Amazon Exclusivity: What does it buy you?

The answer is, it depends. Mostly, in my experience it depends on your book. If you're self-publishing in the US, your biggest single market will almost certainly be the Kindle store. This is not to say that other markets should be ignored. Barnes & Noble (Nook), Apple  iBooks, Kobo, Google Play, and Smashwords sell plenty of ebooks.

Pricing and Countdown Deals

However, selling a book is not always as simple as slapping a price on it and saying "For Sale." Amazon limits the minimum price for a Kindle book sold via KDP to 99¢. It encourages you to price the book between $2.99 and $9.99 by offering the maximum royalty percentage for books in that range. If you enroll your book in the KDP Select program, it means you cannot sell it in ebook form anywhere except the Kindle store (This doesn't apply to print sales). It also means Amazon offers incentives not otherwise available.  Specifically, you can run Kindle Countdown Deals where for the limited number of days specified, the book is available at a sale price (US or UK only). As opposed to you simply lowering the price yourself (which you could do at any time) the regular price still shows up, but it will be crossed out to show the book is on a limited time sale.

Kindle Unlimited (KU)*

The other big benefit is that your book is available in the Kindle Unlimited subscription program. KU subscribers are Amazon customers who pay a monthly flat fee. This allows them to read any book they want in the KU program. There's a limit to how many they can have at once, but not how many they can read. Amazon pays the author not a flat royalty per book, but a per-page-read fee. The amount is not guaranteed, but lately for the US KU market it has been running about 0.0048¢ per "Kindle edition normalized page"**. It is usually less in the foreign KU markets, but the US is usually the biggest one anyway. 

Genre, length, and readability will affect how much money your book can make in the KU program. My experience is limited since I have had only three books in this program. The enrollment is not a marriage; you don't have to keep the book exclusive forever. When you sign up, it's for a 3-month period and then you can renew again every 3 months, if you wish. If you don't renew, your book is no longer in KU and you can't run price promotions. With Saronna's Gift, which is a science fiction romance, I made enough with KU borrows to make it worthwhile to say in for two full periods, that is, 6 months. With Turnabout, a YA science fiction novel that is in no way a romance, I never made much in the KU program so I let it expire after the first 3-month period. Note that Turnabout is also considerably shorter-- only about 80,000 words, which meant less money per KU reader.

To sum up, I would expect a book that was a page turner, a romance, and fairly long would do very well in KU. And, for what it's worth, here's my advice:

• Always start in KDP Select to see how the book does
• Set a goal for KU borrows (say a third or maybe half of what the royalties are) and drop out when you go below your goal.
• Once you're out of KDP Select, go for every market you can! 

Footnotes:

* I am aware that KDP Select also gets your book into the Kindle Owners Lending Library, but frankly, I don't think this is nearly as big a deal as KU so I didn't spend any time talking about it.

** Amazon calculates pages in its own way, but Alien Bonds was 128,000 words and Amazon said it had 658 KENP pages. That's approximately 195 words per KENP page.

Shades of Empire now in more outlets!

Apple has won the race again. My newest title Shades of Empire is now available in iBooks as well as  Kindle and Smashwords. No sign of it on the Nook yet, or Sony or Kobo, but that's not a surprise as they don't even have Where Magic Rules yet, and it has been out for a few weeks more than Shades.

Retailer Update

Looks like Smashwords updated their Apple iBooks numbers last night. That's just over a month since the last time, which is pretty much what Smashwords advertises as their retailer update schedule.

iBooks does not show a count for free books, though, so I can't see how many copies of The Sixth Discipline I have given away in iBooks. It's over 1,000 now in the Kindle store, and a few hundred on the Nook, but the Barnes & Noble numbers are out of date by a month or so. Smashwords lists free downloads in with the sample downloads, so it's hard to get a total count, but the book is free there, too!

iBooks won the race to be free!

I have been checking the Smashwords retail platforms every day, to see if The Sixth Discipline was free yet. I made that book free on Smashwords on June 11^th and as of today, it still costs 99¢ everywhere except on iBooks where it is now free!

That means Apple price-matched Smashwords after only 4 days!  That is much faster than it used to be. Mark Coker did not lie!

Finally!

Smashwords has updated their Apple sales figures. For the first time, my US iBooks sales beat my Commonwealth (Canadian, UK, and Australian) sales. Oh, and Smashwords updated Barnes & Noble sales figures a while ago, but I never have as many sales there, so I don't stress about that.

Sales figures from other retailers: slow is better than not at all

Like the KDP and PubIt platforms, Smashwords reports sales on their own platform very quickly. For all three of them, you see any and all sales within hours or even minutes.

For sales via Smashwords other retailers though, reporting time varies tremendously. I've copied the chart (below) that I see in the Smashwords Sales and Payment Report to show you what I mean. Note the second column in the table, which shows the date for which sales are reported for that retailer. Barnes & Noble is the quickest, followed by Sony and Kobo, but Apple and Diesel are way behind, with Amazon bringing up the rear (except of course I'll never see Amazon numbers in this table because I'm selling direct via KDP). The fourth column shows actual dollar amounts for any sales not already reflected in my Smashwords balance (i.e., money that will be due to me from Smashwords after they get it from the retailers).  All data is as of today, but I've zeroed out all the last column numbers.

When I looked at the sales and payment report in my Smashwords Dashboard, below this chart is a much longer and more detailed one showing sales by date and by vendor. It's actually pretty informative in terms of what titles are selling well, and in some cases, where.  Apple and Kobo show the country where the sale was made.and all of them give you the price paid and the date.

Smashwords pays quarterly, assuming you have enough royalty coming to you. If you're at all interested, you should check out their Payment and Royalties FAQ.

G'day, mate! Apple iBooks Down Under

One reason I like Smashwords is it gives you the option of also selling your ebooks in other retailers, specifically the Apple iBooks and Sony Reader stores. Sony has provide a slow but steady sales stream, but Apple is interesting because their stores have resulted in some international sales for me.

When you own international rights to your book and publish it via KDP,  your ebook is also for sale in the Kindle stores in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. But of course, except for the UK, an English language book is not going to do as well in those countries. The Apple iBooks store, however, sells in the UK, Canada, and Australia as well as parts of Europe. For some reason, Tribes has done better in Australia than anywhere else! Maybe it's the desert setting for the opening scene? Or maybe it's the remoteness of the colony world? Who knows!

But I'm happy they like Tribes Down Under!