Hi everyone! Been a bit since I last posted in here. If I were better at this whole “advertising my writing thing,” I’d want to use my first post in over a year and a half to talk about the new books I’m writing & the stories that have come out. But then, if I were better at it I probably would not have waited a year and a half to do another blog post.
Instead, I kind of want to take a bit of time to talk where I’ve been publishing, how I got to this point, and some of where my thoughts are currently leaning. No announcements here as of yet, so feel free to skip this one if you’re looking for that sort of thing.
But though I try not to get too political, it seems important IMO to talk about KDP right now given the recent boycotts against Amazon & their recent ethics. For the record, I’m all for the boycotts, particularly given a lot of the recent current events. As a former journalism major, seeing how Bezos is forcing the Washington Post to conform the opinion pages in a specific direction absolutely hurts.
However, as an exclusively KDP author this absolutely leads me into a bit of a conundrum. When I first got into self-publishing, I opted to go with KDP for a few reasons. Cost was a big one, especially with those free ISBNs. Plus the toolset was really nice & easy to use.
I’ve never exactly been a fan of Amazon’s business model, but given my experiences working behind the scenes at another fairly large publishing company (and all of the chaos around them), KDP seemed to be much easier to get a book published effectively with minimal bugs.
Yet, their setup is absolutely laced with golden handcuffs…or so it seems. With Amazon owning the free ISBNs, they in many ways get to control how your book comes out. You have to stick with their specific setup or lose your book’s ISBNs…which as far as I can tell means losing your Amazon ratings, having to fight with Goodreads to get those ratings back, and potentially losing links to your books from review blogs & the like. Plus, what about all of the people who have already bought your book on Kindle? Won’t they lose out?
This becomes especially worrisome when you consider how much that puts you at the whims of whatever Amazon decides at the moment. If there’s a price increase to the cost of book creation, you’re generally stuck with it if you’re solely on Amazon. But the more worrisome thought to me is on content guidelines. Staying on Amazon means you’re also subject to whatever Bezos decides is politically expedient…and given his hands-on approach with the Washington Post’s editorial section, I wouldn’t put it past him to push for a similar change in KDP.
Which as the author of a novella about a trans woman (Cora Christensen) means leaving my books in Amazon’s hands feels like a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. One I would do well to defuse as soon as I can.
The more I’ve been researching how to do so, the more I’m finding the answer to going wide from being a solely KDP author is not exactly as dire as it appears. Kindle Create allows you to publish your work as an epub just as easily as a .kdp file, so you can still use much of the same preparation software. Most places still use the same cover sizes, so your PB/HC covers will likely still work with minimal adjustments.
Ebooks may sound exclusive on Amazon’s site, but that’s only if you sign up for KDP Select. If not, they don’t really have anything to tie you to their site specifically. Ebooks don’t generally require an ISBN, so you don’t necessarily have to clear that listing to go wide…so the readers who previously purchased your work don’t have to lose it. You just add it in another spot like Ingram or Draft2Digital & publish the stories to everywhere but Amazon.
That being said, I’m still trying to figure out the Goodreads & blog links issues, neither of which I have a good answer for yet. But as I search, I suspect there will be a good Goodreads plan somewhere.
All this is to say I don’t have any new announcements just yet. But given everything going on, I think the time has come to start looking at going wide & perhaps re-releasing some of my current works on new platforms. I’ll keep you posted if & when something comes of this.
Otherwise, thanks for reading all this as well as keeping up with my works! I’ll try to have more fun story-related stuff up here soon, hopefully without a 1 1/2 year gap before the next post!