Alec Peche's Blog - Posts Tagged "exclusivity"
Decision time - Amazon exclusivity and pre-orders
My next book 'A Taxing Death' is scheduled for publication on May 26, 2015. By the end of the week, I'll need to make the decision on whether to enroll in KDP and adhere to Amazon exclusivity for 90 days.
Amazon added its pre-order feature last summer for indie authors. At that time I had done a pre-order with Smashwords for my June release of 'Chocolate Diamonds', and it added the tiniest bump in sales. For book three, I saw a very nice bump in sales last September and October with my late September release of 'A Break Death'. It meant that 'A Break Death' was only be available for purchase at Amazon for the first 90 days of publication. I did the same with book four,' Death On A Green' published in January of 2015. Unless I see something to change my mind in the next two weeks, for book five, 'A Taxing Death', I'm leaning towards using Smashwords for pre-orders as that will reach iTunes and Barnes & Noble. My reasoning is that the people that plan to buy it on Amazon will do so anyway, and I am hurting my sales by remaining exclusive to Amazon. I also dislike the lack of flexibility in pricing on Amazon. As a KDP client if you want to do a 24 hour sale of your book, you're only allowed one of those in the U.S. market and one in the U.K. market over the 90 day enrollment period. KDP does allow sales of longer than twenty-four hours, but they only allow one sale regardless of the length of time of that sale. This makes marketing efforts on a newly released book limited to those guidelines.
As a KDP author, your book is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited (KU). KU gives the reader an unlimited ability to download books once the monthly fee is paid. Like many indie authors, I suspect that KU has hurt my sales for the long term. Over the life of my two exclusivity periods the sales to KU users has not made up for the loss of sales to iTunes, B&N, and Kobe. Furthermore, Amazon has so whittled down the royalty payment for their KU books that my royalty payment for those sales is around $1.4 rather than the $2.8-$3.2 royalty for the $3.99 purchase price. I simply don't get the exposure and volume to make up for exclusive to Amazon and low KU payments.
Kindle Unlimited has likely been a boon (I don't know Amazon's ROI on this program) to Amazon and certainly it has been a boon to readers. Readers that perhaps budgeted $25/month for books can now get all the ebooks they want for $9.99 - more books then they could possibly read each month. However, many bestselling authors - Lee Child, David Baldacci, and JD Robb do not have their books in KU and I always watch what the famous authors do to understand publishing options.
The KU price was also reasoned to lower the barrier costs to trying new authors such as myself. It would have felt like the book was free once the user paid their monthly fee. Again I haven't seen those projected waves of KU readers trying my books.
So I'll try having my latest book available for pre-order on Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobe, and Smashwords, but not on Amazon. The book will be available on Amazon (non-exclusive) on its date of publication; it just won't be available as a pre-order from Amazon. If I see a worsening of sales, I could always place it on KDP after the fact, and I'll just lose the pre-order bump in Amazon best sellers list. Wish me luck!
Amazon added its pre-order feature last summer for indie authors. At that time I had done a pre-order with Smashwords for my June release of 'Chocolate Diamonds', and it added the tiniest bump in sales. For book three, I saw a very nice bump in sales last September and October with my late September release of 'A Break Death'. It meant that 'A Break Death' was only be available for purchase at Amazon for the first 90 days of publication. I did the same with book four,' Death On A Green' published in January of 2015. Unless I see something to change my mind in the next two weeks, for book five, 'A Taxing Death', I'm leaning towards using Smashwords for pre-orders as that will reach iTunes and Barnes & Noble. My reasoning is that the people that plan to buy it on Amazon will do so anyway, and I am hurting my sales by remaining exclusive to Amazon. I also dislike the lack of flexibility in pricing on Amazon. As a KDP client if you want to do a 24 hour sale of your book, you're only allowed one of those in the U.S. market and one in the U.K. market over the 90 day enrollment period. KDP does allow sales of longer than twenty-four hours, but they only allow one sale regardless of the length of time of that sale. This makes marketing efforts on a newly released book limited to those guidelines.
As a KDP author, your book is enrolled in Kindle Unlimited (KU). KU gives the reader an unlimited ability to download books once the monthly fee is paid. Like many indie authors, I suspect that KU has hurt my sales for the long term. Over the life of my two exclusivity periods the sales to KU users has not made up for the loss of sales to iTunes, B&N, and Kobe. Furthermore, Amazon has so whittled down the royalty payment for their KU books that my royalty payment for those sales is around $1.4 rather than the $2.8-$3.2 royalty for the $3.99 purchase price. I simply don't get the exposure and volume to make up for exclusive to Amazon and low KU payments.
Kindle Unlimited has likely been a boon (I don't know Amazon's ROI on this program) to Amazon and certainly it has been a boon to readers. Readers that perhaps budgeted $25/month for books can now get all the ebooks they want for $9.99 - more books then they could possibly read each month. However, many bestselling authors - Lee Child, David Baldacci, and JD Robb do not have their books in KU and I always watch what the famous authors do to understand publishing options.
The KU price was also reasoned to lower the barrier costs to trying new authors such as myself. It would have felt like the book was free once the user paid their monthly fee. Again I haven't seen those projected waves of KU readers trying my books.
So I'll try having my latest book available for pre-order on Barnes & Noble, iTunes, Kobe, and Smashwords, but not on Amazon. The book will be available on Amazon (non-exclusive) on its date of publication; it just won't be available as a pre-order from Amazon. If I see a worsening of sales, I could always place it on KDP after the fact, and I'll just lose the pre-order bump in Amazon best sellers list. Wish me luck!
