What are the ethics...

[R. C.]

"Sales of print books in the US fell by 6.5% in 2022 compared to 2021 at outlets that report to NPD BookScan, Publishers Weekly has reported." - The Book Seller

"Book Sales Continue to Slow Down in First Half of 2023" - Publisher's weekly

"Global trade book sales in 2022 were 10.11% down compared to 2021, with $76.14 billion. This was the lowest global trade book revenue over the last 5 years, down even from the pandemic-impacted 2020." - Words Rated

I have given a shockling good effort to publish and market wide, both print and ebook. After the initial bump from a new release, or a targeted marketing campaign, my sales drop to negligible. I accept my stories are not compelling enough to overcome a saturated and declining market. If I wrote in the romance genre, I might feel differently. Romance is the only genre bucking declining sales. However, quitting up is for losers. A small return from KU has to be better than a negative return by trying to sell wide.

Given the trends, print is dying a slow death, books sales overall are declining, it seems a change of course is needed: Should I welcome back the shackles of being in KU?

What is/are the ethics of pulling back from "wide" and pushing selected books back into KU?

R.C.

[TimothyEllis]

books sales overall are declining

Trad book sales are declining.

That's all the stats there are.

There is nothing for eBooks without an ISBN, or KU. There is nothing for Amazon.

I think there is very likely some sort of decline in the US Amazon store at the moment due to what Amazon is doing with ranks and product pages, and making it harder to get visibility and hold onto it.

But I seriously doubt overall book sales are declining.

What is/are the ethics of pulling back from "wide" and pushing selected books back into KU?

Why is there any ethical consideration in that decision at all?

[R. C.]

...
Why is there any ethical consideration in that decision at all?

Because I am trying hard not to shoot from the hip.

R.C.

[LilyBLily]

As Tim said, these stats are for print books and do not include (the majority of indie) ebooks on Amazon that do not have ISBNs. No ISBN, no trad pub tracking. Amazon does not reveal its sales figures, either.

These stats have nothing to do with how well your ebooks sell on any ebookstore venue. To be competitive with trad pubs in paperback or hardcover, you would need very substantial bookstore distribution AND be well known to the public already. Hybrid authors, those who started in trad pub and then added or switched to indie, have that kind of renown. Only super breakout indies do, and there are only a handful of them. Most of us create paperbacks for the convenience of readers and for freebies and bragging rights, not expecting our sales to be substantial in paper. If you do the convention / book fair trail, that's a different story and you might want a different (cheaper) print paradigm so you can maximize profit on your hand-selling efforts.

The main sales avenue for an indie author is ebooks. Wide or KU is your choice, and it depends on the kinds of books you write. My romances are mostly KU. My women's fiction is all wide. Do I get sales from other ebookstores? Yes. Could there be more? Ads pushing readers to those stores theoretically would enhance those sales.   

[Post-Crisis D]

How are you getting a negative return by being wide?

I kept my books in KDP Select for too long.  I am not wide as my books are still only available on Amazon, but I'm not stuck in a 90-day waiting period if/when I start offering my books elsewhere.  The "loss" of KU pennies is negligible.  I've occasionally put a book back in, but it's never proved worth the effort.  My last two new releases I let be exclusive for the first 90 days and I made like 29 cents.  Woohoo.  That's like 1/3 of a penny a day for being in KU.

[R. C.]

How are you getting a negative return by being wide?
...

Marketing dollars pointing to a universal link are dollars thrown to the wind. The audiences for D2D/Smashwords are also saturated.

My thinking is changing toward a fundamental shift in self-publishing marketing is needed. Even when targeting proven keywords, using the many eyeballs theory is useless. Narrowly focused targeting is price prohibitive on a per-click basis. It is the classic Catch-22, if you have sales, you can charge more. Question: How much do you spend to generate sales, to create a loyal audience, before it becomes commercially viable? 

Example: I can generate sales for short periods using FB and their limited audience selection.  (Limited means: not well tailored to self-publishing or book genres. Romance is the exception.)  I can also, significantly increase the bid in Amazon ADs and receive limited orders. WrittenWord ADs have been successful but not enough for cost recovery.

None of the approaches results in enough follow-on sales to be considered viable.

If we pivot and return to KU for selected titles, and target the KU audience with a WrittenWord announcement, will it result in enough volume to trigger the algorithms to push the book?

The only way to answer the question is to try... and try again...

R.C.

[Bill Hiatt]

How are you getting a negative return by being wide?

I kept my books in KDP Select for too long.  I am not wide as my books are still only available on Amazon, but I'm not stuck in a 90-day waiting period if/when I start offering my books elsewhere.  The "loss" of KU pennies is negligible.  I've occasionally put a book back in, but it's never proved worth the effort.  My last two new releases I let be exclusive for the first 90 days and I made like 29 cents.  Woohoo.  That's like 1/3 of a penny a day for being in KU.

As with so many other things, an author's mileage will vary.

I'm probably more prawny than you are, yet I make dollars a day in KU. My sales are still reasonable (for me), but in any given month, around 2/3 of my Amazon income has been in KU. My audience is similarly predominately KU.

I've been told KU readers aren't going to be interested in an author who occasionally may put a book in KU. If they can't read the whole series, they will for the most part stay away. But if you're making a good income from the other outlets, it makes sense for you to stay wide, anyway.

[Post-Crisis D]

I've been told KU readers aren't going to be interested in an author who occasionally may put a book in KU. If they can't read the whole series, they will for the most part stay away. But if you're making a good income from the other outlets, it makes sense for you to stay wide, anyway.

I've had all my books in KDP Select at the same time before for a long time.  In or out didn't make much of a difference.

I do not have a series (yet) though.

My last book (well, my last book was a book of poetry but I'm not counting that as I didn't expect any big sales for that at all) was a space opera.  It was my second book that fit into an actual genre and probably the first that followed the tropes and expectations of its genre.  It works as a standalone while also a first in series.

So, I figure, it fits in a genre, it matches genre expectations, etc., etc., so it should get a baseline of sales.  And, even if 90% of KU readers won't read a book unless an entire series is available, there's got to be 10% or at least a reasonable percent that would try a first in series and/or standalone book.

As a disclaimer, I didn't market it as a first in series or anything, as I don't want to set up any expectations because if it didn't do well, there might not be any justification in following it up.

That's the one that made 29 cents in KU.  (The previous one made squat in KU.)

So, I gotta figure that, okay, if the worst case is that only 1% of KU readers who are interested in space opera will read my standalone/potential-first-in-series book and I made 29 cents, then the other 99% who won't read it unless I have a series in KU means I am only missing out on $28.71 in sales.  That $28.71 in sales wouldn't even cover the copyright registration for a second book.

If you want to count read-thru, then if you calculate a best wish scenario of maintaining 80% of your readers through a series, then the first book makes $29 and each subsequent book would make $23.20, then I'm still not even covering the copyright registration fees.

[TimothyEllis]

KU needs visibility first supplied by sales, or by KU readers waiting for the announcement it's live.

KU doesn't generate anything cold. It never has.

Once it has some visibility, it works better.

[LilyBLily]

Into 2016, KU did generate sales without ads. I remember watching the KU reads pile up when I published a book then without any specific launch or publicity. I don't think I even had a newsletter. Amazon used to send around emails to people telling them the next book in a series was out; that's the only way I can account for it.

But that was eons ago in Amazon time. 

[Post-Crisis D]

You made me go down the rabbit hole as trains of thought took me deeper and deeper down the hole.  And that rabbit hole led me to discover that I used to make more in a month blogging than I have in my best year on Amazon.  And that, at one point, I made almost as much in three months of blogging as I have in ten years on Amazon.  And if I include a kind of a special bonus I made in that three month period, I made more than double in three months of blogging than in ten years on Amazon.

Blogging probably isn't as lucrative these days but, dang, I bet it may be better than KU.

[R. C.]

New question... re: Bundles.

Apparently, there is no way to create a bundle and market it in KDP. The recommendations are to combine manuscripts into a single volume and publish the "bundle."  Also, KDP Support is moot on the topic.

Background, two books not in Kindle Select.

Ethics question: If I combine two manuscripts into a single tome, under a new title, can I put it in Kindle Select and leave the others wide?

R.C.

[TimothyEllis]

Ethics question: If I combine two manuscripts into a single tome, under a new title, can I put it in Kindle Select and leave the others wide?

Not an ethics question. It's a ToS question.

No.

All 3 books can go into KU, and all 3 cannot be anywhere else.

So before you put a bundle into KU, the originals have to be removed from everywhere first. And verified removed.

If you what you suggest was possible, every series would be wide, and have the bundles in KU. Amazon deliberately prevented that.

[writeway]

New question... re: Bundles.

Apparently, there is no way to create a bundle and market it in KDP. The recommendations are to combine manuscripts into a single volume and publish the "bundle."  Also, KDP Support is moot on the topic.

Background, two books not in Kindle Select.

Ethics question: If I combine two manuscripts into a single tome, under a new title, can I put it in Kindle Select and leave the others wide?

R.C.

Sure you can combine two manuscripts into one and try to pass it off as a new title and have it wide and in Select at the same time if you want your account taken. Fair warning, don't game the system. You will get caught. There are authors losing their accounts every day claiming they don't know why then come to find out they've been breaking the TOS since they started publishing. Amazon does not take this stuff lightly. If you wanna be wide, then be wide. If you wanna be in KU, be in KU. If you wanna do both then do both but with different books.

As for the initial post, I focus on myself and my books. First off, what you are referring to is the TRADE market. That is a completely different world than the indie market. Indies aren't even counted at all in these reports. But I try not to focus on stuff I can't do anything about. For example, some were upset today because the KU payout went down. Yeah, I get it but that's the risk we take if we are in KU. If it gets to a point where an author isn't making anything in the program they can try wide but they have no other option because you can only control what YOU do. They KU payout is going to rise and it's going to fall. I've had the best months I've had ever in KU this summer. Of course, I didn't want the payout to fall but I still did well because I try to block out stuff I can't control and write. There are always options. I know some hate KU but I was wide too for years and KU is a birthday party every day compared to that IMO. I still make way more if the KU payout drops than I ever did wide outside of having a Bookbub maybe.

[TimothyEllis]

For example, some were upset today because the KU payout went down.

What is the current rate? That thread hasn't been posting in for a long time now.

[LilyBLily]

The box set for my first three western romances did well with a combination of an initial discount and ad push. It continues to garner KU readers. A box set is just another term we use now for a bundle; in print books a box set actually has a physical box, so the way we use the term really is not correct, but somehow it sounds better than a bundle. For mine, I wrote a new short story so the box has original content to entice more purchases and page reads. I gave the short story to my newsletter subscribers first to help keep them happy.

There's nothing wrong with repurposing content in different formats, but you must abide by the terms of service to which you have agreed--or else expect unpleasant consequences.
 

[Bill Hiatt]

KU needs visibility first supplied by sales, or by KU readers waiting for the announcement it's live.

KU doesn't generate anything cold. It never has.

Once it has some visibility, it works better.

Yes, this is my experience. When I do a new release, ads of various kinds generate sales, but it's a month or so later that KU kicks in. It seems to take KU readers a little time to find the book.

By the same token, though, KU isn't as affected by forces that cause sales to drop, at least for me. I saw a major sales decline in July, but KU was much more normal for me.

[cecilia_writer]

I have one whole series (historical almost-romance) in KU and everything else wide via Smashwords. I do get some page reads on the KU series but usually only in short bursts. Last month I made a bit more from my wide sales than my Amazon ones, though none of the numbers were great anyway. I hardly ever advertise except for an odd FB ad and some collaborative retweeting (re-Xing).

[Crystal]

Do you have a code of ethics as a publisher? That should answer your question.

Certainly, going into KU helps Amazon tighten its grip on the market, but one author makes little difference, especially in a popular genre. There are 100s of romance authors who are vying for the same readers in KU. If I go wide, I might convince a handful of readers to drop KU, but I won't do much. I would need to join with other authors in some sort of union and/or boycott to make a difference, which is not something I plan to do.

I think it is better to ask yourself how you feel about KU vs wide. How does each choice benefit you? KU is easier--one platform to update, track, etc. It is also riskier--one platform for the majority of your sales. KU readers are less loyal than wide readers and anyone who says otherwise is lying. The more someone invests in a product, the more they value it. (If I "buy" a book as a free download, I don't really care if I read it or not; if I pay $12.99, I feel obligated to read it). But most genre readers aren't particularly loyal, anyway, and that's more true the more you sell.

Some people make more money in KU. Some make more money wide. There isn't one answer.

I don't like being all in on Amazon, but I like the ease of KU. For now, it works for me.

[LilyBLily]

Recently I have been thrilled with surprise earnings from the Kobo Plus option. I do no ads for that system, so it's all pure profit. I couldn't get those earnings if I didn't have some of my books wide.

Choosing to have books in one system or another probably should depend on where the readership is for that specific kind of book. KU is a good place for short genre novels, and so I keep my short western romances there. That's where readers will look for them. That's where readers with tight budgets will read them.

[Bill Hiatt]

One never knows what will happen. I keep getting a sale a month of one of my nonfiction works (pretty much all that I still have wide), but not from one of the players I'd expect. No, it's from Hoopla every single time.

I'm one of the people who seems to do better in KU, at least based on my past experiments, but Crystal is right. People have very different circumstances. This is definitely not a one-size-fits-all situation.

[The Bass Bagwhan]

My approach is pretty simple. With the market share that Amazon enjoys, it's a good yardstick for any book. Meaning, I assess and worry about the success of a book in Zon first — if it doesn't sell there, then it likely won't sell anywhere ( bad cover, bad blurb, bad title, bad writing, etc...) and there are problems that need fixing before even considering wide. With that, I might as well KU and see if it gets traction there too. Plus, I can't be bothered with advertising on wide outlets. Focusing on Zon is easier. That said, my KU reads are healthy enough that I'm not tempted to stray anyway.

My experience with different genres is the focus now. Can I replicate the sales with less popular genres? Theoretically, there are still literally millions of readers out there who will like my other genres. Are they in KU?

Makes me ask, is there a breakdown somewhere of KU readers and the genres they prefer?

[Bill Hiatt]

Ah, if only we had data like that!

From my limited experience, there are certainly a lot of fantasy readers for pretty much any genre. My nonfiction is wide, mostly because I got almost no KU activity on it. I've heard sci-fi and romance readers are well-represented in KU. Beyond that, I have no insight. There are probably voracious readers of lit fic who might find KU's pricing attractive, but that's a very physical-book crowd for the most part.

[PJ Post]

I think it is better to ask yourself how you feel about KU vs wide. How does each choice benefit you? KU is easier--one platform to update, track, etc. It is also riskier--one platform for the majority of your sales. KU readers are less loyal than wide readers and anyone who says otherwise is lying. The more someone invests in a product, the more they value it. (If I "buy" a book as a free download, I don't really care if I read it or not; if I pay $12.99, I feel obligated to read it). But most genre readers aren't particularly loyal, anyway, and that's more true the more you sell.

Some people make more money in KU. Some make more money wide. There isn't one answer.

I don't like being all in on Amazon, but I like the ease of KU. For now, it works for me.

This.

There is no right or wrong, there is only what works for you. And even following best practices isn't a guarantee.

KU is, in the aggregate, a commodity market with little reader investment. Branding isn't as relevant (not to be confused with genre signaling). Wide, on the other hand, requires heavy branding and meaningful buyer investment, which, in 2023, requires a significant social media investment. KU let's Amazon do the heavy lifting. As Crystal said, it's easier. And if you understand how KU works, you can do well.

[She-la-te-da]

I'm with Timothy, it's trad and who cares? And, what ethics? You go wide, you go KU. It's your business, you decide.