What does “wide” mean here? What is “Select”?

“Select” means KDP Select, Amazon’s program that restricts electronic distribution of your ebook to Amazon in exchange for certain royalty and promotional perks. Choosing select means your ebook will be included in Kindle Unlimited (KU), so KU subscribers can read your book in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL) for free, but you get paid for the pages they read. “Wide” means foregoing those perks to publish your ebook on a variety of platforms and storefronts. Both Joanna Penn and the Alliance of Independent Authors offer valuable primers on the pros and cons of wide vs. select.   

What’s your career objective?

The choice to publish wide vs. select represents a key strategic decision for the author-publisher. Reflect on your long-term business plan and your author goals, and consider which tactic will be more likely to get you where you wish to go. Although authors can switch back and forth between the two channels at will, the audiences are different. Cycling between the two may result in wasting time serving an audience that won’t support your goals in the long run, or failing to gain traction in your chosen sector.

Here are a few factors to consider:

• How many books do you have? Some authors, including prominent indies like Joanna Penn, recommend going with KU until you have at least two books, as it’s easier to learn a single platform first and then broaden your marketing. 
• What genre or genres do you write in? KU readers favor romance, followed by fantasy and mystery. If you write outside these genres, you may find other platforms friendlier places to build readership. 
• How diversified are your product offerings? Do you offer your books in ebook format only, or do you have print and audio options as well? If you offer products in multiple formats, you can choose to offer your ebooks in KU and offer your print and audio books in wider distribution. 
• What’s your product release strategy? If your business model is to write constantly and publish frequently, Amazon exclusivity may benefit you, as you can learn to time releases and promotional days to make Amazon’s recommendation algorithms work in your favor. If you take longer to write your books, it may make sense to go wide, so you can take advantage of the different platforms’ opportunities to market your existing works while you bring the next one out.
• How comfortable are you with risk? Amazon offers a lot of benefits, but using a single retailer means assuming a great deal of business risk. Amazon can change their royalty structure or the KU business model at any time. Antitrust litigation could conceivably impact the way Amazon treats independent authors. The decision is akin to placing all your retirement funds in a single stock (even if it is Amazon stock), or a balanced portfolio of mutual funds. If you’re comfortable with that level of risk, the payoff from Amazon can be great. If you prefer to diversify your risk, wide makes sense. 

Depending on the number of books you have and the formats you have them in, you can enjoy benefits of both markets. For example, you can offer a few ebooks in KU–a first book in a series, or a complete short series–and have your other ebooks (plus your print and audio versions) wide. Offering a few ebooks in KU lowers the risk to the reader, who doesn’t have to pay anything extra to try your book out. After reading your series, that reader may be willing to venture outside of KU to continue to support your career.

• What kind of audience do you want to build? Authors constantly work to build their platforms, or their readerships. With whom do you want to be in conversation? Although I love it anytime someone signs up to my mailing list, as a US-based author, I get a special thrill when I see an email address with a country extension on the top-level domain. If you desire to build a global audience, it’s hard to argue against choosing wide, because Amazon is not the dominant vendor in most countries. Even if you publish only in English, you can gain a global readership quickly.

This map shows my English-language international sales through Kobo, a Canada-based vendor with a major global presence. This kind of reach simply would not be possible by keeping my books in KDP Select. Aggregators such as Draft2Digital and PublishDrive maintain international networks of smaller vendors that can expand your reach and even help you with translations of your books. 

• What’s your timeline? By publishing through KDP Select, even if you publish in a less-popular genre, you can achieve visibility quickly and easily (keeping it is another matter). Publishing wide demands patience. However, as vendors like Kobo and Apple and aggregators like Draft2Digital and PublishDrive offer more opportunities to market and promote your books, the gap will close.

There’s no right or wrong answer to the question whether to publish wide or select. The only thing that matters is what makes sense for your goals. With independent publishing, the tools are available for you to realize almost any goal you can envision, and you have the power to make all the decisions.

Helen J. Darling writes contemporary women’s fiction. Her latest novel, Terms and Conditions, was self-published in November 2019. You can connect with her at itshelendarling.com.

The post Making Goal-Driven Publishing Decisions: Wide vs. Select appeared first on DIY MFA.

Consider me a colleague happy to share her hard-learned wisdom with you. If I were starting over again in indie publishing, I’d do a number of things differently. In future posts, I’ll share with you some of the decisions I regret and why, in hopes you can learn from my mistakes. 

The first thing I’d do differently if I could start again? Not publish until I had at least three novels in a series.

Conventional wisdom IS wisdom

When I first considered indie publishing, I heard this advice: Don’t publish until you have three novels ready to release. Given the work it takes to write just one novel, I thought, This is ridiculous. I can’t imagine waiting so long. Traditional publishing doesn’t operate this way. Is self-publishing really that different? Won’t having a book on the market allow more readers to find me?

Patience pays

Solid reasons exist behind the argument to wait to publish. Primary among them: the market is absolutely flooded with books. There are currently over six million e-books on Amazon alone. Writers also compete with tons of exciting content on television, in film, in video games, and (in ordinary, non-pandemic times) sports and other leisure pursuits. What that means for the single-title-publishing author is that your book, regardless of how good it might be, will drown in a sea of content. 

If you have one book in the market, readers may love it and leave a positive review, but then they need a new toy. If you can’t offer them another book, they’ll move on to someone else’s. And if, like me, you take a year or eighteen months to produce another work, that’s a ton of time for a reader to forget about you. Maybe you were lucky enough to capture some of those initial readers on your mailing list. If so, terrific! But the truth is that only a fraction of your readers will actually sign on to your mailing list. How many authors do you read regularly? Are you on all their mailing lists? Nope, thought not. 

We live in a binge culture. How do you consume TV? If you’re like me, you’d rather wait until the final episode of Homeland is released so you can watch the entire season in three days. Readers behave no differently. Having a series of three or more books gives an engaged reader somewhere to go, and improves your long-term viability in the market. Conventional wisdom in the indie world goes something like this: if readers read you once and your book is good, they’ll like you. If they read you twice, they’ll remember you. If they read you three times, they’ll stay with you, eager for your metaphorical Season Two. 

If you can get a reader to read three of your books, it probably won’t be a hard sell to get and keep them on your mailing list. Then a periodic update–whether once a week, or once or twice a month–will keep you on their radar screens and anticipating your next release. Outside of this model, you start from ground zero every single time you launch a book, and launches are difficult and draining. Don’t make more work for yourself.

Algorithms and visibility

The more readers progress through your series, whether via direct purchase or by Kindle Unlimited borrows, the more the algorithms begin to work in your favor. David Gaughran’s forgotten more than I’ll ever know about the mechanics of algorithms and how to make them work in your favor to increase your visibility, so I’ll leave it to him to share the finer points with you, but this multi-title release strategy is essential to gaining traction in digital marketplaces. 

Development time

Another advantage to completing a short series before releasing the first book is that it gives you time to work with your characters and produce a cohesive product. By the third book, you have insights into your characters that you didn’t have the first time through. I know that if I could go back and rewrite my first book, there’s so much I’d be able to put in that I just didn’t know the first time. 

A fruitful practice might be to draft three books (say, 30 or 40K words each), one after another. As you write the second one, you get important distance from the first story while at the same time broadening your knowledge of your characters, practicing your craft, and honing your voice. By the time you’ve drafted the third book, you’ve figured out how to write a book, where your process challenges are, and how to work through them. In other words, you can now recognize patterns in your own work. 

As you begin to revise and flesh out the first story, you can bring that wisdom to your first book. At the same time, that perspective will aid you in leaving Easter eggs and weaving interesting threads and subplots throughout the series. Map out a series on paper all you want, but when you’re writing, things don’t always go to plan. Crazy things happen. Whole characters show up out of nowhere. Pausing before you hit the “publish” button allows you to refine the entire package into a polished cohesive unit, and for that, your readers will thank you.

Writing a book is a long and difficult process, and exercising patience at the end of that process demands real discipline from the writer. But trust me: I’ve been there, and the discipline is worth it. Your reward will come in increased visibility, a more devoted readership, and improved long-term success–things every writer wants. 

Helen J. Darling writes and publishes contemporary women’s fiction at her imprint, Bricolage Books. She published her first novel, I’ll Know Me When I Find Me, in January 2018. Her latest novel, Terms and Conditions, was published in November 2019. You can connect with her at itshelendarling.com, on Instagram, Twitter and on Facebook. 

The post Don’t Do What I Did: Mistakes in Indie Publishing appeared first on DIY MFA.

In independent publishing, the author acts as the head of a small publishing company, making decisions about a book’s content, title, and cover and interior design. Often, they hire creative professionals to provide key services like developmental or copy editing, cover design, or audiobook narration. (The term independent publishing acknowledges the contributions of these important members of the publishing team.) The author-publisher also sets the book’s budget, plans the book’s marketing, promotion and pricing, determines the formats in which the work will be offered (hardback, paperback, e-book, audio, etc.) and the channels in which those formats will be distributed, and creates a business strategy to ensure their work garners as much success as possible.

If that sounds like a lot of work, it is. But it’s also incredibly satisfying.

Why should an author choose independent publishing?

1) There’s virtually no barrier to entry. That empowers authors to use their time strategically.

Here’s a dose of reality: If your dream is to be published by one of the Big Five publishers, you’ll need an agent. Finding an editor who’ll consider an unrepresented manuscript is harder than finding a Yeti riding a unicorn. And finding an agent….well, frankly, that can be just as challenging. To give yourself the best chance, you’ll have to research agents who represent work like yours, tailor your pitch—which you’ve already spent hours perfecting—specifically to that agent, send it off with fingers crossed, and start the process of monitoring your queries.

Agents get thousands of queries a day. Authors have about fifteen seconds to entice an agent to ask for pages. Even if you’ve done a masterful job of refining your pitch and you’ve targeted your potential agent carefully, your pitch may land in her inbox just as she’s come off a terrible conference call. Or perhaps she’s read three dozen lousy pitches already and she’s crabby, or he just spilled coffee all over his keyboard. Your otherwise-perfect pitch may get passed over due to bad timing or rotten luck.

All these factors mean finding an agent can become a part-time job in itself, frequently taking eighteen months or longer of diligent querying to find a match. By going indie, you can spend that same amount of time working on your manuscript (or two, or more) in partnership with an editor of your choosing, practicing your craft, and developing your platform and your business savvy.

Even if you end up with that longed-for traditional deal, you’ll need strong business and marketing skills to make your book a success. Because here’s a dirty little secret: Unless your last name is Kardashian, you’re going to have to market your book. And if you’re a Kardashian, you’re marketing everything about yourself anyway, so what’s a book thrown into the bargain?

2) You can write what you want

One challenge in navigating the traditional publishing channels is that you’ve got to convince an agent, and then an editor, that there’s a market for your work. But what if you like to read and want to write Amish time-travel mysteries? Or sports romance? Or military space operas? There are successful indie authors you’ve probably never heard of who have quit their day jobs to write in these genres. Independent publishing allowed them to find and serve an audience that a traditional publisher would never have taken a risk on, and they continue to be handsomely rewarded by their readers.

3) The independent publishing community is supportive

Indie authors are, by and large, a generous and collegial lot, eager to share strategies that have worked for them and to encourage new authors to persevere. In an environment where nobody is competing for scarce publisher resources, an attitude of good karma prevails. But wait, you say, aren’t you competing for readers? Let me tell you, there are readers out there who consume a book a day. None of us can produce work on that kind of schedule. Indie authors work together to keep those readers happy. There’s plenty of readership to go around.

4) You can develop a platform to leverage a traditional deal

Still want that traditional deal but having trouble finding an agent? You’ll get more attention if you can bring a platform of potential readers with you. Particularly if you write genre fiction (mysteries, thrillers, romance, sci-fi, or fantasy), you can write a series, develop a following, and leverage that following to attract the attention of an agent.

Along the way, you’ll not only develop discipline and understand your own writing process, but you’ll come to understand the publishing cycle. You’ll develop a better sense for what your readers like, where your strengths and weaknesses lie, and what sells and what doesn’t. All of that knowledge will make you a better client and professional colleague to your eventual agent and editor.

5) You can actually make a living from your writing

Traditional publishing royalties, while varying by publisher, generally fall between 8-15%. Sometimes that’s based on the list price (the price printed on the book) and sometimes it’s based on net receipts (the amount the publisher actually gets for the book, which is often much less). By contrast, Amazon, Kobo, and other vendors pay authors royalties of 70% of list price for books priced over $2.99, and 35% for books priced $0.99 to $2.99. (Why would an independent author price his or her book at $0.99? I’ll address that in a future post.) For a more detailed explanation of traditional publishing’s royalty system, Jane Friedman’s book The Business of Being a Writer goes into useful detail on this topic.

As an independent author, you control the pricing of your work at all times. If you try a price and if sales aren’t what you’d like, you can run a promotion—almost instantly—to get your book in front of more readers. You can tinker with it endlessly until you find the sweet spot that makes your book fly off the digital shelves.

You can also control the pricing of your print book, if you choose print-on-demand options. While the royalty isn’t quite as generous on the print side, it’s still leaps and bounds ahead of the traditional offering. I earn between 20-35% on my print paperbacks, depending on the channel distributing the book.

The cash flow is better, too. With independent publishing, you’re paid monthly. Most traditional publishers pay twice a year or quarterly…assuming you’ve earned out your advance.

Whether they admit it or not, most writers who dare to put pen to paper aspire to make a living off their writing. Independent publishing allows authors to do that, and it’s not just theoretical. Scores of independent authors have quit their day jobs to write full-time, or have used their writing income to pay off debts, put their kids through college, or augment their retirement savings. In future posts, we’ll meet some of them. They may not be household names, but they’re living their writing dreams. If you’re willing to work hard, you can too.

6) It’s incredibly satisfying

Being the publisher of your own work is empowering. Seeing the fruits of your creative labor flourish as a result of your own strategic decisions is arguably as validating, if not more so, than any contract offered by a major publisher.

Independent publishing isn’t for everyone. It is an entrepreneurial act and requires a certain mindset to be successful: one willing to look critically at his or her writing, to assess her strengths and weaknesses, to take calculated business risks, and to be willing to fail and to learn from mistakes. But whether it represents the entirety of the author’s portfolio of work or a small part, independent publishing can contribute in strategic and meaningful ways to advancing an author’s career.  I’m looking forward to exploring this exciting and rapidly changing world with you.

Helen J. Darling writes contemporary women’s fiction. Her first novel, I’ll Know Me When I Find Me, was self-published in January 2018. You can connect with her at itshelendarling.com.

The post Why Choose Indie Publishing? appeared first on DIY MFA.