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Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks
Their initial "incentive" to go exclusive was the ability to offer a book free and a few higher payouts in some foreign markets. Free was not much of an incentive for me. I do have enough in my backlist that one free book MAY lead to other sales, but it did not appeal to me.
They also offered additional visibility (more shows) for going exclusive. THAT was some incentive. Back in those days, my sales there were VERY much on Amazon with much smaller sales on other retailers. When I didn't go exclusive, my visibility dropped, and therefor so did my sales. At that point, it was probably a mistake from a sales point of view. Philosophically, it was the right move for me. I want to control my destiny, not have to go free, not have to end up on only one retailer who, once that retailer has most of the sales, can cut my commission. Similar to what is happening now, a lot of authors feel they MUST be exclusive and must participate--but they are still seeing income drops and there is little they can do about it. What happens if Amazon decides they can start paying 35 percent across the board instead of 70 percent?
I did go from making my living writing to back to work at another job when sales dropped over a two to three year period. Right now, I sell more on Kobobooks than Amazon--that happened slowly over this past year partly because Amazon sales continued to drop for me and partly because sales continued to rise for me on Kobo. I've been building a presence on Kobo for the last two years and it began paying off this year--whereas I used to sell hundreds of books per month on Amazon, I now hit the "hundred(s)" number on kobo most months.
It's a balancing act. From a strictly income POV, I should have gone exclusive with a book or two back when it was first offered because of the visibility. Today? Authors are really struggling because Amazon simply isn't offering visibility or much other incentives. It's up to the author to hope/try to build their own audience (similar to trad published authors).
I have a very decent audience that I've built over the years. I love my readers and I want to make sure they can buy my books multiple places. I'd also like to make more. That didn't work out. Will it in the future? Who the heck knows?
I think it likely that author share of income is going to drop on some venues. Amazon doesn't need indies as much as early days--we did a HUGE amount of advertising of the kindle for them, essentially for free. We did word of mouth, we bought huge amounts of products, we did giveaways. But Amazon has saturated the market for the most part and knows that. They are moving on to different models.
I try to remain aware of typical business practices. When margins get tight, companies cut payouts. KU is one sign of that. KU is still being used to draw readers into a "keep paying" model. How many people forget they have an auto pay going out every month? How many get busy and let it go for a couple of months without reading? That's all money for Amazon. Subscription models are highly lucrative to a lot of business models. They aren't particularly helpful to authors UNLESS the books are read and/or bought.
So those are just some of my thoughts on the matter. Running a business is difficult--it doesn't matter a lot whether I make and sell soap or write books and try to sell them. There's a lot of things that play into creating a brand and a loyal audience. And the biggest builder of an audience is writing good books, books that are good enough readers talk about them. But that's also the most difficult path because it takes a looooong time and a lot of effort to write a book!!!
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To a great extent hasn't that been Amazon's model since the beginning? They push a lot of the work of an ebook store (maintaining the catalog and publicity) back onto the publishers and authors. One of the reasons that the search function is so bad on Amazon is that many authors try to game the system. Of course, to a great extent, the publicity and finding an audience is what a good publisher brings to the table.