Self Publishing? What’s Your Distribution Plan?
It’s time once again for my monthly guest post over at Janice Hardy’s Fiction University. That’s a good thing for me because it makes my post today easier…which I need because I’m brain dead. *smile*
Recently, I had to take hours and hours out of my schedule to fight with email. My email inbox is always a disaster because I receive between 100-150 writing-world emails on a normal day, but I valiantly try to stay on top of the important stuff. (I don’t always succeed, however.)
On top of that deluge, as I mentioned on Facebook yesterday, I also discovered that my email program had decided to move almost every message from my inbox into a different folder. (That doesn’t help with finding emails.) And then the program duplicated every message. (That doesn’t help either.)
The final count in one folder was over 23,000 emails. Grr. To clean that up, I had to manually find and delete duplicates and then move the messages back where they belonged. I got it “down” to 4000 emails. Yay! *sigh*
So if you’re waiting for an email from me, let me know. I might have gotten a bit frustrated and punched that delete button one too many times. *grin*
Anyway, let’s talk self-publishing. Indie publishing isn’t made up of just one decision to put us on one path. The choice to self-publish is just the first of dozens, maybe hundreds, of decisions we’re going to have to make as part of our indie career.
My series about Indie Publishing Paths at Fiction University is working to highlight some of those choices and give us a few guidelines for figuring out how to make the best decisions for us. We don’t want to follow a mentor or advice that isn’t a good match for what we want.
To that end, last month my kickoff of the series started with the topic of knowing our goals. Depending on our goals, we might want to make different choices about pricing, release schedules…or distribution.
This month we’re going to start with a closer look at two distribution options and discuss when one might make more sense for us than another—or when a combination might work even better. (Next month we’ll look at two other options.) There’s no right or wrong answers—only what works best for us.
For example, there are many opinions out there about whether we should go exclusive with Amazon or distribute “wide” (with multiple vendors). And then if we aren’t exclusive with the Kindle Select program at Amazon, there’s no end to the opinions about where else we should sell our books and how we should list them at the retailers.
Authors have succeeded with any and all of the choices. So again, this isn’t a question of one option being “right” and the others being “wrong.”
However, depending on our goals, we might find one (or more than one) option a better fit for us. Once we know which way we want to go, we’ll know which tips to listen to for best practices and the like.
I hope you’ll join me at Fiction University for this month’s post!
Join Jami in her upcoming workshop:
Get ready for NaNo by learning how to do just enough story development to write faster with “Lost Your Pants? The Impatient Writers Guide to Plotting a Story.”
Have you seen authors succeed with different distribution paths (some with Kindle Select and some not, etc.)? If you’re self-publishing (or planning to) have you struggled with knowing where and how to distribute your stories? What pros or cons to any distribution option have you experienced or heard of?
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I’ve seen folks succeed with all sorts of methods.
In my own situation, it’s been less of a struggle due to the distribution methods themselves and more because I know I’ll sabotage myself. I’m getting better on that, but it’s still a factor I have to consider when determining where I’ll put something.
But the even bigger factor that I have to consider is my health—I may want to release a story on all vendors simultaneously, but if I only have the health/energy to put it on 3, I might just put it in Select for 90 days to make things easier on myself. I have sites and distributors where I want to have all my work posted, but I’ve only managed to get a few items up so far. I’m gradually making progress on that front, but it’s mentally and physically draining, so it’s taking far longer than I’d prefer.
Even so, I’m still getting a lot more done than some others I know, so it’s a matter of keeping things in perspective. I’m not where I want to be, but I’m headed that way.
That’s really what matters, methinks.
Hi Carradee,
Great point! No choice as far as distribution is permanent. Yes, we need to decide for our launch, but we can always change our mind later. As you pointed out, even going exclusive with Amazon requires only a 90-day commitment.
That’s one great thing about the freedom of indie publishing: If something doesn’t work, we can easily change directions. Our launch can feel like the end-all-be-all, but our career-planning should be longer-term than that.
For example, I start my listings on Kobo with a distributor (Draft2Digital) because of the pre-order convenience. However, after the book goes live, I “unpublish” it through the distributor and publish it through Kobo directly because they offer promotional opportunities to their direct-authors.
So we could always start with a distributor for time, energy, or convenience’s sake, and then switch over to direct when sales or other factors made the effort worth it for elimination of the distributor’s fee.
This series is obviously focusing on ebooks, as that’s the biggest chunk of self-publishing for most authors, but I haven’t managed to get around to everything I intend to do for print-on-demand for my books yet either.
As you said, we don’t want to beat ourselves up about not being where we want to be yet. It’s more important to keep things in perspective and make sure we’re headed in the right direction down the road. 🙂 Thanks for sharing those great insights!
…Did Kobo change? Last I knew, you could set up pre-orders there.
Hi Carradee,
Yes! You’re right. I should have clarified that I’ve chosen some of my pre-order strategy because some retailers will penalize you for changing a pre-order price mid-pre-order period. For example, if we wanted to start with a $0.99 pre-order price and then go up to $2.99 pre-order price, some retailers will give everyone the $0.99 and some will cancel all pre-orders from the earlier price. Other times, some retailers aren’t very trustworthy with releasing a pre-order on time, or maybe they send out the wrong file, etc.
We need to investigate the specifics of each retailer before getting fancy with our strategy. 😉 Anyway, I can’t remember the reason for using D2D with Kobo for pre-orders because I didn’t take notes on my logic–LOL!–but there was something. 😉 Thanks for that question so I could touch on some of the issues we should watch out for!
Jami, I’m glad you’ve started a discussion on this topic! My current plan is to distribute my ebook version through Kindle Direct, since as it’s been pointed out, it’s easy and you only have to commit for 90 days. I don’t know much about any other options at the moment, so I’m really interested to see what you and others have to say.
Another path I’m looking into is publishing audio books through ACX. I’ve read that readers can purchase both, and simultaneously read and listen to the book on their Kindle. Several people I’ve told about my book have asked if it’ll be available on audio because that’s their preference or due to their circumstances like poor eyesight, they’re truck drivers and don’t have time to read, etc. And since traditionally audio books have been more expensive to produce, there aren’t enough titles to meet the demands of the market. ACX has several options for authors, like CreateSpace and Kindle. So in theory, Indie publishers have a better chance to compete with the best sellers in audio books now.
It’s like you said, the job isn’t over once you publish the book! 🙂
Hi Jennifer, I think that’s smart–get your book out there in a way that’s easy, and then you can add more distribution outlets later as you figure out your plan for the next 90 days. 🙂 There are many other distribution outlets, and each one could have a whole post with their pros and cons, so I don’t know if I’ll be getting into the nitty-gritty in the posts of this series. But I’m happy to answer any questions you have here in the comments. Currently, I have experience with Kindle, Draft2Digital (my distributor for Barnes & Noble and Apple), Kobo, GooglePlay, Smashwords (my distributor for miscellaneous outlets that I can’t even remember–LOL!), and All Romance eBooks. Going along with the two options touched on in this post, I’ve decided against direct website sales–for the time being–because of paperwork/taxes hassles and because I’m not keen to cannibalize my rankings. I decided to use D2D as a distributor for Apple and B&N because Apple is a pain if you don’t own a Mac and B&N has several issues that can cause difficulties when going direct (pricing to free, pre-orders, VAT pricing, etc.). I currently don’t have enough sales from either of those sources to care about the distributor fee. (My time for NOT having to deal with them is worth more than what D2D has charged.) As you can see, while some of those reasons are objective (the Apple and Mac requirement, for example) many of them are subjective, which is… — Read More »
Thanks, Jami! 🙂
I ran into that e-mail problem back when I used Mail on my Mac — the exact same thing happened. I thought I’d done something wrong, but maybe it was just another case of technology showing us who’s in charge.
Distribution, publicity, promotion … the bane of my life. I’ve been doing this long enough that I remember the old days: When, if you got published at all, someone else did a lot of that work. But on the other hand, a lot more people get published now.
Hi Mark,
Ugh. I’m sorry you had that trouble too. I think in my case it was a filter run amok. 🙁
LOL! Yep, when I first started researching “how to get published,” today’s options didn’t exist either. It’s been interesting to watch it change. 🙂 Thanks for the comment!
I have a good friend who has done very well on Amazon, and now I’m on my way to self-publishing on Amazon as well. I’m looking forward to reading your info on Fiction University. It’s very daunting all of this…It’s hard to know if I’m following the right road.
Have a great weekend!!!
Tamara
Hi Tamara,
It is daunting! But as Carradee pointed out, most decisions we make aren’t the end of the story. We can always change our mind later. So if you discover the road you’re on isn’t working, take a detour. 😉 Thanks for stopping by!
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Distribution can get tricky when you’re self-publishing. There are great services that can handle the process for you. But if you have the ambition and the reach, whether it be through a blog, social media, email list, etc., then you can handle the heavy lifting yourself!
Hi Kristen,
Exactly! We have many options, so we just have to find the right fit for us. 🙂 Thanks for the comment!