The Two Platforms Most Authors Forget About After Amazon

Ask most self-published authors where their book is available, and the answer is almost always just Amazon. Understandable — it's the biggest platform, and it's the one every "how to self-publish" guide talks about first. What that leaves out is that a meaningful chunk of readers don't buy through Amazon at all, and two platforms in particular, Apple Books and Draft2Digital, tend to get skipped entirely, not because they're not worth it, but because nobody thought to mention them.

Apple Books reaches a reader Amazon doesn't

Apple Books lives inside an ecosystem a lot of readers never leave — anyone who reads primarily on an iPhone or iPad and already has an Apple ID is a few taps away from buying directly through Apple's own store, without ever opening a separate app or creating another account. That convenience matters more than it sounds like it should. A reader who's perfectly happy buying and reading through Apple Books may never think to check whether a book is also on Kindle, and if it isn't listed on Apple's platform, that reader simply doesn't buy it there.

Getting a book properly listed through Apple Books publishing services involves more than just uploading the same file used for Kindle. Apple has its own formatting expectations, its own metadata and categorization system, and its own approach to previews and sample chapters that authors need to get right if they want the listing to actually convert browsers into buyers. Skipping this step because "the book's already on Amazon" means quietly losing every reader who was never going to check anywhere else.

Draft2Digital solves a problem most authors don't realize they have

Where Apple Books is about reaching one specific reader base, Draft2Digital solves an entirely different problem: distribution to a long list of platforms without having to manage separate accounts, formatting, and uploads for each one individually. Instead of an author juggling Kobo, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, and a handful of smaller retailers all separately, Draft2Digital acts as a single point of distribution that pushes the book out to most of them at once.

The appeal of draft2digital publishing services isn't just convenience, though that alone saves a significant amount of time. It also means formatting only has to be gotten right once instead of separately for each platform, and sales reporting comes through a single dashboard instead of five different ones that all track things slightly differently. For authors who don't want to become part-time platform administrators just to reach readers outside Amazon, Draft2Digital tends to be the simplest fix.

How DAW Books handles both

We treat these two platforms as filling different gaps in the same problem — readers who exist outside Amazon and don't always get reached because setting up additional platforms feels like extra work nobody budgeted time for. Our Apple Books publishing services handle the platform-specific formatting and listing details that make a book actually convert Apple readers, and our Draft2Digital publishing services take care of getting a book out to multiple additional platforms without the author having to manage each one separately.

Amazon is rarely the whole audience, even when it feels like the only one that matters. Apple Books and Draft2Digital exist specifically to catch the readers Amazon alone was never going to reach.