Or: why I went from KDP exclusive to wide and now back to KDP exclusive.
Some definitions first:
- Exclusive: Only publishing on KDP which is Amazon’s book platform.
- Wide: Publishing on a variety of storefronts like Itch.io, Kobo, Google Play Books.
Hello!! Once upon a time, when I first published Succubus 1, Slime 1, and Harpy 1, I enrolled them into KDP Select.
If you’re not familiar with KDP Select, it’s an option authors can pick for their digital books when publishing on Amazon with the following important caveats:
- You can only sell your book digitally on Amazon.
- People can read your book without directly paying with a Kindle Unlimited subscription. You get paid a fraction of a penny per page, which is around 250 words.
- You’re locked into the program for 90 days at a time.
This helps your book get better reach because you get the KU audience, better rankings because these KU reads also count toward it, and if your books are long enough, you can make good money.
I did this at the time because it seemed the easiest and that’s what authors online suggested—manage just one storefront and get some benefits out of it. Effectively, I was checking a box for “I want more people to read my book”.
Then, around three years ago, after lots of deliberation, I decided to move Slime Girl With Benefits and Harpy With Benefits from KDP Select to other storefronts. This is commonly referred to as “going wide”.
In addition to Amazon, I had my ebooks on Draft2Digital (Apple Books and Smashwords are the noteworthy platforms this gave me), Kobo, Google Play Books, and Itch.io.
So, why did I decide to go wide? My logic was fairly simple:
- People wanted to buy my books DRM-free, and at the time Amazon didn’t have it as an option.
- More platforms means more soft advertising and reach.
- The ruthless entrepreneur in me felt KU might cannibalize book sales, leading to lower profits.
- If you can buy all 3 of my books for $9, but KU is $10 a month, you may considering getting KU to read my books instead, and I get way less money from that.
- You might be subscribed to KU already and feel not inclined to buy my books.
- Succubus 1 stayed in KU so it’d still be there as a ‘free’ sample.
After three years, I’ve found, like most things in life, it’s not as simple:
- Amazon, for better or worse, is the bookstore people use. In total, from the non-Amazon storefronts, I’ve made less than $100.
- Other storefronts have a scuffed reader experience because my first book, Succubus 1, isn’t there. So you can buy books 2 and 3, but not the first, which feels really bad.
- Succubus 1 is also arguably my most wide-appealing and popular book, and it’s stuck on Amazon.
- This will feel especially bad when Succubus 2 comes out, which is my most extensive book yet. If I keep that on Amazon, which I should because Succubus 1 is stuck on there, it feels like most my catalog is going to be on Amazon anyway.
- Draft2Digital, my main reason for going wide, is charging a $12 yearly fee if you make below $100 yearly. I make below $100 yearly. Enshittification.
- It takes a lot of effort when I publish a new book to update so many store listings and monitor them.
Is making a lot of money from writing books the most important thing in the world to me? No, but what I do care about is that people read it, and book sales and profits is how I measure whether I’ve created a quality product people like.
So basically, after three years of going wide, I’ve concluded I should put my efforts toward the platform where most my sales happen, because the rest is not worth my time. That means sticking on Amazon and remaining exclusive.
I could put paperbacks on other websites, but that still loops back to whether that’ll actually create meaningful sales for the extra time I have to spend setting that up.
I will miss Itch.io though. Great platform and UI. I won’t miss any of the other platforms which seem to have not updated anything for the modern era. Amazon included but they have the customer base to make up for it.
In more interesting news, Succubus With Benefits 2 is in the beta reader phase. After self-reviewing it, it clocks in at around 50K words, which is pretty crazy. I’ve never written anything so long before.
I hope you’ll enjoy reading it when it comes out, it’s had quite the writing journey. I remember when it was only 20K words.
The version back then and the version now are so different. I’m deliberating whether I should release the old version as a freebie or not so you can see how much the plot has shifted and expanded.
Until next time,
Cithrel