Should You Publish Your Books Outside Of Amazon KDP? - Kindle Publishing 2019

About this video

The creator shares his experience publishing outside Amazon and recommends doing it selectively. For ebooks he recommends Draft2Digital and PublishDrive, which distribute to stores such as iTunes, Google Play and Barnes & Noble, but not Smashwords, whose separate formatting requirements he says cost more time than the few sales were worth. He says he uploaded about 30 books close to a year earlier, uploaded no new ones since, and still averaged about $500 a month: he shows $452 from Draft2Digital the previous month and $424 so far that month, plus $37 in the past 30 days from PublishDrive, which he says usually brings $50 to $100. Uploading involves the docx file and JPG cover, deselecting Amazon on Draft2Digital and deselecting overlapping stores on PublishDrive. The key warning is KDP Select exclusivity: an ebook in Select cannot be published elsewhere, and in his experience with his 30 books, leaving Select made ranking and sales plummet, so he advises only moving a book that makes less than $15 a month from ebook and paperback combined. For print, he strongly recommends IngramSpark alongside KDP Print because there is no such exclusivity, provided you buy your own ISBN cheaply in bulk rather than using Amazon’s free ISBN or paying $125 for one. He claims about 45 books on IngramSpark made close to $1,000 in his first month, and about $1,500 combined outside Amazon in the previous month.

Key takeaways

• For wide ebooks, he recommends Draft2Digital and PublishDrive and advises against Smashwords because its unique formatting makes it not worth the time
• Never publish an ebook elsewhere while it is in KDP Select; in his experience leaving Select caused ranking and sales to drop sharply
• Only take a book wide, he advises, if it earns less than $15 a month on Amazon from ebook and paperback combined
• Print has no Select exclusivity: you can use KDP Print and IngramSpark at the same time, but you need your own ISBN, bought cheaply in bulk
• He claims about 30 wide ebooks averaged about $500 a month with no new uploads, and about 45 IngramSpark books made close to $1,000 in the first month

Episode details: published August 13, 2019 · 13:37 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Sean Dollwet’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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