So if you're a self-published author, one of the big questions that you'll
come across time and time again, is whether you should enroll your
book in the KDP select program, or if you should have wide distribution. So that's exactly what
we're talking about today. We're gonna be covering a
bunch of different things. We're gonna be talking about the
KDP select program, what it is, what the rules are, what
are the pros and cons, some things that you need to know before
you enroll your book in KDP select. And lastly, we're also gonna be talking about
what is right for you and your book. Should your book be in KDP select, or
should you try out why distribution? And I'm doing this video because my books
were on wide distribution and I just recently made the switch to
switch it to Kindle unlimited. So now all of my books, nonfiction and fiction are
now on Kindle unlimited. We'll be talking more
about that in a little bit, but if you want weekly videos
on the business of being author, then be sure to hit that subscribe button
as well as the belt notification icon. So you'll never miss a new upload. This video is actually part of my
beginner's guide to self-publishing a book series here on YouTube. So
if you enjoy this video, be sure to watch all the
videos in the playlist, the playlist will be linked down
below. And in that playlist, I cover all the big things that you
need to know about distribution. And self-publishing your
book for the first time. So first things first, what is KDP select? The biggest rule is that you can't have
your ebook available anywhere else. Your ebook is exclusive
to Amazon's Kindle direct publishing. Another big rule is that you can't
give out your book for free anymore. So let's say you had a first book
in your series and you're using that book as a lead, magnet for
your author newsletter. So if someone signed up for your
newsletter, they got a free ebook, they read it, they love it. And they'll
buy the rest of the books in the series. Well, you can't do that with Kindle
unlimited because Amazon, like I said, owns the exclusive rights to that
book for when it's enrolled in KDP select. What you can do is give out the
first 10% of your book as a free sample. So that way you're still able to
have your book enrolled in KDP select, and you're not breaking any rules. So then all you have to do is figure out
the math behind what the first 10% of your book is. You can use that to create like maybe
a downloadable PDF that you can give to your readers. And that way you still
have an opt in for your newsletter. Another rule behind KDP select
is that it lasts for at least 90 days. So when you enroll
your book into KDP select, you're agreeing to have your book
exclusive to Amazon for 90 days. Now, after the 90 days, you can
choose to unenroll your book, but you are stuck for
those 90 days. Personally, my books actually started out on KDP
select and I tried out the program, not really knowing what I was doing. And
then I switched to wide distribution. And now I, again, back to KDP select, and as we go through the
pros and cons of everything, I'll talk more about why
I made that decision. Now, another important thing that you should
know is that KDP select is just for your ebook. It's not for your print book, so you can still sell your paperbacks
and hardcovers anywhere else. You can sell them anywhere
online on your website. You can sell them at book
signings that doesn't matter. All KDP select cares about is
the ebook exclusivity. Now, with that said, what about
sending out review copies? Because a lot of authors myself included
enjoy using free eBooks as a way to send out to reviewers to more reviews
of their book on Amazon or anywhere else. Now, this is, I do
believe a slight gray area. I try to find like specific
rules of it on Amazon. But from what I understand is that if
you are sending your book individually, one by one to each reviewer, that's fine. But what I don't think you should be doing
is having like maybe a button on your website for reviewers to click, to
download a free copy of the book. So anytime you do wanna send
out review copies of the book, you have to do that manually through
email rather than using like some sort of form that people fill out. So now
that we have all the rules out the way, let's go ahead and talk about the pros
of having your book in KDP select. First things first is that you can go
ahead and create Kindle countdown deals. Now with all the little things
that I talk about today, Kindle has some like specific rules as
to how often you can run Kindle countdown deal and how long that deal can be. But today we're just talking out the
big picture of what these different features are. So a Kindle countdown deal is
basically you run a sale on your book. There's a few different ways you can do
a Kindle countdown deal because one of the cool features about the
Kindle countdown deal and
why it's called a Kindle countdown is that you can start
it out at a super cheap price, but as each day goes by, the price will go up a little bit more
until it eventually gets back to the original list price. So if your book
is normally $3.99 for the ebook, you can do a Kindle countdown
deal where it's $0.99. And then the next day it's $1.99. And then the next day it's $2.99
until finally it's back to being $3.99. Now the exact breakdown of this depends
on how long you want your sale to be and how many intervals you want. It's actually really easy to set up
when you're on your KDP dashboard, you just hit that little
promote button. You say, you wanna do a Kindle countdown deal. You
say how many intervals you wanna have, and you set it up all through there. And it's very clear on when the sale
is and when the price will change. Now, the cool part about this is that when
you run the Kindle countdown sale, it's very clearly
displayed the Amazon page. So customers know this is a sale. It's
not just that you change the price. This is a sale it's temporary.
The price will go back up again. So it creates a sense of
urgency in the reader, because if you aren't through KDP select, if you wanna do a price promo like this, you need to go ahead and go into your
dashboard, change the price, save it. It takes about 24 hours to update. And then it just looks like you
change the price of the book. It doesn't look like it's on sale. It
just looks like you change the price. Whereas when you do the KDP select, you can go ahead and make it display
as a sale and create that sense of urgency. Now, if you don't
like the idea of the countdown, where the price goes up
a little bit over time, you can choose to have just one interval.
And then during the time of that sale, it'll stay at that one sale price,
whatever it is that you choose. And then when the sale ends, it'll
go back to the regular price. Speaking of which that is actually what
I'm doing for Meet Me at the Summit right now. So I wanted to celebrate the fact that
all my books are available on Kindle unlimited. This means that Essence,
She's Not Here. I am Mercy. And of course Meet Me at the Summit
are all available on Kindle unlimited. So if you're a Kindle unlimited reader, you can start reading
those books for free. But if you're not a Kindle
unlimited member, no worries, because I I've got you covered because I
ran a Kindle countdown deal for Meet Me at the Summit . So from
now until April 23rd, 2022, you can actually download, Meet
Me at the Summit for $0.99. So I wanted you guys to know that so
you can take full advantage of it. Please be sure to download the
book, read it. I hope you love it. Write a review on Amazon. Now the great part about being on KDP
select is that even when you run these sales, you can still keep your 70% royalty
rate because in case you didn't know it, when you change the price
of your book manually to $0.99, Amazon changes it so you only
get a 30% royalty rate because price of the book is so low, but if you're KDP select member
and you change it to 99 cents, you still get to keep
your 70% royalty rate. And it's more than just putting your
book on sale. When you run book sales, you wanna do a lot of book
marketing outside of just that sale. You wanna point people to the sale. And the idea is that you promote
and promote and promote the book. So as many people download it as possible. And then when Amazon sees that a lot
of people are downloading your book. They're gonna automatically
push the book a little bit more. It'll push it up in algorithm. So
it might show up in search more. It'll also rank better
in Amazon's, um, charts. That way more people are seeing your
book so that even when the sale ends, it's still a little bit more visible. So you can still get more sales
even after the sale is over. Now, the next benefit of KDP select is that
you can run of free book promotions. This means, instead of
having your book on sale, you're actually giving your
book away for free. Now, why the heck would you wanna do that? It's actually very strategic
and a very effective tool. Especially if you write book series, this is actually very similar to how
you wanna have a lead magnet to your newsletter, where you give out
free downloads or something, where people get something for free
and they sign up to your newsletter. And now you have access
to them in your inbox. It's a little bit of the same thing where
let's say you have a five book series and you do a free book promotion
on the first book in the series. The idea is that they download the first
book for free because there's no risk to it. They read it, they love it. And then they're gonna go ahead and
read the rest of the books in the series that aren't free. Now, again, there's
a lot of strategy that goes into this. You obviously don't wanna just put your
book up for free and not do anything else. When you're doing a
free book promo like this, you wanna do a lot of
marketing outside of that, whether you're doing a bunch of newsletter
features or you're doing newsletter swaps, or you're doing some sort
of social media campaign, again, you wanna point as many people to
the free book as possible. Plus, like I said, even if the book is free, Amazon still sees it as people
downloading in the book. So then they see it as something
that readers are enjoying and liking. So they might promote it a little bit
more so that even when the book is no longer listed for free, again, you'll still have more customers
buying the book afterward. So let's talk about the
third benefit of KDP select. And this is the thing that I think
people get the most confused is about authors. Aren't sure if they
like this, or if they love it. But the third benefit is that you can
enroll your book into Kindle unlimited and Kindle limited is basically
an ebook subscription. So readers pay a certain
dollar amount a month. I believe right now it's $9.99 cents. So readers are paying
$9.99 cents and they have, have unlimited access to any
eBooks that are enrolled in Kindle unlimited. So they can read as much as
they want. Readers can read a book a day, three books a day, however
much time they have to read. Now this gets confusing for
authors because it's like, if they're only paying $9.99 cents, and they're possibly reading
10, 20, 50 books a month, how do I get paid? So when your book is enrolled in Kindle
limited payment is on a page read basis. So when you're on your KDP dashboard,
there's actually two different charts. There's one chart that says how many
books have been sold or shipped. And then there's another chart that says
how many pages have been read so you can look and see how many pages
have been read every single day. And as someone who's had a couple of my
books on Kindle limited for a long time, I can tell you that there are some days
where there are no page and other days where there's a couple hundred pages
read, which is always satisfying to see. Now the payment amount is not concrete. Like there's no set payment per page read. It changes from month to month,
but from the research I've done, you get about less than
a cent per page read, but also keep mind pages are
like pages on a tablet or pages on a phone or whatever E reader
that they're using. Basically, it's really hard for authors to understand
exactly how much they're getting paid for their book, which is why a lot of authors don't
like it because we like that when we sell an ebook everywhere
else, very clear, we're making this many dollars
off of that book. And yeah, you can argue that you're probably making
significantly less through the Kindle unlimited program per book, but the big benefit about Kindle unlimited
is that readers are more likely to read a Kindle unlimited book if
they're a Kindle unlimited member, because they're already
paying that membership price. So if they see a book that they've never
heard of from an author that they've never heard of, but the premise
of it sounds really good. They're more likely to download that
book and read it because to them it's free. They already paid
their monthly member ship. Whereas in any other case, someone might not take the chance on
that book because they don't wanna pay $2.99 or $3.99, or however much you list your book as
basically the biggest benefit of having your book enrolled in Kindle limited
is that you eliminate any risk that a reader may feel towards buying
your book. People who are Kindle, unlimited readers are avid readers. They're readers that are reading a ton
of books and they know what they like, and they know what they don't like. So if your book follows a
certain stereotype or trope or genre that a reader loves and adores, they are more likely to purchase and
download your book if it's on Kindle unlimited, because again to them,
they're just downloading a book for free. And the best part is for Amazon, whether they read just a couple
pages or the whole thing, Amazon still counts it as one
book being downloaded in terms of the algorithm. So if you have 20 people reading your
book on Kindle limited in one day, Amazon sees that as 20 book sales, it may not seem like that to you because
you're not getting that clear royalty rate of 20 books being sold. But Amazon is gonna push books that
are getting the most downloads. And those are the books that are gonna
rise in the rankings on the Amazon bestseller list. So that kind of wraps up all the pros
of having your book on KDP select. So let's go ahead and talk about the
cons because while the pros are really great and awesome tools, there
are quite some significant cons. So obviously the biggest con that we've
already talked about quite a bit is that you can't have your ebook
available elsewhere, but there's also a few other
things that you need to know. It's gonna be really difficult for you
and sometimes even impossible for your book to end up on other best seller lists.
If your book is exclusive to Amazon, this is because for
other best seller lists, it's better to have your book have wide
distribution because that's more of an opportunity for you to sell as
many books as possible. Therefore, qualifying for certain best
seller lists like USA today. So if that's something that's super
important to you enrolling your book in Kindle unlimited may not be the best
idea because you're gonna wanna learn how to do wide distribution for your
book in order to sell as many books in as many places as possible. And of course another con is the fact
there are some readers that you will just never reach because there are some
readers that only read their eBooks from itunes or the Google play
store or any of those other different places. So let's
say someone has a nook device, which is a Barnes and noble device, which means the only place they can buy
e-books is through Barnes and Nobles. So if your e-book is exclusive to Amazon,
then there's a whole group of reader, readers that own and use
nook that you will just never reach. But with that said, Amazon does take up most of the
market in terms of ebook sales, which is why a lot of people
are willing to overlook that. But it's definitely something
that you wanna be mindful of. This is actually one of the
biggest reasons why I did
end up switching to Kindle Unlimited, because I just really never saw much
of anything in terms of sales for wide distribution. I didn't know what I was
doing in terms of wide distribution. I feel like I have a pretty clear idea
of the type of marketing I wanna do to promote my book on Kindle unlimited, but I always struggled with doing
specific marketing to wide distribution. So for that reason, I never really
saw sales outside of Amazon. I would say about 96% of my
sales were always through Amazon. So it just wasn't worth the time and
effort of having my book in other places. When I do want to take advantage
of the benefits of having my book on Kindle unlimited, it definitely comes down to your
personal opinion and what you're most comfortable with. I personally feel
that no matter what you choose, whether your book is on Kindle
select or whether your book has wide distribution, you can succeed either way, because I personally think one
is not better than the other. They both have pros and cons and
you just have to see what you like most. And the best part is
is that you can change over time. You can always, re-enroll
your book on Kindle select, or you can take it out of the
Kindle select you have that option. It's not like you're stuck in one
place once you make a decision. Whatever you choose, you have to make sure that you market
to whatever platforms your book are on, because if you do wide distribution
and you're only ever pushing people to Amazon. So of course you're not gonna see sales
on Barnes and noble or iTunes or on the Google play store. People don't
even know your book is there. And that's really the biggest thing that
I struggled with is that I didn't know how to market my book
for wide distribution. I didn't know how to take advantage
of having my book elsewhere, but what I do know is Amazon and
that's why I'm switching to it. So if you do end up choosing to
go wide with your distribution, just make sure that you continue
to promote your book everywhere. Not just Amazon. This means if you're
doing something like Facebook ads, you can market to people
who own nook readers, and who read exclusively on nook. And you can point them to your book
on Barnes noble rather than Amazon. Another important note is that Google
play and having your book on Google play has significantly less competition
than other ebook distributors. And that's just because one of the most
popular ebook distribution services for wide distribution is draft2digital. But even if you publish
your book on draft2digital, it does not publish it to Google play. You have to publish it separately yourself
to Google play. So because of that, a lot of authors actually kind of forget
or skip the step of publishing their book on Google play. And that's something that you can take
advantage of as an author who chooses wide distribution. And you can put
your book on the Google play store, kind of knowing that
there's less competition. Whereas Amazon is the opposite. There's a lot of people on Amazon and a
lot of people publishing in their books either exclusively or wide on Amazon. So basically you're guaranteed that if
a book is published, it's on Amazon, but that's not necessarily a case
with other ebook distributors. So what I'm trying to say is that you
can make either option work for you. I'm gonna see if the KDP select
program is what's best for my book. So I guess you could
call it an experiment. I kind of anticipate it working out cuz
one of my plans is to continue doing these promo deals that I talked to you
guys about whether or the book is on sale or the book is for free. But one thing I wanna push is that when
I'm promoting my book on social media or doing ads or anything like that, I wanna remind people that they can
read the book for free at any time, if they're a Kindle unlimited member, because to me that's a huge benefit that
readers don't have to take a chance on my book. They can read it for free
at any time, whenever they want, as long as they're a KU member and that's
gonna be the biggest marketing tactic that I use going forward. And I hope to share the results here
with you guys on my YouTube channel. If it all goes well, or maybe it doesn't go well and I
switch back to wide distribution, you guys will be the first
to know. So that is it. Let me know what you think
of the KDP select program. If your books are enrolled in the
KDP select program or if they're wide distribution and let me know your thought
process behind why you chose the type of distribution you did because I think
every author kind of comes at it from a different angle. And I do think that there's no right or
wrong answer and it all just comes down to what type of marketing we wanna
do. If you want even more content, then be sure to join as a YouTube member
because I post monthly exclusive videos where I talk about goal
setting and my author income. So if you wanna see those videos, be sure
to join the button will be down below. Otherwise that is it for today.
And I'll talk to you all next week.
