Some Self-Publishing Hard Truth

Hey Guys,

So I told you I would keep you in the loop during my self-publishing journey. I’ve come to the point where I have to make a pretty big decision and wanted to share the process with you.

Many of you know about Kindle Unlimited- this is the new Amazon service that allows you to read as many Kindle books as you want for $9.99 a month. As an author you are paid a percentage for each download your book receives. If I had chosen to publish AGAIN exclusively with AMAZON it would be permitted in Kindle Unlimited; which would have given me access to a bunch of Kindle Customers.

Instead I wanted to make AGAIN available to everyone, not just AMAZON customers so I published it to B&N, Kobo and I-Books too using Smashwords. After 3-weeks of sales here is how the percentage of sales per site is working out:

Kobo: 0.90%
I-Books: 2%
B&N: 4%
Amazon: 93%

This means if I sold 100 books over 3 weeks 93(!) of them would have been at Amazon, 4 at B&N and so on…

(This was all at the same price .99 when on sale, $1.99 now. I have switched the price just today to $2.99 because B&N takes a LONG time to make pricing changes and I cannot change Amazon’s price until B&N is up to date.)

Smashwords is a great distribution service and I have nothing against them, they have been easy to work with and extremely professional but that is not what I am talking about. I am specifically talking about sales by website.

A business looking at the chart above would say Amazon is where we should be putting all our focus.

As a self-publisher this is my business.

See, not only does publishing exclusively with AMAZON allow you to be a Kindle Unlimited Book, but a lot more marketing perks are also available.

All this is to say that I am thinking of taking AGAIN off of the other sites and trying it exclusively through AMAZON for their 90 requirement period.

I hate drinking AMAZON’s Kool-Aid, but numbers don’t lie.

I’d love to hear your comments about this. And if you are a Nook, I-books or Kobo customer AGAIN may be going away soon :(

 

AMZ: http://amzn.to/1rwZUy7

B&N: http://bit.ly/1o16nMU

I-books: bit.ly/1o16YhN

Kobo: bit.ly/Z8wDiT

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20882839-again