If you search a bit on the Web, you will find a lot of self-publishing writers decrying Amazon. There are plenty of valid reasons not to like the enormous corporate behemoth that got plenty of sweetheart deals and crushed its competition. Jeff Bezos has started to throw some of his gazillions of dollars back at charitable causes as of 2018, but let’s be real, they ain’t the best corporate citizen on the block yet.
I bring this up because I’m publishing Civil Blood‘s debut through Amazon. I put together the print version using Createspace and the first e-book edition uses Kindle Direct Publishing’s “KDP Select” program, which means it’s exclusive to the Kindle for the first 90 days of its publication life. I did this for a few notable reasons.
- I haven’t done this self-publishing thing before and their interfaces are pretty intuitive. There are lots of resources for writers learning the process.
- I only own a Kindle and know only a small group of people who read e-books. They’re all packing Kindles (some use others as well, but they all have a Kindle), so if I want my friends and family to read my book, Kindle’s the way to go.
- I have no advertising budget, so getting promoted even a little with KDP Select means I might reach more readers.
- I looked at the graph at the top of the post. (Credit to AuthorEarnings.com). It’s dated to 2015, but I haven’t found more recent data that modifies it. This graph shows Amazon’s slice of the e-book pie. It’s on the order of 74% for numbers of units sold and 71% of revenue earned. All others combined are that remaining 26%/29%.
Now, I don’t really expect to make money with Civil Blood. It has always been a side project for me, and the novel publishing industry has been pretty hand-to-mouth as long as I’ve been alive. But I do want to reach readers, and I don’t want to neglect all the fine folks out there with Nooks and Google Play and what-have-you who are fighting the good fight and supporting Amazon’s competition. So what was the deciding factor?
Well, my thinking is… it’s just 90 days.
I mean, really. Are there actually going to be legions of people out there madder than heck because they were waiting for that guy who wrote the galaxy map in Mass Effect to anoint their platform with his deathless prose?
No.
And if some fans actually do think it’s some nice prose, well, the product will be just as good in October as it is in June. Books are great like that.
And in October or so, I plan to have a second little push to say “hey, now available on B&N Nook and Kobo!” I’ll do an upload to Draft2Digital, which seems pretty good about reaching the non-Amazon platforms. And hopefully, the process will have the kinks worked out and any terrible mistakes that made it to print will be fixed.
That’s it. That’s my grand marketing strategy.
Let’s see what happens.