It started with a post on the 20 Books to 50k Facebook page. Maybe it was a year ago, maybe less. I can’t remember.
But I remember the utter despair, and the terror oozing from the page as an author pleaded for advice. She was a prolific author with over 50 titles to her name. ALL enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. She was an Amazon-exclusive author and made fantastic money doing it.
Then one morning, she woke up to an email informing her that one of her books had been found on another site. This violated her contract with Kindle Unlimited.
As a result… her entire Kindle Direct Publishing account was nuked. Her entire income gone in a flash. No appeal. No customer service. Nothing.
The cruelest part was that she hadn’t violated Amazon’s terms of service. Her book was uploaded to a pirating site.
Her intellectual property was stolen, and as a result, Amazon (or likely a robot) felt empowered to take her entire life’s work and income.
If memory serves, she was able to get her account back after weeks of going back and forth with the mighty Zon, but it got me thinking…
Why exactly am I putting all my eggs in one basket?
What does it mean to go wide?
If you have one or all of your books enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, it means they are exclusive to Amazon (in ebook form). It also means you have access to special benefits like temporary price promotions and countdown deals. And of course, you get paid for each paid read from Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
You also know that KU subscribers now pay more for their subscriptions, and authors are being paid less per page. Hardly seems worth it. To me at least.
If you want to go wide, the first thing you need to do is UNENROLL your books from Kindle Unlimited. This means turning off the 90-day auto-renew feature. Once your current KU time period runs out, only then can you upload your book onto other sites.
There are self-publishing aggregator sites. For me, I chose Draft2Digital. This site allows you to upload your book files and publish them on just about every available ebook outlet. (They also allow you to publish paperbacks and audiobooks).
I like Draft2Digital because it is easy, it is streamlined, and once my book has been published, the site generates a universal book link so readers can choose their favorite vendor. It looks like this:
Now your books (in all their forms) are available everywhere.
How Do You Track All That?
Once they’re posted at so many vendors, it can get overwhelming. Especially since Google Books DOES NOT take submissions from Draft2Digital or any other aggregator. You have to upload it there manually.
Add to that… what if you have paperbacks through IngramSpark? What if you have audiobooks? Tracking sales from all those sites sounds like a full-time job!
That’s why I use ScribeCount, which (in my opinion) is the very best reporting site for people who sell their books wide. You get an in-depth breakdown of where your books are selling, where your ads are doing well, and your total monthly income.
I love the interface. I love the emails I get every day telling me how many (if any) sales I got the previous day.
Far better than logging onto KDP and nine other sites every day to see what’s up.
Going wide might seem scary, but depending on your situation, you might want to consider it.
PS. If you were wondering which tablet I got, The Surface Go won the poll by a landslide. But when I went to the store to look at it… way too small. So I got the Surface Pro 9. In Green :)
Yay for the green Surface Pro! Also, I second your choice of ScribeCount. I'm not even wide, but I appreciate all the data in one easy-to-use place versus Zon's notoriously crappy dashboards. Here's hoping they incorporate ACX sales soon.
That said, I'm going to be following your wide journey closely. I had very high-minded thoughts about going wide early on, but ultimately chickened out and went KDP. Barring some catastrophe like the example in your post, I see myself rolling off older serious with dwindling page reads from KDP and placing them in the other retails.
The only thing that may pull me sooner is selling direct, which I absolutely love the idea of, but I don't have the back catalog to justify it (and won't for some time).