Publishing Erotica Part 10 – KDP Select

Click here for Publishing Erotica Part 9 – Writing Blurbs

We live in exciting times. The ability to publish your own work is changing the reading world. It’s remarkable. Spectacular. And self-publishing comes with one major question: enroll in Kindle Digital Publishing (KDP) Select or not. It is one of the hardest questions about self-publishing.

Amazon Select is a choice Amazon offers when you publish for them. It is a 90 day exclusive digital publishing contract with them. During your enrollment period, you cannot sell your work in digital form (e.g. an ebook) on another publisher’s website. On the surface, it seems a poor decision. If you sell on every website (Barnes & Noble, Smashword, iTunes, etc.), a practice called going wide, you increase your chances for sells and reaching more customers. So the advantages of Amazon exclusivity must outweigh selling on those other platforms.

So what are the advantages? First, it is getting a full 70% royalty (if your book is $2.99 or more) from smaller markets (not any of the major ones like the United States, United Kingdoms, Canada, Australia, and other European stores, but Japan, Mexico, India, Brazil, and other countries). Next is promotions. If you’re exclusive, once an enrollment period you can discount your title with a sell or give it away for free to increase visibility of your catalog.

But the real reason you choose to go exclusive is the Kindle Unlimited (KU) program.

Now, KU 1.0 was amazing. If a person read 10% of your book, you got 1 slice of the KU pot. This averaged out at $1.33. But in July of last year, the program changed to a page read program. Now this averages at $.0048 per page read. For short erotica, that means you make about $0.20 to $0.25 depending on your word count and book formatting. And that’s only if the customer reads your entire book. So while you don’t make much now, a borrow still counts towards your sales ranks whether they read much of your book at all. On Amazon, the higher your sales rank, the more visibility you get. And if you can get into the top 100 of a category, that’s even more visibility.

So KU is now a loss leader program for anyone who isn’t writing long novels. But is it worth it?

I can’t honestly answer that. But Amazon’s market share is so huge, that going wide (selling in every store) may not make you the same amount of money as you’ll make from KU. And that’s not counting how the increased sales ranks from borrows may affect actual sales of your titles or others in your catalog.

Another tactic is to publish first on Amazon, take advantage of the 90 day enrollment period then go out of Select and publish your work wide. This way you can reach more customers, but only after taking advantage of promotions and KU to increase both your Author rank and your sales rank during those crucial first hours of release on Amazon.

There is another thing to consider about going wide—time. Publishing on different sites means filling out their forms. It requires different formatting of your ebook. You often need to have different file types of your product. All of this takes time, but it may be worth it.

But if you can potentially make more money being exclusive, why wouldn’t you? Simple, you are not entirely in Amazon’s hands. Right now, they are the big name in the game, but things can change. Amazon could decide to ban erotica from their store. They can make KU even worse so that it’s not even worth being in it. And if that happens, you are already in place in others stores with, hopefully, a fanbase buying your works. You’ll be ahead of the game.

So whether to go exclusive is a decision that every author needs to make for themselves. There is no easy answers here. You need to look at all the information and decide what is best for you.

Click here to read Part 11: How to Avoid the Adult Dungeon