KU is toxic and is best avoided. As much disdain as I have for Amazon, it does however offer the best quality platform and accounts for the majority of my sales. I do get some sales through D2D but you have to be a little careful with them - getting the format to work out can be tricky. I've had issues with both the cover formats as well as paragraph separation and indentation. With respect to Smashwords, I think they are a more reliable platform that D2D with respect to formatting the final product despite the wonky manual table of contents you have to create, yet I hardly sell anything at all through them.
Multi-platform vs Amazon Loyalist?
- Thread starter Fullon_v4.0
- Start date
I have a bit of a tricky situation with my book. So far, I’m only on Amazon with my print and ebook. I’ve toyed with the idea of going with KDP Select, it sounds great when Amazon pitches it to you, but with all of the warnings on this forum and elsewhere, I decided to expand my distribution options. So, I signed up with Smashwords. Things were going well until I attempted to upload my file. It was way too large. The fact that it’s a graphics-heavy picture book seems to be limiting my options. Long story short, if Amazon is my only option, should I go with that program of theirs? It sounds a bit sketchy to me.
You may have other problems with a graphics heavy picture book, in terms of electronic delivery costs and reader viewing issues. I would personally try to downgrade the images. Also there is a third option - Draft 2 Digital. You might give them a shot. They mostly port to the same resellers are Smashwords, and I've had far greater luck selling books through them than through Smashwords.
Thanks for the tip! I will check them out. I don’t know if I can compromise on the image quality just yet, but we’ll see. At least it seems to be working so far with Amazon.
I'm not sure why that would be the case, but I've heard other authors say that. Then again, I've heard quite a few say the opposite.
In theory, SW and D2D are simply distributors (Smashwords has its own direct store, but that's largely irrelevant here). They don't do a thing to promote the books on the retail sites to which they distribute, so there shouldn't be any difference in sales using one vs. the other.
The only difference I've noticed (I use both of them for different pen names) is that Smashwords doesn't allow you to enter a subtitle in the metadata, while D2D does. Maybe that's enough to affect sales?
KDP has specialized tools for picture books (Kindle Kids' Book Creator and Kindle Comic Creator) that aren't available through either D2D or SW. I've never used them, but it may be worth checking them out.
Thanks! I might have to check those tools out for the next one. I went through quite a process figuring out how to put this book together already. Like a dunder brain, I started using Word to lay out this book in which every page has a full image. I had to split the thing into multiple files to be able to work without my computer freezing up. Near the end I discovered the limited resolution of images exported from Word and I had to scrap it. I discovered InDesign and it worked like a charm! Now my ebook files are monsters. I discovered today that my ePub file is way beyond the maximum upload for Barnes & Noble, so I suppose I really am stuck with Amazon.
Logically that would seem to be the case, it's just not what I've experienced. It might be due to the fact that I ported everything to D2D first.
Has anyone used ebookpartnership? It's a distributor, but doesn't take royalties; they charge a flat fee. Which doesn't seem sustainable to me, unless they're counting on most authors not making back their initial payment. To be fair, that's probably true for the vast majority - it is for me right now!
Personally, I'm skeptical of any company that takes a flat fee. If it's a low fee, I might be okay with it, but otherwise I have no guarantees that I'll even make back the fee. With royalties at least some of the sale price is deducted only when you actually have a sale.