- Have you faced that scary question of
whether you're gonna go exclusive?
Means no more sellin' around, til death do us part,
when it comes to you and Amazon.
If you're tryin' to figure it out, stick around,
I've got some thoughts on it for you.
(upbeat music)
Hey there, I'm Julie Broad with HaveMoreInfluence.com.
I'm talkin' about one of Kindle's programs
called KDP Select, in case you're not familiar with it.
Now Kindle is a division of Amazon,
and when you've uploaded your book,
and tried to decide what to do,
you probably saw in the chart that to get 70% royalties
you need to go into KDP Select.
But when you read the fine print, you find out
there might be some restrictive things about this program
that may make it so you don't wanna do it.
But first, before I get into why you don't wanna do it,
why would you wanna enroll in a program like KDP Select?
You will earn higher royalties.
You're gonna earn 70% versus 35%
if you don't go into KDP Select.
You're gonna earn your share of KDP Select Global Fund
when customers read your book from Kindle Unlimited
and the Kindle owner's lending library.
You also get to choose between two fantastic
promotional opportunities, the Kindle Countdown Deals,
which is a time-bound promotional discount for your book,
or the Free Book Promotion where readers worldwide
can get your book for free.
When you enroll your book into KDP Select,
you're committing to only sell the e-version of your book
through Amazon.
Let me just show you a quick comparison of KDP Select,
which is a Kindle program, or just selling your book
through Kindle alone.
So, as you can see, KDP Select has a pricing restriction.
You can only sell your book for no more than 9.99.
If you put it through Kindle, you can choose the price.
KDP Select, you're exclusive.
With Kindle, no exclusivity.
So you can offer it through other channels,
including your website.
KDP Select gives you access to the promos,
which I talked about, the Countdown Deals,
and the free promos,
which you don't have access to through Kindle.
There's a 70% royalty through KDP Select,
versus a 35% royalty through Kindle only.
Overall, it doesn't sound that bad,
but for me, here's the reason,
the single biggest reason I didn't do it.
Number one was exclusivity.
I really wanted the option to be able to give it away,
and to sell it through other channels
other than just Amazon.
But the bigger issue was the pricing.
Now here's the thing, I'm a non-fiction author.
My books contain thousands of dollars of knowledge.
These are books jammed with stuff
that I have put into workshops
that I've sold for over a thousand dollars
for a weekend workshop.
So this is already a bargain.
If you pay 20 bucks, or 25 bucks for my book,
to get thousands of dollars worth of experience
and expertise that can save you money and make you money
and save you time and hassle,
it's already a steal of a deal.
As I noted in another video, I did a three year sales tally
for my first book, More Than Cash Flow,
and only 14% of the books sold through bookstores
and Amazon were sold in a digital format.
This means that my physical book pricing
is actually really important.
I think the book is already super-cheap
for what you're getting inside of the pages.
And, as a result, I'm not willing to then say
my e-book is worth half as much as my printed book
because of the paper it's printed on.
But wait Julie, I took this course or
I hired this done-for-you publishing company
and they are requiring me to go through KDP Select
because they want me to do the pre-sales,
or the countdown promo.
Well, fair enough, if Amazon number one best seller
is all that's most important to you,
then yeah, maybe you wanna go that route
and give your book away free, or give it for $1.99,
so that you can say you're a
number one category best seller.
But the reality is, that claim to fame is not gonna
last much longer.
There are books out there, like this one,
that have no content, that are number one
Amazon best sellers to prove the point that
anybody can be a number one best seller.
So overall, should you go exclusive?
The answer is, it depends.
For me, the choice was clear.
There's tremendous value in my books
and it was important to me that my book be priced
like the other books in my category,
the traditionally published books
that I was competing directly with.
And those books are not discounted at 2.99 or 5.99
or even 9.99, they're selling for $20, $22, $25,
and the e-versions are selling for 18.99, 19.99.
And that ultimately is who I wanna be compared with,
that's where the value of my book lies,
and frankly, I was just not gonna price it,
no matter what other options were available.
But again, it depends on your goal.
So do what's right for you, know the choices you're making
and why you're making them,
and I wish you all the best of success with your book.
Got a question, go ahead, post it down below
in YouTube, or if you want more tips and tools
on self-publishing, I'm launchin' a new business
in 2017 called BookLaunchers.com, come on over,
check it out, might not be live yet,
but there's a spot where you can put your name in
and get updates and get the best tools and tips.
And if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up.
Makes me happy, tells me it's worth my time
to shoot more videos to help you out.
Cool, cool.
See you next time.
(upbeat music)