In Part 7 we talked about a lot of things you can do to promote your upcoming book launch and boost your chances of the book landing with your target audience.
But hold on for just a second longer. Don't rush! It’s time to put everything you have learned so far to use. Revise and revise your publishing and marketing strategy once again.
Do you have a well written, well edited and polished book with a genre-appropriate cover?
Do you have a an author website with information about yourself and your book?
Have you been cultivating a mailing list?
Have you been doing giveaways and getting people excited about the book launch by teasing little things and doing little giveaways?
Have you been reaching out to relevant influencers and reviewers in the genre with appropriate messages to give them free copies of your book?
Then you might be onto something.
This would, then, be a good time to let you know how much you probably have to do in terms of all the admin stuff. This part may not be as fun as writing itself or as exciting as promoting your book to people, but it’s an equally important part of being a (self-)publisher: it's the business part, and it's where I see a lot of authors failing and not understanding why they are failing.
If you intend to be self-publishing books and make a career out of it, then you better get comfortable with doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work: the kind of work your readers won’t know, won’t see and likely won’t appreciate. Writing is only half the job, publishing (with everything that goes into it) is the other half.
Still, admin work is absolutely detrimental to taking the right approach to publishing, and there are a lot of pitfalls, so make sure you don’t fall for any of them.
The big question a lot of self-published authors face early on is: do they go ‘wide’ or ‘Amazon-exclusive’? I wish there was an easy answer to this, but there are very successful people making it big without relying heavily on Amazon, but there are others that take 90% of their royalties from it.
Wide vs Amazon-exclusive
Amazon is the largest online book retailer and it’s not even close. When people go on Amazon.com to buy books, they are already predisposed to buy books and browse. The last time I checked, Amazon made up about 75% to 85% of all ebook sales globally. Other alternatives like Apple Books, Kobo and Google Play, etc, only make up the remaining 15-25% combined.
And self-publishers love ebooks because we get paid without having to hold any physical stock of our books. We’re literally just selling digital copies of the books in epub format and selling them online. It can be a really profitable business for those doing it right. And, of course, it’s hard to sell ebooks if you’re not on Amazon. Why wouldn’t you want to be? I suppose some people don’t like Amazon’s business practices, or they don’t like Jeff Bezos, but the truth is, it’s very hard to be a successful self-publisher without Amazon.
You can do it, but then get ready to print out copies of your own books and drive across the country from convention to convention selling physical books every weekend. I know people who make it work like that out of principle and their books aren’t even on Amazon, but that involves a lot of up-front costs and risk. What if you go to conventions, pay for the books printed, fuel, hotel and a table at the Con but then nobody shows up or the footfall at the convention was bad in general? It can be financially disastrous, and probably not the priority of a debut author, especially if weekends are the only time you have to write.
If that is how you want to go about self-publishing, great. I’m planning to diversify my sales by doing some of this too, but I certainly won’t be relying on it solely. That said, going forward, I’m going to be assuming you have nothing personal against Amazon and would be happy to have your books listed there and for sale.
So, going ‘wide’ means your book is available on Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play, among other websites, while Going ‘Amazon-exclusive’ is pretty self-explanatory: your ebooks are solely found on Amazon, not anywhere else.
The benefits of having your book found on all websites are obvious: more platforms, more sales... right? Hold that thought...
Why would, then, people consider leaving their books exclusive on Amazon? Well, because of something called “Kindle Unlimited”. If you don’t know what it is, Kindle Unlimited is a subscription service where readers pay and they can borrow a number of books per month for free, as long as these books are available on Kindle Unlimited. And for authors who decide to go ‘Amazon exclusive’, they aren’t allowed to publish their ebooks anywhere else, but they benefit from when Kindle Unlimited readers read pages of your book.
Now the question is: do your royalties from Kindle Unlimited make up for what you would get from Kobo, Apple, etc? For a lot of authots, the answer is yes. For many others, it’s a resounding ‘No way’. This depends a lot on what market you think is the biggest for your book. For example, Kobo is big in Canada, but super small in the US, so if you’re planning to sell mostly to the US market, you might want to go ‘Amazon Exclusive’. If you don’t want to rely too much on Amazon and would prefer to diversify your sources of revenue, then going ‘wide’ is probably the best option.
Of course, going ‘wide’ also comes with a lot of nuisance: imagine having to upload your book to all those different platforms, managing all the royalty payments coming from different websites, etc. If you go with ‘Amazon exclusive’, all your ebook payments come from one single website: Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).
The good news is that decisions aren’t irreversible, so if you go one route, you can always switch it up and try the next one later. I’ve personally been ‘Amazon exclusive’ since I first self-published and I’m not planning to switch anytime soon, since Kindle Unlimited makes up about 75% of my typical monthly income from KDP, and I really don’t think I’d make that money from all the other platforms combined.
So yeah, just give it a go, and see what works best for you. As I mentioned, this decision won’t make or break your publishing career. If I had to choose between the two, I’d say... go with ‘Amazon exclusive’. It’s going to be overwhelming enough already without you having to keep track of all these different websites. And plus, going ‘Amazon exclusive’ gives Amazon a reason to promote your book in their newsletters to clients based on taste, or in the algorithm, since they are trying to grow their subscription service, and they'll reward you indirectly for your loyalty, in a way. If you don’t like it, you can always switch it up.
Ah, and another thing... this is all just for ebooks. Physical books is another story as well. But we can talk about that later on.
(Continues in part 9)
