One of the most important decisions you will make when setting up your author business is how to reach your readers: will you sell your ebooks directly, set up distribution accounts through each online store, or use an aggregator as a centralized hub for distribution? In today’s episode we talk about some of the elements you might consider when making this decision, such as market access, money, ease, time, platform specific promotions, metadata choices, direct advertising and much more.
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Resources we mentioned in this episode
- Findaway Voices
- Full Time Author:How to build, grow and maintain a successful writing career that you love
- 7 Most Popular Platforms To Self-Publish Your Ebook & Make Money by PMacdonald
- When is it time to go wide? article by Kevin Tumlinson
- Publish Drive
- Draft to Digital
- Smashwords
- Wide for the Win (Facebook Group)
- Amazon Ads for Authors: Tips and Strategies to Sell Your Books
- Amazon Ads Unleashed: Advanced Publishing and Marketing Strategies for Indie Authors
- BookBaby
- IngramSpark
- The Alliance of Independent Authors
- The indy author article: ‘Using Aggregators versus Going Direct’
Complete Episode Transcripts
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Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 044: Going Direct vs Using an Aggregator for Wide eBook Distribution
Crystal Hunt: Hey there, strategic authorpreneurs. Welcome to episode 44 of the Strategic Authorpreneur Podcast. I’m Crystal Hunt.
Michele Amitrani: And I am Michele Amitrani and our mission, as always, is to help you save time, money, and energy as you level up your writing career.
If you find this show helpful you can help us keep the episodes coming by clicking the buy us a coffee button on the website or from the link in the show notes, wherever you’re listening to this podcast. Your contribution helps us cover our operating expenses and keeps this podcast ad free.
Crystal Hunt: In this episode, we’re talking about distribution options for going wide. And whether it’s better to set up directly with individual retailers, to use an aggregator, or to custom create kind of a mashup of both methods that suits your own situation. Before we dive into all that, we’re going to do a newsy little updates and Michele.
What have you been doing this past week in your other life?
What has happened since the last episode?
Michele Amitrani: One of the things that I really want to deep dive in this 2021, and I said that a couple of times already, is to master Amazon’s suggested page a bit better. So yesterday actually I bought a couple of books.
One is called the Amazon Ads for Authors 2021 by a lovely lady by the name of Deb Potter, who actually was a guest in the Creative Academy. We invited her to speak exactly about this subject and I was there and the workshop was very interesting. So I was like, I need to get inside this person’s brain.
And so I bought a newly updated book. Again, the name was Amazon Ads for Authors 2021 And. I’m really digging it. I am now already 30% in and there are already a couple of things, actually, there are already 200 new things that I’ve learned. And I think this is going to help me a lot.
Every single time I noticed that I’m reading a book and I need a block notes to take notes and then immediately understand, okay, this was worth the price. And the second book that I bought yesterday was by a gentleman named Robert J. Ryan. And the title of the book is Amazon Ads Unleashed and Crystal, this second one was actually a suggestion from David Gaughran he describes it as one of the best books that he read about the subject. So I was very curious yesterday I spent some time on Amazon to read the first few pages and then I decided it’s another five bucks and if that’s going to level up my Amazon game and then I’m going to buy this book too.
So I’m very happy for less than $15, I’m now a bit more confident to level up my Amazon game. I know that I will have to read this books at least a couple of times and take a lot of notes. But at the same time, I’m very excited because I define myself as an Amazon rookie still.
I just been using them for a few months, just in one market, very slightly on the U S market, but more heavily in the Italian market. Then I can’t really say, I know a lot of what I’m doing, so I need to learn the vocabulary, I need to know some strategies and I do believe that these two books are going to give me the foundation to prepare myself to really create a strategy.
Especially nowadays this year, both our calendars are pretty publication heavy. I have to publish at least four or five different products. So I really need my Amazon game to be in shape. And then the second thing that I’m really concentrating is finishing the translation of a novella that I’m going to give as a newsletter cookie for my meaningless subscribers. Today’s actually the day I need to give it to my first better either. So after this podcast, I will have to head downstairs and start to translate in that book.
So these are the couple of things that I’ve been working on in these past seven days. Okay. So that was me. I’ve been pretty busy on that side. I’m going to just guess that you’ve been even more busy than me. Usually that’s the outcome here. So what have you mean up to Crystal?
Crystal Hunt: I have been celebrating a little bit because our Full Time Author book is live. I got the print version and you all can’t see it.
But I’m holding it up so that Michele can see it. Cause we’re on video and it is a giant beast of a book at 500 pages. The hardcover is coming in the next couple of days as well. So I’m super excited to see that. And by the time this episode is live, the hardcover should also be live. So you should be able to go and check that out on Amazon and get your very own copy should you desire it.
Our big news is that we hit the number one slot in a couple of different new releases categories last week. And that was pretty swell. I have to say we both the paperback and the ebook were ranking in the top 20 on amazon.ca and we had a nice little surge on the.com site as well.
And one of the other guides, the conflict book, which was the last one that came out by Eileen cook was also ranking at the top of a couple of categories. So that is really exciting to see and the guides are really doing well, which is fantastic. The next one up for me that I’m working on is the Strategic Indie Author Book.
And that’s all about, the indie publishing side of things. So a lot of what we talk about here on the podcast and kind of an extension of a bridge book between the full-time author book and the strategic series author book, how do you get a book out into the world and how do you indie publish in a way that makes sense?
And this one spans the other two and pulls the package together. So you can follow along with the instructions all the way through, which is great. And the first time I wrote that book was in 2010 and it was called self-publishing for profit. And I coauthored a book with my husband actually, and we released that over a decade ago.
So I went back into the old book and I was reading through it and seeing what is still relevant, because some things like the editing process don’t change a ton over time. Other things. Holy cow, there was a few times where I was just in hysterics giggling because the wording, it wasn’t common for everybody to have a computer at home necessarily at that point.
And the cutting edge technology were a couple of companies that no longer exists. And so there’s a lot of updates to be done, and I really will be rewriting probably three quarters of the book, but it was really fun just to dive back into the old stuff and see how far the industry has come and how far we have come in the interim as well.
So that is going off to be edited at the end of February. So that’s my focus project for writing this month is to fill in the gaps and update the content on that one. And on the fiction side, we’re still focused on getting everything into plotter and getting the published side of things, series bible completed so that I know what all has been committed to.
So my assistant is hard at work on that and we’ll switch to helping me republish everything wide because all of my titles are coming out of KU. Some last week, some this week and a few more next week, and then I should have everything back and be able to publish those all wide, which makes our today’s discussion about going wide with your eBooks and what are some of the positives, negatives, benefits, challenges of using an aggregator versus going direct and what kind of a plan may work the best for us. So let’s dive into that Michele.
Direct publishing vs aggregator
Michele Amitrani: So this episode wants to be a continuation of the past week episode, where we discussed about going wide. The pros and cons Crystal, and also about exclusivity. So we didn’t really deep dive into using an aggregator or going direct, what it means exactly for a person that wants to publish independently.
So there are two main ways you can do your publishing on the internet if you are an independent author. So you can go in direct, meaning that you use the platform that can be Amazon, or it can be Google Play, can be Apple, can be Kobo, and you create your own account. And then you probably sell books directly.
So you book your cover and then all the metadata keywords, you decide the categories. And then you just publish, you decide the price, all of that stuff. But you can also go in a different way, which is basically you ask to a service, a website, to do all the publishing in all the platforms for you and Crystal is going to deep dive a bit better in the difference between an aggregator and distributor, but these are basically the two main roads. When you’re going and using a website, like for example, Draft to Digital or Publish Drive, or Smashwords, you’re basically delegating a lot of admin job to that site. So you are inserting all the information about the book and some of them take a cut out of the selling of the books, some of the others, like for example, Publish Drive just takes a non nominal fee. And it depends on how many books, of course you’re publishing with them. This is the main difference. In today’s episode, we are actually going to speak about not only the costs and the advantages of making the choice of going direct or using a website, like a Draft to Digital, for example. But we’re also going to speak about which one is the in between parentheses the easiest, which one is the most time-consuming and also if you want to be for example, advertising, your book you have to take some steps in order to do that.
Also every single platform is specific and has its own rules. So these are some of the things we’re going to talk about, and this is the main frame we’re going to address and are going to use when we addressed the episode. But Crystal, if you want to explain a bit better, the difference between those two things, aggregator and distributors.
Making the decision between direct or aggregator
Crystal Hunt: Yeah, the language is something that a lot of people, especially if you’re newer to indy publishing have trouble, because there are a lot of different names for things that do the same thing. And so that can be a little bit confusing, a little bit overwhelming, and it is like learning a whole new language when you dive into this indie publishing world.
So when we talk about a distributor. A distributor is the company that gets the ebook from you to the customer. Now, if you add in an aggregator, that is when you upload to an aggregator, the aggregator gets the book to the distributor and then the distributor gets the book to the customer. So you can see here adding one more step in the chain, but as Michele mentioned, it’s all done from a central dashboard then, so instead of uploading to all of these different places, you’re really just doing everything in one spot. You’re collecting your data in one spot. And you can pull together all of that information very quickly and easily from that one place. So there are some definite upsides. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the main considerations that you would have.
Like what do you weigh when you’re trying to make a decision of which is the better way to go? In some cases, straight up access is an issue. Not all ebook platforms let an author upload directly. So sometimes you have to go through an aggregator or you can’t get access to that particular distributor.
So sometimes the choice isn’t really much of a choice. If you’re trying to get your book into somewhere specific that you can’t go direct to, then that’s a pretty easy decision. I think the next one is one of the most common sort of sticking points for a lot of people is the money. So if you go direct to, let’s say KDP, if you go direct to Amazon and you upload your book to KDP, you get a percentage based on how much you’re charging for your book and what royalty rate you’ve selected in the back end.
So you’ll get somewhere between 35 to 70%, depending on whether or not you’re exclusive and what the other terms and conditions are. If you are uploading direct to Apple, you’ll get a certain percentage from them. You’ll get a certain percentage from Google play.
Same thing for all of those. But if you go through an aggregator, the aggregator has to pay their bills. Somehow they are a company they’re a business. And in order to provide this service for you, they need some kind of compensation. And there are three different primary models that are used by aggregators, as far as the fees that they charge.
Draft to Digital is a good example of one that keeps a royalty share and Find Away voices does this the same way. Actually, if we’re talking to audio books. So if you use Draft to Digital, they keep 10% of your revenues that come in as their cut of managing all of that stuff for you. Very reasonable.
It’s the same as your agent would take a 10 to 15% cut in the traditional publishing world, same kind of idea. They are acting as your agent out there in the publishing world. The second kind of model., is the model that Publish Drive uses and that is that they charge a flat fee per month.
So you don’t pay a percentage of your royalties, you keep every penny that you get from the companies except you pay a monthly fee. And that fee will vary depending on the size of your catalog. So your first book is free and then you pay about $10 for two titles. $20 for six titles and $50 for 24 titles, a hundred dollars for 48 titles.
And that’s a monthly fee. So when you’re first getting started and you’re not selling a lot of money or you’re not selling a lot of books and you’re not generating a ton of revenue, if you’re only making a hundred dollars a month, 10% of that. It’s not so much, but what if you’re making $10,000 a month, suddenly 10% of that becomes quite a big fee.
So a lot of people are making a decision based on how much it’s actually costing them in a finite amount. What is the fee percentage or the fee flat fee amount that they’re paying out and they make a choice that way. There’s actually a third way though, that some places like BookBaby or Ingram spark charge, a setup fee.
And they may also have an annual catalog fee as well. Like IngramSpark charges, a base set up fee, which I believe is about $50 right now and then there’s also a $12 catalog fee per title that renews on an annual basis. And, don’t quote us on these, go check the websites because it may be true at the time of our looking things up right now and the time that this podcast is going live. But if you’re listening to this in the future, you’re going to want to double-check all those amounts, this stuff all changes on a regular basis. So make sure you go and do the research for yourself. We just want you to understand that there are three different ways that the money stuff is calculated.
Okay. So that’s the first sort of access you’re going to be measuring things on is what is the fee structure of the company that you are looking at in terms of if you are going to go through an aggregator or not, what is the actual cost to you to do that? And if you are going to then, which pricing format makes sense for you?
Okay, so money is number one. Number two is market access Michele.
Market access
Michele Amitrani: So the other decision that you will be faced with, is how many places on the internet I want my book to be visible and you want people to be able to access to it. We spoke about exclusivity in the past episode. And we know that if you are exclusive on a specific platform, there are places that your book simply can’t be because you are basically pinned down by a contract.
This is not true if you take the decision to first going wide, and then you decide: I want my books to have the maximum radium when it comes to market access. So this is another big decision after I think money that you have to take. So different markets are accessible, via different distributors.
So for example, I’m using Drafts to Digital and I can’t access a Google Play, which is not very nice for me because I want to access that market. It’s nice and it’s also more it’s better for me if those books are available in that store, because there are people that use that website to read books.
And it’s huge and it’s big and it’s a website and it’s a store that is available in many countries. This is one of the decisions you have to take. Market access depends of course, on what is your objective as an author. But in my case, because where we are going on that way, I was forced to go on Google Play, not forced, but I decided that I wanted to really be part of that slice of the market. So I decided to go direct and that would have been nice for example, for me, if I use something like Publish Drive that in the stores that they cover, Google Play is one of them.
But let’s just say I wasn’t willing to pay that flat fee per month, but that means that I was forced to make a decision. Google Play was definitely something that I wanted to be able to access with my books. And so I decided to take this road. One of the things that it’s important, especially nowadays with COVID happening and stuff, we have seen a use of libraries and online libraries, but also onsite libraries. There is increase in the past year and a half, if you are exclusive or, again you make that decision, you can’t use the libraries and that’s, again, for me, it simply not possible not to be nowadays in this venue.
And I think Crystal feels the same on that regard. And there are other markets, like for example, India, China can be part of Southeast Asia or other parts of the world that have some worldwide partner that can be access. So for example, through Publish Drive, to mention one of those. That is why I think market access is also important, if not even more important than money, because it’s really you deciding and taking a decision, taking a stand almost, where am I going to be? Where is my readership going to see and find my books? Another thing that I think is very important is the easiness, how easy it is for us as authors to collect all the information about our books and to just release them.
And I think Crystal, if you will think about this particular element, why this is so important when you are, for example, starting out and you’re deciding, okay, am I using an aggregator? Am I going direct on four, five different platforms? Why do we think the easiness and the difficulties is important to consider, to be one of the decision that an author should pick, from the very first day? And then they can change, but it’s important for them to know what’s best for their business sooner, rather than later.
Four main areas this decision affects you (ease, time, formats and data)
Crystal Hunt: Yeah, I think the ease really impacts four main areas. So one is, how easy is it to upload all of your formats in the same place or all at once? You’re in a huge learning curve when you’re first getting started. And there’s so much to pay attention, to and understand and keep track of, that it can be quite overwhelming. And if something like, trying to set up your first price promotion, and you’re trying to organize a stacked promo for the first time or your book launch, and you’re trying to figure it out, you’re juggling so many things already and it’s a lot to process and a lot to learn.
And so I think the fewer places you have to deal with those details, the better and the less chance of mucking things up. So if there’s something like, you found one of your arc readers found a typo on page seven and you have a need to correct that then you’ve got to remember, okay where did I already upload this version of the file?
You’ve got to correct it, you’ve got to upload new ones in all of the places. You really need to be able to do that as efficiently as possible and as accurately as possible. So while you’re learning, it can be really good just to be able to do that from a central place so that you do it once, that change will get pushed out everywhere and you’re not spending all of your time on the fiddly side of the management stuff that you can do at once and have it done.
And that’s also relevant from a time perspective, as well as an energy and focus perspective. It may be that you are, maybe you’re not just getting started, maybe you actually are paying somebody to help you do the uploading. And that’s something to think about when you’re looking at costs as well. You may say I have an assistant and so I’ve created all my publishing accounts, but my assistant uploads the files everywhere. But how much is it costing you for your assistant to do that in five different places? Might actually be cheaper to pay the monthly fee or the percentage cost of going with an aggregator and it might take your assistant 10 minutes instead of three hours to upload the files in all of those places and to get everything set up.
So just make sure if you’re doing that cost versus benefit math that you’re actually looking at all of the moving parts when you make those decisions. Different formats that can be uploaded and managed and tracked from different aggregators. So it’s not just a matter of, can you put all your ebook titles in one place? If you are really interested in streamlining, can you also do your audio books from that same space?
Can you manage your print books from that same space? And that will really help you just keep everything together. The less external pieces you have, the easier it is to see your data all in one place like we talked about. And that’s the last piece of this ease quotient is how easy is it for you to actually see and understand the data?
What do the numbers mean? And do you have a complete picture? So in some cases you get really detailed data from the dashboard of the distributor, and you can see where people are downloading your books from and what is successful in terms of marketing campaigns and all of those things. You may or may not be able to see that same level of detail from some of the aggregators.
Some of them you only get just a stat that says you sold X number of books this month. So you need to do a little investigating and make sure you’re comfortable with the level of data that you can see when you are going in through an aggregator. Will it answer the questions you need to answer to make smart business decisions, or will it not?
I think one of the other areas that’s really interesting is actually thinking about connections and relationships. And we get talking about the algorithms and the systems and the processes behind everything and we forget about the people, but in a lot of these wide platforms, like Kobo is a fantastic example, there are still people choosing which books to feature in the online bookstores and deciding which products to include in special promotions. You can make relationships with people at these companies that will then influence what opportunities are available to you and they can help you position your books and promotions and stuff.
So you don’t always get to build those relationships if you are using an aggregator. So that’s something to think about. Now on the flip side, you don’t always have to build those relationships in the same way, because those do take time and energy to develop and can take years to actually get into place.
One of the things that I’m finding really interesting about Publish Drive is actually that I can get into a bunch of those special promos but through the aggregators connections, they set up opportunities as a group that then we can apply to be part of. So I think that one can go both ways. You can have access to special advertising programs and stuff if you go direct, and you can also have them through certain distributors, you just need to know what is available and what isn’t. In that same vein, the review codes and coupons are something that is really relevant. On Amazon you can leave reviews even if you didn’t purchase through Amazon, but that is not the case on some of the other stores.
In order to leave a review, you have to have purchased from that particular platform. And so as an author, you need review codes that you can give to your reviewers, your arc team, your street crew, whatever you want to call them. They need to be able to either pay for your product or for you to give them a coupon code so they can download it for free.
And then they can actually leave a review. Now, some stores have negotiated with these retailers to be able to offer those codes and others are not available. So if you really want to focus your efforts on a particular store, you need to check with your aggregator to make sure that you will be able to get those coupon codes and that you won’t end up with no opportunities for your reviewers to be able to do that.
Michele Amitrani: I think one of the other things that you said about connections, I’m finding it myself at least to explore a bit more that especially now that I decided to be a wide. So for example, on Kobo, when you access your dashboard and you are direct, at the beginning you don’t see this, but you can actually request to the supporter to add the tab that is called ‘promotion’ if I’m not mistaken. And when you request this, they are going to add that tab and every single, I think on a weekly basis or a monthly basis, there is this page and you can go through. And you can see if you want to apply for some free promotions.
Some of them are very specific with genre, for example, historical fiction, romance and I actually applied for a couple of them and I got accepted, but again, this is an interesting things to discuss.
If I didn’t reach out to that support, if I didn’t ask, could you please add the capability for me to see that promotion tabs? And then if I didn’t enroll one of my books, I actually enrolled a couple of my books, I wouldn’t have had this option. The only way I was able to access that through Kobo was because I’ve requested that to support.
So definitely worked a Crystal set on that regard and finding myself at least that it’s very powerful, very important, and I’m very excited actually to see how this promotion goes. It’s going to start on February. This is a promotion that actually lasts for a month. So it’s going to be for around 30 days.
So that’s definitely interesting. So do check out if you are direct on places like Kobo, they actually have a lot of promotions going on. And again, there are people there, so they’re going to be pick, every single thing that you request to be part of. And the other couple of things that I believe might be useful for you to keep in mind.
And this was reminded to me I was listening at the lovely conversation at the Indy Author Podcast. There was Dale Roberts that was talking about another couple of elements that are very important when you want to decide if going direct or using an aggregator. And it was actually mentioning the element of keywords and metadata and I actually never really thought about that until listening to him. So when you use an aggregator, definitely, you can use it to choose your category and keywords and stuff like that, but it’s not as specific as if you were direct on Amazon. And for example, Amazon gives you, when you’re going through the publishing step, those seven spots where you can add the keywords.
And actually it can be even more than seven keywords can be way more than those. You can’t do that if you’re not director on Amazon. And I think that’s important for you to consider it gives you a better understanding for the readers through your product. Keywords, it’s definitely something you have to decide if you are, for example, 100% using a Draft of Digital, you don’t have the same specific leverage than a direct author has on that regard.
Also category wise. S the person that up-to-date his own book and decide that book wants to be part of several different categories. I think up to now, Amazon allows to an author to request up to 10 categories, that’s something you can do easily if you are direct. So keywords and metadata in general. It’s another thing. It might be more time consuming. It does take time to choose the right keywords for that specific store, but in the long run might be very important, very powerful for you. And the second thing that I wanted to address was the direct advertising.
Amazon advertising it’s in my opinion, one of the most effective, even cost effective way to run outs to your own book. I’ve tried it, Crystal is using it for our own fiction and also for the fiction, it works. Of course you need to, as I’m doing, buy books, you need to study the subject, but it’s important. It’s something that definitely is a way to drive traffic to your book page. Unfortunately you don’t get that if you are distributing to Amazon KDP though, for example, Drafts to Digital, you don’t get that though Smashwords. You do get that though publish driver according to what in this interview was said, but again, I prefer to go direct.
I want to see, the dashboard what’s happening and I don’t think the cost in time it’s not worth the power that I can use for managing my own dashboard. So direct advertising, if, and it should be something on the back of your mind in the future, you are going to advertise your book, definitely you want to be a director on Amazon.
Crystal Hunt: Yeah, I think one other last really important thing to think about is the ability to customize your books for reading experiences on different platforms.
So for example, if you’re really trying to get reviews on your books and your call to action at the end is click here and leave a review. If you have different versions of your books on the different platforms, let’s say we have an Amazon version and we have an Apple version and whatever, you can include a link directly to the page where they can leave their review when you say, please leave a review, they can click it and it can take them right there. You can’t do that if you have a centralized file that you can’t adapt for the different platforms. So just something to keep in mind, if you are, really wanting to build up that side of things, it may be worth the little bit of extra effort to upload your book directly in order to be able to get those reviews and put in direct links to different products, different pages, different purchasing options for the next end series or whatever else you’re trying to do.
Hybrid approach
Michele Amitrani: So I believe at the end of the day, our listener deserves at least our 5 cents on what’s best and what is not. I think there is no right answer to this question. It depends a lot on what is the path of the publication you find yourself in? I can tell you my 5 cents. I like to say that I use an hybrid approach, meaning that I am yes, direct though Amazon, I’m direct thorough Google Play and through Kobo, but I also use Draft to Digital to get an access as many places as possible. I do know Crystal has a completely different approach, but she is at a different position in her author career. There is no right answer. I think this is very important for you to understand, it really depends on your catalog on your strategy.
It depends on the time that you have, if you have a virtual assistant is going to be way easier for you to delegate some of these admin work to her or to him. So I think there isn’t a right answer, there is the right answer for you at this moment, and it doesn’t mean that he cannot change it three months from now, 12 months for now.
I changed because I was not going to use for example as many direct place as I turn out that in fact I wanted to use so it’s a strategy that can change. And I would like to know, since you have been in this game, Crystal for a bit longer than me what would you say it’s something that the listeners should really be aware when they decide am I going direct on as many places as possible, or am I using a distributor?
Crystal Hunt: One of the factors that will influence your choice is whether or not you’re using your own ISBNs and this is quite different. If you’re Canadian or American or somewhere else in the world. In Canada, we get free ISBNs from our library, archives, Canada. Yay for Canada.
And so there’s no reason not to claim our own ISBN. The only thing you have to do is make sure that you submit two copies of your book in each of the formats that you’re publishing it in to the national archives. They keep one copy in the national archive and one in your provinces specific archives.
And so it’s nice to contribute two part of the historical record. I think it’s great to have your books in there and that’s the only cost for your ISBNs. So absolutely you should have your own because if you use the free ISBNs that the distributors sometimes offer or that the aggregators sometimes offer, what happens is the publisher of record is them. It’s not you technically in the system that ISBN belongs to that company. They’re the one who purchased it, they’re the one who is in charge of it and they will have it in their catalog, as it goes out, it doesn’t mean they own your book, it means they own your, that particular ISBN.
So if you wanted to take your book later and go to a different distributor or a different aggregator, you would have to get a different ISBN for your book, which is going to result in a different book listing, which is going to mean you probably lose all of your old reviews and you’re basically going to start over.
So unless your choice is… if you absolutely cannot afford an ISBN at that moment and the only way you can go ahead with your book is by using one of the free ones that supplied by one of these companies. Then, okay that might make sense. Cause it’s better to have a book than no book, but at the same time, if you have a choice and you can figure out a way in your budget to own your own ISBN, it’s like your book, social security number, it’s going to be with your book for its entire life.
So you really want that to be something that you own, not something that’s in someone else’s control. So that’s super important. And as far as my own decision of what to do and whether I was going to go direct to all the places, when I first started, you weren’t even allowed to go direct to most places. That wasn’t an option.
You just couldn’t as an individual author, I’ve been through all the really complicated phases of setting up like an iTunes producer account and all the elaborate steps involved. And there was a lot of paperwork in the olden days for things like that. And you had to like, pretend you were this big publishing company to get accounts with places in order to do stuff.
That’s not really the case anymore at all. So now, I’ve used, Draft to Digital for years. Love the platform. And I actually do a combination of things now where I go direct to Amazon, I use Draft to Digital for a whole bunch of platforms. And then I use Publish Drive for all the rest of the platforms.
So you can, inside the aggregators, you can turn on or off different platforms in your dashboard. So I start with the one that goes to the most possible places and at the cheapest possible rate and then I use the rest to fill in the blanks. And that gives me kind of the benefits of all of the things, but minimizes the drawbacks or the limitations of them. It is super important for me to have my books in the libraries. So I love that Overdrive is part of the drafted digital system. You can absolutely get in there. And I really love that published drive has a whole bunch more library systems as well, all over the world.
So I am able to tap into that whole other set of markets. And I do that as I grow the potential to distribute from one dashboard, all different formats is very appealing. So I’m, weighing as each platform develops every year, I do a bit of a revisiting of my business model and deciding what’s going to make sense for the coming year.
I did make a decision to pay that monthly fee a little sooner than I probably needed to or made financial sense in the short term, because I wanted to put everything into a system that I wouldn’t have to change as things grew. So depending on how you are going to grow your business and you know how big you want to make your author business and how complicated and all of those things, you can make that decision for yourself, but you will be able to see how it works and just always review on a regular basis.
Is this working for me? Is this still working for me? And if it’s not, make a change, there’s nothing to keep you locked in other than just the inconvenience of it all. The one thing I would put out though as kind of survival advice for you is that if you are thinking you’re going to change from being a exclusive, to being wide, just really make sure that you have turned off, that your KDP Select term is over before you were going wide.
If you’re going in that direction, if you’re going the other direction from wide to Select, you need to make sure you give it some time for all of those other stores that your book has been listed in to get turned off and to unlist your book before you enroll in KDP Select.
Because if those time spans overlap, you can get yourself into trouble and you’ll be in violation of the contract that you have signed for exclusivity. Just make sure that if you are making a shift from one way to the other, that you are giving it a little bit of time to get out there in the world, once you’ve pushed that button, that it has some time to trickle out and make sure that you are checking to make sure that all of those stores have in fact removed your book before you hit the publish button on the Amazon side, because that’s the direction that gets very sticky. And do not panic. If you still see page reads, showing up in your Amazon account in your KDP dashboard, even after you’ve gone wide with a book. That is because if somebody’s already had their book on their reading device and they are still reading pages, it’s not still available in Kindle unlimited. They’re just making sure you get paid for all of the stuff that’s already in the system.
So those will taper off over time and don’t panic. It doesn’t mean that your book hasn’t shifted status. It just means that there’s still people reading what they already had on their device.
So it’s a good, it’s good for the reading experience that they won’t just yank them back off people’s Kindles or Kindle apps. So that is a good thing, but yes, it can be a little bit disconcerting when you’re like, but I went wide already? Why is there still KDP page reads? What is happening? So don’t panic.
Don’t worry about that.
Audience question on copyright rules
Michele Amitrani: I really hope that what we said today is useful to you. Again, it’s very important that you do your own calculations. We also have a lovely question from Vanesa about copyright, Crystal. And Vanesa wanted to know about international copyrights for example. She’s saying” if I copyright my book in one country, does it cover the rest of the world though? What’s the answer to that question?
Crystal Hunt: It’s a solid mostly. Okay. So there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is that about 120 countries have signed treaties where they agree to honor reciprocal copyright protection. So, if you’re dealing with any one of those, 120 countries who have signed the agreement yes, by copywriting the work in your own country, it is also protected in the other countries. And for example, in Canada, you don’t have to register, you don’t officially have to register a copyright in order for your work to be protected. As soon as it’s published in any format, it is technically covered.
Now that being said, prosecuting somebody for breach of copyright in another country is though a whole different ball of wax. You’re probably going to need intellectual property lawyers. International litigation is extremely expensive and complicated. It’s not going to be an easy process to actually defend that.
So we are not lawyers. We are not copyright lawyers. We’re not intellectual property lawyers. We are no kind of lawyers at all. We are authors. So take this all with a grain of salt, but if you are worried about copyright or you have specific questions about intellectual property, it’s always best to go and talk to an intellectual property lawyer.
If you can’t find one or you can’t afford one, the Alliance of independent authors has a fantastic option where members can ask questions of their legal team. And so if you have not yet signed up as a member of the Alliance of independent authors, or Alli as we call it a L I for short, you should probably do that because they have some guides, they have some documents and they do have these fantastic resources that you can consult and send your personal questions to and get proper actual legal answers from people who are lawyers.
So that is a great follow-up. And hopefully Vanesa, that helps to answer your question. For everyone else if you have questions, we would love to answer them on the show. So please email them to crystal@strategicauthorpreneur.com and we will get them into the next available slot on the show. And you’ll get to hear your name on air, which is very exciting.
Trust me.
Michele Amitrani: We also hope that you enjoyed today’s show it was packed with information. Always remember to hit that subscribe button whenever you’re listening to the podcast and also remember to visit us at strategicauthorpreneur.com for the show notes and for the links to the resources and tools that we love and that we mentioned in this episode. And feel free to buy us a coffee if you find the show out for you wouldn’t find this link on the webpage of the episode of the podcast, but also on the home page and on the description of each episode the next week, happy writing riding guys
Crystal Hunt: Talk to you soon.