors are not required to have an account to use the conversion tool. 

Pro Tip: Publish Drive is one of Apple’s preferred providers, so authors who choose to distribute their ebooks to Apple Books via Publish Drive have the option to turn on Apple Books Digital Narration to produce AI-narrated audiobooks. According to Publish Drive’s site, the process takes approximately two months to complete.

Promote Your Book

Publish Drive offers built-in user tools for managing Amazon-sponsored Product Ads. Amazon also integrates with Savant, Publish Drive’s proprietary AI technology, to help users identify product targets and improve ad campaign performance.

Track Your Sales

Publish Drive’s sales analytics dashboard makes it easy to track your sales and performance data, according to the site. Select whether you want to view sales data or preorder data from the top of the screen. With built-in filtering, charts, and the ability to export data to Excel, authors have flexibility in managing sales and preorder data.

The site also sends users auto-royalty reports, so they can track earnings and payments.

Pricing

Authors interested in Publish Drive can choose from two pricing models. The Public Plan consists of five tiers, with the option to pay monthly or annually by credit card or PayPal. Below is a high-level overview of the cost, number of distribution channels, and output formats associated with each tier. Anyone wanting to take a deeper dive into the features associated with each tier can find a comparison graphic at https://publishdrive.com/pricing.html.

• Free: Includes one book; access to thirty-one distribution channels; and ebook-format only.
• Starter ($13.99 annually or $16.99 monthly): Includes up to three books; access to fifty distribution channels; and ebook, audio, and print formats.
• Standard ($20.99 annually or $24.99 monthly): Includes up to six books; access to fifty distribution channels; and ebook, audio, and print formats.
• Plus ($41.99 annually or $49.99 monthly): Includes up to eighteen books; access to fifty distribution channels; and ebook, audio, and print formats.
• Pro ($83.99 annually or $99.99 monthly): Includes up to forty-eight books; access to fifty distribution channels; and ebook, audio, and print formats.

There is also a Subscription Plan for those with more than fifty books in their backlist, offering authors a flat-fee distribution model in place of the traditional tiers. Publish Drive also offers custom payment models by request.

In addition to the above plans, some of Publish Drive’s added-value features, like Publishing Assistant, have charges associated with them. Upon sign-up, users are given sixty credits to try the Alexandra interface. To obtain more credit, users can click the blue diamond-shaped credit icon in the upper right corner of the screen to open the Buy Credits Now window.

Credits can be purchased in three amounts:

• one hundred credits for $9.99,
• three hundred credits for $24.99, or
• five hundred credits for $34.99.

Credits never expire and can be redeemed at any time. 

Starting at $1.49 per title per month and adjusting upward as titles are added, users who need to track and manage royalty sharing can also add Abacus royalty management to their Publish Drive account. For authors who need to manage royalty splits with co-authors, translators, or others, data importing is available from Amazon KDP accounts (Kindle Unlimited), IngramSpark, Draft2Digital, Kobo Publishing/Subscription/Plus, Google, Apple Books, and more. 

According to Publish Drive’s website, Abacus can help you calculate author royalties automatically; share royalty reports with authors; add other revenue and cost sources for financials; run custom analytics for series, authors, or other datasets; and manage payments for authors using one royalty reporting software.

Authors with larger operations may be interested in a case study detailing how large indie publishers like Michael Anderle’s LMPBN and others have used Abacus, which can be found on the Publish Drive site. 

Strengths and Limitations

Among Publish Drive’s many strengths is its robust tool set, user-friendly interface, AI-driven data insight capabilities, and its 0 percent revenue share pricing models. It’s important to note that in lieu of a percentage-based revenue share, Publish Drive takes a flat fee that scales based on catalog size and sales volume, which can be a limitation for authors with smaller backlists and lower overall sales volume. Percentage-based revenue models of its competitors like Draft2Digital (10 percent) and IngramSpark (30 percent) can result in authors receiving a larger percentage of their profits. As catalog size and sales volume increase, however, Publish Drive’s flat fee model quickly moves from a limitation to a strength.

Publish Drive users may also appreciate the ability to share and manage their account access. Publish Drive’s User Management system allows you to invite other users via email and to enable or disable their access as an account owner or administrator, content manager, or accountant role for PD Distribution and/or an administrator for Abacus.

Some may consider the platform’s reliance on AI a limitation; in order to use some of the program’s features, an author needs to upload one or more of their books and allow the platform’s AI to consume that content. Authors wishing to use a fixed format for image-heavy books, books with tables, or other unique formatting may also encounter issues with Publish Drive’s free EPUB converter, as it only offers reflowable format conversions, though Publish Drive offers paid conversion services that are guaranteed to be accepted during the upload process.

Finally, Publish Drive only offers print-on-demand author copies in a beta version as of the time of writing.

With tools, features, and multiple pricing options to accommodate backlists of any size, Kinga Jentetics and the team at Publish Drive have created a distribution platform worth considering. For authors seeking a customizable, data-driven approach to publishing across global platforms, Publish Drive might just be the missing piece of your publishing puzzle.

Jenn Mitchell

Jenn Mitchell writes Urban Fantasy and Weird West, as well as culinary cozy mysteries under the pen name, J Lee Mitchell. She writes, cooks, and gardens in the heart of South Central Pennsylvania’s Amish Country. When she’s not doing these things, she dreams of training llama riding ninjas.She enjoys traveling, quilting, hoarding cookbooks, Sanntangling, and spending time with the World’s most patient and loving significant other.