Posts Tagged kdp select

My Month of Amazon KDP Select

It is just over a month since Amazon announced KDP Select, opening their Kindle Owners Lending Library to independent publishers.  After deliberating the pros and cons, I took the plunge, giving the program a try.  It has certainly been interesting!

Today, Amazon announced the results of the program so far.  First, I’ll share my experience with the program during this month.

After I signed up my techno thriller Counting from Zero, reluctantly saying goodbye to Smashwords, I didn’t have long to wait – the borrows started happening immediately.  After Christmas, I saw another wave of borrows, presumably new Kindle owners.  Then, in the first few days of the month, another surge.  (I presume this means that borrows are done on a calendar month rather than 30 day periods.  If this is true, we will often see lots of borrows at the start of the month.)

In the 3 weeks of December KDP Select was active, for my eBook, borrows represented 18% of Amazon activity (sales plus borrows).  For January so far, the percentage is about 16%, but with higher numbers of both sales and borrows.  I’d estimate overall sales seem to be up about 25% since Christmas.  Since my sales have increased but my sales ranking has not, this seems to be a general trend, at least in my category.  So, looking at my numbers, since the non-Amazon eBooks sales I gave up to participate in KDP Select only accounted for 5% of my total sales, I appear to be ahead of the game, at least in terms of numbers.  But the question was what would publishers get paid for borrows?  Amazon did not commit to any royalty rate when the program was launched, instead saying authors would share a $500,000 pot of money based on borrowing numbers.

Amazon answered that question today in announcing that KDP Select authors will receive $1.70 for each borrow in December, based on 295,000 borrows in December.  For my relatively low-priced eBook of $2.99, this isn’t much lower than my normal royalty for a sale, which is about $2.  I have yet to try out a free book giveaway day, so I can’t share my experience with this aspect of KDP Select, but I hope to soon.

So, one month in, I do not regret my decision to give KDP Select a try.  I see no reason why I won’t renew (re-enlist?) in two more months. However, I am still unhappy about the exclusivity requirement, as are many other independent publishers.  Amazon, if you are paying attention, this requirement just stinks and you should drop it.

How was your month with KDP Select?

Advertisements

, , , ,

5 Comments

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Amazon

Today I ditched a long time partner, Smashwords.  I feel really, really bad.  I remember clearly the day I found the site and realized I could use this one excellent site for distributing my eBook on multiple platforms: iBooks, Nook, Diesel, Kobo, Sony, etc.  I loved the way I could generate free download coupons for my eBook.  I raved about Smashwords on this blog.  Between Smashwords and Amazon KDP  (Kindle Direct Publishing), I had my eBook publishing bases covered.

As of today, I am using Amazon KDP exclusively to distribute my eBook, Counting from Zero.

Why?  Because of the terms of the new KDP Select program Amazon launched today.  In exchange for forsaking Smashwords (and all others), my eBook will be a part of Amazon’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, a brand new part of their Prime service.  Users of this service get to “borrow” one eBook per month for free.  Authors and publishers get no royalty, but instead will split a slush fund from Amazon based on their books share of lending.  How much will this be?  No one knows – it depends on the degree to which users adopt this new model.  There is also the opportunity to offer my eBook for free promotions, as well.

Why did I decide to participate?  Well, the financial calculation was trivial.  As the pie chart shows, 88% of my sales have been eBooks on KDP, with 7% paperbacks (on Amazon and B&N), and just 5% eBooks through Smashwords.  To give up those 5% sales to add a new distribution channel is an easy calculation.  Also, I just love being able to participate in the disruption of the publishing industry, and it will be a very interesting ride the next few months to see if this takes off.

Despite the title of this blog (apologies to Dr. Strangelove), I do still worry about Amazon.  Their power in the publishing industry is growing exponentially.  If the Kindle Fire takes off and lending as well, it will give Amazon even more leverage.  I really, really don’t like the exclusive requirement for Kindle Select.  It feels awful to say goodbye to Smashwords, a site that has been extremely useful to me this year.

So, here it is – it will be interesting to see how it goes!

, , , , , , , ,

2 Comments
https://countingfromzero.wordpress.com/tag/kdp-select/
countingfromzero.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-47
47342
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:DSAAAJK5POJWKUS5Z3WADGPDBGTEZFDQ
<urn:uuid:8039c9c2-9740-48f9-bb1e-7a7c198e0e57>
2017-11-21T17:21:58Z
192.0.78.12
text/html
sha1:OTWHW3N7262CYOS6WUGRUS5DMZJ4SNWX
<urn:uuid:36802ee6-1679-4bcf-97d6-a362f212da3e>
https://countingfromzero.wordpress.com/tag/kdp-select/
length
response
<urn:uuid:038b05b1-0871-48ea-aeef-78eb0ca46dea>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-99-209-250.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-47
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for November 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf