Patty Jansen - Going Wide Unboxed (The Three--year, No-bestseller Plan For Making a Sustainable Living From Your Fiction Book 3)

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O .M.G.

You have unticked that auto-renew box for Select in your KDP dashboard.

After a few seconds of exhilarationIm no longer a slave to a single retailer!the fear sets in.

What do I actually DO? How do my books SELL? There is so much stuff to do and set up and I dont get any of it. And I dont even get how people find books on these other sites and its all so WEIRD.

Help!

Fortunately, youve come to the right place. Ive been selling books wide since 2011, was never able to get any traction in Select, through reasons that will become clear in this book. Non-Amazon sales have accounted for anywhere between 40 and 80 percent of my monthly income.

But, a word of warning: going wide is a mindset, and will require you to examine everything you do, from how you source your mailing list to where you advertise.

T HIS BOOK IS a service to my writer friends and anyone who is interested in taking their books to a worldwide audience in many different stores as opposed to being exclusive on Amazon.

For some reason, going wide strikes fear in the hearts of many. It is the great unknown, the morass, and it looks like so much work.

Yet, at any one time there is usually some form of panic going on about declining sales on Amazon, about declining page reads, scammers in Kindle Unlimited, or any combination of those things.

This is a book for people who are sick of the fearmongering, who are sick of worrying about what happens on Amazon, who want to stop caring about rankings and that a single bad review will torpedo your career. This is a book for people who want to see themselves as global citizens and invest time in building a more solid sales base that can support a longer lasting career, without having to fork out big in stomach ulcer medication.

This is not a book about Amazon, or about any of the storms that are going on there at any time, and its not about complaining how Amazon does the wrong thing by writers. This book is about everything that is not Amazon.

This doesnt mean to say that you should turn your back to Amazon, to the contrary. For most writers, but not all of them, Amazon is likely to provide the bulk of their income. Now this may change, but at this point in time in 2017, it is the reality we live in. And there is nothing wrong with that.

But its a rollercoaster, and many people feel deeply uncomfortable with giving their entire income in the hands of just one income source. Its not healthy, its not productive and not conducive to reaching out to a worldwide audience.

This is not a book that tries to convince you to go wide. Its a book for those who have already decided that they want to do it.

T O GO WIDE is to step into the world. This may seem a little frightening to people from the US, because in the US, the prevailing attitude seems to be that Amazon is the world. The everything store.

It is not like that in the rest of the world. Sure, Amazon exists in other countries, but its often a latecomer on the scene, and not always the biggest one. Even if it is the biggest one for ebooks, it has a lot more healthy competition from the other stores in other countries.

If youre not from the US, you will probably already understand that not everybody buys on Amazon. You already know that in some countries books are quite expensive, and readers are used to these prices. Traditional publishing has a much stronger grip on the market in those countries. Some countries, like France, have a protective industry with laws that make it easier for local content to be sold.

You may already understand that some people in some countries hate Amazon with a passion and actively legislate against it.

Or you may understand that books are sold to worldwide niche markets that are big enough to allow you to make a liveable income from selling to just that market.

My point is: it is not always about the price, and it is not always about being a fish in the biggest pond.

While market for science fiction books in Poland might be small, you could earn a handy income if for some reason your book takes off there. This is not to say that your book will take off in Poland, but there are many other countries and many other small markets where it might. And readers in those other countries probably dont buy their books on Amazon. And even if they do, you give yourself more chance of being found if your books are available everywhere.

The frustrating part about your books taking off in Poland or Sweden is of course, that you cant control any of it. You feel like youre just throwing wet spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. You cant game it and you cant predict it, but there are definite steps you can take to make sure that something will happen somewhere.

An interesting byproduct of concentrating your sales efforts to non-Amazon markets is that youre likely to increase your sales on Amazon, too. More specifically, youll likely increase your sales on Amazon stores that are not in the US.

The US is but one market. Quite a big one, but even so. The UK is one market. Germany is one market, and Canada, and Australia, and so on. By being in Select, you appeal primarily to people in the US, and a bit in the UK.

By being wide, you appeal to the entire world, no matter where they buy.

So, lets get started.

F IRST , YOU FACE the unenviable task of creating files for all retailers and uploading them.

Yes, I can hear you groan.

I know this can mean a lot of work. I finally went direct with Apple a while ago, and took several days uploading all my books and filling out all the details. That was just one retailer. Of course I had more than thirty books, but I understand why people are turned off, I really do.