A word of warning: This post is very long.  Over 5k words, in fact.  I didn’t mean for it to get this long.  It just did.  It might also be easy to interpret some of what I’m saying as complaining, ranting, etc.  It’s not.  This is me looking back on my choice of going with KDP Select back in 2019 now that I am in a very different place, working toward different goals.  It’s about why I made that choice, what thought processes went into that decision, why every one of those thought processes were flawed (even illogical), and what the alternatives are.
So if you’re in that place, wondering if you should go exclusive with Amazon, I encourage you to read this.
If you’re just curious about another person’s author journey, I encourage you to read this.
But I’ll absolutely understand if you decide to skip this.  
Until next time,
Danielle

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In 2023, I came to a very hard decision: if something didn’t change, I needed to quit publishing.

At that point, I had been publishing since 2019, had two completed series under my belt and another I’d just started.  I had been consistently publishing a book every 4 months for that entire time.

I’d also been experiencing what I called “cyclical burnout” for a year or two.  What I mean is that every publication cycle involved an increasing number of weeks of burnout, followed by pushing myself to extremes to make up for the lost time, all so that I could make an arbitrary deadline that still couldn’t reach the impossible standards I had in my head.  Simply put, no matter what I tried, my writing career was in a standstill.  

Nothing seemed to move the needle.

My Initial Plan

Now, that might at first blush seem a little chaotic and like I went into this thing without thinking it through first, but nothing could be further from the truth.  I spent years learning about the publishing industry, learning the various options available to me (trad vs indie, publisher vs self-published, KDP Select vs Wide, etc.) and brainstorming strategies on how I wanted to set out initially.  

By the time I decided it was time for me to finally publish, KU was a thing, and it certainly threw a wrench in my original thoughts of publishing (specifically that before that, I couldn’t imagine going exclusive with Amazon).  You see, from the research I’d done, about 80% of books on Amazon in my genre were in KU.  Add to that, going exclusive with Amazon meant I would have less of an initial learning curve (from only learning one platform vs. many), and the KDP Select program began to look increasingly appealing.  I could always go wide later if I wanted to, but KU would allow me to get royalties from readers who read my books for free, lowering the cost of entry for trying a new author, which seemed really valuable.

And so, I went exclusive.

Logic Failures

Looking back, there were a variety of assumptions I made that are actually baffling when I look back at them.  I don’t know what I was thinking, and I think at least some of the problem is a form of brainwashing.  Society has been tricked by Big Tech for a long time, telling us we want to be a Big Fish in a Big Pond (I’ll get to that in a bit) when that is an almost impossible dream.

So what were these assumptions I made?

Most SciFi Romance Amazon books are in KU, therefore Most READERS are in KU

This is actually a multistage assumption with more holes in it than swiss cheese, so let’s name them:

1. Books = Readers
2. Almost All Books are on Amazon
3. Selection is the most important factor
4. Be Where My Competition Is
5. Amazon Helps Drive Author Success

Books = Readers

In retrospect, this is an obvious one, but it bears saying.  

Books do not equal Readers.  

I don’t know what I was thinking, but apparently, I took the statistics I’d been seeing for years to heart, which was that the vast majority of eBook sales happen on Amazon.  As such, it seemed silly to sacrifice KU royalties for that ~15% at other retailers.  

I was wrong.

The truth is there aren’t a lot of accurate numbers on Indie eBook sales.  Especially back then, some of the most well known services for tracking book sales didn’t even monitor eBook sales.  Of those that did, they didn’t track Indie or self-published sales, and if I remember correctly, none of them tracked Amazon sales, so it was near impossible to actually say what the true percentage was and is.

Almost All Books are on Amazon

This is untrue for a lot of reasons, but let’s look at a few of them:

1. Some authors have been banned from KDP
2. Some authors refuse to put their books on Amazon
3. Some authors pursue alternate distribution methods
4. Amazon might not be a dominant/known eBook retailer in their region

That last one was a fairly recent eye opener for me. In some ways, I’d always known some of the others, but it wasn’t until I started seriously looking into going wide that I learned #4. For example, Kobo is the predominant eBook retailer in Canada.  I think Tolino is the major one in one of the European countries, and there are other (English-speaking) countries in Europe that don’t even know that Amazon sells books.  

Selection is the most important factor

This is another one I kind of already knew, but didn’t really think of at the time.  Like with authors, readers can and do choose to avoid supporting Amazon.  Some might prefer another platform for functionality or to avoid a platform they have moral or ethical concerns about.  Others might just want to support more Indie companies and creators.

Additionally, if you started on a platform with less selection, you might not know the difference.

Be Where My Competition Is

Even if I were to assume that the numbers I’d originally put so much faith in were true, my conclusion would have still been flawed.  After all, if 20% of books in my genre were wide, then that meant wide readers were being underserved.  It also meant I had less competition for those eyeballs.  

I would be a Small Fish in a Small Pound rather than a Small Fish in a Big Pond.  Less competition means more visibility.

Amazon Helps Drive Author Success

This is also one I was quite familiar with (man, from this list, you would think I was a masochist…).  While Amazon KDP has done a lot for the Indie author community in the past, like popularizing reading eBooks with their Kindle eReader and pioneering the standard of 70% royalty rates on eBooks, that’s about where their advocacy and support of authors ends, really. They present themself as somewhere anyone can publish their book and become an author, but they also lock down basic marketing tools behind an exclusivity contract (tools all the other platforms offer for free, by the way).

I’d heard plenty of stories of Amazon locking people’s accounts or banning them or canceling their pre-orders etc., all for no reason other than “the bots decreed it.”  Amazon doesn’t care, and I knew that going in.  I knew that they could get uppity if one of my titles got pirated (which wouldn’t be my fault, certainly, but Amazon doesn’t see it that way).  And when something goes wrong, there’s nowhere to turn.  Maybe you’ll get lucky and be able to talk to a real person.  Maybe they’ll even be able to fix the problem, but not before you have significant consequences like lost pre-orders and royalties.

I guess what I didn’t see at the time was the alternatives, like how I’m pretty sure if you email Kobo Writing Life, you get a real person, how I’ve had actual conversations with people who worked there at conferences and such, how Itch.io gives you almost complete freedom to set up your book pages and storefront however you want (not to mention setting the royalty rate yourself), etc.

Point being, there are Indie-friendly spaces on the internet, and there’s really no reason to confine yourself to a space that isn’t.

Amazon’s Cliff and the Advice that “Nothing Sells Your Current Book Like Your Next Book”

Oh boy, was that bad advice couched as good advice, and I certainly took it to heart.  I was so focused on publishing that next book that I never seemed to have time for marketing.  Even today, I struggle to find the time, even when I set it as a priority.  I’ve had a task on my to do list to create some evergreen social media posts for my books for months… and it still hasn’t been done.  Hopefully I’ll get to it soon, I guess.  But even when I was doing a “good” job on marketing, it was always hard to keep any real focus on it because those self-imposed publishing deadlines were always just looming, whispering in my ear that I was running behind, that I had to start writing, editing, formatting, working on covers, etc.

And so, it didn’t get done. 

I suppose, in theory, it’s a sound concept.  Some readers will not consider a book unless the author can prove they can continue in a series.  Some won’t even read until the series is finished, but if you start out focused entirely on publishing each book and leave the marketing for the future, starting in said future is mighty hard.  You never learn, never practice, and you’re suddenly a noobie at it when you’ve had plenty of opportunity to gain experience.  Not to mention the fact that you’ve designed your entire schedule around not performing marketing, so trying to fit it into your schedule after the fact can sometimes be really hard for those of us who also have a full time job or other obligations.

On its own, your next book will never sell your current book, because the next book has to actually sell to do so.  In other words, you have to market your next book in order for it to sell your current book.

Additionally, publishing exclusively to Amazon tends to create a mindset where you’re constantly chasing the algorithm, and the biggest area where that hurts part time writers is publishing frequency.  On Amazon, the bulk of your sales happen in the first 1-3 months.  For many (especially those not heavily marketing it), that might only be a few days.  As you keep publishing, you’ll see these successful (translation: full time) authors publishing a book every 4-6 weeks.  You’ll start thinking that’s the reason it’s not working (even if, again, you’re only managing sales for a few days, a week, a couple weeks. etc.).  You’ll convince yourself that if you could only publish faster, you’ll do better, you’ll get more sales, you’ll be successful, even if consciously, you don’t believe it.

You’ll start trying to increase your publishing frequency, even if it’s not possible.

Little Fish in a Big Pond

Yeah, I said I would get to that, didn’t I?  

Anyway, we’re told we need to be where the readers are, whether that’s social media or vendors.  And we’re told that most readers are on Amazon, on TikTok, etc.  That if we’re not on those places, we won’t make the royalties, we’ll never become full time authors.  The amount of people I’ve heard say you have to be on TikTok is just insane.  Never mind that no social media platform has stayed relevant indefinitely.

That’s why I tried TikTok.

That’s why I went exclusive with Amazon for eBooks.

I was convinced by the hype, by the numbers, and I ignored some rather glaring but in retrospect obvious points of concern about such a large platform.  I assumed that because most readers are on Amazon (again, is this even true?), that I would have the best chance of getting reads and sales there.  But is that really how it works?

We’re often told you don’t want to be a little fish in a big pond, but isn’t that exactly what the above is recommending?  Being on Amazon, being on TikTok.  That’s where the readers are.  You’re promised that if you join the Big Pond, you’ll find the readers.  You’re sold the dream of being the Big Fish, of hitting the Top 100 Lists on Amazon, of going viral on TikTok, but how many people actually pull that off?  Well, at least for Amazon, that’s sort of baked into the name, now isn’t it?  100.  That’s how many books can hit the top 100 in a genre at any given time.  

And well, I actually looked into it once, back in June 2022.  At the time I’d pulled the numbers, there were 70 titles on the list that were actually SciFi Romance. Of those, a solid 31% of books in the top 100 in my genre were from the same author, Ruby Dixon.  In fact, a lot of the books in the top 100 were by authors with more than one book on the list. There were 26 unique authors. 13 of those authors had at least 2 books, so the space at the top is a lot smaller than you might think at first glance.

What’s more, those authors are often ones who can crank out a book every 1-2 months, meaning an author who can only crank out a book every 4 months, every 6 months, every year can’t possibly hope to compete on Amazon. You’re invisible, and you never have a chance to build any momentum in the algorithms.  You’re a Little Fish in a Big, Big Pond, and you probably always will be.

That’s why what you want to be is a big fish in a little pond.  That’s what the phrase is, after all.  Or as Judge Roy said in “The Bank Shot Job” episode of the TV show, Leverage, “The trick to living in a one-horse town? Be the horse.”  But Big Tech convinces us otherwise.  With social media and eBook markets, we’re told we need to be where the readers are.  Never mind the fact that readers are everywhere.  And as a small time author, you simply don’t have the capacity to leverage the bigger pond’s full capacity.  You don’t publish fast enough, you don’t have enough followers, you don’t have enough engagement, enough reviews, enough eyeballs, enough superfans.  So you’re just left drowning.

And those Big Ponds?  They’re not exactly Indie-friendly either.  They tend to trample the little guys, acting first and asking questions never.  

YouTube is a great example of this.  YouTubers can get strikes on their channel (and even lose their channel) when they did nothing wrong.  And when they ask for clarification, they can’t even get an answer on what part of their video is causing the problem.  They have to guess.  Not so bad on a short video, but nearly impossible if your videos grow into the several hour range.  And when you appeal?  There’s a possibility the appeal will be rejected without a person ever reviewing it.  I believe Jessie Gender once pointed out a situation where her 4 hour long video got an answer on the appeal after minutes.  Like that’s literally not possible.  You can’t evaluate a 4 hour long video in minutes.

And TikTok is even worse, with people losing their accounts left, right, and center, with no warning and I don’t even think any option for appeal (not that I have any experience on this front).  I’ve heard of people creating accounts there again and again because they keep getting their accounts banned.

Amazon KDP will often cancel pre-orders, decide you were violating KDP Select (and take all your royalties) or even ban/delete your account (and also take all your royalties… there’s a pattern here, ya’ know?), sometimes with no obvious way to talk with an actual person.  From personal experience, trying to resolve something with KDP is often less effective than just pulling your hair out, with equal amounts of pain and frustration.  And remember Ruby Dixon earlier?  They once lost their KDP account for a spell because their older books started trending on TikTok.  The only reason they got their account back is because they have a massive following that complained and vouched for them.

And yet, like I said, Big Tech has convinced us we want to be on Facebook (with billions of users), TikTok, Amazon, Twitter/X, YouTube, etc., even though only the top fraction of a percent of users ever see any real success with those platforms.  

So why are we there?  Why do we keep giving our time and attention to platforms that are frequently frustrating and harmful to our mental health?  Well, because we’re told to.  We’re told we want to be where everyone else is, and some part of our lizard brain likes that idea, even though we’ll end up making stronger communities with better, more meaningful interactions on smaller platforms (or even in person).  Even if we initially dismiss it, the message eventually gets through.  It’s why we have the 7 Touch Rule in marketing.  It works.  The more times someone encounters something, the more likely they are to trust it, the more likely they are to engage with it.  If we aren’t careful, it’s very easy to fall prey to this, and it’s everywhere, all around us, in every facet of society and every thing that could influence our decision making.  It’s honestly kind of scary when you think about it.

So obviously, you don’t want to be a Little Fish in a Big Pond.  It’s hard to be seen.  It’s easy to feel isolated.  There’s no real upside, only the mostly empty promise of becoming a Big Fish someday.  

Conversely, it’s a lot easier being a Little Fish in a Little Pond.  I’ve found a lot more luck connecting with people on BlueSky and Tumblr than Threads, Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram.  

And as for selling books?  I’m not really doing a lot to sell my books wide yet, but lately, I’m getting more sales wide than on Amazon.  In fact, Amazon probably accounts for maybe 20% of my total income at the moment.  My income is more thoroughly spread out, even if some of the platforms are not selling anything at all yet.  It’s smaller on each, but it doesn’t have to be as big on any given platform to make a difference.  I don’t have to push as hard to be seen.  I don’t need to push as hard to appease the algorithms.  

In some instances, there are no algorithms.

Putting All My Eggs in one Basket

So, not putting all your eggs in one basket is the advice you always used to hear (and maybe you still do) when people are trying to discourage you from going KDP Select, but when I was first starting out, as I said before, I put a lot of faith in the statistics I was seeing, and that made the idea of putting all my eggs in one basket a whole lot easier to stomach.  

It was still scary.  There was always the possibility that Amazon could decide to kick me off KDP someday, take all my earned royalties, and ban me from the platform.  I’d heard too many such horror stories to make me think it could never happen to me.  It could, and fortunately, it hasn’t.

But let’s look a little more at the numbers again. I already shared why my numbers were flawed, why my faith in them was misguided.  Now, let’s work out the truth behind not putting all your eggs in one basket (besides the whole gambling on your author career thing).  Say I’m publishing through the following vendors: KDP, Barnes & Noble, Draft2Digital, Kobo, Google Play, and Itch.io.  Say I needed $2000 a year to turn a profit on my business.  That’s about $167 per month.  That’s a lot for a new author on one platform.  Now let’s look at it spread out between platforms.  That’s about $28 per platform.  That’s a hell of a lot more reasonable.  It’s manageable.  That’s about 8 $4.99 eBooks sold per platform per month.  

Now let’s add in a few more things, say a subscription service like Ream or Patreon and a direct store.  Now we’re at 8 places.  That’s about $21 per.  That’s about 6 books per platform.  And by now, you have some platforms with better royalty rates.  Itch.io’s default is 10%, direct is generally only the cost of credit card processing fees, and Ream is 10% plus processing fees.

Now, obviously, you might struggle to get some platforms off the ground and start getting those sales.  I don’t think I’ve made a sale on Kobo or Google yet, for example.  But Kobo, Draft2Digital, Barnes & Noble, Google, and Itch.io all have built-in promotional tools that you can use to drive sales.  And there’s nothing that says you can’t work at building out one platform at a time, figuring out what works then moving on to the next.  That’s the beauty of multiple revenue streams.

It also means that if royalties from one platform suddenly tanks, you’ve maybe lost 10-20% of your income, not 100%.  You can probably weather 10-20%.  Maybe you won’t even feel it.

And by the way, Wide for the Win, a book by Mark Lafebvre, was a great read and really helped me get my head around this stuff a bit more.  It helped me see my books as assets, and really helped change how I viewed my author business.

Also, did you know?  I didn’t even know that Itch.io sold books in the first place until I learned about it on BlueSky.  BlueSky is a smaller social media platform, but it has a strong bias towards Indies because it is an Indie platform itself.

I’m a Business Owner on Amazon

From the start, I thought of my author career as a business.  Early on, I wrote a business plan, giving myself goals (that I never seemed to hit).  I created separate accounts, did all the things I was supposed to do, and I thought I was building a business.

I wasn’t.  

I only thought I was.

Instead, what I was really doing was sharecropping.  I wasn’t treating my books like assets to be sold and leveraged.  I was treating Amazon like it was a mall and I was one of the stores inside that mall.  But I wasn’t.  Because when you own a store in a mall, you have a lease, there’s a limited amount of space, a limited amount of competition.  If you’re not happy with your lease anymore, you can move at renewal time.  You know what your true assets are, and you use them accordingly.

Sharecropping, however, is what KDP Select is, it’s what YouTube does.  These creators are making a living off borrowed assets, borrowed land.  It’s inherently unsteady, leaving you at the whims of those who own the land.  If they change the rules, you have nowhere to turn.  If they kick you out, you have nowhere to go.  There are no promises, no contracts, no recourse.  And you have no backup plans.  If you get kicked out, you’re screwed.  And if you get kicked out?  All your hard work goes into the hands of the owners, not you.

Editing Note:
After rereading this for edits, I want to make something clear.  Sharecropping is not inherently bad.  When everyone, including the owners, have a community mindset, it can be invaluable during hard times.  When the share owed is fair, both the farmers and owners are invested in the success of the harvest.  
Unfortunately, though, when that’s not true, it is ripe for abuse.  Sharecroppers tend to be the poorest and most vulnerable. In many cases, participating in sharecropping only resulted in these people experiencing increasing amounts of debt.  Because they don’t owe anything initially, and many merchants will offer them supplies on credit, their success is inherently linked to how fair their arrangement is with the land owner and how good their harvest goes.  In lean years, they become more and more indebted, stuck in a system that oppresses them.  Eventually, they are not really working for themselves anymore, they are working to pay off their debt, a debt they might never be able to pay off.
In a way, places like Amazon KDP are even worse.  You’re growing on a land that’s not your own, they take a share, you have to “pay” for the resources they provide with exclusivity and (with Amazon Ads) money you haven’t received yet, they are not invested in your success because you’re easily replaceable, and if something goes wrong, they might even take what you’ve rightfully earned.  
When your business is inherently tied to a specific platform, you have the same uncertainties as sharecroppers. When things are bad, the platform still does well even if you might be struggling.  When you have to leave the platform, you’re often left with little or nothing because KU readers (for example) are less likely to be invested in specific authors.  The fruits of your labors are inherently linked to the platform, the land, and that can be taken away.
And now back to the regularly scheduled blog post…

I had no control over my business, really, and I didn’t even realize it.  I thought I was trying to build a business.  Trying and failing.  I had a website and mailing list, the essentials every author had, but I didn’t even realize the ways in which I wasn’t utilizing them properly.  For example, I had a website, but I used linktree.  I had a website, but I used Books2Read.  I was sending all my readers elsewhere, always places I had no control over, where I had little or no visibility, when I could have been sending them home, to my home base.

I’m not a business owner on Amazon, because I don’t think you can be.  Amazon is somewhere you can sell stuff, but it isn’t a mall.  You don’t own a store there.  

And it’s also not how most businesses work.  Most businesses don’t put all their hopes on selling on Amazon.  No, instead, they sell on their website, they make agreements with brick and mortar stores, they continue putting their products on site after site until they (hopefully) reach market saturation.  They have agreements with vendors, negotiated on both sides, with details such as displays, placement, pricing and more being worked out in advance.  There are rules built in on what each organization can do and can’t do.  And if someone breaks the rules, you whip out the lawyers.

Conversely, our relationship with Amazon is one-sided.  Amazon dictates what we can do.  They make all the rules, and they make all the decisions.  All we can do is hope and pray.  Even if Amazon breaks the rules they set, there’s not much we can do.  They continue on, secure in the idea that the average author will do nothing because they can’t afford a lawyer.

I suppose all vendors are like that to an extent in the book industry, at least when it comes to working with authors, but that’s the point, we have no control over vendors.  We don’t have contractual agreements with vendors.  We have no control over them, but conversely, they don’t truly have control over us either.  We can pull our books from circulation at any moment.  We can add them to new vendors.  We can change our pricing.

But see, that’s only true if we stop thinking of ourselves as things like “KU authors,” if we start thinking of our books as assets to be utilized and maximized.  Instead, we start thinking of vendors as resources to sell more books, a “bonus income,” shall we say, because that’s exactly what it is.  It’s bonus income.  It’s another organization selling your books for you, rather than selling it yourself.  We’ve gotten so accustomed to selling on vendors that we’ve become blinded, seeing it as the standard when really no other industry works that way.

Moving Forward

Moving forward, I’m actually going to be treating my author career like a business.  Truly.  I’ve already made steps in that direction, including:

• Starting a direct store
• Starting a subscription
• Creating a links page on my website to use on social media and etc.
• Directing all book links to my website rather than sites like Books2Read
• Removing all my books from KDP Select
• Starting to put my books up wide
• Investigating future places to sell my books (e.g. Itch.io)
• Starting a serial and posting it on sites like Wattpad and Inkitt to draw in new readers
• Leaning into my strengths for marketing (i.e. my writing)
• Investigating and planning for other ways of monetizing my creativity including special editions of my books and thematically related products like stickers, pins, t-shirts and etc.
• Investigating ways of cutting costs including moving to a self hosted mailing list service provider that doesn’t run on a subscription service.
• Started working on building audiences and engagement on Tumblr and BlueSky

I’m nowhere near where I want to be.  It’s taking me a long time to get things done, and I’ve got a lot more I want to do.  It feels like for every thing I get done, at least one more thing gets added to the list, but I’m working on it.  And every day is another day moving in the right direction.  I feel good about the direction things are going when I review my finances.  I’m not selling as much right now as I did when I was in KU, but I also haven’t launched a new book since February of 2023.  And the sources of income are a lot more diversified, and that feels good, better, safer.  

I’m new to these new platforms, and I know I have plenty of room to learn and grow.  I know that until I get more books in series on Google, I won’t be able to fully utilize its strengths, so I’m waiting there, ready to dive in once I do.  I know that Barnes & Noble has a promo tab that I need to figure out how to get (that’s one of the harder ones to gain access to), but B&N is also one of my bigger wide retailers so far, so I’m okay with where things are right now.  Kobo has a lot of promos I really haven’t been utilizing yet because I want to get more books on their platform before I start shelling out money for promos.  

And all of these vendors take time to build on.  I’m okay with that.  It’s sad that I wasted so much time on KDP Select, but I’m here now.  I learned my lessons.  I’m moving forward, little by little, step by step.

I’ll continue to make mistakes.  Hopefully, not any as big as strangling my career as I did with KDP Select, but you can’t avoid making mistakes.  You can only dust yourself off and figure out what you did wrong so you can reorient yourself and figure out what you’ll do next.

Successful people aren’t people who never fail. They’re people who never give up.  You see, successful people are like fortune tellers.  You only notice the hits, not the misses.  So many authors have stories of getting rejection letter after rejection letter from agents, publishers, etc.  They spent years trying to get published.  Now, decades later, they’re a bestselling author.  You don’t see or hear their struggles most of the time, you only see that NY Times Bestseller or USA Today Bestseller emblazoned on the covers of their books.

I’m not looking to be a bestseller.  I have no interest in fame or fortune.  Right now, I just want to not lose money on my publishing.  I want to eventually turn a profit overall.  I want to eventually be able to live off my writing.  It’s not a big dream.  It doesn’t have to be.  

And while in some ways, I might seem farther from that goal than ever, I feel hope for the first time in years. 

And because of that, I’m not quitting.  I’m gonna keep producing books, little by little.  I’m gonna keep trying new things, finding what I like, what I’m good at.  And hopefully, some day, I will be where I want to be.

Until then, I’m just gonna keep trying to figure out what works.