Bookshop.org, Draft2Digital to Make Self-Published Ebooks Available Through Indie Bookstores

In a potentially significant development for the rapidly growing self-publishing sector, online bookselling platform Bookshop.org has announced a partnership with leading self-publishing platform Draft2Digital that will empower indie bookstores to sell self-published ebooks.

With the partnership, “hundreds of thousands” of self-published titles from Draft2Digital will be available for sale via Bookshop.org’s nascent ebook platform, which launched in the U.S. a little over a year ago, in January 2025, and in the U.K. in October.

Draft2Digital’s catalog includes more than one million titles, including bestselling authors Jan Moran, Piper Lawson, Kristen Ashley, Juliette N. Banks, among others. The program will launch with as many as 100,000 ebooks available upon launch and is expected to expand significantly and quickly in the coming weeks and months as indie authors and publishers opt into the program—with 100% of Bookshop’s ebook profit passing directly to the affiliated indie bookstore making the sale. When an ebook purchase is made on the Bookshop.org platform without selecting an indie bookstore, the profits are shared among all participating bookstores.

In a statement, Andy Hunter, Founder & CEO of Bookshop.org, called the Draft2Digital partnership a “watershed moment” for authors and booksellers. “Partnering with Draft2Digital means self-published authors, an essential and rapidly growing part of the publishing landscape, can now work with indie bookstores, and they can support each other,” Hunter said.

The partnership comes as self-published ebooks—fueled by social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram—have become an increasingly popular and commercially successful sector of the book business.

“All the major ebook retailers carry indie titles, because they sell,” said Kris Austin, CEO of Draft2Digital, in a release. “This partnership with Bookshop.org ensures independent bookstores can now participate in that success by enabling self-published ebooks to become a meaningful and permanent part of their inventory.”

Empowering Indies

Both Hunter and Austin said the partnership has been a long time in the making. “We’ve been talking about this for 18 months, even before bookshop launched our ebook platform,” Bookshop founder and CEO Andy Hunter told Publishing Perspectives. “It’s always been a priority, but it took a lot of work to get to the point that we could support all the authors and all those titles successfully. We needed to be able to handle a very large feed with a ton of data. We wanted to make sure that if we were going to bring hundreds of thousands of indie authors onto the platform, that it was rock solid. And we feel like our platform is really there now.”

But can indie bookstores really succeed in selling ebooks? Can digital sales be a meaningful part of indie bookstore sales? Hunter believes so—and says the first year of Bookshop’s ebook platform for indies has been encouraging, with ebooks making up 5% of Bookshop sales in 2025.

“I think that’s great, because, if you look at Amazon, I think they’re around 11% and they’ve been dominating the ebook market pretty much forever. So, the fact that we’ve been able to get to 5% in a year is amazing. We sent about $6 million in 2024 to local bookstores, and last year we sent $9.5 million dollars to local bookstores, and some of that was the clearly the ebook effect. You know, the average independent bookstore’s profit margin at the end of the day—for the ones that are profitable—is around 2% for the year. So if an indie can get 5% ebook sales, that can help really their profits.”

Perhaps more to the point, Hunter stressed, is that indies must be in the game. Ebooks—including self-published books—are now a significant part of the marketplace that can’t simply be ceded to Amazon.

“It’s about making sure that indies have everything,” Hunter said. “The great thing about ebooks is that they are always available. And that makes a big difference in conversions and retaining customers. In print, indies have always had to compete with Amazon on breadth and depth of inventory, but now that we have ebooks, and independent authors, we really can.”

Hunter also points out that, unlike in the print marketplace, where Amazon can often underprice indie bookstores, digital prices are uniform across platforms. “With ebooks, it’s the same price and it gets to you immediately. So there’s two huge competitive advantages Amazon doesn’t have with ebooks.”

Furthermore, Hunter believes that indie bookstores actually have the potential to thrive in the digital marketplace. “The great thing about independent bookstores is that they’re completely iconoclastic. There are romance bookstores and horror bookstores and science fiction bookstores. And they all have really passionate human curation. So, you’re not going to get the homogenization and commercialization of culture and art that occurs when you are going with one megaretailer like Amazon,” Hunter says. “So this has the potential to really radically diversify the bookselling market, now that indie ebooks can be sold through all these independent retailers.”

Austin agrees. “Indie authors are so quick to respond to the market, and they’re very business savvy these days. And they really create a lot of popular books very rapidly across a lot of genres. You can see how Indie authors took over romance in such a major way in the early days of self-publishing, and now you’re seeing that too in horror, and fantasy,” he says. “There a lot of new authors for whom self-publishing is their first choice now. I think people are wanting something different. They’re wanting a different experience than going always to Amazon. They’re wanting something a bit more personal and local.”

Patience

Hunter and Austin also both point to a sort of natural alliance between independent authors and independent bookstores.

“There’s something about these groups, they really have a passion for what they’re doing. They have a passion for helping each other. Indie authors help each other. Indie bookstores help each other. And there’s a culture that can lift each other up to help make a more diversified industry, and move it away from the one single player who seems to be dominating it,” Austin says.

“Independent bookstores and independent authors, there should be a natural affinity,” Hunter adds. “They both have this kind of outsider status, and yet they’re doing so much for culture, and they’re doing so much to promote books. And now they can finally work together freely in a way that wasn’t really possible before.”

Meanwhile, Hunter and Austin both acknowledge that getting there will require time. Indie booksellers need time to get used to selling ebooks, and consumers may need time to understand that they can now find and purchase ebooks, both traditionally published and self-published, through their favorite indie.

“I do think patience is going to be required in this whole process. It takes a long time for an industry to shift, and I think that we need to have a long view,” Austin says.

“It’s not the kind of thing that’s going to change overnight,” Hunter agreed, adding that he views “this whole ebook project” as more of a five-year plan.

“But within five years, I think that we can truly have a competitive platform with Amazon, that has really diversified the market for ebooks and taken some of the eggs out of that one basket that everybody’s eggs are in at the moment.”

A version of this story was first published in the Publishing Perspectives.