Both Episodes of Starship’s Mage are available on a wide variety of platforms and retailers. Most of these are through a single distributor, but Google, Amazon, and Kobo are each set up individually.
Getting all of these to release at the same time and at the same price is complicated. (For example, one of the retailers was set up for pre-orders of Episode 2, with a release date of March 15. It was March 17th, the following Monday, before the book became available).
I’ve received enough requests to make sure that the Episodes are available on one platform or another that I don’t really begrudge this, but it does help emphasize an interesting point: a lot of Amazon’s promotion options for authors are tied up in KDP Select. KDP Select books must only be available on Amazon.
A lot of the self-published authors I follow closely only publish on Amazon, and their books are registered with KDP Select. Looking at the breakdown of my sales figures (I’m an accountant, I have a spreadsheet), fully eighty percent of my sales come from Amazon.
If KDP Select could increase my sales by 25%, locking myself in to an Amazon-only publishing setup would be worth it. Of course, there’s no guarantee of any such thing!
It’s an interesting thought, if nothing else. For the moment, I’m continuing on with the wide spread of retailers that I have, but if I finish the potential ‘third project’ that’s beaten against my head, I may try out KDP Select and see what happens.
Experimentation remains the name of the game in e-publishing for me so far, after all.
Glynn Stewart
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