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Originally Posted by calvin-c
I don't own a Kindle and probably never will so I don't know much about the KDP Select program. Assuming it does give Amazon exclusive rights to sell a book (which seems to be what you mean although the way it's worded is ambiguous) then why would an author sign such a contract? Higher royalties? Maybe Amazon won't carry the book if the author doesn't sign an exclusive contract? If the latter then I'm surprised the government isn't already investigating Amazon, at the least. If the former then I'm not too concerned because it's the author's choice. A non-exclusive contract will always generate more sales. Not always more royalties, but definitely more sales.
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KDP Select requires 90 days of exclusivity in return for a variety of promotional services, the most attractive of which has been inclusion in the Prime lending library. Amazon does not demand exclusivity to carry a book in the kindle ebookstore. But Select titles usually get a bit of extra promotion to customers Amazon's system identifies as potential customers.
Publishers choosing to go with KDP Select seem to do it for one of two reasons: either as a timed-exclusive launch mechanism to rack up exposure (and hopefully sales) and reviews in the Amazon ecosystem before going multi-platform, or because their multi-platform sales skew so heavily to Amazon that forgoing the benefits of Select doesn't make business sense. A fair amount of the second group start out in the first: they launch under Select and then go multi-platform but find the results less than satisfactory on the competitors. Some cases I've seen, it is the alternate retailer's services that fall short; either on the visibility side or on the backend side. But the most common reason I've heard for publishers abandoning multi-platform is that for *them* multi-platform does not bring more net sales.
As I said above, Amazon's domination is not due solely to their excellence but also their competitors' deficiencies.