For authors, there are two options for publishing your ebooks – ‘exclusive’ with a platform like Amazon (known as Kindle Unlimited or KU) or ‘wide’. This means publishing across all platforms – including Kobo, Apple and Google Play, among others.
Publishing a paperback is slightly different, as you can make these available across all platforms with no exclusivity.
KU works by subscription – readers pay a flat fee per month and can download up to 20 books a month. They can get more, but have to return some first, like a library. This is great exposure and might make people more likely to pick up an unknown author, as they’re not paying for the individual book. However, this comes with a cost for writers because you can’t make your ebook available anywhere apart from Amazon. Payment is a slightly complicated formula as you get paid per page read from a pot of money raised by all pages read across KU. It can be a good moneymaker and that’s where I started out.
But my dream had always been to get into libraries, something you can’t do if you’re in KU. So, in 2020, I decided to ‘go wide’. This meant stepping away from KU and uploading to a whole range of other platforms, including those I mentioned above. Fortunately, there are some excellent aggregators out there – I use Draft2Digital – that help you reach some much smaller retailers.
There are a lot of challenges to publishing wide. For example, if you’re exclusive with Amazon KDP Select – part of KU – they offer some free promotions. If you want to run promotions wide, especially making your book free, you have to make the changes across all platforms and then ask Amazon to price match. Getting traction on non-Amazon platforms can be difficult. In fact, I’ve still not mastered that skill apart from Kobo Plus, their alternative to KU. Promotions to the Kobo Plus platform have been really successful and brought in some income. Not as much as I’d like, but it’s improving year-on-year, which is a start.
But back to my dream. Libraries don’t buy from Amazon, they have their own sources. Once my books were ‘wide’, I approached my local library, and they agreed to stock the ebooks. Finding that the paperback was also in there came as a lovely surprise. It used to be a habit of mine whenever I was in a library or bookshop to have a look at the M section in crime fiction. “That’s where my book will go,” I’d say to myself. Imagine my delight when I did that one day and found the book on the shelf! I’m sure I looked mad standing there taking a picture, but I couldn’t help myself. I make a little bit of money from libraries – writers get paid a small amount whenever someone takes out their book – but it’s really more of the satisfaction of seeing it there that makes it worthwhile.
Going wide was a tough business decision. Getting your books in front of readers through subscription, particularly when you’re a newbie, is a bit of a no-brainer. It’s tough to get people to part with their hard-earned cash to buy the book, so a subscription service is great. Building an audience across wide platforms is much harder and is a much longer game.
But the benefit of having your books available to more people (particularly when people are boycotting Amazon) far outweighs the drawbacks. I wouldn’t return to exclusive now. For me, that would be a terrible business decision. So, I’ll continue to be wide and get my books out to the widest audience I can.
Check out your favourite platform and see if you can find me!