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D2D finally brought in the long-awaited print book option. I don’t know when. I haven’t even looked at it in two years.
Note that with their new print book option, you are allowed one print interior or cover change every 90 days. That includes your initial upload. So, if your first cover or interior have errors, your expected options are to wait 90 days to correct one, then another 90 days to correct the other, or pay $25 USD per upload correction. That means if you need to re-upload both your cover and interior file, that’s going to cost you 90 days in D2D jail for first one then the other, paying $50 USD to upload both a new cover and new interior ($25 each), or a variation of the two options.
If you are going with the free D2D provided ISBN, you need to NOT EXPECT TO PUT THE ISBN IN YOUR INTERNAL FILE! At least not right away. (But read on!)
Yeah, I know. You want it to look 110% professional and all the books in bookstores have the ISBN in the front matter.
You can re-load the file later with the ISBN ($25 USD cost to upload a change or wait 90 days!), but unlike others like Amazon, 2D2 won’t give you the ISBN until AFTER you have finalized and approved your book to print.
I was hoping they would have considered that and get a chance to at least re-upload the internal file with the correct ISBN before it goes to publication. Nope. No dice. You do not get the ISBN to include it in your internal file until after you hit the publish button, and then not even right away to try to trick it into letting you re-upload the interior in another internet window that’s still sitting open on that page.
Being me, I stubbornly pressed on, hoping for another chance while at the same time knowing the outcome will be exactly as I suspected it would be. The file I uploaded was already set up for the same trim size. All I needed was to change the ISBN and add that new anthology I have a short story in in the front matter. I guess I’ll wait to see if they reject it and hope I have a chance then to upload the file with the correct ISBN without paying the $25 USD fee. Either way, if it gets rejected or not and I have to pay, I’m going to try waiting the 90 days to upload the correct ISBN interior free.
At this point I feel like I’m yelling at them, “Don’t tell me what to do!”
To me, allowing you to include the ISBN in your front matter whether you have them convert your eBook file or upload your own interior should be an automatic thing. It should not be restricted to the converted eBook file only. My guess is they’re trying to cut their costs on buying ISBN’s by not assigning them until you are committed to publishing it and hit the publish button.
Auto Conversion of eBook to POD
You can, of course, opt to let them convert your eBook file to print, if you aren’t too fussy about how your interior looks. And, providing you did not upload your own eBook interior with the ISBN embedded in so it can be consistent with your book published through other sources.
You see below my POD front matter, with the D2D eBook ISBN number.

And here, below is where D2D puts the front matter with the ISBN if you chose the file conversion and click the box for them to add it. Why does this look weird to me? I had to go back to the books on my bookshelf. It was a 50/50 shot whether the copyright page was centered or left aligned. They also pretty much filled that page, so it didn’t look as weird to me as this short little blurb in the top corner.

This is all you get with their option to include it with converting your eBook file to POD.
Here’s a closer look of what it looks like from the PDF preview download:

Allowing D2D to convert the eBook file to POD also added almost a hundred pages to the paperback book length of one book when I tried that. Just how big is that print they use?
This second book I’m using as an example is 353 pages printed elsewhere, but D2D’s conversion is 416 pages. That might be fine for a shorter word count, but this is an extra 63 pages you have to pay printing costs for. Printing costs generally are a base rate plus price per page.
Using D2D’s cost calculator, a 416-page 5.5 x 8.5 inch trim size book costs $6.30 to print. March 1, 2022, they have a price increase in effect, and it will cost $6.45 per book to print.
Comparing the 353-page count elsewhere to the D2D 416-page count converted eBook:
- 353 pages at 5.5 x 8.5 trim = $5.66 with D2D after March 1, 2022
- 416 pages at 5.5 x 8.5 trim = $6.45 with D2D after March 1, 2022
$0.79 USD doesn’t seem like a lot per book, but you generally are not working with a large markup margin, and this comes out of your royalties. Let’s assume a $15 list price. Your 45% royalties on a $15 list price book are $6.75.
- 353 pages at 5.5 x 8.5 trim = $5.66 print cost = $1.09 royalty/per book
- 416 pages at 5.5 x 8.5 trim = $6.45 print cost = $0.30 royalty/per book
You cannot sell a 416-page book for $0.30 royalties per book. This gives you 30 cents USD per book sold for marketing costs before you are losing money.
The higher your word count, the larger you can expect this page count disparity in uploading your own interior vs. allowing D2D to convert your eBook to be.
Interior File for Auto conversion of eBook to POD
If you are going with allowing D2D to convert your eBook file, I strongly recommend sticking strictly to the “D2D Simple” template style.
Most of the interior file options look very gimmicky with junk like magnifying glasses, birds, or whatever that interior style option has, everywhere you have an extra line return spacing out your paragraphs.


I might have liked this when I was eight. Maybe. Garbage.
I’ll stick to formatting and uploading my own interior files – but without the ISBN number in the front matter until the 90 days of upload jail or fine expires. Then I can upload a proper interior file with the D2D POD ISBN number included.
Using Your Own ISBN
You’re probably asking why I don’t just use my own ISBN. Cost, that’s why. Here is a quick Google search on the price of an ISBN for those of you who have to go through Bowker in the US:

Here in Canada ISBNs are free through the Library and Archives Canada. But there’s a catch. Once your book is published using a Library and Archives Canada ISBN, you are required to send them physical copies of your book. How many depends on the number of books produced. Assuming you want to sell more than 100 copies, it would be two physical book copies you need to send.
When I priced this out years ago, between the print and shipping costs for the two books and the postage to ship them to Library and Archives Canada, it was not cheap. I don’t remember what the cost was, but it was close to the Bowker cost. I don’t have a budget for this. The day job that pays the bills, like so many others, pays the cost-of-living bills without wiggle room to invest in my own interests. Your spending money doesn’t go far when you use it for things like school fees for your kids and in-between payday grocery shopping food items. My writing costs have to pay for themselves and it’s not cheap to publish, get author copies and table stuff for book events, and all that. I’m already in the red on this. I just used money I’ve been saving for a few years for a replacement computer to buy a cheap filing cabinet because of the lack of budget for this.
I haven’t even ordered author copies of the new anthology from Dragon Soul Press, “All Dark Places 3” with my short story Dark Shadows yet because that’s also going to cost me money out of pocket, putting me further in the red. I will have to before I do any author events, once those things open up again.
Assuming $1.50 USD net royalty per book, more than the example above, you would have to sell 84 books just to pay the $125 USD ISBN cost. That’s assuming they don’t charge a tax on it. I didn’t look to see if they do.
If I sell that book for a list price of $17 USD: 45% royalty on $17 = $7.65 gross royalty per book less the printing costs.
- 353 (my own interior upload) pages at 5.5 x 8.5 trim = $5.66 print cost = $1.99 royalty/per book
- 416 (eBook conversion) pages at 5.5 x 8.5 trim = $6.45 print cost = $1.20 royalty/per book
At $1.99 net royalty per book for my own interior file upload, I still have to sell 63 books to cover a $125 ISBN cost before I make a penny off book sales, without spending any money on marketing.
But Bowker has their reduced price per ISBN deal for a 10-pack!
Let’s say you bough the $295 10-pack of ISBNs. You use two on Amazon, two on D2D, and two on IngramSpark. You’ve used six up on one book. But you want a hardcover version in addition to the eBook and paperback. That’s two more assuming two publishing platforms.
In three publishing platforms, you’ve used 8 of your 10 ISBN numbers for paperback, hardcover, and eBook versions of the same book, because each and every version on each platform requires a unique ISBN number. That’s an ISBN cost of $236 USD for one published book edition. At $1.99 net royalty, you have to sell 119 books across all versions and platforms just to cover the cost of the ISBNs, not including any money spent on advertising.
Also, if you are in Canada and taking advantage of the “free” (not free because you have to mail them copies of your books), you have to send them physical copies for each ISBN used for print books.
That’s why I opt for the free ISBN’s.
But You Aren’t the Publisher Unless You Use Your Own ISBN
I haven’t forgotten this. Yes, the ISBN code breaks down to numbers that identify the country, publisher, and book title. The first two are only included in the 13-digit number:
EAN – Bookland country code.
Group – Country identifier for national or geographic grouping of publishers. Basically, the country it’s being published in.
Publisher – You or the publisher/publishing platform.
Title – Unique number assigned to that particular edition or format of your book title.
Check digit – Exactly what it implies. It’s a check digit that validates the ISBN. An internal control verification digit in ISBN Book Land, which has no bearing on the country, publisher, title, etc.
How important is having this unique to you as a publisher? That depends on you and what you want.
This is what your buyers are going to see. It’s a series of digits catalog number. The only identifier that means anything to them is what you put in your front matter as your publisher identifier:
Interior front matter:

Back cover:

Apparently you can search the publisher name from an ISBN number here, but most people won’t know that and even fewer will care enough to bother.
Update: Results from D2D Review
Fast forward to days later…
D2D has reviewed the book upload and, as I would have been disappointed if they had not done so, rejected it because the ISBN in the front matter does not match.
The good news is that it allowed me to upload that interior file with the correct ISBN without having to pay $25 USD or be in D2D upload jail for 90 days.
I win!
Now, if you’ve thought to publish on D2D, IngramSpark, or anywhere else prior to putting up a paperback or hardcover on Amazon KDP, you’re going to run into a problem with Amazon KDP. Expect them to reject it as being already published by another publisher. Their list of approved correspondence “proof” specifically denies your own pledge of being the author and publisher and wants a third-party letter. Oops to all the self-published writers out there.
Keep writing my friends. Let’s make this world better one emotionally stirring book at a time.