Скачать или смотреть Why I went from wide to Amazon exclusive | AuthorTube | Self-Publishing

When it comes to self-publishing, there are two main routes to consider: being Amazon exclusive or going wide. Authors will usually go from exclusive to wide, but I kind of did the opposite. Why?

Before entering into the details of my decision, a little bit of context.

Being Amazon exclusive means… being exclusive to Amazon. Duh. It means you usually enrol in KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited, which require you to not have your ebook available anywhere else. It doesn’t mean you can’t have your paperback, hardback and audiobook elsewhere though, but authors who go exclusive with Amazon usually won’t have their printed or audio books on other retailers' platforms. The reason behind it is… it makes things simpler.

Going wide is the opposite. It is having your book listed on many retailers’ platforms. Not only on Amazon, which is still the king of books selling, but also on Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books, etc etc. You can sell directly with those platforms or you can use an aggregator like Draft2Digital just to name one.

And that’s what I initially did when I released The Londoners: I went wide. I had listed my book directly with Amazon, and used Draft2Digital to list it with other vendors.

Being wide means you’ve got to advertise that your book is available on multiple platforms. I did advertise it. But do you know how many sales I got on other platforms compared to Amazon?

Let’s have a quick look:

From March to December 2021, I sold 78 books on Amazon and… 1 through Draft2Digital. Knowing Draf2Digital don’t pay you unless you reach a $20 threshold, it simply means I haven’t been paid for that one sale. And as Amazon doesn’t have any threshold — I’ve once been paid 0.01 euros… — I do get paid for every single sale I make on the platform.

Those are the data from The Londoners sales, so my own data. It doesn’t mean you will get the same results. I know I didn’t do my best to advertise on other retailers, and honestly I didn’t have the time to do it properly. So I decided the best solution for me would be to pull The Londoners out from other retailers and enrol it with KDP select and Kindle Unlimited.

Some genres, like romance, are doing better than others on Kindle Unlimited. This Amazon program pays you per page read, and you need to have a serious amount of pages read for it to be worth it.

The Londoners is a travel memoir, so not the typical book that does great on Kindle Unlimited. However, since January 2022 and at the time of recording this video (so August 2022), I have 1,609 pages read, so I earned 5.75 euros. Compared to the 46 cents I made through Draft2Digital, that’s way better already.

I don’t say that being exclusive to Amazon is the way to go. Don’t forget that I went wide originally because I don’t like having all my eggs in the same basket. But as I could just not allocate the proper time to advertise my book on other platforms, I knew pulling it out and enrolling it to Kindle Unlimited would simply work better for me.

At this stage of my author career anyway. I plan on going wide again when I’ll have more books under my belt and that I know for sure that people are waiting for them outside of Amazon.

#AmazonExclusive #AuthorTube #GoingWide

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