Traditional publishing might be frustratingly slow and capricious but the Kindle Direct Publishing option offers neither prestige nor money.
The love-hate relationship between authors and publishers is well-known. In recent years there has been even more despair because advances shrank, and royalties are now so rare that all but a handful of authors can make a living from writing. Yet even today, there is grudging recognition that publishers did and still do the very important task of selecting, editing, and marketing significant as well as popular works. It is difficult to find anything similarly redeeming in Amazon’s direct-to-readers program, or for that matter among other self-publishing platforms with similar business models. These neither offer authors the emotional satisfaction of a prestige publisher nor an economic windfall from their supposedly large distribution reach. The reason is simple: Amazon can dictate terms because for all practical purposes it is a monopoly - selling 65% of all new books - in print and digital formats. For example, it nudges authors to be part of the Kindle Select plan that then includes their books in the Kindle Unlimited plan for Amazon prime subscribers. The books on Kindle Unlimited appear to be for "free" to readers. Authors compensation for those is an opaque model based on downloads and pages read (details here).
Intrepid authors have in fact experimented with selling directly to fans through custom websites for years. However, only the most successful or the most technology savvy of them could afford to invest the necessary time and money. We at ScrollStack, have eliminated that pain and upfront cost out of the process. Authors get their own private web address that is setup as easy as a social media account - it takes less than two minutes. All authors need to do is upload their eBooks and start selling. They decide the price, own all the rights and keep 90% of what they charge. What this means (Table 1) is that for an author to make Rs 100,000 ($ 1500) from a book priced at Rs 200 ($3) they have to sell just over 500 copies vs. 5000 in the traditional model. Moreover, they know exactly who bought their books unlike the opaque Kindle Direct Program or even traditional publishers.
The biggest worry authors often express is piracy. After all downloaded books and articles could be shared. This fear is vastly overblown in real life. The only books that are likely to get pirated are huge bestsellers (and that happens despite security technology). The downside of not making your work available to fans vastly outweighs the imagined upside of keeping your work under “lock and key”. One of the most successful authors on Amazon's K.D.P, Hugh Howey, also offers his book DRM-Free on his own website. On ScrollStack too there are authors selling their eBooks in ePub and PDF formats with volumes larger than they get to on Kindle (For example, 1, 2).
Two years into the pandemic book sales have revived and now is the right time for authors break out of the old ways. Hundreds of millions of readers have acquired the habit of paying for online content. And while it will take time for an author to establish a direct-to-fans presence it has never been more worth the effort than today. In 2022, when most readers discover books and recommendations on social media, it no longer makes any sense that an author's eBooks are not a mere click away on their own sites.
And then it’s a simple as uploading you book from the plus menu:
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