At time of writing things around here are still in flux, but the important bits are that I've set up a bibliography page listing all of my books, and a handy form to sign up for my mailing list. Check the navigation bar between the lovely undead lady and this post! I expect I'll add a few more pages before I'm done, so be sure to check back every once in a while.
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I've been thinking lately about "going wide", which when it comes to self-publishing these days means getting off of Amazon as your sole marketplace and selling books through other distributors, like Barnes & Noble's Nook store or Smashwords. Amazingly yes, Amazon doesn't dominate every aspect of eBook sales (yet)!
The advantages and disadvantages are pretty obvious. Going wide puts your book on more shelves, virtually speaking, which means a better chance it gets in front of more readers, which leads to more sales! On the other hand, it means formatting and managing your book on three different storefronts, which is a not-insignificant amount of work.
The other disadvantage, in my case, comes from Kindle Select.
If you're not familiar, putting your book in Kindle Select puts you in the Kindle Unlimited program, which lets people read your book for free if they're signed up. And you get paid! Not much these days, because people scammed the page system without mercy, but still something. The disadvantage is that Kindle Select books have to be exclusive to Amazon, and breaking that agreement gets them reeeally upset.
So as I consider going wide, I have to consider if it's worth leaving Kindle Select. Which, obviously, means checking how much I'm actually making with Kindle Select. So I have to dig into some spreadsheets.
How To Figure Out How Much You're Making With Kindle Select
This is what a typical KDP payment report looks like. You will note there are a lot of numbers that aren't at all helpful for what I want. (Right-click and View Image if you're curious, but the figures aren't all that interesting.) So I have to massage the data to figure out how much I'm making from Kindle Unlimited page reads, compared to actual book sales.
The first thing I do is add two new columns: one tracking what percentage of each payment comes from Kindle Unlimited, and one for sales. To get the numbers, for each payment I divide the listed earnings for Kindle Unlimited reads by the total earnings. That number goes in the Kindle Unlimited column, to two decimal places. I subtract that number from 100 to get the percentage of my earnings from book sales. I'm sure there's an Excel function to do all this easily, but I hand-jammed the numbers for these columns.
So now I know the ratios for each payment, but I need to know my actual earnings. Again, I add two new columns, one for Kindle Unlimited earnings and one for sale earnings. This time I just go to the top column and use the PRODUCT function:
=PRODUCT($P2,$R2)
That multiplies the total earnings value in column P with the percentage of earnings from book sales in column R, which gives me the earnings from book sales. Then I click on the lower-right part of the cell in the spreadsheet and drag down, which auto-fills the rest of the column with the same formula, adjusted for the row it's on. Much easier than hand-calculating! I do the same thing for the column for Kindle Unlimited read earnings and end up with this:
Now I just total up the sales, and I've got my answer!
In my case, it turns out a little over 20% of my earnings this year have come from Kindle Unlimited. That is not an insignificant amount of money to give up, even though I still need to review a few details and see if that's because of actual reads or a few glitches that seemed to add 500-page chunks to my earnings. But, at this point, it's also little enough that even getting one or two sales a month on another platform would probably make up for the loss of page reads.
Kindle Select makes you sign up for 90-day periods, so I don't exactly need to rush to decide what I'm going to do. I'm still definitely tempted to support other platforms, though. Maybe let me know in the comments if you'd be interested?
-Lea
New header image courtesy of Depositphotos.
My personal two words of advice: go wide :)
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