Going Wide with your ebook
I’ve long held the belief that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, and you should go wide with your ebooks. This means creating as many direct relationships as possible with ebook retailers:
I’ve always recommended going direct with Amazon KDP, no matter what the rest of your distribution plan looks like. Some authors prefer to go direct with all these retailers, and others cherry-pick the easy ones (KDP, B&N and Kobo), and reach other retailers, distributors and library services through an ebook aggregator like Draft2Digital, PublishDrive, or Smashwords.
I felt so strongly about this going wide approach that I wrote an in-depth book about creating an ebook and paperback distribution strategy for your travel guides.
It took months and months to research and write, and then go back and validate the prices and facts before sending to the proofreader. To give you an idea of the size and scope of that writing project, the other two books in my How to Write and Self-Publish a Travel Guide are around 165 pages each (Write your Book, and Plan your Book), but my Publish your Book comes in at a whopping 390 – more than twice the size.
Enrolling my travel guide in KDP Select
This year I’ve been juggling writing and publishing two different books.
As well as finishing off and publishing my Write your Book (#2 in the series), I also completely revamped my Bodrum Peninsula Travel Guide for 2019. As I was short on time, I decided to get my travel guide onto Amazon asap and enroll it into KDP Select for 90 days to see whether the page read income I received from Amazon would make me rethink my ebook distribution strategy.
Based on the Kindle Unlimited (KU) and Kindle Owners Lending Library (KOLL) royalties I’ve been receiving over the past three months, it makes financial sense to re-enroll my travel guide into KDP Select for another 90 days.
The income generated from going exclusive with Amazon for this travel guide, far outweighs the accumulated income I received from other retailers and aggregators combined, over a 12-month period.
But I’m going one-step further…
Removing my ebook from other retailers
I’ve just logged into my retailer and aggregator accounts and reset my book’s status:
- In Draft2Digital I delisted my books
- In GooglePlay I deactivated my books
- In Barnes & Noble Press I have removed my book from sale
- In Kobo Writing Life I delisted my books
- In Smashwords I unpublished my books
The process of going from wide to exclusive distribution was a bit of an anticlimax. It was incredibly easy to remove my book listings from all of my accounts. The only minor hiccup I had was with Kobo. I couldn’t delist my book until I removed it from their subscription program, but that was just one extra key click.
It took my precious hours to set up all my books across my distribution network, and within minutes, they have all be taken down. Of course it can take a few weeks for my book to be removed from downstream distributions services, so I’m going to wait a couple of weeks until I enroll all of these books into Amazon’s KDP Select.
Besides my travel guides, I write nonfiction books, and I’m going to do a 90 day experiment to see how much additional income I can generate by going exclusive with Amazon. I’m anticipating that my page read royalties will outnumber my projected retailer and aggregator royalties, so that I can retain a simple ebook distribution model going forward.
The benefits of exclusivity
I spend hours each year maintaining my books across multiple platforms. Each time information changes, I have to update each of my listings. This wouldn’t be such a chore for a fiction book, but nonfiction books need more maintenance, especially when they include information with a limited shelf-life—like travel guides.
2020 is my year to focus on creating online courses. I have a wealth of content that is ideal for creating courses for travel writers and travel bloggers, so going exclusive with Amazon will not only increase my royalty income (fingers crossed), it’ll also free up my time to focus on content creation rather than content maintenance.
I’ll let you know how the experiment unfolds.
Fly in the ointment
Of course, now this means I have to rewrite Book 3 in my How to write and self-publish a travel guide series. It goes into great depth about all of the different retailers and aggregators, and as my first 90 days has shown that my travel guide earns more royalties in KDP Select, I need to update my book to just focus on going direct with Amazon. But…
All that research and hard work creating this book isn’t going to go to waste. I’m planning on cutting out all of the going-wide ebook content from Book 3, and using it to create a new book about publishing your nonfiction ebook. I’ll leave in all the content about going direct with Amazon, and the information related to publishing a paperback. Just because you’re going exclusive with your ebook, doesn’t mean you have to go exclusive with your paperback too.
Watch this space for updates about my KDP select experiment for my nonfiction books.
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Hey Jay,
This was comforting to read. I love going wide in theory, but there’s something nice about having the option on Amazon to revise my book files, especially for mini educational books that I want to produce quickly.
I have an indie author community and would love to chat about having you join us for a speaking session. If that’s something you’re interested, I’ve provided a link with more details below. Cheers!