Should your ebook be exclusive to Amazon?
The case for “yes” is simple. Authors in KDP Select get access to $700 million a year in the Kindle Unlimited fund. Plus, exclusivity makes everything easy. You have one login, one dashboard, one algorithm, and one company.
The case for “no” is also simple. That one company won't let you talk to a human with authority when something goes wrong, and it runs an algorithm that can end your career without telling you why.
Indie authors have argued about “wide versus exclusive” for years. Do you want more money, or more freedom?
It isn't that simple anymore.
A recurring theme on this show has been how easy it is to get banned on Amazon without doing anything wrong, or for breaking a rule you didn't know. More money is not worth much when it can vanish overnight with an email saying your account has been suspended.
I've worked with authors earning millions inside Kindle Unlimited, and I've worked with authors earning millions outside of their ecosystem by going wide. If you manage your timing, you can do both. There's no one right answer for everyone, but there is a right answer for you right now.
My guest is Kris Austin, CEO and co-founder of Draft2Digital, the largest wide distributor in indie publishing.
What is Draft2Digital?
Kris: Draft2Digital is the biggest distributor of indie books. We help authors get their books into retail channels, subscription services, and libraries all around the world. We're your one-stop shop.
Thomas: I remember when you were the "turn your Word document into an ebook" company. Vellum didn't exist back then. Apparently, people still need that help.
Kris: Over 60% of the books we receive are in Word format, and we convert them automatically. In addition to formatting, we lay out and organize the text so it gets divided into chapters properly and shows up cleanly in ebook and print.
Can Draft2Digital simplify sales reporting and payouts?
Thomas: One downside of going wide is that if you do it yourself, you end up with dozens of dashboards, portals, reports, and 1099s. It gets messy, and because the numbers in any one report are small, it gets noisy. Draft2Digital gives you a single consolidated report across all the stores.
Kris: We put it all in one dashboard on our website and consolidate your tax reporting for everything that comes through us. Most authors don't realize that every retail portal has a minimum payout. If you haven't reached their minimum in a month, you don't get paid. Combine those retailers through our service, and you clear our minimum, which is small, so you get paid more often.
Thomas: And you clear it within minutes. I'm a big believer in data-driven marketing.
Learn more about data-driven marketing in the following episodes:
- How to Track Your Book Promotion
- How to Use Marketing Data To Sell More Books
- How to Spend LESS Time Marketing Your Book
- How to Use Marketing Data To Sell More Books
Can Draft2Digital pull in your Amazon KDP data?
Thomas: I recommend that authors who go wide keep their own KDP account and use Draft2Digital for everything else.
Kris: That's probably the most common setup. You'd be managing two different dashboards for reports. Amazon for their stuff, us for everything else.
Thomas: A feature worth considering is pulling in Amazon's data. Publisher Champ has that technology and can do interesting things with the reporting.
For most authors, it works well to treat Amazon as one report and all other retailers as a separate report. Even for authors who publish wide, Amazon is usually still the largest source of sales.
Thomas: Publishing wide does not mean, "I'm going to boycott Amazon and stick it to Jeff Bezos." Your job is to serve your readers, and your readers want to buy books where they already buy books. Telling them they can't is obnoxious and elitist.
When you publish wide, you're not forcing anyone to buy from Amazon.
You also don't want to go the other way and say, "You can't use Amazon. You have to find me in an obscure bookstore you've never heard of and create an account." Don't do that either.
Kris: Correct. Meet readers where they're at. You'll sell more books that way.
How does Draft2Digital print distribution work?
Thomas: Print is another thing you've added since the olden days of being an ebook maker.
Kris: When we first started, it was really difficult to get your book into print as an indie author. You essentially had to do large print runs, buy 1,000 books, stick them in your garage, then pack and ship them yourself. It was a nightmare. Places still offer that today, and I don't recommend paying for any of them.
Then came print-on-demand, which is phenomenal. When someone orders your book, it gets printed, shipped, and delivered in a few days. It also means indie bookstores can buy your book and Amazon can get your book.
Every indie author should have their book in print. There's no excuse anymore. Our tool sets convert your ebook into print, including a wraparound cover with your description and your picture on the back. Those were the big barriers, and we created D2D Print to knock them down.
Thomas: If you don’t have a print book, you're leaving money on the table. Plus, you want a physical artifact of all the work you put into your book.
For certain genres and authors, print is a small piece of the pie. They may make 80% of their money on audio or on ebook. But that other 20% is still something. Younger readers really prefer a print option.
Does Ingram run the print-on-demand machines?
Kris: Yes. They have their own machines, and in certain parts of the world they partner with other printers.
Thomas: That's why it's so fast. The machines sit inside Ingram's fulfillment centers, and Ingram is the biggest book distributor. Most big publishers use Ingram to move books around the world.
Print on demand also lets you print books close to the customer’s location. Instead of the books sitting in Kansas and getting mailed east and west, someone in Los Angeles orders and the book prints in Los Angeles. That's cheaper and much faster.
The real advantage is printing in Australia and avoiding the tariff. Australia and New Zealand hit us with sizable tariffs if you mail a book there. From my understanding of the tariff law, if you print the book in Australia, even as an American author, you don't pay the tariff, because it's an Australian-printed book.
Amazon KDP and Ingram have the biggest global networks of print-on-demand locations, so those are the ones to go with.
Should you work with Ingram directly or through Draft2Digital?
Thomas: I don't recommend working with Ingram directly, especially for a first book. Ingram is notoriously difficult to interface with.
I like that you offer a friendlier wrapper for Ingram's technology on the back end, and you actually like indie authors. Ingram likes big publishers who have accounts with multiple commas. They've begrudgingly offered IngramSpark and indie services, but that's not their love.
Draft2Digital cut its teeth on indie authors in the early days.
Kris: Our mission is to make publishing accessible to all authors.
We realized early that our job is to take something complicated and make it simple, and we designed our website around that. But sometimes things don't work as well as we hope, so we back it up with the best customer support in the industry. You'll get very rapid support from us by email.
We took the same mentality to print. I don't intend to compete with IngramSpark. Some authors need that level of control and should go there. There's no right choice here. We just think we can make your print book easy since we already have your ebook.
When we made D2D Print, fewer than 5% of indie authors had their books in print. We asked, "How do we fix that?"
Does having an audiobook help?
Thomas: There's no excuse not to be in print, and no excuse not to be in audio. With the rise of AI authors, one of the best ways to prove your humanity is by offering an audiobook. I have seen very few AI-written books that also offer an audio format. It's the flag that says, "This book was worth the effort and money."
What many authors don't realize is that today, if your book doesn't have an audiobook version, some readers may assume the book was written by AI. Most readers don't care if the book is written by AI, and they still enjoy it.
It's easy for authors to criticize those readers and say, "No, you need more sophisticated taste." But McDonald's sells a lot of hamburgers. Are there better hamburgers in this world? Yes, but readers are still going to buy McDonald's.
For the readers who want something nicer, you have to signal that it's nicer, and you can do that by offering an audio version, even if you use AI narration. That's still better than none at all, which makes you look AI.
To learn more about audiobook publication, check out the following episodes:
What are your options for audiobook distribution?
Kris: We've partnered with quite a few ways to get your audiobooks where you want them. Our first partner, who we've worked with for a long time, is INaudio. They have a product called INaudio Voices for distributing indie audiobooks.
If you already have an audiobook, whether you paid for human narration, which is the gold standard, or used a digital narration service, INaudio is the best way to get it everywhere that accepts it. Not every retailer takes digitally narrated books. They have quality requirements your narration may not meet, and INaudio knows who will take it and who won't.
The second is Apple Digital Narration. They'll automatically create an audiobook from your ebook, available on Apple as an exclusive version. Apple's digital narration technology is incredible, and I'd recommend listening to the samples on their site.
Spotify also has digital narration that authors will want to look at. We partner with all of these people.
Which audiobook platforms have the largest market share?
Thomas: Spotify sells the ebook now too. They started with audiobooks, moved into ebooks, and I think they have a bookshop integration coming where they sell paper.
Nothing is confirmed. But Spotify is leaning into books much harder than I anticipated.
As a podcaster, I thought their move into spoken word was a way of paying less in royalties to the music studios. They'd rather you listen to an hour of Joe Rogan than an hour of Taylor Swift, because Taylor Swift earns a new royalty every three minutes and Rogan doesn't.
Then they went into audiobooks in a big way. I thought it was a gimmick, but it isn't. They're taking real market share.
When you started Draft2Digital, Audible was the entire audiobook market. Everything else was a rounding error. Spotify brought in a whole new group of listeners who never used Audible. They came in through podcasts, and Spotify is the number two podcast platform.
The third-biggest audiobook market is actually YouTube. I know authors making $1,000.00 to $2,000.00 a month on YouTube ad royalties alone. The book cover is the video, and the audio plays over it, so it's a four-hour or eight-hour video. You get paid per minute when the viewer is a Premium subscriber, and that can be real money without many readers.
Kris: That's clever, especially with digital narration tools. You can make good quality narration these days.
Does Draft2Digital distribute audiobooks to YouTube?
Kris: I'm pretty confident authors would need to do that separately.
Thomas: YouTube is the one channel Draft2Digital doesn't reach yet.
The downside is that YouTube keeps raising the minimum threshold to get paid. Becoming eligible for ads used to be easy, and they recently raised the bar again. You need a lot of streamed minutes.
The advantage is that when you have ten eight-hour books, those minutes come easily without many viewers. YouTube counts minutes, not viewers, so authors have an unfair advantage.
This may be a whole new revenue source. The YouTube pot is, I think, bigger than the Kindle Unlimited pot, and it works very similarly. Most of it goes to Dude Perfect and MrBeast, but there's money for the little guys too.
How do you replace the Kindle Unlimited money when you go wide?
Thomas: For many indie authors, Kindle Unlimited is their biggest chunk of income. Many try going wide, see a huge drop in revenue, and go back. $700 million is a lot of money, and if you're published wide, you don't have access to it.
Kris: We get that question all the time. One thing authors don't fully appreciate is that every store has its own audience, and it takes effort to build readership at each one. Going wide is a long-term play. It's generally not instant, but I strongly believe it will be better for you over time.
That quick money from Amazon is enticing, but building a readership across retailers, libraries, and subscription services gives you much more flexibility.
You have to stick with it. If you think you'll jump to wide and replace what you lost within a month, that's highly unlikely.
Thomas: You're running a business, and I always tell myself I should never let another company decide whether my company still exists.
The appeal of being an indie author is freedom. If you're getting all of your money from Amazon, you just have a job, and the job is working for the Amazon algorithm. You don't even have a boss. It's worse. Your boss is a machine, and the machine tells you how much money you get and what to write next.
Kris: I've seen too many authors start making really good money on Amazon, change their lifestyle, start relying on that money, and then Amazon changes something. They lose their account, or the algorithm shifts and their book stops selling. You'll never figure out what happened.
Relying on one income source is a risk you need to plan for. There are ways to mitigate it while staying exclusive, but wide is another pathway worth considering.
Can you switch back and forth between wide and exclusive?
Thomas: There's also a hybrid approach. If you need to wean yourself off that addicting KU money, you can go wide nine months of the year and exclusive for three. You can oscillate and still dip your ladle into the Kindle Unlimited fund.
Kris: With Draft2Digital, you pick and choose which retailers we send your books to. You're non-exclusive with us. If you want to put your book up for a day and take it back down, you can, although I don't recommend it.
When you make your book exclusive anywhere, you're hurting the retailers you're not doing it for. I think it's in the author's interest to get this industry healthier, where there's not one dominant player. But at a personal level, that can be difficult, and people should make the decisions they need to make.
Does going wide depend on your genre?
Thomas: Let's be clear. As a Texan, I love the idea of publishing wide, and I like platforms that make it easy. But many authors make less money going wide, especially in the short term.
It also depends on the genre. If you write romance or LitRPG, the readership isn't just on Amazon; it's on KU specifically. Some authors make 80% of their money from Kindle Unlimited, because they write the kind of romance that appeals to that kind of reader.
That's tricky, because if that's your readership, Kickstarter is harder and many things are harder. These readers finish a book every day or two. They're voracious, and they may not remember you.
So we have two ends of a spectrum. On one end is the reader who reads one James Patterson book while they’re on summer vacation each year. That reader really knows James Patterson. On the other end is the romance reader who finishes a new romance every day and only gets it on KU because it’s cheaper to read a book a day on KU.
Not all genres have that voracious KU reader. Nonfiction in particular has a small KU audience, and most of those readers buy paper books, often in person at a speaking event.
Some genres play better wide, and some play better inside Kindle Unlimited, because that's where the readers are.
Kris: It's genre-specific for sure. Romance is made up of many subgenres, and it changes between them. Some readers in those subgenres won't read as many books and won't be in KU. They'll be at Apple or Kobo.
That said, be cautious about thinking in terms of the average reader. Just because most of them happen to be at Amazon doesn't mean that's the only place to target them. Readers buy where they like to buy, and they're everywhere.
Readers are at libraries too. Thankfully, KU authors can now send their books to libraries, and Draft2Digital is a great service for that. I strongly recommend KU authors get into libraries as soon as possible. Come to us, and we'll send your book to OverDrive and Hoopla, where it'll be available right away.
Thomas: This is new. If you're thinking, "Wait, I'm on KU, I'm not allowed in libraries," you weren't allowed five minutes ago. But it's a new day. You can now be in libraries and on KU simultaneously.
That could be the way to dip your toe in with Draft2Digital. Stay in Kindle Unlimited and use Draft2Digital just for libraries.
What about my print books?
Thomas: When we talk about wide and exclusive, we’re only talking about the ebook. Your paper book can always be wide. There's no expectation of exclusivity for paper, and even if you print with KDP Print, other bookstores can order your book.
Barnes & Noble is happy to order an Amazon book. They probably won't shelve it, but it's in the machine. Some indie bookstores hate Amazon so much they'll cut off their nose to spite their face, and if you're not in the Ingram system, they won't buy from you. For those stores, going wide through Draft2Digital or IngramSpark helps.
Should you use the same ISBN for KDP Print and Draft2Digital?
Thomas: This is where people get confused about ISBNs and two versions, one printed by Amazon and one by Draft2Digital. For your first book, keep it simple.
Kris: For sure. But you can sell on Amazon through KDP Print only and use Draft2Digital to go everywhere else. That's one way to set it up.
As long as you’ve never picked Amazon's expanded distribution, which sends it into the Ingram network, it's easy. Just don't pick that. Use the same ISBN, but make sure you're using the same content, the same cover, and the same interior.
Amazon may pick up the book through Ingram if their printers can't keep up, but it won't matter, because you're sending us the same copy. Your reader won't know the difference. Use the same ISBN in both places, and everyone's happy.
Does Ingram or Amazon print better quality books?
Thomas: People make a big noise about this, and it really depends on how new the printer was at whatever warehouse got the order. Both services print on location, which is why it's fast and why you don't pay for warehousing.
Kris: Don't worry about it too much. A reader is almost certainly holding one book, not comparing copies. Both are good enough for a reader to be happy with. I promise.
Thomas: Authors can create extra stress for themselves by holding a magnifying glass to their book cover. The reader isn't buying paper. They're buying a story, or an answer to their problem.
What about special editions and hardbacks?
Thomas: Certain readers are looking for a beautiful book with a hardcover and sprayed edges, and Draft2Digital isn't a solution for that. Bookvault does that kind of printing. If you want to sell a $100.00 copy to Kickstarter backers, they do a great job. They don't really compete with Draft2Digital.
Can Draft2Digital do large-print books?
Kris: Readers who want large-print books are an underserved part of the print market. We can help you publish a large-print version.
People don’t fully realize that indies write in every genre you can imagine and some you can't. Traditional publishers don't fill those gaps, and you'll have readers in your niche who want a large-print book. Why not give it to them?
You talked about looking professional with an audiobook, a hardcover, and the ebook. Add large print, and you have four or five formats, just like a traditional publisher. That's another way to differentiate yourself from the AI storm.
Thomas: I talked with an author yesterday who had gotten a large-print copy of her book. She said, "I got this so my 98-year-old father could read my book." It had an audience of one, but other people will want that large-print book.
Thomas: Can I click "make a large-print version" and you do the typesetting and the rest of it?
Kris: That's correct. That's exactly our intention with the product. We want to make it super easy.
Should you buy your own ISBNs?
Thomas: A large-print book needs a different ISBN. Every version of your book needs its own. Audio, ebook, large-print, hardback, paperback. The ISBN needs to say which version it is, and you need to buy them yourself.
In America, that means buying ISBNs from Bowker. Elsewhere, it means the official source in your country, and some countries provide them for free. I think Canada does it through the government. Don't buy through a reseller, and don't use Amazon's free ISBN. Avoid, avoid, avoid. Own your ISBN and control your metadata from the source. That's Thomas' advice. I'm curious to hear yours.
Kris: I agree with just about everything you said. We do provide free ISBNs because they can get pricey.
ISBNs are really an inventory tool on the print side. People don't find ebooks that way, but print books are purchased using ISBNs, so the ISBN identifies where to buy the book. Just because we give you one doesn't mean we own any rights to your book or are pretending to. It confers no rights whatsoever.
I understand the advice to own your own, and they're a lot cheaper in bulk. But I caution brand-new authors about spending much money on a first book. Even one ISBN is very pricey, and it might be worth saving that money while you're getting your career launched.
Keep Your First Book Simple
Thomas: There's a lot to be said for keeping things simple with your first book, because there's so much you don't know that you don't know.
The biggest mistake I see is that authors get into a rush. They pick an arbitrary date for publication. An author might say, "My book's about World War II, and I need it out by the 70th anniversary of this battle." Nobody cares. No reader goes looking for a book because of a battle's anniversary.
It's more important that the book is done right and launched well. It's easy to waste money in a frenzied, panicked state. Some authors get there because they're nervous and excited, and they're finally going to be a real author. If you're willing to be patient, you get a better launch and a better product.
Talk to an author launching their 12th book, and it's like when we had our fifth child. The drama in the hospital was much lower. When the nurses and doctors said things, we knew what those words meant. We knew how to click the baby into the car seat.
For the first baby, everything is terrifying. I remember the first pediatrician visit. We brought three bags, both of us went in, and it was a big, stressful thing because we didn't know, and we were overcompensating.
Experience makes things simpler. Be careful taking advice from the author of 25 books and expecting to do it their way. You can add things later.
It's fine to launch your first book on Amazon with KDP and be in KU. You're not promising to stay there. With your second book, you can pull out, or a year later you can go wide. Keep things simple at first and add tools like Draft2Digital later.
Or you can say, "I don't trust Amazon, and I want to go wide from the beginning. I don't care that it's less money." You can do that too. I see authors take both paths.
There are things that boost your sales by 0.5%. If you sell two copies a month, that rounds to zero. If you sell 200,000 copies a month, it's hundreds of additional sales. The 0.5% doesn't always matter.
Kris: That's sound advice. Brand new authors overthink it a lot. Go simple. It's so easy to get caught in analysis paralysis.
It's like people who read a lot of self-help books but never stop to think, "Maybe I should do the things I already learned." It's the same for indie authors. It's easy to take in too much.
Thomas: A pastor once told me I was trained far beyond my obedience, and he wasn't wrong. It's much better to do the few things you know how to do than to wait. You can't steer a parked car.
What if my first book was a flop?
One wonderful thing about being indie is that your first book can fail commercially and your career can still succeed. That's typically not true in the traditional world.
I used to be a literary agent. Nobody cares about anything in the proposal if the numbers for the last book were bad, and they only care about the last two or three. That initial failure dooms the whole career, and it sometimes takes years to realize the book you published ruined your traditional career.
In indie, if your first book failed, no reader knows. If they had bought it, it wouldn't have failed. Your failure was blissfully ignorant.
Nobody knows what grade you got in high school algebra. You didn't get along with that teacher, you got bad grades, and at the time you thought it would ruin your life. Nobody knows, and nobody cares. That's indie world. You can recover, pivot, and try new things until you find what works.
Kris: Writing is a skill, publishing is a skill, and every skill needs practice. Getting your first book out is a huge feat. On the second book, you'll get better. You'll tell better stories, and you'll launch it better. Don't get stuck not doing something.
Why did Draft2Digital start charging a small fee?
Thomas: Draft2Digital is not a free service, though the costs aren't high. You offered it for free for a long time, which I think was always a mistake. When you offer something free, you get flooded with non-humans and anti-humans, and sometimes the tiniest paywall keeps the bots away.
Our community at authormedia.social is a social network for authors, and we started having a bot problem. I added a one-time fee of $9.00, and it completely solved the bot problem. It's now a humans-only zone, like the cantina on Tatooine that doesn't let droids in.
Kris: Our model from the beginning was to be as accessible as possible, so we only ever made money when a book sold. Our mantra was that we only make money when the author makes money. The AI events of the last few years forced us to rethink that.
We've always dealt with scammers. But the new tool sets made it much easier for bad actors to act poorly. They've been ruining the indie author landscape because retailers are getting all this terrible content through the indie channels. It was coming into KDP. It was coming into Draft2Digital, even though we did a good job stopping a lot of it. It took enormous manpower. The small fee changed it overnight. It was shocking.
Thomas: If you really wrote your book, even with AI help, you spent dozens or hundreds of hours on it. Paying $20.00 or $40.00 to get it into the world is no big deal.
But if you're spinning up a dozen pen names a day and yeeting 100 books over the wall, $40.00 per book breaks your business model. That model assumes 99 of 100 books get zero sales and the one that gets algorithm traction covers the token cost of the rest.
Charging a fee is the best way to filter the good uses of AI from the bad. Someone putting real effort in doesn't mind a fee. Someone prompting AI to "Write a book about how to make money, make it 50,000 words," is very sensitive to a tiny fee. Charging a little fee often improves people's behavior.
Kris: We put it off for a long time because it went against our ethos and our mission. We put it off too long, admittedly. But it hurt so much. We kept saying, "I don't ever want to charge fees." The fees really are low, and they're meant to be, because this is about filtering out scammers.
We were shutting down hundreds of accounts per day, sometimes thousands. We were rejecting 70% to 80% of all titles submitted. It was getting phenomenally out of hand.
Thomas: If your screening is 99% accurate and you're handling thousands of books a day, dozens of real humans are getting falsely rejected. That's drama and pain you don't want.
Nobody can screen for AI. Everyone says Pangram can, but it can’t do it reliably. I build AI tools, and I'm telling you AI won't stop this, but money can, because the AI agents don't have wallets. Even the ones with wallets have humans who won't let them spend.
Moving toward a more commercial economy, or an in-person gift economy, works because AIs don't exist in real life. I wish we could go back to the free websites of the '90s, but we can't. The question is how we navigate it, and we navigate with small fees here and there.
That's good, because I'm a big believer in paying for what you use. It's part of why I'm against social media, especially the Meta platforms, and why I like X better. Once X let you pay for X and YouTube let you pay for YouTube, both became much better platforms. I'm happy to pay $15.00 a month to skip ads on YouTube.
Be a customer rather than the product being sold, and your whole experience online will be better. Don't freebie seek. Pay for things, support the people who give you stuff, and maybe support the podcasters who give you free episodes.
Final Advice for Authors Waffling Between Wide and Exclusive
Thomas: Draft2Digital has been around for 14 years. They’re part of the infrastructure now.
Do you have any final tips for somebody still waffling between wide and narrow?
Kris: Don't think too hard about it. Just make a choice and get out there. Finish your book. That's the first step. Finish your book, choose a path, and then you can change it. Try a few different things and see what works for you.
Connect with Draft2Digital
- Draft2Digital.com
- Self Publishing Insiders (D2D's live show)
Featured Patron
Brandon M. Wilborn, author of The Treasure of Capric
The Treasure of Capric is a fantasy adventure where witches wield dark magic, monsters stalk the wilds, and young monks wonder if miracles still exist. Curian's troupe must battle deadly enemies, unravel ancient mysteries, and confront a bandit king to reclaim their sacred treasure.
To survive, they must discover the truth about their land and become the heroes their legends promised.
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