Right now, a lot of people are (for various reasons) rethinking where they get their books. I’ve been seeing a lot of comments about it. Along with the comments, I’ve been realising how many pieces of the underlying landscape aren’t very visible to readers. This blog post is here to explain a couple of pieces of the landscape, for those who want more information to make their choices.
Here, I’m talking about indie authors (people who self-publish their own work), though some of this also applies to small presses. As I note where relevant, trad publishers (especially the huge ones) work under different rules.
We’re going to talk about the overall landscape, then different sources of ebooks, print, audio. I wrap up with what I do and what readers and authors might do about different aspects of this.
The overall landscape
Fundamentally, books come into the world because they are written. Then they’re polished, formatted and prepared for publication, and distributed. These involve a bunch of different steps (with all sorts of variations). That ‘distribution’ step is what we’re focusing on here: how the books get from the people who made them happen to the people who want to read them (or at least own them).
There are plenty of variations here too. I’m going to focus on ebooks, but touch on print and audio briefly later in this post.
For indie ebook authors, there is one major decision that affects everything else: wide or not. But that choice is often not very visible to readers. It has to do with whether an author wants their books to be available through Kindle Unlimited or not.
A second issue is the general prominence of Amazon in the ebook room. (Beyond the question of Kindle Unlimited).
The last key issue is how indie authors can manage multiple streams and all of the administrative, technical, and logistical wrangling that comes with that.
There are a lot of possible different answers to these three issues. Authors are going to make a variety of choices here (for reasons that may not be obvious to the reader). And of course, the landscape isn’t static. Various aspects keep changing. Let’s look at some specifics.
Ebooks
Most indie authors sell vastly more ebooks than they do any other format (there are exceptions, but that’s why we’re starting here).
To sell an ebook as an author, you get set up on a distributor’s site. (And there are a bunch of those possible!) You upload your book’s text and cover, enter information about the book (the description, categories, keywords, etc.) You click a lot of buttons and wait for pages to load. And then the book’s available for purchase.
There are whole bunch of different ebook distributors out there. The big names include Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble Nook, Google Play, Kobo, and Smashwords. There are umbrella distributors who distribute to a bunch of smaller or international distributors, like Draft2Digital. Some smaller distributors focus on specific niches (Campfire has been looking to build up cozy fantasy, for example). There are some new players in the space, too. I’m going to be talking about Bookshop specifically below.
Distributors take a cut of the sales price in exchange for providing all the file hosting, point of sale (charging the credit card), and often some tax aspects. The percentage depends on the distributor, but it’s often about 30% to the distributor, 70% to the author for the big sites. That means for a book priced at $4.99, I make about $3.49 from a sale. For things where I go through another layer of distributor, it’s more like $2.49.
Amazon is absolutely the largest distributor for most indie authors. I average about 75% of my sales right now through Kindle, the other 25% split across all my other distribution channels.
But there’s that ‘wide vs. Kindle Unlimited’ problem here.
Amazon
Amazon has two ways for indie authors to distribute their books. One is just putting the individual book up for purchase, like any other distributor. This gives the reader access to the book, presumably long-term.
(Why do I say ‘access’? As Amazon’s text by the button has been noting recently, this is actually a license to access the book. It’s not permanent access via an independently accessible file outside their ecosystem. There have been cases of Amazon removing books from ereaders in the past. Changes in the ability to download files are part of what have a lot of readers looking at other places to get their ebooks right now.)
The other option is what’s referred to as Kindle Unlimited for readers and Kindle Select for authors. (Same program, two names. Yes, that’s confusing.) In this option, the reader pays a monthly fee and can select books in the Kindle Unlimited (KU hereafter) program to read for no additional cost. Readers can have a number of books on their device at once, but once they hit the limit for KU titles, they have to return one to get a new one.
How can you tell a book is in KU?
It’ll have a little label above it in some search views, it will list the price as $0.00 (Kindle Unlimited) for the ebook, and there will be a button below the different options offering a trial or letting you know the KU subscription price. (This comes above the ‘just buy this book’ button.)
About KU
There’s a couple of things that aren’t so obvious.
1) For indie authors, being in KU requires exclusivity. This means they can’t sell the book through any other distributor (or even make it available for free anywhere.) They can sell it on Kindle (for readers not in KU), they can sell it in print or audio. But they can’t sell a book that’s part of Kindle Unlimited on any other distributor or their own store.
2) The big traditional publishers have different rules. They’re not required to be exclusive to KU if the books is offered there .
3) KU has a 90 day term. Some authors will start a book there, then move a book wide after a period time (90 days, 180 days, etc.) It’s possible for an author to ask for a book to be removed from KU early, but Amazon doesn’t have to agree to that.
4) If you (a reader) read a book in KU via that service, the author gets paid a tiny amount per page read (the first time it’s read: rereads don’t count.) The number changes every month. In January 2025, it was $0.004091 per page, with a max payout per book capped at certain amounts (for a 300 page book, that was $1.50.)
5) There are also some promotion options that are only available to KU authors.
What does this mean for buying books? Books available in KU are also available for purchase (well, license) with a single payment. But those ebooks are only available on Amazon, not other sites, so if you want to read that book, some money is going to Amazon no matter how you do that.
Why do authors choose Kindle Unlimited?
In some genres and subgenres, that’s where the readers are. For romance readers (who often read vast numbers of books, thank you all!), a subscription can be a great choice. It keeps the book budget under control, while the reader gets to try a lot of different books. That means that books by and about marginalised groups often get people exploring them (and hopefully loving them and wanting more by those authors). There’s an established audience, hungry for more books.
The income differences can be incredibly stark between KU and wide in those genres and for some authors.
The question of moving from Kindle Unlimited to wide distribution isn’t just the cost in time, energy, learning new sites (more about that below). Because there’s no middle ground for a given book (either it’s in KU or it’s wide), moving a book wide means taking a big leap and hoping the sales will catch up elsewhere. It will also likely mean giving up a significant chunk of income in the short to medium term. For authors who depend on that income to pay their food and housing bills, that’s a terrifying shift. It’s certainly one that needs time and planning to deal with well.
Other distributors
So, what about the other distributors? None of the others have this kind of exclusivity deal, so if an author decides against KU, they can distribute their book through whatever channels they like. A few notes of interest here:
There are companies like Draft2Digital where authors can choose distribution channels – D2D will let you distribute ebooks to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, and many other smaller or international options. They also provide access to library sales.
Bookshop has been making print books available with links to independent booksellers for years now. They’ve just launched an ebook app. Right now they’re starting with big traditional publishers, but they mention there are plans to make ebook sales available to indie authors (via Draft2Digital or other similar businesses) in the future. We’re not there yet for indies.
Wide distribution considerations
On the author side, every time you add a distribution source, there’s a certain amount of admin upkeep. Each site has its own user interface, order they want things in, differences in how they want the information about the book shared and formatted. You have to maintain accounts on all those sites, with appropriate payment details, and so on.
Along with that, they all pay at slightly different points in the month. (Oh, and there’s a delay of weeks in most cases between when you make a sale and when you get paid for it. For books I sold in February, I will get some payments in mid-March. Others won’t come until the end of April, or whenever I hit the payout level for that seller.)
Admin costs stack: All this isn’t a lot for one site – but if you’re managing half a dozen sites, that can take some time, energy, technical literacy, and more. (Ask my friends how often I curse about the upload interface for certain sites…) It can definitely be one thing too many if someone’s low on time, resilience, or admin cope already.
Similarly, figuring out how to help readers find you on lots of sites is different then getting them to find you on one site. You need all sorts of different skills and approaches.
Libraries
I am all in favour of libraries! (As a librarian by day job, you’d expect that). Libraries can buy print books, but there are also several sources for ebooks. In the US, these include Libby (the backend is Overdrive), Hoopla, Palace Books, and a few others.
The way libraries get access to these varies. In some cases they buy a certain number of loans for an item, in other cases there’s a cost per loan. These can add up to a lot of money per library, so libraries regularly have to figure out what’s going to work best for them, their library users, and their budget.
Subscription services
Kindle Unlimited isn’t the only subscription service out there!
Kobo also offers a subscription service, Kobo Plus. However, there’s no exclusivity clause – authors can have their books there and everywhere else. (All my books are available via Kobo Plus.) Kobo Plus pays authors via a calculation of minutes read, with payout each time a given book reaches 300 minutes across however many readers. Yes, that’s a bit confusing.
Everand also has a subscription service.
Paperbacks
Obviously, print books exist too! Or at least they’re an option. Most indie authors rely on print on demand, with some doing print runs of special editions (often via Kickstarter to make sure the print costs are covered in advance. It’s not cheap!) Amazon offers paperbacks printed on demand, as do Ingram (which has wide distribution to print booksellers), and Draft2Digital does as well.
Paperback formatting can be fiddly. Talking about it on my authorial Discord recently, I made the comment (and my cover designer agreed) that basically we expect something to glitch at least once in the process for some reason that seems really silly from our end.
Common issues are that each printing option uses slightly different paper (meaning the spine width varies across printers). Some have issues with a large area of black or very dark ink on the cover. They all have slightly different requirements for where the barcode goes.
Most bookstores also prefer to have the option to return books that don’t sell. For a whole bunch of reasons, this is a lot more complicated for indie sellers than the big traditional publishers. That’s true both in terms of bookkeeping and in terms of setting and managing payment terms. Long story short: many booksellers will gladly order a print on demand paperback on request for you, but they may well not have it in stock on the shelves.
Audio
Of course, there are a lot of different distribution models for audio books. Again, one of the big elephants in the room is Amazon. They have a setup – ACX – that allows indie and other authors to audition narrators, and manage the files.
However, if the book is done via royalty share (split between the author and narrator), the book is exclusive to ACX’s channels for a fixed term or until the author buys out the narrator. The royalty percentages here are particularly lousy, for the record – ACX keeps the majority of the income in a lot of cases.
There are some audio book services out there (Podium and Tantor are examples) that will buy audio rights to a specific book and produce it. Usually in this case, the author has less control over narrator choice or some other aspects.
The other option is to have the author fund the production costs up front. I just did that with Pastiche, which is still rolling out to a few audio distributors. I’m delighted with the audio book, but getting the funds together for that involved a Kickstarter and then a lot of other steps to get the book ready for narration and to check the recording (and a lot of steps in between).
Fortunately, there a whole lot of audio distributors out there. One a lot of people I know have been liking is libro.fm, which supports local bookstores. They offer both memberships and ‘just buy this book’ options.
Direct sales
Besides using a distributor, direct sales are getting more popular. Here, you go to an author’s site, click whatever link to buy that book, put in your payment info, and get the file (or a link to get the file, depending on how things are set up).
There’s a lot of good here: authors can share books directly with readers. There are some processing fees for handling those credit card payments, but the author gets to keep a much higher percentage. (More like 90-95% instead of 70% or less). And there’s a lot more control over how things look and feel or ability to connect to other information. I’m working on getting some things like bundles set up that would be hard to do on other distributors.
However, there are also some challenges:
- The author has to set up and maintain a site, which can be a time sink!
- They have to figure out how to deal with taxes in different places. (Some direct sales options make this easier than others).
- They have to figure out how to let readers know their books exist. (The thing about browsing Kindle books or Barnes and Noble ebooks or whatever is that readers are there looking for a book already.)
And obviously, direct sales aren’t an option for KU authors until they remove those books from KU.
What I do
I knew from the beginning I wanted to be wide. Having books in libraries makes me the happiest ever. That shaped a lot of my other choices as an author, and continues to affect how I think about things like describing my books, the advertising I do (I’m not good at that part!), and more.
If you explore the books on this site, you’ll see I’ve got links to the big stores, plus a link to buy direct at the top, and a link to other options at the bottom. I want readers to get books whatever way works for them that I can support.
(Coming soon: a page with more info about how to get paperbacks, and I’ll have audiobook links and info up for Pastiche. My blog and newsletter will have more when those are ready, likely both in March.)
Where do I get what I read?
I have been mostly in the Kindle ecosystem (the best setup I’ve got for research note highlighting runs via the Kindle app or reader). I’m rethinking my options for a bunch of reasons, but haven’t come to any decisions just yet. I know that I’m going to continue buying some books from authors I love (some of whom are friends) who are in KU, even if I use other sources for books when I can.
I also get some things via my library (mostly ebooks), but it depends on whether reading that book is time-dependent research, if I think I’ll want it for reference later, and my mood.
What you can do
Readers
The big thing I hope readers understand is that there are lot of different pieces feeding into an author’s choices about how to sell or distribute their books. Some of those are things that are easy to change, some are harder.
Going wide if someone isn’t already especially takes a lot of admin time early on. There’s a lot of cognitive load in learning new sites, getting payment and tax details set up, etc. Once you’re familiar with the sites, uploading is a lot easier (I do it in an hour or so now).
And of course, moving a back catalogue takes a bunch of time! I have more than 30 books out. Even if each book only took 10 minutes each, that’s 5 hours right there. (And it’s never that simple, is it?)
It’s absolutely fine to ask an author if there’s a chance they’re considering making their books available in other ways. But it’s also a decision that may take them some time to implement even if they are going to make a change. They may have good reasons for not doing that, or not immediately. (So many of us are at the edges of what we can manage given the state of the world around us, right?)
If you’ve got a question about something in this post, feel free to ask it via the contact form.
Authors
If you’re an author who has thought about going wide, there are definitely resources to help. In general, Wide for the Win is a great place to learn more. (Discussion communities on Facebook and Circle, depending on your preference, plus a lot of linked resources).
Some options depend on genre. Here, I’m most familiar with romance and some subgenres, but I’m glad to point you at some other places if I know about them. Drop me a note in the contact form, tell me a little about your genre, and I’ll reply by email. (It might take me a day or two, I’ve got some upcoming stuff that’s going to slow down my responses a little this month.)
One option that has worked for some authors I know is to move series wide one at a time. The folks I know who’ve done this generally start with the ones getting minimal reads in KU right now. That allows time to figure out how wide works without changing everything all at once. Start with a couple of wide options, or via something like Draft2Digital if the admin overhead of figuring out a lot of different sites is too much.
