Should You Go Exclusive in Kindle Unlimited or Publish Your Book Wide?
The conversation is outdated for independent authors.
If you’re considering self-publishing or independently publishing a book, you most likely will come across a hot topic of debate about whether to put your book into a Kindle Direct Publishing program called Kindle Unlimited. This program which makes your book exclusive to Kindle Unlimited for 90 days means that you can’t post or distribute more than 10% of your book anywhere else, not even on your own website.
In exchange for this exclusivity, your book is enrolled in Amazon’s unlimited reading subscription program and you get paid additional royalties for pagereads. You also gain visibility in Amazon’s store as any borrow counts as a sale in your sales rank.
As a result of the Kindle Unlimited program, independent authors sometimes divide themselves into two camps in terms of publishing, marketing, sales, and business strategies. Kindle Unlimited means keeping your ebooks exclusive to Amazon, while Going Wide means publishing your ebooks to other platforms like Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, and Kobo.
Kindle Unlimited versus Going Wide — which is better?
There is often debate over which path is better for the independent author: overall, when they are starting out, when they have a big catalog, at various points in their business, and so on.
But the one thing I rarely see discussed in the KU vs. Wide debate is that the conversation is actually a little outdated and a relic of a time when independent authors could still *only* make money from their ebooks.
Over the last several years, a lot of those options have cracked wide open. Now, whether you are exclusive in ebook or not means zilch about how you find readers for your audiobooks, print books, and translations, and those markets are growing rapidly for independent authors.
Although lots of independent authors make their money primarily through Amazon/Kindle Unlimited, that doesn’t mean they don’t have a wide mindset or can’t work right now to find readers outside of those avenues. I see KU authors growing their following and readership in print, audiobook, and elsewhere all the time.
I’m wide and have no plans to ever go back to Kindle Unlimited. I’m also trying to be aggressively wide, which takes time and a lot of work as you are expanding your catalog in many, many directions. I chose that for a lot of personal reasons, including my passion for being wide, my core values around supporting wide platforms, my desire to experiment freely with my content in creative ways.
It’s what I enjoy, and what I want long term, and I completely understand why others have simplified by only having their ebooks and possibly audiobooks on one retailer. Honestly, what not everyone admits is how much admin work this job takes, and that multiplies significantly when you are wide. And then when you factor in the marketing work…
All of this is to say, I believe going wide is about far more than ebooks!
Selling more books in the print format
A lot of indie authors say that print books are only 5% of their total sales. When I say this, I’m talking about the comments on various author forums, plenty of which are on Facebook in the form of groups. Look around, you’ll see the 5% figure tossed out quite a bit. It’s a number that gets thrown around a lot, and often from the mentality that it’s normal and what a new author should expect.
But it’s not really the whole truth, which is that there are tons of independent or “indie” authors who have found ways to make print books 25% or more of their sales. Some indies are primarily print. Some indies sell six figures in print.
The whole truth is that you’re going to learn to make money wherever you focus your attention. And there is so much opportunity outside of the few places that most of the indie community is focused on. You can pick any one of those avenues, own it, and build your author career fairly quickly by not following conventional advice that is often skewed toward Kindle Unlimited (KU).
I make far more than 5% of my total unit sales from print. And I get better royalties on that than my ebooks, by my own design and basically just pricing correctly. (Another thing that I’ve noticed indie authors are doing — pricing too low in POD to be profitable.)
The good news is that it’s not an exclusive nor an elusive club. You can be in KU and you still have free rein over your print books. You can grow your print and keep your ebook money. Win-win.
Selling more books in the audiobook format
Another figure I hear tossed around by independent authors is that Amazon and Audible (owned by Amazon) hold 85% or more of the audiobook market in the US. This number is likely derived out of confusion (Amazon does hold 85–90% market share of the ebook market in the US) or from personally having about 85% of their audiobook sales come from Audible.
In reality, Amazon holds something closer to 40–50% market share of the audiobook market, which is in line with them holding ~50–55% of the ecommerce market in the US.
Apple Books, Google Play Books, and Kobo (Rakuten) are all vying for larger pieces of the audiobook market because it will help them chip away at Amazon’s ecommerce market share in the US and at their share of the ebook market as well.
Devices are also an important part of that conversation. Apple, Google, and Amazon are all trying to get home and car devices into as many homes/cars as possible. Devices are going to determine ecommerce market share in the future and have the ability to reorder things.
While creating audiobooks is cost prohibitive to independent authors (costs run at about $250 a finished hour for a narrator), audiobooks are a big driver of ecommerce growth and likely an area that non-Amazon retailers will be pushing and investing money into in the coming years.
Three takeaways:
- Even if your ebook is exclusive to the Kindle Unlimited program, it’s smart to make your audiobook wide to all retailers that will take it. Amazon simply doesn’t hold enough of the market share of the audiobook space to make exclusivity worthwhile.
- Despite the upfront investment of creating audiobooks, most independent authors should still invest—even if they can’t make their money back in the near-future. With in-home and in-car devices, more reading will move to audiobook. While much of that market share will likely be gains to the book industry, audiobook is also likely to chip away at market share of print and ebook, just as ebook once chipped away at market share of print. Creating audiobooks is a way for independent authors to bolster the longevity of their book careers.
- A lot of independent authors think Amazon has won the game of ebooks. But audiobooks are the sneaky back door. If people buy audiobooks from other retailers, they are likely to start picking up more ebooks from there too. The game for market share of ebooks is not over, and I expect Amazon’s hold to weaken in the next several years.
I have sold about 10,000 audiobooks through ACX, which is a royalty share program with Audible. I never paid a cent to produce my audiobooks, but in exchange I’m exclusive to Audible and also split money with my narrator. However, I’ve since released new editions with new ISBNs of all of these books (both fiction and nonfiction) which means I can produce new audiobooks myself, pay my narrator(s) upfront, and make them non-exclusive.
Let’s let go of the Kindle Unlimited versus Going Wide debate
Independent authors have so many options beyond ebooks. While print and audiobook used to be an afterthought for many authors, there are now tools and software to make the process of creating and growing these other formats easier.
You can also build your author business with translations, ancillary products, and selling subsidiary rights.
If you’d like to know more, I have a variety of books on these topics.
Monica Leonelle is the founder of The World Needs Your Book and helps authors turn their writing hobby into a career with her two series, The Productive Novelist and Book Sales Supercharged.