Self-Publishing: eBooks

By: A.D. Sterling

Wed, May 20, 2020

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Publishing eBooks

Publishing an eBook is the easiest way to get into the space without much investment. Your cover will be simpler to create and there are tools available to make it easy to create the eBook file. If you only intend to list with Amazon you are not required to publish using an ISBN, but if you intend to expand out further to other eBook providers you will probably want one anyway.

Amazon KDP has the market share of eBook readers, so creating your book here is going to make your book available to the most readers. There are definitely other platforms out there (like Nook and Apple Books), but for now I’ve only launched my eBook on Amazon KDP. I’ve done this for two reasons.

It was easy to set up, it’s free, and you can make as many changes to your document as you want without incurring a charge.
If you sign up for KDP Select you will earn a larger royalty payment (70% vs 35%) on the sales of your eBook. Your eBook will also be free to Kindle Unlimited readers and you will get paid a portion of that money based on how many pages of your book are read.

Being enrolled in KDP Select also gives you access to run promotions on your book (like listing it for free for 5 days) to help entice readers to download your book. Eventually I intend to expand further to other eBook platforms, but when you enroll in KDP Select you commit to only listing with Amazon for 3 months.

UPDATE

At the the end of my 3 month period with Amazon I chose to discontinue my KDP enrollment in order to see if expanding to other distributers would have any impact on my readership.

I could have listed my eBook with IngramSpark but instead I chose to list directly with the major eBook distributers (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Google and Apple). If you choose to list with IngramSpark it does distribute out through these channels as well as others, but I wanted to make sure I kept as much of my royalty payment as possible.