Not sure if you should publish your eBooks wide or exclusive to Amazon? There is no one right answer to this question. In today’s episode we are talking about advantages and disadvantages of both routes while providing our experience on both sides of the fence. We also explain the differences between selling books directly through individual retailers like Kobo, Apple and the GooglePlay store vs using an aggregator to do the distribution to a variety of places from one dashboard.

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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 043: Wide or Exclusive for eBook publishing in 2021?

Crystal Hunt: Hey there strategic authorpreneurs. Welcome to episode 43 of the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. I’m Crystal Hunt.

Michele Amitrani: And I’m Michele Amitrani and we are here to help you save time, money and energy as you level up your writing career.

Crystal Hunt: If you find the show helpful, you can help us keep the episodes coming by clicking the by us a coffee button on the website or in the show notes. Your contributions help us cover operating expenses and help keep this podcast ads free.

In this episode, we’re talking about what it means to publish wide versus exclusive and what some of the upsides and challenges are when you do that. But before we dig into today’s topic, it’s time for a peek into what we’ve been doing to level up our author careers this past week. Michele, what have you been up to?

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele Amitrani: Crystal last week, we spoke a lot about what we had in store for 2021. And one of my main objectives was the one of cultivating my newsletter. So trying to do something a bit better on that side, getting a bit more engagement, getting those numbers on the Italian and the English front to be a bit more up.

So I’m very happy to let you know that I am, let’s say 50% on a project that is related to building up my newsletter asset. I am now on the process of finishing translating a novella, which is the second part of a let’s call it bilogy. It’s a shortest that you can possibly have.

And I should be done translating this novella the day after tomorrow. So I already did the first the second one is a bit longer, so it’s 20,000 words. I am now at 7,000 works and I’m hoping this afternoon to reach 10,000 so that tomorrow I will be able to finish the first translation so that I can start giving it to my beta readers and hopefully I’m keeping my fingers crossed by the first half February 12th to publish this newsletter cookie for my entire newsletter.

I’ll keep you updated because this is going to be the first phase, let’s say phase one for the increasing of the organic subscribers on my Italian newsletter. Let’s see how it goes. And basically want to give one book for free wide and then attached to this first book the second book, only two people that actually get into my newsletter.

So it’s something I’ve never done. I’ve been told that it’s a good strategy. Just to give one book for free, maybe book number one of a series, and then make the second book, or maybe the third book, the later book as an exclusive for your newsletter. I don’t know if Italians like this kind of stuff I’m going to try and I’m going to let you know how it goes.

And the second thing, very briefly just to keep you updated on what I told you the past week, I’m also working on the Italian version of Bringer of Fire, my Italian novella, which is called La Stirpe del Fuoco. I’ve got just two more betas that I need to give it to them the Italian version then it’s going to be just formatting assembling the review team, publishing and then placing those Amazon ads to give it hopefully a starting boost and then I’m going to hit the release with everything I got. So my newsletter, my Facebook page, every single ounce of power that I have.

So these are my two main projects for the next two to four weeks. And I’m very excited to see how it goes again, as promised, I’m going to keep you updated on a weekly basis. And what about you? I know that you’ve been if possible, even more busy than I was.

Crystal Hunt: We have launched the Full Time Author book now so that is really exciting. So ads have started running the reviews have come in. So we have enough of that made sense to start the ads and the paperback is live as well as the ebook. And we actually are adding hardcover, will go out the same day as the wide ebook release date, which is the 28th of January. So just a couple of days from now.

So that is really exciting. Big milestone. We’ve been just revamping all of the resources section on the website for Creative Academy to make sure that all the resources that go with the books are fully up to date and everything is good. So we can check all of those things off the list now.

And now I get to shift into the writing of the Create with Coauthors book, which is the next one in the series that we’re working on as a group. Donna Barker, Eileen Cook, and I, all three of us are co-writing that book because it was silly to write a book about collaborative writing projects on your own.

So we’re doing it together because that makes sense. Another goal that I had for this year was to do four new audio books and at least two of them to be non-fiction books. So this week we’ve been tackling, setting up a Findaway voices account for our Creative Academy guides and getting started in the process of actually casting somebody to do our audio for us, because for the collaborative books, we weren’t really sure which one of us should narrate them. It’s not like there’s a specific section that each of us does, we all work on all of the sections. So it didn’t really make sense to try to do that with multiple narrators.

And I think that would be distracting for the reader. So we’re actually going to just dive in and hire somebody to do that for us, it will mean we get it done a lot quicker and they are professionals. So we don’t have to learn all of the editing and mastering and all of that side of things.

We’re just gonna make it happen. So that is exciting and will be a nice way to dive right into words one of those big goals that we talked about last week. And if you miss last week, you can go and check out our intro episode to the season because we did a deep dive into what our 2021 goals were going to be.

And we also did some interesting reflection on the data from 2020 as well. So that was quite interesting. Now today’s topic is basically just an intro to going wide. Maybe Michele, can you give us a little bit of an explanation? What does it mean to go wide versus be exclusive?

Wide vs exclusive

Michele Amitrani: I have to say I’m so excited that this episode even exists because just for spoiler alert, we’re both wide authors at the moment we’re talking.

And a couple of years ago I would not have had an answer to that question, which is as we’re talking now and I’m sure in the future even more important. So there are two very big terms that we’re going to use a lot in this episode. One of these is exclusivity and the other one is wide. We’re going to deep dive on a number of things today and everything that we are going to say in this episode none of this can be applied to just one author.

Every single person needs to take their own point of view and their own objective, and then they have to craft their own strategy. To answer Crystal’s question, when a person, an author decide is to gold wide, it means that he or she wants to publish the book that they have created everywhere basically.

In as many online retailer, but also offline retailer as possible. Exclusivity means that you have basically opted to make your book available only in one distribution channel. And this is also something important since we are in the self publishing era and we’re not necessarily talking about legacy for publishing or traditional publishing exclusivity in a traditional publisher sense it applies more on a contract, so it can apply to a specific book or several books. In this case, when I refer to exclusivity, I’m just talking about one specific book because we can decide to make one book or one series of book exclusive, for example, just to say, on Amazon KDP Select and other books we can decide as author, because that’s our strategy to make them available wide.

And just before going forward I wanted to give some kudos to a couple of people. While I was researching in order to try to provide you guys as much value as possible, I went through a couple of articles that talk about wide the and exclusivity one of these article was ‘When is it time to go wide? by Kevin Tumlinson.

And this is not the super recent article. It’s a few years old, but it’s actually actual, it feels any needs. So I’m going to use, we’re going to use some of the vocabulary and some of the things that Kevin said, and the other article that we are going to take from it’s called the ‘7 most popular platform to self publishing your book and make money’ and this one is by Mr. PMacdonald so just to give credit to who deserves that. So that’s the answer to your question, wide it means basically to publish everywhere you can your book as wide as possible. But there are some things that I believe Crystal is better for us to explore immediately after explaining what exclusivity means and what wide means.

There is one word also that we are going to repeat very often today, which is aggregators what is it that an aggregator if somebody that is listening to this name for the first time and why might be useful, or maybe not, to an author?

Crystal Hunt: So when we talk about going wide versus being exclusive, I think one thing to point out is that with print books, you don’t have to be exclusive.

There’s not the same debate around print books as there is e-books and audio books. Just to put that out there. So far, none of the platforms require that if you’re going to use them, you don’t use anybody else for your print books. So with print books, the goal is always get them in as many places as you possibly can.

And try to just make them as available as possible to your readers when it comes to the other books, so we’re talking about audio books or eBooks, then you need to decide, are you going to go to each of the retailers directly yourself, or are you going to use an aggregator, which is a company who is effectively a distributor for your book to all of the other small, smaller stores and the bigger stores too, actually.

So what that means is if you’re using someone like Smashwords or Draft 2 Digital or Publish Drive, those are some of the more popular e-book aggregators or distributors that you can use and they let you upload your book to one place and then they manage the relationships and the accounts with all of the stores, and then they pay you out once a month from all of those places in a lump sum. So it’s much more efficient in a lot of ways, because you’re only managing that one dashboard and you’re only uploading your book to one place and when you change the information, they will push it out to all of the other places.

So that’s one of the upsides and the flip side of that, if you are going wide and doing it directly to each of the individual stores, then you can actually set up accounts with Amazon iTunes, Barnes and Noble to get your books into the nook store, Kobo, Google Plus, and then there’s also the option to sell your books directly from your website through a variety of different tools. And there are a few other, there’s lots of other smaller ebook stores that you can also put your books into potentially. And that’s, so that’s a summary of what an aggregator is.

It’s just a centralized distributor, so that you put all your information there and they blast it out to everywhere else.

Michele Amitrani: That’s amazing. I have a funny story for you. I am, full disclosure, I am not only wide but I’m also direct on Amazon, on Kobo and I’m direct at Google and then I reach everything else through Draft to Digital.

So I was basically doing my tax form on Google, which is a platform I’ve never used to go direct. And the wording that they use when it comes for you to fill out some spaces where slightly different from other platform. So that meant that I had to spend some times to go on the internet to check the answer to that question.

And then actually I reached out to Google Play store to make sure that was the exact answer. Then I was able to finish the two filling up the form and everything was okay. But that means that I have to spend half an afternoon in order to find out the way for me to let Google Play pay me.

So that’s extra work, that’s something that I wouldn’t have done if maybe I would have used like a an aggregator. So this is just to say that you have always to consider the extra admin work. And I didn’t go, for example, direct on the Apple iTunes for a couple of different reason, but one of the reasons is also because and then I will have to add another platform every single time you have to for example to update the book price or all that kind of stuff.

So this is something that it’s, I think Crystal worth underline. It really does take some times and every single platform, if you’re going director, has a its own criteria and specifics and you have to be the one adapting yourself to them.

So I think this is something important and something that I wish somebody would have said, because I thought everyone would act like a Amazon, for example, but they actually have different rules and you’re the one that needs to be interested in finding out exactly what they want and how they want it.

Crystal Hunt: One thing to jump in there, we’re actually going to dig in the next episode in detailed each of the different platforms and highlighted a few of the issues or things to be aware of for you. So we’re going to talk about the different possible distributors you could use to go wide if you’re using an aggregator.

And then we will let you know there are certain rules about types of cover images you can use on some versus others and there’s different rules about whether or not someone can manage your account for you and what access they get, all those kinds of things and how they really work. So we are going to dig into that in more detail in the next episode.

And today we’re going to focus a bit more for the over the next little bit on kind of advantages and disadvantages of exclusivity or being wide and why you might want to choose one over the other. And just to debate that a little bit, because as Michele mentioned earlier, it’s not going to be the right decision for everybody, depending on your genre and depending on your approach and your business model and your skillset and preferences, all of those things are going to go into the decision of, should you be wide or should you be exclusive?

And I guess there isn’t a “should” really, here. There’s no “should”. There is: will you? Or do you want to? But there just should, because that implies that there is a right way and there isn’t. It really is a personal choice. So let’s talk for a minute about what are some of the advantages of being exclusive versus being wide. Let’s compare and contrast those a little bit.

So advantages of exclusivity would be what?

Advantages of exclusivity

Michele Amitrani: So I have made a point to at least name three of each in this case for the exclusivity, I will say, and I’m going to explain each of them. One is more money in the short term potentially less admin hassle, so I basically before losing of an afternoon in order to make sure that my tax information went correct on Google play, that’s something I didn’t have to do if I was exclusive with my book or books on one retailer.

I say less admin hassle because it’s less admin stuff that you have to do. It’s just one platform, that’s your central hub and you don’t have to worry about anything else. You’re exclusive with that book or that series and you don’t have to invest resources and energy and potentially even money on trying to find out what’s the best solution to a specific problem of one publishing platform. And on the same point, I also say more money short term. And why am I saying that Crystal? A couple of reasons. I’m just now mentioning one potentially venue where you could go exclusive, which is, might be Amazon, for example.

There are a couple of perks that definitely gives a potential authors that decide to enroll their book on KDP Select that are worth mentioning. So one of these is the page reads. So for example, it is a way for us author to get paid when a person enrolled in Kindle Unlimited download our book and then read it.

So every page we get paid a bit. That’s something you don’t get if you’re not exclusive with that particular platform. So I said more money, short term. This is a possibility. Me, myself. I have enrolled a science fiction series on KDP Select and I am making money every single day with this strategy.

So I can see it’s definitely a perk. It’s definitely something good. It’s money on the table that I can use that I can leverage. I can pay stuff with that. So more money on the short term, but that’s not the only reason. The other reason why I say more if you want resources in the short term, it’s also because you have a bit more visibility, especially in that store that I mentioned before.

There are ways, of course, if you are exclusive with Amazon, that your book get a slight bigger visibility because every single time a person that is enrolled on Kindle Unlimited download your book and then that book, borrowed book count exactly as a sale. So you can see bit of a bump in your chart position.

And that’s very nice, actually it’s an additional visibility and it’s a possibility for more readers to see you on top of that chart. So this is for me one of the advantages of the exclusivity, and also the visibility. And the higher return on investment. I’m thinking for example, of another perk of being enrolled in that exclusivity program, which is for example, Kindle Countdown Deal, you can get 70% instead of 35% of the royalty.

This is huge, but not only because you have to consider, you have to consider this. Person that author, there are enrolled in Kindle KDP countdown deal, they potentially can spend more than double the money on advertisement because they have potentially not only that added visibility, but they have double the amount of royalty they can make.

So they have more firepower if you will. This is definitely an advantage and it’s something that folks like me and Crystal, have to come up with different strategy to try and solve or address. It’s not impossible to try and respond to the kind of firepower, but you have to consider you’re basically like playing not at home, you’re playing from a different part of the field.

So that’s definitely three of the advantages of exclusivity, potentially more visibility, more money in the short term with less admin work and potentially again, higher return on investment with things like Kindle Countdown Deal, which are just scratching the surface. I’m not even going further of the, for example, the free stuff that you can give to people for example, the e-book for five days for free and all other stuff that goes into the popularity list, which we are not going to talk about. What do you think? Have I forgot something on the advantages of exclusivity that you would like listeners to know Crystal.

Crystal Hunt: I think the simplicity is really an important thing to highlight of what is attractive about being exclusive.

If you are newer to indy publishing and you’re trying to learn all of the things, the less admin hassle is true, but it’s also a lot simpler for readers in some ways when you’re sending out newsletters, there’s one link to send, there’s ways around all of these. And we’re going to talk about those for sure.

So that you know how to simplify the wide process as well, but I think it’s important to just be aware, there are definitely lots of ways that it is just much more simple and because you’re only committing to 90 day exclusivity periods at a time, you could actually just start there and then add wide after the first three months, if you’re really learning your way around, that is an option that you can start one and build the other.

Now there’s also some downsides to that, which we will talk about shortly here as well. But yeah, I think you covered the highlights. There’s lots of different ways that you do get increased visibility if you are part of the Kindle Unlimited Program, particularly. So that is something to be aware of.

But yeah, we think there’s other things that can offset that as well. So let’s talk about some of the disadvantages of being exclusive just to balance things out. And I think that while you may get more visibility within certain platforms, so inside the Amazon ecosystem, we’ll say you don’t hit everybody in the world.

Not every country in the world has Amazon, not everyone is, even has the option of being in Kindle Unlimited in terms of our readers, depending on where your audience is there are lots of countries where Kobo or Google Play or other platforms are actually the primary e-book source for folks. So understanding that while you may have bigger reach inside of one particular space, you are not covering everywhere.

And so you’re not reaching all of the possible platforms. You’re also really dependent on one platform. So that’s like putting all your eggs in one basket. What happens if you drop the basket or what happens if something falls on your basket or if your basket gets dumped out? All of these things are not good.

So when we talk about putting all our eggs in one publishing basket, that’s what we’re talking about. If the rules change, that can really hurt your revenue and your business model can seriously suffer. So that’s something to be aware of. Definitely that can be an issue. If something adjusts and you are dependent on your business income, then that is a problem.

You can’t put your books in the library if you’re exclusive. So for me, that’s a really big stumbling block. I really want my readers to be able to get my books from the library, especially when times get a bit tough and finance can be challenging. It is really nice to be able to still send your readers info that you have a new book, but they can get it from the library and you still get paid by the library.

So it all works out that way. But yeah, it’s not an option if you are exclusive. The other thing you really can’t do, if you are exclusive, is just give away your books, however you want. I like to do lots of promos and I like to have the first in series free and I liked to be able to reward my newsletter list with a freebie whenever I feel like it and that gets a little bit challenging when you are exclusive any books that are in that program have to stay in that program. And I do find sometimes that can be very hard when you’re doing box sets and things like that as well, it does limit your options of how you can package your various products and also how you can promote your various products.

One other disadvantage to being exclusive is that you cannot hit a list. If you are exclusive, you can’t hit the New York Times or USA Today bestseller lists, unless you have books available through multiple channels. So if you are going after a list, and getting your letters as they call it in the biz, then you are going to want to make sure that you are in fact wide, even if it’s just for the book that you’re trying to actually get on the list for that is a requirement, but also it’s not impossible to get a BookBub feature deal if you are exclusive, it’s totally possible, but it is, they prefer generally, if you are a wide author and there are lots of promo sites who also prefer if you are a wide author.

So just keep that in mind. It can also be a bit off-putting for readers if they don’t… because they don’t understand the business side of the publishing industry, nor should they, it’s not really relevant to them except where it crosses over with their reading preferences.

So you may find that you have some upset readers when they try to get your books on other platforms and they can’t. So just be aware that there is a certain amount of preference and of giving your readers options that can be an upside to wide as well.

Advantages of going wide

Now advantages of going wide, it’s the flip side of all the negatives that we just talked about. So you have a more diverse sources of income. You have more security and stability. You can leverage some different strategies and you can take advantage of really different kinds of promotions.

And you have a bit more reach in terms of what countries you can be in and where you can be featured and all of those good things. Now what Michele would you say are some disadvantages of going wide?

Disadvantages of going wide

Michele Amitrani: There is one major that I’m finding out, but actually we already discussed about this even behind the scene, which is: it really takes a lot more time.

And it’s basically many people in the industry define it as a slow burner. It really takes longer and that’s simply because this concept is embedded in the concept itself of going wide. You have to cover more regions, the readership is potentially way bigger, but there are so many other things that you have to keep in mind.

If you can compete in one single spot only you can address and basically put all of your resources on that platform and that’s it. You have to focus just on one part of the game, but if you’re wide, it’s like you are on a chess board, but this chess board is bigger than usual. There are really way more things that you have to consider in order to catch the attention of readers.

And you don’t necessarily have those, between parentheses, those weapons and those resources that you have if you are exclusive. So I will take number one, it really takes a longer time. And I already mentioned that on the administrative side of things, it’s way more complicated. And I’m referring to the time invested, the attention to details the resources and the possibly also the money that you have to invest in order to do that, because there are, for example tools like Publish Drive that is going to help you a lot if you want to centralize all of your authorpreneur empire, but those resources they cost. Especially if you decide for a more, a higher end plan and maybe not all of the others can afford that. So I would say it’s very much more demanding on the resources side.

So it takes more time, more admin job, more resources on the table and I will also say there is a psychological factor and you would ask, what does it mean psychological factor? And it’s basically you see everybody else that, for example, are enrolled exclusive, and they are going fast and in a world like today, 2021, everyone expect everything now.

And so when you see that your sales are not as big as if you were exclusive, especially if you have both legs in two different separate regions, so maybe you are a kind of a hybrid, so some of your series and your books are maybe exclusive and some others, you decided to give it a shot to the wide and see how it goes and you can clearly see the difference, and Crystal I am seeing the difference as we’re talking.

I have that science fiction series that is doing pretty okay for the size that it is and for our many years has been out there and then I’m trying something different with my mythological fantasy collection of stories and I can clearly see the difference.

I can clearly see that it takes more attention, there is all are less let’s say enthusiastic but at the same time to go back to the psychology of it, I think you have to consider this: Because it’s a slow burner you can’t expect those results to come overnight. It’s just a completely different kind of game.

I am reminded of one suggestion that one of my author friends from Italy and she’s wine and she’s successful told me when I decided to go wide I’ve asked Crystal and ask her another couple of people that I really trust and gave me: give me something that is good, but also give me something that is bad to you since you’ve been there for sometimes. And this other person told me, look, you can, for example, go exclusive for two or three months and then go wide but you have to consider it’s a completely different kind of game. You have to shift your mentality completely. So for example, she suggested me just to start as a wide author so that you don’t see that big difference when you are making maybe more money and there is more visibility and then you take everything off and you put it on the wide side of things and then nothing happens. So that was one of the major reason why I decided, okay, if I want to go wide for this 2021 with mythological fantasy series, Crystal, and then I’m going there all in, because I want to learn how it is difficult. You are basically crawling, not even working or running you are just going slowly and hopefully steadily to one destination. I’m seeing that if you listeners are listening to this and you are at that point, I feel you, I understand you. It’s really slow burner and I will say one of the biggest disadvantages of going wide.

But I will also say this. It’s more of a way of thinking of your work and your business as an author long-term because there is something that I wanted to say at the end, but it’s actually, I think it’s more, more central to what I’m saying now. In the article that I have mentioned to you before about wide going wide, When is it time to go wide by Kevin. So I’m using this as a reference. He said: “If your goal is to be known for your work to have readers pining for the next book in all the corners of our world, then the only true path to that success is wide distribution” and he continues, “after all, no one ever said to themselves, I can’t wait to start a writing career and only be read by people who subscribe to one special specific service.”

And I think this is meaningful, if you are thinking of the long-term. You see this as a disadvantage, but at the same time, you see this as a starting point for something that who knows? Maybe two years from now, five years from now, you will thank yourself later on. And you will realize that it was actually worth doing it.

I don’t know if you want to add something in that regard on the disadvantages of going wider, I will say that psychological factor was big. And so I wanted it to underline it that much. What do you think about that, Crystal?

Crystal Hunt: I think in the disadvantages side or just something to put in the mix as you’re weighing your options is lead times are longer in wide.

Like the way that pre-orders work is different and the advantage to having pre-orders and longer lead times is higher. I think the advantages for rapid release are in the sort of Amazon ecosystem and the advantages for slower, more regular release schedules over time. Yes, it works in the Amazon side of the exclusive side also, but I think there are more advantages to slightly longer lead times for your books. And so if you are someone who is not interested in publishing a book a month or book every two months, then wide can have some advantages in that you can really build that up. And the way that pre-orders are handled is a little bit different. So you get credit on the day that the book goes live and you also get credit on the day that that book is sold when you’re wide. So most of the platforms do actually credit you on the day that the book launches officially. So if you’re trying to build a lot of momentum for a launch, then wide is a nice way to do that because you can build up those downloads over time, or if you have a series with several books releasing in a year, you can get that live and put all those links into your other books and it just, it gives you a bit more wiggle room on the admin side to be able to get all your ducks in a row and to plan things in a really organized fashion. So those are some upsides I think of the wide. And when it comes down to, which is better, there’s a few things you really need to crunch the numbers on to help you decide.

One of those is how long of books are you writing? Because both of us right now, Michele and I, are writing shorter things. We have novellas and short novels that we’re working on. And when you do the math of what the total revenue from that book is it’s 0.00488, is how much you get paid for a page read.

And so you have to do the math on the number of K E N P or Kindle edition normalized pages that your book is and figure out what is it worth to you if somebody reads the book through Kindle unlimited versus if they pay and download your book. For example, a novella where you’re making 70% and it’s selling for 2,99, you might be making roughly $2 per book that people purchase.

And on a page read scenario, you might only be making about 40 cents. So you really have to crunch those numbers and see what it means to you. When I looked back at my numbers from last year, I only made it on the fiction side, I only made about 35% of my revenue from page reads. Yes, it’s a percentage and it helps, but it’s not that much. It’s not enough to justify cutting off the rest of those worldwide markets, particularly now, as I think library sales are becoming even more important for this next year or two. And I think also when you’re looking at deciding if it makes sense to be wide or exclusive, you need to look at the patterns in your genre.

So if your certain genres of romance where people are reading a ton of books, they might be reading multiple books a day, then being part of a subscription service, whether it’s scribed or Kindle Unlimited or whatever, Kobo Plus is also one of those. So that’s a way to control your book buying budget.

So from a reader standpoint, it makes sense that they could then read everything they want to in those programs. I do feel like, for some genres and if your goal is to make a living faster than you, yes you may need to seriously consider the exclusive or approach. But if your goal is to make a living longer, then you may want to peak a little on the wide side and see what’s involved in that. I’m personally, I’m looking at this as the next 25 years. I’m going to be pretty focused on that. And if you’re writing non-fiction, is way more common to be wide with nonfiction. Although there are some authors who do put their non-fiction in Kindle Unlimited and do quite well with it.

We found only 5% of our revenue was actually coming from page reads in our non-fiction books and so it did not make sense to keep those in the exclusive arrangement that we were in at all. It makes way more sense to just go ahead and make it available as widely as possible. So we did that transition over the last quarter, the last three months, we have been getting all those books uploaded and adjusted to make sure that we were not breaking any of the rules of any of the stores of mentioning other unmentionable stories in the books. So you have to make sure you follow all their guidelines so you don’t get caught in the File checker process, but we’ve done all that, everything is now wide, so that’s exciting.

And it will be interesting as we report back in, we’re doing progress reports once a month now, so we’ll be able to give you some numbers as to what percentages of sales are coming from different places and how all of that’s working. So make sure you join us for our progress report episodes if you want the skinny on how well each of these things is performing for us.

You also want to think about geography, where are your readers? And you want to think about what are your own values in terms of where you want your books available? And if libraries are part of your deal? Or maybe you just have moral objections to certain companies, that is your right to decide how you want to approach that.

And it’s important to be building an author business that is in line with your values because you need to feel comfortable in how and where and when you are promoting and if you don’t feel comfortable with that, it’s going to hold you back. So make sure whatever your choices you’re making they do line up with the things that you think are important and also the things your readers think are important.

So you need to look at the history of your publishing career if you’ve been wide for 10 years, and you suddenly decided that you’re going to jump on the exclusive bandwagon, you’re going to have probably a lot of pretty upset readers if they’ve been with you all the way. So make sure that you are also respecting your readers and the agreements you’ve made with them. You have a social contract in a lot of ways. You’ve made a commitment that you’re going to keep giving them more books. And if you are going to make us switch, definitely don’t do it in mid series because that is going to cost you some readership if you go from one direction to the next, regardless of which way it is, if you hop from wide to exclusive or exclusive to wide in the middle of a series, you’re going to have some upset folks. So just be respectful of your readers who have gotten you this far, and that will also help you.

Rescources

Michele Amitrani: We’re going to also list a couple of resources for you guys.

The article of Kevin that I mentioned, that’s going to be on the resource page. And also Crystal I think it’s fair to mention Wide for the Win, is a Facebook group we’re both part of, and there are really a lot of useful resources there. And folks over there, if you have any questions, they are pretty solid and pretty helpful for when it comes to answering any kind of question.

If we don’t help each other in this game, it’s going to be even more difficult. So this Wide for the Win Facebook group is going to definitely be one of the resources for this episode.

Crystal Hunt: Yeah, they have a great crew of authors over there. And I’m one of them is Mark Lefebvre who’s actually writing a book called Wide for the Win and it is coming out in March. So that is a good thing to check out if you’re interested and there are a ton of resources in that Facebook group, there’s something they call the tree of knowledge, which is very cool and it’s just a linking system to help you find some of the most valuable posts and stuff.

So maybe start there and see how that goes. Now we are starting a new question and answer segment on our show and we need your questions. So if you have a question about writing or publishing or promotion or anything a strategic authorpreneur might want to know, you can email your question to crystal@strategicauthorpreneur.com and we will answer it on the next available show slot for you.

Michele Amitrani: And as always, we really hope that you enjoyed today’s show. Remember to hit that subscribe button whenever you’re listening to the podcast, and you can also visit us at strategicauthorpreneur.com for the show notes and the links to resources and tools we love and that we mentioned in this episode. And feel free to buy us a coffee if you find the show helpful, we don’t drink coffee, but that love that you share with us is going to maintain the cost for hosting the podcast transcription, and all that. So until next week, happy writing.

Crystal Hunt: Happy writing everybody see you soon.