Bookshop, the online bookstore that offers a virtuous alternative to shopping at Amazon, started selling ebooks in January 2025. As with print, every ebook sale through Bookshop benefits the independent bookstore community, with affiliated bookstores earning 30 percent of the list price of any ebook—the full profit margin offered by the publisher.
Today, Bookshop announced a partnership with leading ebook distributor Draft2Digital, giving self-published authors easy access to a retailer that’s become increasingly popular with those who don’t wish to give Amazon their business. But when I first became aware of the partnership, I didn’t immediately see a natural fit. To broadly generalize, I consider Bookshop’s audience as more literary and upmarket, more devoted to print, and willing to pay high prices. Draft2Digital, meanwhile, is more populated by authors writing commercial fiction, more devoted to digital sales, and who often compete on price. It’s certainly welcome for authors to have another place to sell (and in fact I offered a quote for their press release, saying bookstores and libraries shouldn’t ignore self-publishing titles—they’ve become essential inventory), but I had to wonder: Is this a bigger development than meets the eye? So last week I spoke with Bookshop founder and CEO Andy Hunter and Draft2Digital CEO Kris Austin for their perspective on this partnership and its importance to their communities.
Bookshop has been making a concerted effort to reach out to mainstream readers and diversify their audience, says Hunter. “We were looking at our sales in 2022, and at the time, Colleen Hoover had nine out of the 10 bestselling slots on Amazon. [Yet] Colleen Hoover was selling almost no books on Bookshop.org. On one hand, that’s exciting because it means that we really are an alternative, and we’re outside of the mainstream, and we’re featuring all kinds of different voices, and that’s great. But on the other hand, that means that there’s so many readers that aren’t shopping at Bookshop.org that should be supporting their local bookstores. And so we’ve got to move to the middle, and we’ve got to get them—not just romance readers, but also parents and people who shop for kids’ books.”
Hunter says their efforts to diversify have paid off. Kids’ books have become one of their top two categories every month, and romance is growing fast. “Heated Rivalry has been insane on Bookshop. Now our bestseller list is like eight Heated Rivalry books.” Hunter says the books that will come to Bookshop through the Draft2Digital partnership will help feed those readers, plus the partnership will open doors for them to do more with ebooks. “We think we can hit so many more customers,” Hunter says. “We think it can be 10 times the size that it is now, and this partnership is a really important step to getting there.”
Ebooks purchased at Bookshop are accessible through any browser or the free Bookshop app for Apple iOS or Android. They can also be sideloaded onto Kindle, among other devices, but often that’s not possible because of DRM protections placed by publishers. Authors have generally been less likely to use DRM because it’s considered reader unfriendly. Hunter says, “If there’s been one complaint on places like Reddit about Bookshop’s offering, it’s that we don’t have enough DRM-free books, and there are still a lot of readers that don’t understand that it’s the publishers that make that decision, not Bookshop, and that it’s not Bookshop’s decision that you can’t read one of our ebooks on your Kindle, for example. We would love it if you could. … This [partnership] is going to vastly expand the catalog of DRM-free titles available to our readers, so we’re really excited about that piece of it, too.”
Another strong factor at play: growing customer avoidance of Amazon. Increasingly, I see readers pushing back against authors who are exclusive to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited (meaning authors cannot sell such ebooks at other retailers); this has long been a favored strategy among romance authors in particular. While I haven’t seen any studies about the size of this anti-Amazon group, I find them among the most vocal. And on the flip side, indie authors who are anti-Amazon want to send their readers and fans to one place to buy all formats, plus their readers may be ebook readers first and foremost. (Bookshop already sells print editions for self-published authors, assuming their distribution ultimately involves Ingram.)
“Over the last 14 years that I’ve been doing this, there’s always been this kind of love-hate relationship with Amazon when it comes to indie authors,” Austin says. “Authors realize they have too many of their eggs in that Amazon basket. And they really notice it when Amazon starts tweaking algorithms or changing their content policies.”
Moreover, Hunter says, the current political moment has bolstered Bookshop’s business and appeal for anyone who’s grown disillusioned with the behavior of Big Tech CEOs and founders. “I saw a big increase last year around this time—that was around the inauguration and when Jeff Bezos was there at the inauguration. We’re seeing a similar spike right now because of ICE activity and the fact that Amazon provides technology and support for that program, and also they’re the biggest donor to Trump’s ballroom. There’s a lot of things like that.”
And, last but not least, independent bookstores want to sell indie books. Austin says as they considered this partnership with Bookshop—which has more than 2,800 affiliate bookstores in the US and 630 in the UK—they talked to booksellers and studied what they’re looking for. “It was pretty universal that they wanted access to this mainstream indie content [because] their readers want it.” Many stores lack physical shelf space to stock everything they want, but in the world of ebooks, there is no such limitation. They can have thousands of ebooks from indie authors available to their customers. “I think they’ll realize how much of a game changer it is over time,” Hunter said. Some of the first ebooks to be made available to Bookshop through Draft2Digital are from bestseller Brandon Sanderson (browse).
I spoke with one bookseller—Donovan Scherer at Studio Moonfall in Kenosha, Wisconsin—who focuses on stocking indie authors. He sells books at Author Nation in Las Vegas every year and collaborates with indie authors on marketing, promoting, and selling in his Wisconsin store and online. While his customers prioritize shopping for print and sometimes audio (he partners with Libro.fm for that), he says Bookshop can now serve as a one-stop shop for both print and ebook, which will “help me a lot in promoting authors I can’t fit in the store, and for later books in a series, it’s super helpful.”
Bottom line: Hunter says, “There should be a natural affinity between indie authors and indie bookstores. Beyond just the fact that they both have indie in their name, they are all individual, passionate advocates for creativity and the importance of books and doing it themselves, taking it upon themselves to make an impact in our culture around books. They should be supporting each other more. And this is one step to building that bridge and making sure that natural affinity becomes a direct working relationship that helps sustain both communities.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
