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.
