Recently there have been talks about how the current boycott on Amazon (well, that and the decision of people to cut expenses due to the cost of living) has severely and negatively impacted the livelihood of indie authors.

No, I’ve never been in KU (going to just get that out of the way upfront).

But I have been wide since day one, sell books every month as a wide author, and have worked in three publishing houses and studied publishing and KU in-depth.

Which is why I completely understand why people choose KU. I really do:

• The opportunity to earn a liveable wage from the platform and write full time?
• The fact that you get a boost in discoverability as an unknown author?
• The built-in audience of readers that reduces the need to pour hours of time and energy into lengthy marketing campaigns?

Trust me, I see the appeal. But from a business standpoint, I view KU more like a poison apple—it’s tempting, and it looks promising upfront. But it truly doesn’t make good business sense if you desire to be a global success, to be stocked in physical stores, and to make your books more accessible for everybody.

As a sustainable, long-term business strategy, I would not advise to solely build your brand and income on it. And that’s one very good reason why publishers don’t—despite having the connections and resources to produce physical books and get into bookstores, that’s a LOT of overhead publishers need to consider when they could just make bank through KU. Publishing bankrupts many small presses every single year. So have you ever thought about why publishers don’t pivot in spite of this?

Let’s talk about why I don’t like KU + what you can do to pivot out of KU, if that’s something you’re looking to do.

The business-side risks + cons of KU:

ACCESSIBILITY

How easy it is to purchase or borrow a book influences book piracy, and believe it or not, book piracy is not a price problem… it’s an accessibility problem.

In fact, that’s exactly why the Steam marketplace exists in the gaming industry, they created it to mitigate this exact problem for games.

While there are exceptions to this (usually from people that don’t actually value books and would never purchase from you anyway), when given fewer options to easily access a book, people turn to pirating. And this is one reason why KU actually screws authors in the long run.

Just as Amazon is an American-based business, the majority of readers in KU are thought to be American readers. And I mean this with as much kindness as possible, but it’s always been a very American mindset to put Americans at the center of every conversation and completely ignore other countries in the world. The simple truth is that for many other countries, KU is not their primary marketplace for books. So when books are exclusive to the Amazon platform and cannot even be picked up by libraries (a problem I’ve encountered a LOT for many popular indie books I try to purchase myself), I, like many others, are not able to get my hands on them, which means we cannot support those authors financially.

If you want to go global, being wide will always be better since Amazon is not dominant in every market. And it allows more readers choice in choosing where and how to shop your books.

SUSTAINABILITY

I’m not saying that KU doesn’t have it’s place. In fact, I even released a ​podcast episode recently​ talking about the one circumstance where I would (and in fact, do intend) to leverage the KU strategy.

But ultimately, there is too much risk in putting all of your income in one basket, in case KU disappears for any reason. Including the very real potential scenarios where:

• You lose access to your Amazon account (sidenote: this happened to me in 2020 and I never got the account back. I lost 5 years of publishing work)
• A boycott eliminates your incoming royalties
• TikTok gets banned and suddenly, less people are able to find your book

These things DO happen to people and the second two of these scenarios threatened to happen in the first 3 months of this year alone.

So even if KU does generate an amount of liveable income for you that you can quit your job and write full time… that is not sustainable when it can disappear the very next month.

Even if I did want to put my books on KU as an ‘exit strategy’ from a 9 – 5, I would likely find myself back at a 9 – 5 the moment something out of my control happened in the world.

So as a financial security blanket? I wouldn’t recommend KU. But as a discoverability tool, like I mentioned in my podcast episode? Absolutely. Except I wouldn’t do this for every series, or else I wouldn’t actually be diversifying my income streams. And that’s just smart business sense, truly—it’s playing the long game, a side of business that so many authors don’t consider.

CREATIVE FREEDOM

The other piece of KU is probably more personal, but it literally limits you in so many ways (with exclusivity clauses and a singular marketplace) that you might as well have traditionally published. I’m serious!

For me, leaving my publisher was to gain back more creative control, largely because they weren’t doing the right thing by me and I could achieve more on my own without jumping through all their hoops than they were able to offer me in return. So the last thing I want to do is limit myself again to a platform that tells me what I can and can’t do, makes it harder to reach global readers, and limits the strategies and campaigns I can run to sell more books.

If you chose indie publishing for creative control and freedom over your work AND your publishing business, I don’t understand what KU actually offers you (aside from the financial freedom and the temporary break in marketing).

Let me tell you this: KU is a platform that is based on page reads and conditions readers to not have to spend more money to access more books. They are a different type of buyer to your wide reader—they value things differently, make purchasing decisions differently, and shop in different markets.

So if you ever desire to go wide one day, all you are doing is delaying the hard work it will take to establish yourself in a wide marketplace and adapt new marketing and sales strategies that actually work for wide readers. Because wide readers are not looking for their next deal, and they’re not going to buy just because you dropped the price or ran a flash sale on your book.

(This is not to say that KU can’t play into a long-term strategy to go wide eventually, or won’t offer some sort of foundation. I’m just saying the full scope of work required cannot be completely avoided).

While wide authors don’t always have the financial backing upfront, they do have an amazing advantage that the first 5 – 10 years of their career is spent establishing a wide presence. They are already ten steps ahead of any author trying break out into a wide market. If you desire to be a global brand one day, you will not be able to escape or avoid the requirement of marketing your books wide, no matter how much success you gain through KU.

(A NOTE ON PAGE READS)

As mentioned above, one of my biggest peeves with KU is that you’re paid on page reads. Which means, you need a fuck-ton of page reads to hit a reasonable amount of income earned.

But that’s not the most pressing issue.

The issue is that, readers can only actively be reading one book at a time. And this means, every single time a major author like Sarah J. Maas or Rebecca Yarros drops a highly anticipated release, the majority of readers in your genre are no longer reading your book—they’re reading theirs.

I’m a big believer that there’s no such thing as competition. People can own multiple books and get around to reading, reviewing and talking about all of them. But at least, as a wide author, you still get paid the FULL price upfront, even if that reader then takes six more months to get to your book.

If your reader abandons your book to go read the new SJM book, that’s a chunk of active time where you are not earning money.

So as a I said—if your goal is discoverability and you get a nice cash injection alongside that, that’s wonderful. But if you have no other way to earn a sustainable living every month when people aren’t reading your book via KU, your business is not set up to run profitably month to month–because this is a risk you haven’t factored in. And that’s not the reader’s fault—it’s your responsibility, as the CEO of your business, to solve for it.

So, how does one make the pivot out of KU?

I know this is something that is easier said than done, and it certainly won’t be an overnight solution for anyone actively living on KU income. But if you desire to create a more sustainable business in the long-term and diversify your income streams to reduce risks, this is what I would suggest focusing on:

1) Always think long-term

I am always thinking about where I want to be in 5 years from now, and the decisions, moves and investments that will get me there—NOT where I am currently and making decisions based on that.

Because currently, I could really use $5k/mth in book royalties coming through KU. But making that decision today impacts where I could be in 5 years time by being available through more marketplaces overall.

Another thing I consider with long-term is how I’m releasing each series and selling it. While I plan to take one of my series and put it in KU while keeping the rest of my work wide, I would recommend the opposite for anyone in KU. Take a series and make it wide on purpose.

Intentionally build a sales pathway from one of your KU series to that wide series. Make it the next recommended read at the end of your eBooks. Incentivise people purchasing it through other retailers or even directly through you. You actually have the foundations and access to an existing audience already—so use it to start driving your reader traffic off of KU over time.

2) Consider direct sales

I know this is a conversation many authors are resistant to, but I only started selling directly through me as of last year (after I had 10 books published). And before you come at me complaining about all the overhead costs… I only sell eBooks directly through me, and it works.

I make it worthwhile by incentivising bonuses when people purchase directly through me as opposed to through wide retailers. I’m not saying that they can’t or shouldn’t if that’s their preference. But I am saying that when they purchase through me, not only do they get bonus chapters with their purchase, they can still send the eBook file directly to their Kindle with the mere click of a button.

It’s really not complicated, so there’s no reason for people not to get the bonuses. And often, people want them and make the direct purchase.

It literally costs me less than $50 a month to directly sell this way (the cost of my distribution softwares and some sales tax). And considering I’m earning the full $9 per eBook purchase? I don’t need that many sales per month to breakeven either.

As for generating a liveable wage? I’d certainly rather sell 500 x $9 books a month than require 3,000 readers to read x number of pages of my book through KU to hit the same income. That’s literally 500% more people I’d need to sell to, so if you hate the effort of marketing, it’s literally easier to do direct sales because you don’t need as much volume.

(P.S: If you want to learn more about direct selling the way I do it, you should get this training bundle).

3) Build a strong brand

This piece is honestly the most important one.

The reason your sales dip severely when you suddenly go wide after years of being exclusive to one platform is because outside of that platform and community, nobody knows who the fuck you are.

Just because you are making consistent sales doesn’t mean you have a strong brand presence. If your books and brand have not infiltrated different reader circles (with different TYPES of readers who have different purchasing behaviors) then you don’t have a wide enough brand presence.

If you do zero marketing outside of Amazon promotions and some social media, you don’t have a wide enough brand presence.

As I talked about earlier in this issue, my launch strategy involves a LOT of moving parts:

• Press releases
• Events
• Bookstore outreach
• ARC outreach
• Promoting interviews and features I’ve secured
• Social media campaigns
• Sales and pre-order campaigns
• A book launch party
• My Substack newsletter
• My podcast and blogs

All of this is building my brand with an incredibly wide net. Because the more people that hear about me, the more likely I am to create a global impact.

And yes, it requires work. A lot of work (sidenote: I am tired AF right now). So going wide is not a recommendation for anyone who isn’t interested in proactively marketing their books. But the tradeoff to this, of course, is ongoing financial instability and, possibly, never reaching your full potential with how many readers your work can reach.

Anyone who wants to build a long-term career knows the work is required, and worth it.

Maybe you didn’t come here to build a career. Maybe you came here to write and make some money doing it, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s also a distinct difference, so expecting the former while doing the latter will only leave you disappointed.

I recently ​wrote a blog post​ about the #1 key thing that is going to set me apart on my journey and truly build a global brand. This one thing is the difference between a six figure earning KU author and a 7 figure earning global brand author. Because yes, branding is doing more than just showing up in one place and expecting everyone to know your name—but it’s also so much bigger than that.

This piece is your messaging.

In the blog post, I share examples with Sarah J. Maas, Rebecca Yarros and Scarlett St. Clair — all MASSIVE mainstream authors right now. And I highlight exactly what sets them apart from other authors—why their brands are so easy to buy into, why they have movements and fanbases built around them, why their work continues to spark conversation. No, it’s not the spice, and no, it’s not their publisher or the resources they have access to. It’s their marketing messaging.

When you nail this piece down, you will find it so much easier to go wide because you will be able to speak beyond buying behaviors and attract people who simply love your stories.

P.S: If you found this advice on KU helpful, I have a bundle which I highly recommend diving into called ​The Audience Bundle​.

This bundle contains four masterclasses that dive into different areas (audience building, brand building, content strategy and visibility strategy) which will all help you to go wider with your marketing efforts to support the transition to wide publishing.

I highly, highly recommend this bundle, and when I first recorded these trainings I did so with the intention to lay a foundational roadmap for authors. ​Get it here for just $127​.