As a self-publishing author, you will need to make many decisions about the publishing processes as you go along. Having this sort of freedom to choose your own path is one of the many advantages of being self-published; however, it can also be difficult to make these decisions, especially if you don’t have any connections or mentors in the publishing world.
In this blog post, we will be considering one of those decisions – whether to remain exclusive to one platform (such as Amazon), with the benefits this brings, or whether to go wide and sell across any platform you like. This blog post will consider the benefits of exclusivity, with another one to follow on the advantages of multiple platforms.
Higher Royalties
Let’s start with one of the more obvious ones – higher royalties. If you stay with just one platform, you may well get a better cut of the profits than you would if just sold your book without signing up for an exclusivity deal. How much extra you get will depend on what the platform offers, so this may affect your decision.
Higher royalties mean that you get more money per sale, so there should be more to invest in your book, marketing, or paying yourself. It can also help you to reach your goals quicker, if one of these is to reach a certain amount of profit. However, being exclusive may also mean that you have fewer readers, as you don’t have ones from other platforms. This can mean that you actually earn less money, despite the higher royalties.
Promotional Tools
Your selling platform may offer additional promotional tools to help your book attract readers. For example, Amazon’s KDP Select scheme offers two: Kindle Countdown Deals and Free Book Promotion. Kindle Countdown Deals allow you to offer your book at a discounted price for a limited time. This can attract new readers that might not have bought it at full price, as well as getting it featured on the page for Countdown Deals, meaning that new readers can see it.
The other tool KDP Select gives you is Free Book Promotion. This allows you to offer your book for free, worldwide, for a set amount of time. The benefits of this are much the same as for the Kindle Countdown Deals – you can increase your audience and get some additional marketing this way. Amazon has separate lists for free and paid books, so you will be able to increase your ranking in the free list, getting more potential readers to notice your book. However, do remember that your book will revert to the paid lists once you take off the promotion and you will lose your ranking.
In addition, using KDP Select means that you can get your book into the Kindle Online Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited. These can help attract new readers to your books, as they can read them for free (on subscription). This again helps to build your audience – readers may tell their friends, or join your mailing list, or simply look out for your next book.
Also, you are still paid royalties for books read through these services. You will receive these per pages read, from a monthly fund which is divided between all authors publishing through these methods. It may not be a considerable amount per month, especially if you only have one book available, but you can still offer your book for sale at the same time, meaning you have multiple sources of income from Amazon.
Greater Discoverability
Another advantage of being exclusive is that it is easier to focus on your discoverability with just one site. Selling across multiple platforms means that you have a greater range of potential readers, but unless you are already a well-known author, it is hard to market to all of these at the same time. Each platform will have different systems in place for organising search results and suggestions, so mastering every one of these is difficult.
You will likely have more success if you just pick one and use any promotional tools offered in exchange for exclusivity. You can then focus on rising in the ranks on this platform, making your book as visible as possible.
Easier
Furthermore, only working with one selling platform means that you only have one format that you need to work with to have your book ready to upload. It also means that you only have one version to maintain if you need to make any corrections or updates.
Wrapping Up
I hope that this helps you to decide whether to stay exclusive or not! In my next blog post, we will be looking at some of the advantages of selling on multiple platforms, so come back in two weeks for that.
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