Why I Publish Aggressively Wide as An Independent Author

Hey there, Igniter! Monica Leonelle from theworldneedsyourbook.com. You are watching and listening to The Productive Novelist, and today's topic is why I publish aggressively wide as an independent author. So I'm going to talk about, um, my personal reasons for publishing wide, but also about some of the industry movements that make Is going wide a good long-term decision? Um, at the current time, this is April of 2021 when I'm recording this, you know, going wide is not really a great financial decision at this point, um, in the short term. So you're not going to make more money going wide in most cases. Most people, um, are probably going to make more money in the short term being in Kindle Unlimited, which is the exclusive program that Amazon has. It's actually called KDP Select. It's not Kindle Unlimited, but Kindle Unlimited is the Unlimited Reader Program subscription that people join. So people sometimes call them like KU authors, KU readers. Really, the authors are in KDP Select, which is the program. So first, I guess I'll talk about what it means to be aggressively wide. And basically what that is, is that you are not part of the KDP Select program with your books. And typically, so, you know, some people are like kind of half in, half out, or like their books go in for a bit and then they come out, or their books are out for a bit and then they go in. Being aggressively wide is really a commitment to having all your books on as many retailers as possible and in as many formats as possible. So it's kind of daunting, actually, when you think about it, because there are a lot of formats these days. And with each format, there are multiple retailers and multiple places to, like, upload your files and that sort of thing. And those places don't always play nicely together is another thing. Like IngramSpark and Barnes Noble, they don't play super nicely together in print. But it's just, it's basically just a commitment to having your content as wide as possible. And if you're interested in this and this concept, maybe you are thinking about publishing your first book, maybe you're in Kindle Unlimited, but you're interested in going wide, there are a couple of places to learn about this. There's an amazing group on Facebook called Wide for the Win. It's one of the best author groups on Facebook right now, and it is focused on going wide, basically. So there's lots of great information in there about that. I also have a series coming out. It's called Book Sales Supercharged, and the series is focused on going wide. You can find out more about it at theworldneedsyourbook.com/wide. But basically, it's just a series of books. The first book is a very general book called Get Your Book Selling Wide. So it can actually give you more of an overview of what being wide or being aggressively wide means and can kind of explain the details of your options. And then the next 6 books in the series goes through each of the ebook retailers, the big ones. Um, so they'll go through Apple Books, Amazon, Kobo, Google Play, Barnes Noble, and then your website, because I think selling direct is really important too, um, in ebook. And the series kind of continues from there. So after it goes through all the ebook ones, and there's a book dedicated to each one of like how do you get onto the platform, how do you sell more, how do you market, how do you work with their merchandising, or whatever, um, whatever key questions you might have about that platform. After that, it goes into other formats like print, audiobook, fiction apps, translations, and so on. So that, that is available as well. So you can go to theworldneedsyourbook.com/wide. And then if you want to just kind of get your feet wet on it, I've been posting more content about this on Medium. So you can find me on Medium. I think it's medium.com/MonicaLeonelle or maybe slash @MonicaLeonelle. I don't know. Basically Monica Leonelle on Medium. My publication there is called The Productive Novelist. It has some content about being wide. And then this podcast has content about being wide as well, I guess. Didn't really think about that. And then there's also a Substack. So the Substack is at theworldneedsyourbook.com/substack, or you can go to aggressivelywide.substack.com. Substack.com. So lots of places to learn more about this if it's of interest to you. So I'm now, you know, I'm gonna go into a couple reasons that I think as an industry people should be looking at kind of like the bigger picture and considering why, even though in the short term it's probably not the, um, it's not the place where you're going to make the most money yet. So there are a couple reasons why I'm— why these are not in any particular order. I just kind of jotted them down beforehand. Um, so the first reason is that the industry is changing very quickly. Um, and so by that I mean the independent author industry. I mean publishing in general. Um, because it's changing so quickly, there are a lot of other factors that are coming into play. So one is, um, that the technology is changing. The other thing is that rights are changing. So for example, there used to be just audiobook rights. And now there are likely going to be tiers of audiobook rights. I think it was Joanna Penn who was— who recently did a podcast on this, but she was talking about 3 different tiers, one being an AI read audiobook, the other being a performance like a narrator audiobook, and then the third being a like a big production performance. So like a high-end performance that would only be for, you know, the most popular books. And she was talking about that being 3 tiers. There's also just so many other rights coming out. The technology is changing very quickly. So, and companies are kind of catching on to this as well. So they're saying things like, we want all your audiobook rights in, you know, every possible, possible iteration of them, um, even rights that are not invented yet, that sort of thing. And so the contracts are getting a bit sketchy, to be honest. Um, and, you know, additionally, um, it's, it's a little tough to be selling rights right now because one you don't know what those rights will actually be in the future because the tech is changing so quickly, because the actual rights themselves are changing so quickly. But yeah, also, you know, there's not— it's kind of like there's kind of like a rights grab going on right now. So I was talking to some people, for example, who had done audiobook deals. And so 5 years ago, it was a really smart idea to take an to sell your audiobook rights. And now, you know, 5 years later, it's kind of not a great idea. There are lots of problems with it. For example, if your book does well and you don't own your audiobook rights, those audiobooks are selling and you're getting a very, very small amount of this. And also, you didn't really have a good, you know, I think the the going rate was like $500 for some, you know, $250 like that. The audiobook, you know, advance was pretty small to begin with. And people are getting like these very small fractions of their audiobooks that they, you know, they sold the rights on a while ago. And so before it was a really good idea because you could get all your production costs paid for, you got this nice advance. Like people would take like a whole series at once. And now it's kind of like, well, you know, making audiobooks is cheaper. There are more places to sell audiobooks. There are potentially like these different, you know, your, your IP has gotten a little bit more fragmented. There's different types of audiobooks like the AI read versus the narrator read at this point. And with, you know, with a small amount of royalties, you can't really advertise an audiobook and make it profitable in some cases. Now, it depends on your contracts. Of course, I'm kind of speaking very generally because the contracts are all over the place. But that's just one example of like the industry has really changed quickly. And it wasn't, you know, what was a good idea a couple of years ago maybe isn't, and you may be able to like exploit those rights at this point, um, and make a lot more money now than you did, you know, by going with this contract. And so that's, that's one example. It's actually happening kind of everywhere. It's the same with, you know, people are starting to do like exclusive deals with fiction apps, for example, but then like this new technology comes out and that exclusive deal was like not really that good of a deal, actually. Um, so what I'm kind of— what I've been personally kind of advising people to do is just to hold on to your rights for as long as possible at this point. I think as an independently published author, in many cases you can almost do better on your own, or you can at least wait till the technology develops and then make a better decision. In a lot of cases, if you are going to sell your rights, I encourage you to keep those keep the rights very specific and take out like all those clauses of like anything that's invented in the future. Like, no, you're not, you're not giving them that because they can, they can kind of go wild with that. But then also, you know, keep those contracts limited to like a year or like 2 years instead of, you know, like some of my audiobooks, for example, are now in they're in a 7-year contract and I can't get them out and they're on popular books. So I can't advertise the audio, you know, can't do advertising on my audiobook, for example. So yeah, it's, it's just changing really quickly. I don't think being exclusive with anybody on any of your rights is a very good idea because of that. Speaking of audiobooks, the growth is poised to explode. Amazon currently has 40% of the audiobook space. I think a lot of people don't really know that, though people are kind of catching on to that. And a lot of people think that Amazon is going to be able to consolidate the audiobook space the same as they did with ebooks. I don't think so, because there are so many companies in the audiobook space right now, and it includes companies like Google and Apple, companies who lost the ebook wars and lost market share in the ebook space. So they've kind of wised up and they realize like, okay, we're not going to let that happen in the audiobook space. And all of these major companies, all the Big Five ebook retailers, they're all investing heavily in audiobooks right now because they kind of see that happening again. Additionally, there are lots of smaller companies like Scribd or Scribd, I'm not sure how you say that. But there are lots of smaller companies that are doing subscription services. And then in addition to that, there's companies like Spotify. So Spotify had no stake in the publishing space. They didn't care about publishing. They were, you know, they were doing music streaming. They've recently gotten into the audiobook space. So now— and they had to, they had to get in there because audiobooks are really important to their future as well. Like, people are, you know, Spotify— people aren't just listening to music on their jog anymore. They're listening to podcasts, they're listening to audiobooks. And so Spotify kind of has to get into this game to maintain its position in the market. So there are lots of little companies like that. And this isn't just audiobooks, it's also on the fiction app side. And it's in these areas of growth on the fiction side that, you know, we as authors are not, you know, we're kind of like just dabbling in, in many cases. Like for the most part, we got the ebooks covered, we got the print books mostly covered for most of us. A lot of us are in audiobooks, but like, and like some of us are in the fiction apps, but These are growing spaces. And when these growing spaces happen, they, they eat away at the current formats as the other thing. So like when ebooks happened, when the explosion of ebooks happened, it ate away at the print book space. And the same is happening with audiobooks. Audiobooks are big. It's eating away at ebooks and at print. And their market share of the whole book sales space. So there's that happening. Um, global communities of readers are growing. So Amazon's exclusivity program, it's only in a certain number of countries. If you look at what Google Play Books and what Apple Books are doing, they're in 50+ countries each, and they're positioning themselves pretty well to be global distributors. They also are the devices companies. So they, they have the entire market share of phones and they, you know, specifically Android and Apple, that's kind of globally they, they own it like they just own all of it. And so they have a pretty good hold in a lot of these other countries. Kobo as well. Kobo is an interesting One, it's a Canadian company, but its parent company is a very large company in Japan that is, you know, well-resourced. So Kobo is not really going anywhere. And they have partnerships with a lot of the biggest bookstores in a lot of other countries. So, you know, basically Kobo— so like Barnes Noble has the Nook here in the US. I'm just going to give a US example. So apologies if you're not in the US, but Barnes Noble has the Nook, they have like 600+ stores in the US. They're like the biggest brand of bookstore in the US. So Kobo has gone to like Mexico, for example, and they are partnered with essentially the Barnes Noble of Mexico. And the same is true. They're, they're like partnered with the Waterstones in the UK. So like they kind of go into every major country and they partner with the biggest bookstore there and try to get those bookstores into e-reading and into ebooks. And so that's kind of their strategy. So these global communities are growing and Amazon is not there in all these places. So you kind of— you don't want to miss like ebook sales exploding in France, for example. Fiction apps have also created a new center for the publishing world. This kind of snuck up on us in, um, here in the US at least, or here in the English-speaking space. And it probably snuck up on Amazon a bit. But basically what's happening is that there are a number of e-commerce companies in the Asia-Pacific region. So specifically, they're in, um, mostly in China, uh, South Korea, Japan, countries like that. And they are extremely well-resourced. They are, um, e-commerce giants in their countries. And they have built these— they also own like these fiction apps, or they're buying up these fiction apps that are serialized fiction online. So, you know, Google and Apple, they own all the devices. So they're actually pretty well positioned here. But Amazon, you know, that's a threat to Amazon. Amazon doesn't have that kind of access in these other countries. And these fiction apps are exploding right now. They're, they're even exploding here in the US, and we'll see where they go. But they've kind of shifted, um, you know, for a long time the publishing world is, was, um, English-speaking and in the US. Um, and so these companies are kind of shifting the center of that, and we don't really know where that's going to go. So it's not— it would be a good idea to be on some of those apps. Is my point. So independent publishing in general, it's really become, um, it's really heavily tied to tech companies and it's also heavily tied to e-commerce. So it used to be tied to New York, basically all these companies in New York like Simon Schuster and Penguin, which I think is now Simon Schuster. It's hard to keep track of the big publishing companies, but that's really changed. So if you're in— if you're an independent publisher, like, your livelihood depends on these— the big tech war basically depends on like Google, Apple, Amazon, like battling it out for market share in these different spaces. And so I think some people, you know, being exclusive with one company you're kind of betting on that company to do well, and perhaps they will. There's certainly space for everybody globally, especially companies that are that big, but things can shift. Amazon currently has about 90% of the ebook market here in the US, and I think in many English-speaking territories, so like Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, they have you know, a good portion of the market share. But that's not really— so first of all, the market share is shifting away from ebooks in general. And beyond that, you know, there— it's also shifting away from like e-readers. It's shifting more toward devices and shifting more toward audio. And it kind of makes sense, right? Because we have these in-home devices like Alexa and Google Home. We have iPhones and Androids. We have, you know, stuff in our cars. Like, we're kind of busier. We're realizing that we can multitask. And so audio is just growing significantly. And Amazon is, you know, Amazon is decently positioned, don't get me wrong, but they certainly don't have that whole— they're not the only dominant player in that space. So there's a lot shifting around, and, um, if you're exclusive, you're kind of betting on Amazon to win a lot of those spaces. And it's possible they could win. I'm not, you know, who knows. But it could be good to be on some of these other platforms because, um, you, you know, the one of those platforms could win, or because it's a smaller pool, you could take off on one of those platforms when you may not take off on Amazon as an author. So these are some of the reasons that I think, you know, the bigger picture, the global picture of the industry is important to making this decision on a personal level. The reason— so the reasons that I got out of KU, because I was in it for many years with some of my stuff, I had a lot of anxiety about getting shutting down, getting shut down on Amazon, my personal account, not because I was doing anything wrong, but because I saw people who were not doing anything wrong get shut down. And it only takes like 1 or 2 people, but it was still like, oh wow, I don't want that to happen to me. And then the other thing is I'm pretty excited about experimenting and just like the new opportunities that authors have. And that really excites me on a personal level. So I would hate to be missing out on that, um, with my content. So I just want to experiment more. So those are my thoughts on this. Definitely let me know your thoughts if you have any. Feel free to leave a comment anywhere. I hope this was helpful to you. Thank you so much for watching and listening, and have a wonderful day.