This is possibly one of the most divisive topics in the self-publishing community, so this is going to be another long post. As with most complex topics, it’s best to start at the beginning.
What even is KU?
If you’re an avid reader of ebooks, and your Amazon Kindle is your ereader of choice, you’ll already know that KU stands for Kindle Unlimited. It’s a subscription service Amazon offers which allows you to read unlimited books for a flat monthly fee. You’re just not allowed to keep said books; you borrow them and you return them, much like you would in a library.
Obviously this sounds great for readers. If you’re someone who devours a novel in a day or two, the bill for your monthly reading can quickly get out of control.
And as authors/publishers, we always want to make things easy for our readers, right? So, you might be thinking right now that KU is a wonderful thing and you should definitely participate. But, not so fast! Because there are downsides for authors.
The payout usually isn’t great.
Because a KU reader only borrows your title, and doesn’t buy it, the payout for you–the author–is lower than it would be if the reader had purchased a copy for themselves. KU reads are paid by page read by the customer, so if your book is quite short, you’ll get less money for a full read-through than you would if your book was longer. This seems fair at first glance, because typically, it might take you longer to write an epic novel than it would to write a short story.
But, different genres and categories play by different rules and have different reader expectations. A short erotica story might command the same price as a full romance novel. Illustrated children’s books tend to be quite short in terms of words on the page (Amazon appears to use the word count of a book as a major factor to calculate page length for the purposes of KU payments), but it’s the illustrations that give the book more value. If you put such a book into KU, you’ll get pennies for every person who reads it, whereas a purchase of the same book would make you much more money.
The counter-argument here would be that since readers can read unlimited books each month, you might end up with way more reads in KU than purchases you would have gotten otherwise. Amazon also appears to be giving KU books an extra boost in visibility, again possibly resulting in more borrows/sales than you would have gotten otherwise, but information about this is largely anecdotal.
There are numerous stories out there from authors who 70% or more of their monthly royalties from KU pages read, so for them it seems like an easy choice to make. Just put your books into KU already, right? Hang on, because the bigger catch is coming right up…
The exclusivity issue.
When you upload your book to Amazon KDP, on the third page of the publishing process, they give you the option to participate in “KDP Select”. That’s the option to tick if you want to add your books into Kindle Unlimited. But it clearly states that if you do this, you’re bound by an exclusivity requirement for as long as the contract period lasts (3 months at a time). You may not publish your eBook anywhere else until you end the contract!
Suddenly it becomes apparent that in order to give readers the cheap and cheerful option to borrow your book for free (after paying for their KU subscription), means that then readers who shop at other eBook retailers can no longer buy your book at all. Neither can you make your eBook available to actual Libraries which remain the most cost-effective option for readers on a budget. This can be a major downside, depending on your books’ target audience.
Actual market share numbers for Amazon and other eBook retailers remain shrouded in mystery, because there seem to not be any official reports about it, but for the US, I’ve seen stats ranging from over 80% down to 68% as reported here. Basically, nobody seems to know exactly. But those figures don’t take into account readers who borrow eBooks from libraries. And still, you’d be excluding at least around 20% of eBook readers by keeping your book exclusive to Amazon. Are you okay with that? It’s an individual choice every author should make for themselves.
So, what do we mean by wide, then?
Wide means publishing your eBooks on other retailers as well as Amazon. This can mean just the big ones: Apple, Barnes & Noble (US only), Google Play, Kobo, and entering libraries through something like Overdrive. Or it can mean making an effort to publish absolutely whereever you can, including on other subscription services (that don’t require exclusivity): Scribd, Kobo Plus, and reading apps such as Radish, Dreame and Kiss, etc. You can achieve this by using an aggregator like Draft2Digital/Smashwords, Streetlib, PublishDrive, to name a few, or “going direct” to retailers that allow it.
Kobo, Google Play, Barnes & Noble and Apple all have plublishing platforms you can use to upload your own books. Sure, it’s a lot to keep track of, but it can be worth it to get your books into the hands of more readers, and entering into global markets where Amazon doesn’t have such a high marketshare.
How to choose between wide and KU?
I already mentioned it’s an individual choice, but there are still some parameters you can use to make a decision. I’m going to list some below, not necessarily in order of importants, to help you figure out what to do.
How much time/publishing experience do you have?
It takes time to upload your book to various retailers, and it takes even more time to keep your books up-to-date if you ever have to make changes to them going forward. To be successful, you’ll also need to do some marketing, which again will take time. Anecdotal stories from other self-publishers tell us that it might be less work to stay in KU, because you’re going to get a little bit of visibility organically when you first publish, but that quickly falls off as your book gets older.
Will you be happy to learn how to navigate various publishing platforms, keep track of royalty payments, apply for promotions wherever they’re available, and reupload your book to all these different places every time you find and correct a typo?
I am, but I’m doing this fulltime.
Considerations for International Authors
Market share differs per country. You might have noticed this yourself, talking amongst your own friends who are avid readers. A company like Kobo has a larger marketshare in Canada, because that’s where they are based. They’re also connected to many different local eBook stores worldwide, which will be especially relevant to you if you write in a language other than English. In fact, if you’re from a country where the go-to eBook store is something other than Amazon, you’ll definitely want your books to be available there, which automatically means you can’t opt for KDP Select (and by extension, Kindle Unlimited).
Genre/Market research
There are genre related trends that can be observed across different eBook retailers. Some flavours of romance, for example, are super popular on Kindle Unlimited, and not so much on Apple. Before you publish your first book, I would anyway urge you to do a bit of research on Amazon to find books that are comparable to you. Observe cover design trends and learn from other author’s titles, descriptions, and even pricing strategies. While you do this, you should also take note of whether your peers seem to be overwhelmingly part of Kindle Unlimited or not.
If you’re interested in publishing wide, but all your fellow authors whom you would want to cross-promote with are in Kindle Unlimited, your audiences are not going to overlap well. In fact, you’ll just annoy the hell out of KU readers if you try to promote a wide book to them, and vice versa. KU readers will complain that the book isnt’ in KU and thus they have to pay full price for it, and wide readers will complain that a KU book isn’t available on Barnes & Noble, or wherever else they like to purchase books. It’s a lose lose proposition.
If this is your situation, either find yourself some comp authors who do well on other retail platforms, or reconsider your position on the wide vs KU question.
What are your principles?
Some of us have some very strong opinions when it comes to monopolies and corporate policy. If you feel like Amazon is getting a bit too big for comfort, and you would like to support the other eBook retailers out of principle, you might want to publish wide. An eBook platform without any books on it can’t attract customers. This is exactly why Amazon requires exclusivity. It’s part of their strategy to become the only player in the eBook space.
How patient are you, and are you willing to give things a good try?
Anecdotally, it takes time for sales from other retailers to start coming in. Publishing wide, seeing that you haven’t sold any books anywhere other than Amazon during the first month, and then changing your mind is a recipe for failure. Amazon appears to be the only retailer that gives new books a visibility boost only during the first month or so, while older books tend to be overlooked and forgotten. Other retailers reward loyalty and typically visibility there starts to build as you gain some kind of track record of sales through promotions and other marketing efforts.
Publishing wide is considered a long game. Something that works better if you have multiple books out and are able to use discounts and free giveaways to boost the rest of your book catalogue.
Whatever choice you make in the wide vs KU debate, be prepared to stick to it for a while. There’s nothing wide retailers hate more than an author who keeps putting their books in and and then taking them out repeatedly over time.
How strongly do you crave diversification?
The old saying not to put all your eggs into one basket does seem to have some merit. As a wide publisher myself, I’ve slowly seen my income from other retailers grow. I’ve also seen that while Amazon sales can fluctuate quite a bit across different months, depending on my promotional activities, wide sales are much more steady. They help even out the lows caused by slow months at Amazon.
Of course, you can diversify as a KU author/publisher by publishing different formats of your book (paperback, hardback, large print, audio, translations), but as I’ve touched upon in a previous article, eBooks tend to account for the majority of sales of self-published authors. So, while you might add a little side income to your bottom line by publishing paperbacks, hardbacks and other formats of your book, you might still earn more than that from retailers other than Amazon should you publish wide.
As much as I hate fear mongering, I would like to ask you to consider for a moment what would happen if your Amazon KDP account got banned. What would happen to your earnings? If you’re all in Amazon KDP, even with print books, you’d be done for until you got that account back.
This sounds very doom & gloom, but it does happen. And it has happened to publishers who have done absolutely nothing wrong or made unintentional mistakes. Add to this that a common justification given to some publishers when their accounts get banned (and their royalties withheld!) is the accusation that they attempted to manipulate borrows/page reads, I think being in KU actually increases your risk of getting into trouble. You can’t fake a purchase, unless somebody actually paid for it. But there are entire bot farms out there opening free trial subscriptions to KU, then going through books, faking page-reads to earn publishers money. Sure, you’re not doing it, but these scammers often try to obfuscate which books they’re targeting by picking random other books to fake-read as well. And yours could be one of them, in which case you might get into trouble.
Some publishers who get caught up in stuff like this manage to get their accounts reinstated, and some do not. Do think about this, and diversify by uploading your print books to other retailers, even if you don’t publish your eBooks wide just yet.
How is your performance in KU?
Finally, if you’re already in KU now, or have been in the past, you can look to past income as another thing to factor into your KU vs Wide decision. Personally speaking, I did try KU years ago for a new pen name. It did okay for a while, but not as well as some of the other authors I’d interacted with who told me that they were getting 80% of their income from KU borrows. I was getting closer to 40% of my income from KU. At that time, I decided to try taking these books wide, because I didn’t think my KU income was so overwhelming that I’d have a hard time making it back at other retailers. Indeed, my decision to go wide has worked out in my favour.
The Hybrid Approach #1
Some authors want to have the best of both worlds. Some books in KU and some books not. This can be an option for anyone who is uncertain about what is right for them and their books. But there are some downsides to it as well, and as such I wouldn’t recommend this in the long term.
- Your KU readers will want to read your wide books, and then get annoyed when they can’t borrow them.
- Your wide readers might get annoyed that they can’t buy your KU books anywhere else.
- This makes it difficult to announce new releases and sales, unless you’re planning on keeping your mailing lists for KU books and wide books completely separate.
- You have to have enough books out in total, to be able to support a strategy like this. Don’t even try if you have less than two series with multiple books out.
The Hybrid Approach #2
Some authors decide to try a time-bound strategy. Publish all new books in KDP Select (KU) for the first 3 months. Then when the contract period ends, publish them wide. If you stay on top of your contract restrictions with Amazon KDP, you can consider this. But again, there are some downsides.
- A KU reader who discovers your latest book while it’s in KU will be annoyed that the older ones are not.
- Wide readers tend to be a bit more patient and will usually be happy to wait the 3 months until the book is available, but you’re not allowed to put them up for preorder until the KDP Select contract period is over, so by then they might have forgotten that they wanted to buy your book.
- Amazon KDP has this irritating habit of putting you back into KDP Select even after you’ve unticked the box to renew your membership at the end of the 3 months, so you’ll have to check and double-check this. (Put a reminder in your calendar!)
The other variation to this approach would be to do a wide preorder for your new books, and then unpublish them everywhere else and putting them into KU. This in my opinion is the worse option. Sure, you take care of annoyed KU readers who want to binge-read your whole series and not just the newest book. But you’re not going to be able to benefit from much visibility on wide retailers this way. Longevity helps, newness doesn’t. You also won’t be able to take part in any promotions on wide retailers, because you won’t have you books live long enough.
Conclusion
I hope this article has helped you make up your mind. As I’ve already touched upon, I’ve tried KU, and for multiple reasons I preferred to take all my books wide. I make a more steady income on average, and have built up a readership on various retail platforms.
But don’t let me tell you what to do. Ask yourself the questions above, and figure it out for yourself. And the beauty about self-publishing is that you can always change strategy later. Just don’t do it multiple times a year, or you’ll have real trouble getting traction on wide retailers! Good luck!