Narrow or wide? How to decide? #SelfPublishing #KU #Monopoly

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

 

Self-publishing offers an author a lot of freedom. You’re no longer bound to the schedule of a publisher; you can release your books whenever they’re ready, or according to a strategy related to your personal future plans. A self-published book does not need to fit neatly into genre-based pigeonholes. You can write and publish work that reflects your creativity and vision, rather than the often rigid categories that supposedly define “the market”. Furthermore, self-publishing can spare you sometimes painful fights with house editors about words, phrases or content that violate the house style rules. You, the author, are in the driver’s seat, and your book is 100% your own.

On the other hand, you become responsible for many critical decisions. What should the cover look like? What categories and keywords should you use? How should you position the book, with respect to your other work as well as the competition? What price should you set? How should you promote the book? All of a sudden you’re not just the author, but also the publishing executive and the marketing manager.

One thorny issue facing any self-publishing author at the moment is whether to go narrow or wide. Everyone knows that Amazon commands the largest share of the ebook market. “Going wide” involves publishing and selling on other platforms as well as Amazon, for instance Barnes and Noble, Kobo and Google Books. If you want to go wide, there are a variety of sites that will publish and distribute your books to a range of online vendors, including Smashwords and Draft2Digital. In return, they take a cut of the royalties (but a smaller percentage than a regular publisher). As an alternative, you can upload your book independently to different sales sites, which takes more effort but can result in somewhat higher returns as well as better control over format.

“Going narrow” means publishing exclusively on Amazon, enrolling your book in KDP Select and Kindle Unlimited (KU). You may publish and sell a print version of your book, but the ebook version must not be sold anywhere else.

KU is a subscription-based model for reading ebooks. Rather than paying for books individually, KU members pay a monthly fee (currently about $10) in order to download and read an “unlimited” number of books. (In fact, I believe there are some restrictions on how many books you can be reading concurrently, but I have not been able to find the details on the Amazon help pages.)

Since readers don’t purchase books under the KU scheme, Amazon pays authors according to the number of pages of their books that KU members read. The actual unit is called KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Pages), a quantity which is calculated based on a (secret) algorithm. Authors receive a certain amount of money per KENP; the amount is also a secret and varies over time, but is some fraction of a cent. Note, by the way, that Amazon systems must periodically access individual readers’ Kindle devices or apps in order to compute KENP.

Many authors swear by KU as a way of making more money. It does seem that KU reads do not reduce the number of outright purchases by much. KU subscribers are a different population from purchasers. On the other hand, by going narrow, an author risks losing sales from readers who prefer to buy from other sources. This includes a segment of the reading public who actively avoid Amazon for various reasons including the company’s monopolistic tendencies, their intrusiveness and their indie-author-unfriendly policies. In the interests of full disclosure, I will personally confess that I fall into that segment.

My personal experience with going narrow is very limited. I have one book, a boxed set, available in KU. Since I released that book, in February 2020, it has logged 22,217 KENP. The payment for this has been $54.22. So I’m getting about 0.0025 cents per KENP. The book is about 600 pages, so the page reads translate to roughly 37 sales. The purchase price is $4.99 and the royalty percentage is 70%, so if I’d actually sold these copies, I would have received $3.49 per copy, or $129.13.

Of course, it’s not likely I would have sold all those additional copies. As noted above, KU subscribers wouldn’t necessarily purchase the books they download as part of the program. Like all “unlimited” subscriptions, Kindle Unlimited encourages readers to take a chance on merchandise they’re not sure they want, because there’s no penalty to downloading a book but not finishing it. In addition, KU subscribers have an incentive to consume as many books as possible in order to “get their money’s worth”.

It is clear though, that Amazon itself saves money when authors go narrow. Given the current KENP formula, for a complete KU read of Vegas Babes, they only have to pay me about $1.50, which amounts to a royalty rate of 30% - rather than the 70% I get for an outright purchase.

Still, there’s a segment of the reading community that loves to see the words “Free on Kindle Unlimited” splashed across a book banner. It’s not really free, of course, but once a reader has paid the monthly fee, they will tend to forget that.

Mostly, I’ve gone wide, because I want anyone who is interested to be able to buy my book. As noted above, I personally don’t have a Kindle or buy ebooks from Amazon. I read 5-10 books per month. Knowing how important this is to authors, I try to review almost everything I read. Since I’m active on Goodreads and host a lot of authors on my blog, I frequently encounter books that sound interesting. If the book is available on Smashwords or Kobo, I’ll consider buying it. However, if it’s exclusive to Amazon, that kills the notion. Hence, my fellow authors are losing out on reviews from me because they’ve chosen to go narrow.

I don’t want my own potential readers to have the frustrating experience of wanting to acquire my books but finding that Amazon is the only source.

I know I’m not neutral on this topic. I recognize that many of my author colleagues have made a good deal of money by going narrow. It’s your decision – and it’s not irrevocable, since you have the option to remove your book from KU after ninety days.

I’d like to finish by presenting some interesting data. I just ran a contest for members of my email list. To enter, they were required to send me a message answering three questions:

1) Approximately how many books do you read per month?

2) Where do you get your books? (Amazon? Other online sites? Bookstores? Garage sales? The library?)

3) Do you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription now or are you considering one?

I received 26 entries. (I have about 300 people on my list.) They read an average of 11 books a month, with a lot of difference between readers (minimum 1, maximum 30).

The majority of respondents (16 or 62%) get books from many sources including Amazon. Other sources mentioned included BN, Kobo, Google, ARCs from authors or publishers, BookFunnel, yard sales, brick and mortar book stores, and libraries. Seven respondents (26%) mentioned only Amazon. Three people (12%) did not mention Amazon at all.

Only six people (23%) said they had or were considering a KU subscription. One or two said they really loved it, since they read so many books. One person said she was considering dropping it, because she didn’t read enough to make it worthwhile.

Finally, I got a couple of comments that, I have to admit, mirror my own feelings about Amazon. One person, in response to the third question, said: “No, I like to keep my books and hate to think they're tracking me.”

Another reader said: “No, I do not have Kindle Unlimited nor do I plan to get it because a couple of years ago Amazon banned me from leaving any type of reviews, so why should I pay to read on there?”

So: narrow or wide? It’s not a straightforward decision. By choosing to go narrow, you’re probably gaining some new readers, but you may be losing others.

I will leave you with this thought: Amazon wants you to go narrow, not only to freeze out the competition, but because they can pay you less per book than they’d have to if you went wide.

Here’s another consideration: what will happen to authors (and readers) when Amazon is the only place you can buy ebooks? Prices will go up. Royalty percentages or per-KENP payments will go down. It’s inevitable. Monopoly is never a good thing for either suppliers or consumers.

That’s enough to clinch the decision for me. Your mileage may vary.

Reader Survey Results – Part 2

This is a continuation of my previous post, sharing the results from my recent readers survey. I meant to post this last Thursday, but you know how the world can get in the way!

One aspect of the ebook revolution that really bugs me is the poor editing one sees in many books. Misspellings, grammar errors, typographic errors and incorrect word use are all too common. Poor editing can really spoil my reading experience (and lower my review rating, even for a book I enjoy). However, given the prevalence of this problem, I’d assumed that as an author, I must be more sensitive than most readers.

Not so, apparently. When I asked “Do you notice misspellings, wrong

words or other mistakes when you are reading?”, a whopping 95% said yes.

My next question was: “If you do notice these kinds of editing errors, how much do they affect your enjoyment of a book?”

Here are the answers:

A lot – it makes me really mad to read a poorly edited book

34.18 %

Somewhat – I try to ignore the errors

54.08%

Not at all – I only care about the story and the characters

11.22%

I don’t even notice editing errors.

0.51%

Clearly I’m not alone in my frustration with poor editing. I should have asked whether editing errors in one book would affect a decision to buy a second book by the same author, but alas, that didn’t occur to me.

Next I asked about purchasing decisions. Specifically, I gave respondents a list of different types of information and asked how often each one influenced their decisions to buy a book. I don’t think I structured this question very well. For almost every factor I listed, the most common response was “Sometimes”. The exceptions were “Author” and “Genre”, where “most of the time” was the most common response.

The other factors I asked about were price, recommendations from friends, reviews, excerpts, cover, blurb and book length. All these seem to have some influence, but none dominates.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this question was the large set of “Other-specify” responses I received. Here’s a selection of those responses:

Where I can buy them. For instance, I have never purchased an ebook from amazon. It's all from Are, Smashwords, B&N or direct from publisher.

Since I read most of my books from the public library, price is not a factor. However, when I find a book I love too much to live without it I will look for a good deal on it and buy it.

Availability as an ebook.

Recommendations from other authors I read

Quality of the writing

A lot of times I look at the 'if you like this book, you might like...' type things.

Interviews with authors -- one author mentioning another author

Reading the first page or part of the first chapter

Advertising - if it's promoted on social media or on the Kindle I will likely buy in. I'm vulnerable to blog posts about

books with links to Amazon :-)

Quality of writing

Sample texts are my #1 factor: if the first chapter (or even page) doesn't grab me, I won't buy or borrow the book.

Grammatical errors in the excerpt, blurb, or title

I will often choose free first books and then purchase the entire series if I like the characters or enjoy the writer's style. Then I purchase the backlist and new releases from that author.

In short, who wrote the book has a great deal of influence, but writing quality and marketing do have some effect. And yes, we authors can help one another by recommending each other's books to our committed readers.

The next set of questions I asked involved technology issues. One reason I ran this survey in the first place was to evaluate whether it would be worthwhile for me to use my tech expertise in order to create an author app. So I wanted some idea of how connected my respondents were, and how much that affected their reading and buying habits.

I won’t go through all the details, but here’s a summary of what I found out.

73% of respondents have a smart phone (about evenly split between Apple and Android)

67% have a tablet (Android dominates, but not by much)

Only 7% have ever downloaded a mobile app from an author.

Of those who downloaded an author app, 30% open it rarely and 18% have never opened it, even after downloading.

I think I’ve received a pretty clear answer. Better I should spend my time writing then programming!

I was curious about social media use. Here’s the results from asking about the most common ones.

Goodreads is almost as popular as Facebook. In the “Other” category, there were multiple mentions of Tsu and Tumblr.

83% of respondents have, at some point, friended an author on Facebook. 64% have followed an author on Twitter. (9% said they don’t use Facebook; 19% said they don’t use Twitter.) I conclude that social media are at least one way to reach some readers.

Just for fun, I asked respondents to compare their own reading habits to those of their friends. Here’s what I found.

These are definitely the readers with whom I want to connect!

My final set of questions involved readers' specific familiarity with my work, and their perceptions or attitudes toward me and my books. I won’t go into these results in depth, because they’re not really relevant to other authors, but I did find that quite a few respondents had never read anything by me.

Obviously, I’ve got my work cut out for me!

Thanks for reading. If you’d like more details about any of the data I’ve summarized here or in my previous post, feel free to get in touch.

Reader Survey Results - Part 1

My reader survey ended on Saturday, and I’ve been poring over the very interesting results. As promised, I’ll share the highlights here on my blog. It’s going to take a couple of posts, since there were more than thirty questions in the survey. Some of the results surprised me—and encouraged me.

First of all, though, I want to thank everyone who participated, and to congratulate Kelly, who won the grand prize of a $50 gift certificate. A lucky girl indeed!

I received a total of 201 responses. Of course this isn’t a random sample, since I recruited respondents from my mailing list plus asked my fellow authors (who likely have similar tastes to me, and write in similar genres) to publicize the survey. On the other hand, out of the 170 odd people who included their emails, I’d say at least a third were unfamiliar. Also, in answering my open-ended question “What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the name ‘Lisabet Sarai’?” quite a few people said, “Nothing. I’ve never heard of you before.”! So I clearly did reach some new readers.

The first two questions asked “On average how many books do you read per month?” and “On average, how many books do you buy per month?”

Here are the summary results:

Read: average 11.7, minimum 1, maximum 75

Bought: average 10, minimum 0, maximum 145

(I’ve got to figure out who is buying more than 100 books per month, and get them on my list LOL!)

In later questions, some readers indicated they only borrow books from the library or download free books, but on the other hand it seems the some people have a serious backlog of books they’ve bought but not read yet! This agrees with answers I’ve gotten on smaller and less formal surveys. Some people have told me that they’re really losing ground, with hundreds of unread books in their stack.

Good for authors, of course...

I then asked where they got most of their books. Up to three sources could be selected. Here’s a summary of the results in graphical form.

Amazon dominates, but it’s nice to see that physical bookstores are still holding their own, and both Barnes & Noble and All Romance have their fans. This question had an “other – specify option”, and I received quite a few responses, including Bookstrand, Audible, Harlequin, free books for reviews, free book offers, library sales, etc.

Publisher websites get more attention than I'd expected, more than B&N. I should probably have asked which publishers. 

I should mention that a few readers said they would never buy anything from Amazon. And in a later question about factors influencing purchase, several respondents said that where the book was available made a significant difference.

For the next question, I asked what fraction of the books they read were ebooks. For this population, e-reading clearly dominates print (though obviously some people are buying print as well, and about 8% are print-only fans).

The majority of people reading ebooks do so on dedicated devices like a Kindle or Nook, as shown in the following graph, but other mobile devices and even laptops still have some adherents.

Next I tried to get a handle on what lengths people preferred. I asked them to rate a set of lengths, from the ones they liked most (rated 1) to least (rated 5). Despite what some people have claimed about the attention span of today’s readers, longer works tend to be preferred—though every length has some adherents. Short stories are the least popular, followed by boxed sets.

Length	1	2	3	4	5
Short stories (fewer than 20 pages)	8.63%	11.68%	8.63%	23.86%	47.21%
Novellas (between 20 and 100 pages)	6.09%	15.23%	34.52%	36.55%	7.61%
Short novels (between 100 and 200 pages)	15.23%	37.56%	27.92%	13.71%	5.58%
Long novels (more than 200 pages)	61.93%	15.74%	7.61%	11.17%	3.55%
Boxed sets or collections (multiple novels per set)	8.12%	19.80%	21.32%	14.72%	36.04%

One issue that concerned me was whether my results would be skewed only toward people who read erotica or erotic romance. So I asked what percentage of the books they read fell into these categories.

The mean was 67.2 percent—so yes, erotic work is popular—but the range was huge, from a minimum of 0 to a maximum of 100. (The standard deviation, if you know what that means, was almost 30.)

My personal answer to this question would probably be about 50%, by the way.

The final set of results I’ll share in this post have to do with the importance of various factors in determining a reader’s enjoyment. I’ve read some comments by readers (especially erotic romance readers) that suggested all they really care about are the characters. Certainly, the respondents in the survey find that characters are critical as shown in the graph below.

In the past, I’ve felt quite discouraged by this. In my own work, I’m at least as concerned with providing an original premise and an engaging plot, as well as with the clarity, beauty and emotional impact of the writing itself. (I seek these as a reader, too.) However, I have worried that readers don’t really care about any of these things. Based on the results of the survey, I’m wrong.

Plot is as important as characters. More than fifty percent of respondents find that creativity or originality strongly affects their enjoyment. And a whopping seventy five percent say style is very important!

I believe that a significant subset of the respondents were authors (who obviously would respect and value writing style). Still, I have to say I’m quite relieved. When I read some of the (pardon my French) crappy writing published these days, I worry that all the effort I put into my work will have zero effect on readers.

Clearly that’s not true. Of course, this doesn’t say anything about sales...!

Anyway, that’s enough for now. I’ll continue my discussion of the results next week.