Amazon recently announced its KDP Select program, which invites publishers and authors to make 
their Kindle books available via Amazon’s lending program. Amazon users who participate in the book lending program (via Amazon’s Prime service, an annual subscription program), will have an “exclusive” list of titles to choose from–all at no additional cost to the buyer.
Amazon is also promoting its $700,000 fund, designated for authors and publishers who participate in the program. Publishers/authors who participate will be paid a percentage from the fund, based on the number of times their book is borrowed and the number of titles in the program.
Of course you can read all of this for yourself on Amazon here.
Here is why I will NOT participate in KDP Select:
1. The biggest deal-killer 0f all: Amazon requires exclusive rights to your ebook. That means that you can’t distribute it to Nook, iBookstore, Smashwords, Bookbaby, or even on your own website. Ridiculous! There is not nearly enough incentive here to limit my distribution. Note that you can still make your ebook available on Kindle without participating in KDP Select!
2. The fund of $700k isn’t that much money, especially when you consider what Amazon earns on the back end. They charge $80 per year for prime membership, which I subscribe to because it includes free shipping on most Amazon products. I don’t know how many Prime members Amazon has, but let’s just assume at least 500k people are members. That adds up to $40million dollars in revenue for Amazon. And they’re going to allot just $700k to compensate authors and publishers?? No thanks.
3. The publisher/author compensation is unclear and rather elusive. You can “earn your share of royalties” based on total participation and number of copies borrowed–but nobody knows how many will participate or how many will borrow or how much you’ll really earn. It feels a bit like rolling the dice at a casino.
4. Amazon is once again playing hardball with publishers and authors. They are requiring exclusive rights, making the numbers look fuzzy at best, and causing a big stir in the industry over this program. Amazon doesn’t play nicely in the sandbox. The company has demanded higher-than-industry-standard discounts on books (55% when most retailers expect 40%), started their own custom publishing division, and recently began offering traditional-style publishing contracts to top authors. They are essentially putting some publishers out of business and threatening many others.
As a consumer, I am a fan of Amazon. I shop there on a regular basis. But as a publisher and author, I have grown increasingly frustrated with some of their demands. Amazon needs to level the playing field and make allies instead of enemies. But it appears that Amazon is trying to take over more than just the sale of books–it wants distribution and production too.
If anyone participates in the KDP Select program (and I don’t know anyone who is), please report back about your experience! I will not be taking this one for a test drive.
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Earlier today, I ran into a colorful discussion on Apple’s expectations for iBook authors – very demanding. Here’s the article that started that discussion: http://mashable.com/2012/01/22/apple-ibooks-author-2/
Me neither, mostly because I don’t see enough upside to even bother ticking one checkbox.
However, it seems the period of exclusivity is only 90 days, not all eternity. This page
https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?ie=UTF8&topicId=APILE934L348N#Select
says in part “Through KDP Select, for an initial period of 90 days your Digital Book is exclusive to Kindle”
I could be wildly misinterpreting it, and in the end, it won’t matter to me ’cause I ain’t going.
Even if exclusivity is just for 90 days, it still cuts us all off at the knees and prevents me from selling my own ebooks on my own site!! Thanks for sharing, Joel.
I am not a fan of Amazon’s attempt to control eBook sales AND lending. However, let’s get the facts straight here:
1) Exclusivity, as others have noted, is only for the 90-day period you commit to loaning your book through KDP Select. If most of your sales come through Amazon anyway, then it makes sense to give this a try and be among the first authors in history to be paid for LENDING your books as well as selling them.
2) Prime membership is $79/year, not $80. The resulting $39.5 million received by Amazon (for your suggested 500K members) is an annual receipt, while the $700k is a monthly payout. Multiply that by 12 and the payout on a $39.5 million annual receipt is $8,400,000 annually–a hefty piece of the receipts, given that Amazon is providing two-day shipping and lots of streaming video in Prime membership as well. (I expect there are actually a lot more than 500k Prime members. According to Amazon, there were 295,000 checkouts in December, and I doubt if as many as three-fifths of Prime members were aware enough of the new feature, or interested enough in it, to take advantage of it in its first month.)
3) “The publisher/author compensation is unclear and rather elusive.” Not really. Authors earned precisely and clearly $1.70 for every checkout of their book(s) in December (again, according to Amazon). You can’t lose. Which, in any casino, you certainly can.
4) Capitalists are not supposed to “play nice in the sandbox.” Capitalists do what they do, and society makes rules to regulate that as society sees fit. (Our society doesn’t see fit to make many such rules. But that’s not Amazon’s fault.)
I, too, am a long-time fan of Amazon. However, the biggest threat I see from them is not to authors (Amazon is doing wonders for tens of thousands of KDP Select participants, paying them for LOANS, for heaven’s sake), but to public libraries, which are currently failing by far to adequately serve the eBook-reading public.
The End of Libraries
http://alltogethernow.org/showtag.php?currid=85
Dale, We’re all entitled to our opinions and I appreciate you sharing yours. I stand by my decision to not participate. I sell a lot of ebooks through my own site alone and it doesn’t make sense to me to give exclusivity to anyone, even if for just 90 days. I also earn more than $1.70 per title when selling on my own so the economics don’t add up for me. Best of luck to you.
The biggest allure of the KDP select program is to be able to make your book free on Amazon. This, so far, has not worked for me but I suspect it was for reasons unrelated to the program, which I am working on correcting. I know a handful of authors that had not sold a lot on Amazon and after making their work free became known and begun to sell. It is also my understanding that this program is responsible to propelling many unknown or not very well known self-published authors into the higher brackets, so in that sense it has been a success. The majority of these authors were not selling much elsewhere anyway, so the restrictions were not an issue. I also want to note that even though you can’t post chapters of your book on your web-site you can send out free copies to reviewers.
Thanks for sharing, Rolando. I haven’t heard about people propelling to success simply by giving their books away, so I’d like to hear more about that. I have seen evidence that lower ebook prices help move books, but regardless of price, authors still need to do the marketing work to help their audience find their books in any form–print or ebook!
Stephanie – like you when I first heard of the KDP Select program, I made the decision to not participate. Lately, however, I’ve done a lot of research and found that many authors who were only selling a handful of books a month raised their Amazon ranking and sales by participating in the program and using their 5 free days. If you want to find out who this is happening to, visit my blog where I have links to several blog posts by other authors who describe their KDP Select experience. Quite honestly, after investigating the program and reading pros and cons by other authors, I feel it is worth it to try the program. I sell most of my books on Amazon anyway, so being exclusive there for 90 days wouldn’t really hurt my sales – all it can do is either stay the same or get better. For me, it’s worth the try.
Hi Deanna, I’d love to hear how it works out for you! I’ve also heard some good reports, primarily from fiction authors. I’d like to hear good results from some nonfiction authors too. Never say never.
Stephanie,
I am disappointed that my comment did not “make the cut.” Was it because it corrected a number of misimpressions from your piece? This is a very emotional issue, and people need to start from a position of full understanding before making up their minds about something so important to their livelihood.
Your comment did “make the cut,” I just hadn’t gotten around to moderating comments yet. I do not censor comments on this site and believe we’re all entitled to our opinions. Clearly this is an emotional issue for you so you have every right to express that.
I have a confession to make. I know my own ebooks are 99 cent (and now FREE) garbage and trash, so I came here a while back and made comments that made me sound like an @ss. I’m sorry, Stephenie.
I’ve always known I couldn’t write. The only way folks would buy my books is if they were FREE! My work is just so bad, I don’t know what else to do but give it away for free and pray people download and then read it. Even Stephenie Meyer can write better than I can. To ease my chagrin, I opened book 1 of her vampire series and saw how much stronger her writing was when compared to my tired, outdated, 99 cent (and now FREE) prose. I cracked open Dan Brown’s material, and then Sookie’s from Jersey Shore. The work they created had more merit than the free dookie I compiled to make my ebook.
But here’s the rub : Prime customers will get my free ebook, yes, but they’ll pay once they download it, open it, and get a whiff of that smoking hot sh1t that makes up my ebook! *Chuckes darkly*
There is another advantage of KDP select and that is that a free book is more likely to be read and so more likely to get some reviews. For an unknown author, this could be the start they need.
I have written a children’s book. All royalties will go to charity. As it is illustrated I was worried about Kindle, as many readers are monochrome.
I intend to use the KDP select. New Kindle fire buyers get a free trial period, they have colour screens. It gets the book ‘out there’.
I am not a known Author, the charity is ethical and researchable.
As it is a Children’s illustrated book, I am hoping this will encourage people to buy the paper book.
The title when it comes out is ‘Innocence lost in the ice cream forest’.
Stephanie, the Amazon KDP program is a no-brainer for me.
I want people to read my books, and I want my Amazon ranking to increase, oh and I want to make more money as an author. KDP does all three things for me.
I sold a tiny handful of my books on Apple and Smashwords so it was easy for me to remove them from there and go to KDP.
In my first day of the KDP promotion there were 1,753 downloads of my book “Creating the Perfect Lifestyle” which took my book to the 150th most popular book on all of Amazon. After the promotion it sold better than before (at $8.97), and is still selling multiple copies a day. Then I get to add $1.70 per borrow – and I am making hundreds of dollars a month MORE than I made before going on KDP.
I am launching my book “How to be an Amazon #1 Bestseller – and Make Money” in late February where I will be outlining all of the results of my last two years of research on launching an ebook.
Oli Hille
Amazon #1 Bestselling Author
@Ollie Hillie
You need to calm down, son, and stop sounding so full of yourself. You’re not exactly John Locke, are ya ? So you sold a few copies on Amazon & now you’re going on a world tour or something? If you haven’t sold millions, sit down & sit back.
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