Ep 98: Wide vs. Amazon Exclusive: Understanding eBook Distribution Strategies

In this episode, we explore the critical decision of whether to distribute your ebook "wide"—across multiple platforms—or stay exclusive to Amazon through their KDP Select program. 

Going wide means your ebook is available on platforms beyond Amazon, such as Kobo or Google Play, giving you access to a broader audience globally. This approach can increase visibility, particularly in countries where Kindle isn't the dominant e-reading platform.

On the other hand, exclusivity with Amazon through KDP Select offers perks like participation in Kindle Unlimited, higher royalties in certain regions, and access to exclusive promotional tools. However, this exclusivity comes with restrictions, including a 90-day lock-in period and the inability to sell your ebook elsewhere, even on your own website.

The right choice depends on your genre, goals, and audience. Romance, mystery, sci-fi, and fantasy often perform well on KDP Select due to the voracious reading habits of their audiences. However, if your readership spans multiple countries or platforms, going wide might be the better option.

Top questions tackled: 

• What does it mean to go wide or stay exclusive to Amazon for ebook distribution?
• What are the pros and cons of enrolling in Amazon's KDP Select program versus going wide?
• How should an author decide which distribution strategy is best for their genre, audience, and goals?

MENTIONED RESOURCES

Ep 90: Creating Audiobooks with Drew Linsalata 

Write the Damn Book Already is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with authors as well as updates and insights on writing craft and the publishing industry.

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Transcript

To go wide or not to go wide. That is the question we are going to tackle this week. It's a question commonly asked by independent authors, meaning those who are self published or who are published by a hybrid publishing house, perhaps by a publishing service.

And when it comes time to upload the book, the question can become, do you want to go wide or not? And authors go, "What the hell are you talking about?" So first let me clarify what going wide means. And we are talking about the ebook. That is the first point I really want to clarify for everyone. When we're talking about whether or not to go wide or be exclusive and it's typically exclusive to Amazon we're talking about the ebook. We also might be talking about the audiobook because you have a choice there as well, and i'll get to that at the end of this episode, but a lot of the pros and cons for the audiobook are the same as the pros and cons for the ebook.

So we're going to focus primarily on the ebook. What it means to go wide is actually quite simple. It means that you're selling your book at places other than Amazon. And if you do a Google search, and I know this because I did one just five minutes ago, just to kind of confirm my theory of "Should I go wide or not with my book, or is it better to go wide or be exclusive to Amazon?" you will get pages upon pages upon pages upon Reddit threads upon pages of answers, and everyone has a different opinion.

And you know what? They're all right. Because, in most cases, the opinion speaks to a specific genre, a specific author goal, a specific intention. And so, with that in mind, without the context and the nuance of "what is your goal, what is your genre, how many books have you written, etc." it's really next to impossible to determine a good or the best answer for you.

So first, I want to talk about the pros and cons of both going wide and being exclusive to Amazon. Within the Amazon ecosystem, there is a program called Kindle Unlimited. Now, it's called Kindle Unlimited if you are a reader. So you can subscribe for, I think it just went up recently, it's like 12.99 a month.

And it's essentially the Netflix app for eBooks over on Amazon. You can have checked out up to 10 books at a time. So if you have 10 and you wanna get another one, they'll make you return one, and then the author gets paid. If, in this case, if you're the author, you get paid based on pages, read of those books.

The way they determine the pages. Well, let me back up a second. So Kindle Unlimited is what it's called on the reader's side. On the author side, it's called KDP Select. Why they're two different things, I don't know, but they are. So as an author, you would choose to enroll in KDP Select if you want your book to be your e book, to be exclusively sold by Amazon.

And what's really important to know about this, above and beyond everything else, is that when they say exclusive to Amazon, they are not kidding. So not only can you not have the book available for sale on any other re ebook retailer, but you cannot sell it yourself. So you cannot sell it through your own website.

You cannot offer it as a free download. Like literally the only place a person can get your ebook, not your paperback, but your ebook is Amazon. If you are exclusive, you, if you are enrolled in KDP select and the way it works is you have a 90 day enrollment term. So when you upload your book or later, if you decide to test this out later, would you.

Absolutely. Can you do not have to enroll the first time your book is loaded to Amazon? You would select to enroll in KDP select, and then you have 90 days and there's a little check box in there somewhere where you can specify whether or not you want your book to be auto re enrolled after the 90 days, this box is important because if you forget, if you mess it up and you miss that window by an hour.

You're stuck in there for the next 90 days. So, I tend, when I did do it, and when I have tried it over the years, I have tended to make sure that I do not auto re enroll, so that I can make the decision to re enroll at the end of the 90 day window. The way that it works from a payment, Schedule is, you know, if your book is being sold on Amazon as an ebook, you earn 70 percent of the royalty within the US. 

If the book is purchased by someone in the US And then it varies in other countries. But if you're enrolled in KDP Select, your book is available for lending through the Kindle Unlimited program. If someone borrows your book, you're paid based on how many pages they read. And Amazon is pretty good about knowing, you know, there used to be this old thing, well, can I just have my kid flip through it a thousand times?

No, because Amazon now can tie your IP address and your Kindle and whatever device you're reading it on and say, oh, this person already read page 65, so we're not going to pay them again for page 65. So it's how many times they read a single page all the way through, Within the app. And now, to make life even easier, the Kindle Unlimited, the Kindle reader, is a free app that can be downloaded on any device.

So it can be downloaded on an Android, it can be downloaded to your laptop, to your iPad, to your iPhone, to wherever is the bottom line. So that has opened up the world for more people than just Kindle owners, like the actual physical Kindle. To read books on the Kindle app, which is great. The way that authors are paid is there's a global fund that is based off of how many people are actually subscribed to Kindle unlimited.

So that fund continues to grow or shrink as more and more people join the Kindle unlimited program. The challenge is that more and more authors are also joining the Kindle unlimited program or the KDP select program on that side. So back in the day, authors were making, like, a penny to maybe four cents, I don't know, per page read.

And when I say back in the day, I mean over a decade ago. But now, they're only making, like, half a cent, if not a third of a cent. I mean, it keeps, it kind of keeps going down per page read. But depending on, you know, The volume and, and we'll get into genre here in a minute, but depending on the genre of your book, it can be quite lucrative for authors in some genres and not at all lucrative for authors in other genres.

And it's important to remember that all the same caveats apply where if you're not talking about your book, if you're not out promoting your book, no one, it's, it's not a solution, right? Joining KDP select is not a solution for lackluster sales. It's potentially a way to boost. awareness of a book that's already doing well.

So the pros of being exclusive to Amazon with your ebook are higher royalties. And what I mean by that is you have additional royalties. You don't necessarily make higher royalties, although in some countries where you wouldn't get 70% royalty, If you are a KDP select enrollee, you do get 70%. So it might bump you up by a few percentage points in terms of your royalty.

If you're a KDP select and people in those countries are purchasing, purchasing the ebook, not, not renting it, not borrowing it, but purchasing it. Again, you get a little bit of an increased bump sometimes in earnings from pages read, but the amount per page read is pretty insignificant at this point, and it takes a lot of pages read for that to really make an impact.

And then there are exclusive marketing opportunities that are available to KDP select enrollees. One thing that cannot be done on Amazon is offering your book for free unless you're price matching. So if you're offering your ebook for sale. through Nook or Kobo or Google play or some other platform for free, then Amazon will price match it for free, but you can't just decide out of nowhere to offer your ebook for download for free on Amazon.

However, if you are enrolled in KDP select, you get a certain number of free days per enrollment period. So per 90 days. And the last time I was enrolled in KDP select, it was five So you can do those sequentially. You can do a Big push and have a promo for five days of free, or you can do three days here and two days there, or you can have a one day thing and have a big promo associated with it.

And that works really well. If you're just trying to get the word out, you're just trying to get a lot of downloads. It's obviously not a moneymaker. But it can be great if you're trying to get more eyes on your book, get more eyes on you, and certainly if you have a backlist. So if you're a fiction author and you have multiple books, or even just two books, and you want to offer the first book, especially if it's a series, for free, and then hope that the reader will Be compelled to purchase or borrow the second book as well.

The cons of going exclusive are it's, you've got less saturation in the market. I mean, that's, that's pretty obvious. You're only available on Amazon. And yes, Amazon is responsible for 60 plus percent of all online book sales. However, the 40 percent are coming from somewhere. So if a large majority of your readership might be somewhere other than the US., whether it's Canada, the UK, Asia, you might be missing out on sales by not being, not going wide, not being available in those markets with your ebook. And the other con in my experience is that 90 day lock in. So if you recognize after 30 days that this just is not working for you, You're still stuck in there for the next 60 days.

You cannot ask to be excused early. So those are the pros and cons when it comes to going exclusive. Going wide, on the other hand, I mean, it means you make your ebook available everywhere and anywhere ebooks are sold. So the pro to that is more saturation. You're, you're making your book available to anyone, anywhere on any platform.

And that allows you to reach other communities and other countries through other platforms. While Kindle is the most popular e reading platform in the U. S., it's not the most popular e reading platform worldwide. For a long time, Kobo was the preferred reading platform in Canada. I'm not sure if it still is, but if you were exclusive to Kindle, you would lose out on those potential Kobo readers.

If they couldn't purchase your book in ebook format, if you were exclusive to Amazon. The cons are not significant in my opinion. So one of going wide is, you've got more places to upload to. It's very easy to overcome that hurdle. You do not have to upload to every single e reader platform that exists, of which there are thousands, especially once you add in all of the e reading library platforms.

You can use a service like Draft2Digital. Or Publishdrive or Smashwords. There are tons of platforms out there that take that job off your hands by distributing wide for you, you essentially upload to one place. They push it to all the thousands of other places. They take a, an extremely small percentage of your sale and it's worth it for the amount of work it would take you to individually upload to each of those places.

And then you receive sort of a collective paycheck at the end of every month. That is a. An amalgamation of all of the royalties you've earned from all of the different e book readers. And then you'll receive a separate payment from your Amazon sales. So every month I receive one payment from Draft2Digital because that's who I use to go wide with my e book.

And then I receive another payment from Amazon for all of the e books and paperbacks and audio and et cetera that have gone through Amazon. The other, I guess it's a con, but I mean, we're going to put it in here because it could be perceived as one, is that you might, and this is of going wide, might earn less royalties because you don't have some of those preferential treatments of being exclusive to Amazon.

There is a theory, I've never heard that it's proven, Necessarily, but there is a theory that if you are within KDP Select, Amazon's algorithm favors you, favors your book. So if someone is searching for contemporary romance based in Santa Fe, a book that's enrolled in KDP Select would receive preferential treatment in the search results over an e book that isn't.

But I don't have side by side comparisons to say whether or not that works out well enough in someone's favor, uh, financially or with regard to exposure to make it, see the air quotes, worth it. So now comes the big question, well, what the heck do I do? Like, do I go wide? Do I go exclusive? What's the best thing?

And I really want to encourage you that it, it, you can change your mind. So, A few things to maybe help make the decision easier, at least upfront, going exclusive with Amazon tends to, again, there's no superlative always here, but tends to be best for the romance, mystery, sci fi, and fantasy genres. And in my mind, one of the main reasons for that is that Readers of those genres, they're like prolific, right?

They cannot stop reading, especially if it's a series. And most series are either romance, mystery, sci fi, or fantasy. So it makes sense that the authors would enroll those in KDP Select and have free days on the first one. In order to incentivize readers to either buy or borrow the second one. But sometimes what you have to do is really play around with that.

So I tried this for a bit. I pulled, I can't remember which book it was, but I pulled it out of wide. So I actually discontinued it. And it took a minute, by the way, it took 30 to maybe 45 days for the ebook to become completely unavailable on all of the other ebook platforms, because Amazon will go out and look and see if the ebook is available anywhere else.

And if it is, they will immediately pull you out of the program and they can suspend your account and all kinds of things. So you really want to make sure that the book is not any longer available on any of the other ebook platforms before you decide to experimentally enroll in KDP select. If you're doing it after the fact.

And you didn't, and you went wide to begin with, but you can track it. And I recommend doing that for three to six months. I don't recommend like a one month experiment on this because you just probably won't have enough data to know where the majority of your sales are coming from, and you want to make sure that you're not changing anything other than what you're doing.

That parameter, like you're either wide or you're not. That's the only parameter you change. Because if you all of a sudden decide to enroll in KDP select and you up your advertising and you start offering free days and you start posting a lot on social media, then you're not really comparing apples to apples.

In my experience, I didn't have enough of an uptick in Amazon sales to make it worthwhile for me to not go wide. I, I absolutely sell the majority of my books, printed and e books, through Amazon. It's always been that way. I'm imagining it likely always will be that way or for a very long time. But I do still sell books, e books, on other e book and e reader platforms.

So it makes sense for me to go wide. Also for some of my books, I have a larger community. I have readers in Europe, I have them in Australia and in Canada, and I want the books, the e books to be available there and on different devices. So that's important to me. When it comes to audiobooks, it's really the same, the same pros and cons, but now we're talking about typically ACX.

ACX is the platform that feeds your audiobook to Audible, Amazon, and iTunes. And if you go exclusive with them, they have a higher royalty amount that you earn, versus if you load to them and you load to another audiobook distributor. The one I use is Findaway Voices. And this is a fun topic for me because my good friend Drew Linsalata and I have discussed this ad nauseum.

He has three books all about anxiety. They're fantastic. So I really encourage you to check them out if that's something that you're interested in or challenged by. He's a phenomenal human being and an absolute wealth of information. And he chose to keep his audiobooks exclusive to ACX. And as an experiment, at one point, he decided to go wide.

I use a service called Findaway Voices to go wide. And that allows my book to be The reason I chose that was because I actually wanted to be available on Chirp. I don't know if you know about Chirp audiobooks, but I am completely obsessed. Every day they have a new deal, and I have 230 audiobooks sitting in my Chirp app waiting to be listened to.

It's kind of a problem. I've had to stop opening the emails because I cannot keep up. I need to catch up and then we'll start again. But I wanted my book to be available via Chirp. So I ended up going with Findaway Voices because at the time, they were one of the first services that offered distribution. 

But I tend to sell more books through the Findaway, more audiobooks, through the Findaway Voices audiobook platforms than I do through the ACX platforms. Drew has the exact opposite experience, and he ran an experiment where He stopped going exclusive to ACX, he went wide, and he almost completely halved his income for the month.

Because his royalty amount from ACX was cut in half, because he was no longer exclusive, and he lost all those sales. So it's not as though the sales translated from ACX to another platform, he just lost them. And he did not make them up via another platform. His audience is just in the ACX ecosystem.

Dumb. And so that's where he's chosen to stay. It doesn't make him right or wrong. It doesn't make me right or wrong. We just both have done the experimentation to know where we're best reaching our unique audiences. And as it turns out, my, for audio books, it's not as much Amazon as it is these other services, but for eBooks, it is very much Amazon.

That being said, I still choose to go wide with my eBook because for me, I just want it to be available everywhere. More than anything else, please don't let anyone talk you into the idea that one or the other option is right or wrong across the board because it's just not the case. And when people report that they're, that one option is right or wrong, essentially what they're saying is this is what has worked really well for me and I would never do it any other way.

So make sure you hear that because that's completely valid. You just want to make sure too that you translate that over to your genre, your goals, your audience size. The number of books you've written all of that kind of thing before just outright determining you need to switch your approach.