In this post I’m going to talk a little about how I managed to get all my titles pulled from KDP Select, together with a warning that this might not have worked and may not work for you. I talked about my reasoning for doing this in my first post, which you can read here.
I’ve decided to be up front about how I’ve been doing reasonably well on Amazon, and then show how my performance changes as time goes on. I am expecting to see a significant drop in overall income over the coming months as I lose page reads and it takes time for the other marketplaces to come on stream.
To start with though, rather than show overall monetary amounts I’ve graphed below the proportion of income from page reads and sales over the last two years. I chose that time period because hopefully it shows the effect of the Covid lockdown over the first half of 2020 where it seemed a lot of the people sitting at home decided to read more fiction.
Sales and Page Reads 2019: Average %age of income from page reads 40%
Sales and Page Reads 2020: Average %age of income from page reads 38%For both graphs the red block shows sales and the blue upper area the number of equivalent borrows. It also shows peaks where I had a book launch, and it’s clear that my sales have increased this year since last, which is good. As you can see from the percentages, getting on for half my income has come from page reads. Which raises the question – am I totally crazy giving this up?
Well, the answer remains to be seen.
I want to point out I’m not doing this through any prejudice against Amazon. They have always treated me well and treated me fairly. A case in point is how I emailed them four days ago and asked if they could remove all my titles from KDP Select. They responded within 8 hours and said sure, it’s done. Had they not done so this experiment would have had to wait until into December when my last title dropped out of Select.
I do want to point out, however, that this response is not a given. Amazon are perfectly within their rights not to remove you from KDP Select in bulk, but I’ve heard of others who have had success and maybe it depends on how you have interacted with them in the past. Anyway, I’m now out of Amazon borrows and need to replace them with something else.
As you can work out from the graphs, I need to sell almost 10,000 more books over a year through Kobo, Apple, B&N, Google books, all other vendors and libraries to make up the shortfall from borrows.
I’ll say it again – am I crazy? The answer is still probably yes. However, assuming the worst case scenario and I can’t get anywhere near those 10,000 extra sales a year, I always still have the option of going back into KDP Select. I’ve come out once before and when I returned my page reads picked up almost at once. I have also heard some anecdotal reports that book sales increase on Amazon if readers cannot borrow the title but do want to read it.
So that’s about it for today. I’ve set a marker in the ground against which to measure my performance over the rest of this year and into next. How long I’ll keep the experiment running I have no idea, but if sales totally tank outside of Amazon probably not much more than 6-9 months, unless I see some pick-up that offers hope the strategy is working.
As soon as all the titles are live I intend to apply for a Bookbub for the first in series as it should be easier now the books are more widely available. This should kick-start readers on each platform into the series and lead to read-through and hence more sales (Thanks to R who advised this – you know who you are).
Interesting times…
Next time I’m going to talk about uploading to Kobo Writing Life and what you have to do to get an account and upload your books. I’ll also come back in a later post and discuss the marketing tools Kobo offer for Indie authors.
