When KDP Select started at the end of 2011, I was an early adopter. My books had sold very well on Amazon, while selling hardly any via Smashwords, so the decision was a no-brainer for me. And at the start of 2012 it enabled me to sell huge quantities of ebooks at a higher price than I'd been able to charge before, as well as making money from Kindle Owners' Lending Library (KOLL).But what has it done for me lately? Over the past year, the benefits of KDP Select have dwindled, and Amazon has not yet offered anything to replace them. I'm not criticizing Amazon; Jeff Bezos runs his business extremely well, and has no obligation to promote my books for me. It's possible that Amazon no longer needs indie authors in the same way after the DoJ's judgment against the Price-Fix Six. I'm grateful for the opportunities Amazon has put my way, enabling me to prove there is a market for my writing and make quite a bit of money.
But it may be time to move on. Last week I came across a long article on Survivorship Bias, including this observation:
Lucky people tend to constantly change routines and seek out new experiences. The lucky try more things, and fail more often, but when they fail they shrug it off and try something else.
These days there is an alternative to Smashwords' clunky meatgrinder: Draft2Digital. Its site is classy, non-buggy and easy to use, its terms eminently reasonable. Support is fast and helpful. D2D's software converts your Word document into an ebook with a ToC and chapter breaks. Five of my six books reached the end of their three months in KDP Select yesterday, and I've now loaded them on Draft2Digital. Within the next week or two, they will go live on Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Apple's iBookstore.
I'm not expecting to sell much, at any rate initially, but I know from Statcounter that people are looking for epub versions of my novels, and now they will be able to buy them. I hope to be lucky - but if it doesn't work out, I'll try something else.
