Julie Broad breaks down Amazon's KDP Select program for indie authors: 70% royalties and Kindle Unlimited access if you go exclusive, but you lose the ability to sell your ebook anywhere else or price it freely. She chose not to join because she wanted to match traditionally published authors' prices and keep her books on other platforms.
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Have you faced that scary question of whether you're gonna go exclusive means no more selling around till death do us part when it comes to you and Amazon, if you're trying to figure it out, stick around. I've got some thoughts on it for you. Hey there, I'm Julie Broad with havemoreinfluence.com I'm talking about one of Kindle's programs called KDP Select. In case you're not familiar with it. Now, Kindle is a division of Amaz and when you've uploaded your book and tried to decide what to do, you probably saw in the chart that to get 70% royalties you need to go into KDP Select. But when you read the fine print, you find out there might be some restrictive things about this program that may make it so you don't want to do it. But first, before I get into why you don't want to do it, why would you want to enroll in a program like KDP Select? You will earn higher royalties. You're going to earn 70% versus 35% if you don't go into KDP Select. You're going to earn your share of KDP Select Global Fund when customers read your book from Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle's owners, the Kindle Owners Lending Library. You also get to choose between two fantastic promotional opportunities. The Kindle Countdown deals, which is a time bound promotional discount for your book, or the free book promotion where readers worldwide can get your book for free. When you enroll your book into KDP select, you're committing to only sell the E version of your book through Amazon. Let me just show you a quick comparison of KDP select which is a Kindle program or just selling your book through Kindle alone. So as you can see, Kindle KDP select has a pricing restriction. You can only sell your book for no more than 9.99. If you put it through Kindle, you can choose the price. KDP select your exclusive with Kindle. No exclusivity, so you can offer it through other channels including your website. KDP select gives you access to the promos which I talked about, the Countdown deals and the free promo promos which you don't have access to through Kindle. There's a 70% royalty through KDP select versus a 35% royalty through Kindle only. Overall it doesn't sound that bad. But for me, here's the reason. The single biggest reason I didn't do it, number one was exclusivity. I really wanted the option to be able to give it away and to sell it through other channels other than just Amazon. But the bigger issue was the pricing. Now here's the thing. I'm a nonfiction author. My books contain thousands of dollars of knowledge. These are books jammed with stuff that I have bought, put into workshops that I've sold for over a thousand dollars for a weekend workshop. So this is already a bargain. If you pay 20 bucks or 25 bucks for my book to get thousands of dollars worth of experience and expertise that can save you money and make you money and save you time and hassle, it's already a steal of a deal. As I noted in another video, I did a three year sales tally for my first book, More Than Cash Flow. And only four 14% of the books sold through bookstores and Amazon were sold in a digital format. This means that my physical book pricing is actually really important. I think the book is already super cheap for what you're getting inside of the pages. And as a result, I'm not willing to then say my ebook is worth half as much as my printed book because of the paper it's printed on. But wait, Julie, I took this course or I hired this done for you publishing company and they are requiring me to go through KDP select because they want me to do the pre sales or the countdown promo. Well, fair enough. If Amazon number one bestseller is all that's most important to you, then yeah, maybe you want to go that route and give your book away free or give it for $1.99 so that you can say your number one category bestseller. But the reality is that claim to fame is not going to last much longer. There are books out there like this one who that have no content, that are number one Amazon best sellers to prove the point that anybody can be a number one bestseller. So overall, should you go exclusive? The answer is it depends. For me, the choice was clear. There's tremendous value in my books and it was important to me that my book be priced like the other books in my category. The traditionally published books that was competing directly with and those books are not discounted at 299 or 599 or even 9.99. They're selling for $20, $22, $25 and the E versions are selling for 1899, 1999. And that ultimately is who I want to be compared with. That's where the value of my book lies. And frankly, I was just not going to price it no matter what other options were available. But again, it depends on your goals. So do what's right for you. Know the choices you're making and why you're making them. And I wish you all the best of success with your book. Got a question? Go ahead. Post it down below in YouTube. Or if you want more tips and tools on self publishing. I'm launching a new business in 2017 called book launchers dot com. Come on over, check it out. Might not be live yet, but there's a spot where you can put your name in and get updates and get the best tools and tips. And if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. Makes me happy. Tells me it's worth my time to shoot more videos to help you out. Cool. Cool. See you next time.
