In my last post, I mentioned alfageek’s blog, where Joshua, aka alfageek, generously shares his book marketing experience with his blog’s readers. Last week, he returned to KDP Select after experimenting with leaving for a while. As a number of you have asked me in the past what the benefits of KDP Select are, it occurred to me that Joshua’s experience is a perfect way of answering that question.
Why He Left
First of all, why did Joshua leave KDP Select in the first place? He cites the following reasons, all of which are perfectly valid:
- Being able to run $0.99 sales at a full 70% royalty resulted in negligible royalties.
- His Kindle Unlimited reads had dropped to zero in October 2016.
- One would expect that having the book on iBooks, Kobo, and B&N would bring new sales.
- He thought that BookBub might be more willing to feature him if he wasn’t exclusive to Amazon.
The Results
Image: dailyfinance.com
After almost three months, Joshua has decided to return to KDP Select. Here is why:
- He has not had a single sale on any store other than Amazon. This, despite publishing in iBooks, Kobo, and B&N, and investing the significant amounts of time to do so.
- Also, BookBub rejected him yet again, suggesting he uses instead BookBub Ads (you can see how that worked out here).
- He also tried to crank up the list price of his print editions in order to distribute through stores other than Amazon. Sadly, that didn’t work either: he didn’t sell a single print copy through any store other than Amazon.
My Take
When I am asked why I choose KDP Select for my books, I usually respond with one word: laziness. Or, to put more politely, a chronic lack of time. Consider that I have now published some 15 titles. Publishing them on five different outlets (including Smashwords) would require creating 75 different files. Making even a minor change would mean spending at least a day updating everything. Therefore, the return would have to be pretty significant indeed for me to be willing to invest the necessary time.
From Joshua’s experience, I think I’ve made the right choice sticking with KDP Select, even if I’m truly sympathetic to services like Smashwords and would love for them to successfully compete with Amazon (a monopoly is always a dangerous thing).
You can read Joshua’s entire post on the alfageek blog.
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I’m with you and many others Nicholas. I’ve done lots of comparison shopping with author friends over the years. What works for some doesn’t work for all. Unless we are ‘famous’ and people will clamor anywhere to find our books, why would I want to babysit files on several sites and have to promote on just as many. I barely ever seen a review for books on Smashwords or Kobo. It would be like starting all over again to build a following. I’ve concentrated my efforts for almost 4 years on Amazon, and even with their authoritarian ways, I have built a readership and reviews, so I think I’ll stay on the comfy couch. 🙂
There’s much to be said for the comfy couch 😀
Yes indeed! 🙂
Good to know. All eggs in one basket bites, but there seems to be a chicken or egg situation there too. Thanks!
So much of what we do is trial and error, isn’t it? 🙂
I used Select for my first mystery novel with poor results for about 6 months. I have 3 novels out now on Amazon, B&N, Smashwords (Smashwords includes ibooks and B&N. Kobo, and others sites too). I don’t get many sales direct on B&N but do get B&N sales through Smashwords. Perhaps Smashwords reaches a wider audience for their distribution, so I do like them. Also, I have sales on ibooks and Kobo through Smashwords. But Amazon has the most sales consistently throughout the years for my novels. I’ve had several BookBub promotions and my advice is to keep trying. Twitter and Facebook are a waste of time in my experience. People who are shopping to buy books are not shopping on Facebook or Twitter, they shop on Amazon and Goodreads.
Many thanks for sharing your experience, Paula!
Thanks for this. I’ll stick with Select. I sold one on Smashwords. I never was paid for it either as it was below the threshhold they make payments and I moved to KDP Select.
Ouch! Thanks for sharing that 🙂
Interesting post, Nicholas. Thanks for sharing the information. 🙂 — Suzanne
A pleasure! I hope you find it useful 🙂
I’m lazy too, Nicholas. It seems that laziness is the way to go 🙂 Yay!
Lol – yay for us sloths 😀
I’ve had similar results. I went wide and although it was nice to set sale prices and get better royalty rate, it didn’t amount to anything. I had zero sales on Apple or Kobo. Amazon is where 100% of my sales come from. After struggling to make an impact, I moved all our books to Select. I’m getting more people seeing our books through KU and even reading them. The bots and search engines recognize our books and market them for us. Rather than fight the beast, I’ve joined the Zon army. It’s worked well for us and we’re gaining more readers in the process. Great post, Nicholas and Joshua! 🙂
Many thanks for sharing your experience, NN 🙂
My pleasure, Nick. 🙂
I’ve never done Select as it flies in the face of my personal business ethics. This is because I’m pretentious! Phnark.
However, if I wasn’t leery enough about using a single supplier, once I’d had my income build by 50% month on month for 3 months and then stop completely, after an algo change, I kind of felt validated my view that Amazon was not the basket to put all my eggs in. Having a full 100+k novel permafree helped a lot at the start, too.
What kicked my non ammy sales off was two things. First, I started looking for promos that specialise in wide distribution and I guess I got a bit more savvy about finding them. Second, I am driving most free book downloads through instafreebie promos with other, similar authors, or through mailing swaps with other similar authors whose books I’ve read and enjoyed who distribute widely. Now that I have so many non amazon readers on my list, I can’t really publicise amazon only books any more. They get too ticked off. So I guess now I’ve gone down the wide route, I’m kind of forced into staying wide.
Since, I started the wide promo strategy bout mid 2015 my royalties from non amazon outlets has steadily risen. These days I’m getting a decent chunk from Kobo every quarter and a small but rising amount form D2D (an aggregator that puts my book on iTunes because I won’t pay their buy-an-apple-product-for-the-price-of-a-car-to-upload-your-books-direct tax).
However, to put it in perspective. I published my first ebook in 2010 and it was probably late 2014 before I saw any income on any site other than Amazon. Nowadays, Amazon is still two thirds of my income but I wouldn’t want to rely on them for anything. For example, I was doing really well with permafree downloads from them, but now that permafree are invisible everywhere, not just on Amazon, I’ve actually made my permafree book a paid book again. I’m working on some shorter books that I may make into permafrees or sell at 99c to get folks interested. I still give out free books, too, it’s just that these days, I do it through instafreebie or my own website. So yeh, I need to look at my optimisation now! 😉
Cheers
MTM
Many thanks for sharing your experience, Mary!
Thought it might be useful, I hope it is. 😉
Thanks, Nicholas. I’ve had the same experience on iBooks and Kobo… zero sales, so I don’t bother anymore.
Thanks for sharing your experience, John 🙂