HOW TO EARN MONEY FROM EBOOKS

Why I Prefer Wide Over Exclusivity for My Ebooks

Amazon KDP is one among many marketplaces

Hazel Paradise
2 min readDec 8, 2023
Photo by Ellie Ellien on Unsplash

I have been on both — exclusive and wide for both brands fiction and non-fiction and I think I can answer this well.

When I started, I didn’t know much about being wide and exclusive to a single program. This was when I saw the first video of Joanna Penn talking about it.

So, after seeing many income reports from various authors, I went exclusive without thinking much. Before that, I was writing widely but exclusivity never came to mind, and I was excited to see the results.

My KU Experience

  1. Exclusivity means enrolling your book in the Kindle Unlimited Program but isn’t allowed to publish your ebook anywhere else. It means only KU readers will discover your ebook. Other formats can be published widely.
  2. My first genre was romance so KU worked for me. Romance works well on the Kindle Unlimited Program! I made a good income out of it for many years.
  3. Any drawback? Definitely. Everything comes with pros and cons. If there are no pros, then cons wouldn’t exist as well. Here, you are fully at the mercy of one marketplace; I was making good money but dependent on Amazon KDP.
  4. I also published my nonfiction books on the KU program but there were rarely any sales. (I used an SEO tool later to increase sales.). Non-fiction works better wide.
  5. I was missing out on the markets like — Kobo, Nook, Google Playbooks, Odilo, Scribd, etc.

Conclusion

If you are confused then I advise you to go for exclusivity first to check whether it fits your needs or not. Then after 90 days, you can pull your books out of KU. Simple. You don’t have to be in exclusivity forever!

I had ups and downs with exclusivity. Some days were really good where I made money without much effort (Keywords play a very important role. I hit the right one!) But wide was something that gave me freedom and peace.

If you want to know more about making money writing ebooks, then you can check out my book “My Mistakes in Self-Publishing”. Happy Writing Journey!

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Hazel Paradise

Top Writer On Medium. Writer of 90+ books under multiple pen names. Yes, I make money writing ebooks. https://hazelparadise.gumroad.com/l/fclinr