When writers refer to their ebooks as ‘being wide’, they usually mean that the ebooks are not solely published on Amazon, but are available on other online retailers like Apple, Smashwords and Kobo.
Such has been the case with my ebooks. I publish them directly with Amazon, Kobo and GooglePlay, and use a distributor—Draft2Digital (D2D)—to publish on the umpteen other retailers and library sites available, many of which I have never heard of before. D2D take a cut from every sale and it’s an arrangement that has worked well as far as I’m concerned.
Not so much for D2D apparently. They’ve recently announced that they are to introduce an annual charge for everyone who distributes through them who hasn’t achieved at least $100 in net sales in the previous twelve months.
The purpose of this piece isn’t to be critical of D2D. They’re perfectly entitled to introduce a fee for using their service and they’ve given us plenty of warning so we can choose to withdraw from distributing with them before the charge kicks in next month.
The charge will apply to me this year. Although I have enjoyed years where I’ve achieved sales comfortably in excess of $100 with D2D, I’ll be nowhere near that figure this year. It’s not a huge charge—only $12, I believe, annually—but it has me thinking about whether it’s worth my while continuing to distribute through them. In short, the answer’s no.
I conducted a simple analysis of where sales of my ebooks come from. (For these purposes, I completely ignored books given away in limited-time promotions or permanently free.) The results were not what I’d expected.
Knowing that the Earth Haven trilogy has sold reasonably well in the wider channels, I’d assumed the pattern would be similar across all titles. It was a bit of an eye-opener.
In short, Amazon accounts for the vast majority of my sales. My collection of dark Christmas short stories has the smallest percentage share on Amazon, but the Zon nevertheless accounts for 76% of all sales of that title in ebook format. The largest percentage share is of my first published work, the short story collection Pond Life. Amazon accounts for a staggering 98% of all ebooks sold of that title.
We’re talking low overall sales figures of both these titles, but the picture is similar with my bestselling works. The Earth Haven trilogy, which has combined ebook sales exceeding fifteen thousand and so which arguably provides more reliable statistics, breaks down percentage sales on Amazon as follows:
The Cleansing 89%
The Beacon 94%
The Reckoning 93%.
I worked out the average percentage share across all my titles sold in ebook format. It’s pretty conclusive:
Amazon 89%
The rest 11%.
Clearly, Amazon is by far and away the retailer where most of my ebooks are sold. So how does this affect the way forward for me?
I like having my ebooks available to readers at retailers like Apple and GooglePlay and Kobo, and I’ll always be grateful to the handful of readers there who have bought my books. But sales on those sites have dried to a tiny trickle and I don’t know how to reach their readers—have I ever mentioned that I’m really useless at marketing?
And a group of readers exists—a group I understand to be voracious in its reading appetites—to which I have not had access: members of Kindle Unlimited. (For anyone who doesn’t know, Kindle Unlimited is an Amazon programme that allows subscribers unlimited access to ebooks which are enrolled in the scheme and which pays the authors according to the number of pages read by those subscribers. For writers to have their ebooks included in this scheme, the works must be exclusive to Amazon.)
So I face a simple choice:
—start paying for my ebooks to be distributed across the wide platforms, but without the marketing skills to promote to users of those platforms, a prospect I find singularly unappealing; or
—make my ebooks available to an untapped section of a market which is already by far the most profitable for me, and it’s not even close.
It’s a bit of a no-brainer. This, then, is what I have decided to do:
—withdraw my ebooks from sale on the various wide channels like Apple, Kobo and GooglePlay, and from loan on the various lending sites like Hoopla; and
—enrol all my ebooks into the Kindle Unlimited programme.
In other words, I’m going narrow.
My ebooks can still be purchased, though only on Amazon. They will no longer be available to buy or loan in the wider channels. They will become available to read at no additional cost to subscribers to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited programme.
I am, of course, aware that some readers object to shopping on Amazon on moral grounds and I am sorry that my ebooks will no longer be available to such readers, but my paperback and audiobook editions will continue to be available to purchase (or borrow where applicable) at the various online outlets where they have been available since they were published.
Wish me luck in trying to crack the Kindle Unlimited market. Being a complete muppet at marketing, I expect I’ll need it. I shall report back in a few months or so as to how it’s going.