Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
The thing is, Kindle moves 4-5 times as many ebooks as Nook or Apple, 8-10 times as many as Kobo.
There have also been reports that Nook rigs their rankings against indies in certain genres, listing them about 100 slots lower than their sales would merit. They may or not still be doing it but the rumors are out there. There are also abundant reports of ebookstore failings for both Nook and Kobo that hinder discoverability.
While most authors would prefer to be multi-platform on principle, many find that their sales skew so strongly towards Kindle that they might as well go Select and make.
Although every author is different, indications are that is quite possible to prosper as an indie publisher on Kindle alone (and not uncommon) but impossible to do it without kindle.
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I think it was more possible to prosper on Kindle alone in the past. I don't think Amazon is boosting visibility for indies as much as they did in the past.
And while your stats are probably true for many writers, they are not true for all. I sell extremely well on Kobo. Is that because I've been working multi-platform longer? Is it because I hang out on forums where there are kobo readers? I've always sold as well at Kobo as B&N -- they were secondary markets compared to Amazon until about a year ago. B&N sales are inconsistent. Some months are great and I think the books are finally taking off--followed by a month of 3 sales overall and I wonder if the books are even listed...
Also someone was asking early in the thread about listing the books on B&N versus Amazon. B&N doesn't pay quite as well in commissions, but the load process is about the same. Kobo pays the same as Amazon, has a very easy load process (it does require an epub check) and allows pre-orders. Not even Amazon lets indies list for pre-order yet. That's in the works, but not working yet.
I find the customer support at all three retailers to be quite good.