KDP or No? Best Publishing Platform for your Title

You’ve written a book and you want it to be published and Kindle Direct Publishing is the company that everyone is talking about. Should you use them to publish?

The answer is, it depends. Do you have a vision for your book and how you want it published? Here’s a few tidbits to consider.

1. Where do you want your book placed?

Amazon is a HUGE book market. It’s the top seller of, well everything, worldwide. If you want your book to be easily accessed by your customers, KDP is a great way to go.

However, do you want your book in major or minor bookstores? What about global reach? UK, Australia, Africa, etc.? If this is apart of your book publishing vision KDP isn’t the place you want to go. You’ll want to consider Ingramspark, one of the most famous global distributors and a go-to for many small book stores. You can also look into Lulu, a rising favorite for independent authors that also allows for global distribution.

1. Do you want to control the price of your book and make the most money possible?

Amazon is notorious to adjusting the cost of author’s books without notice.. Your book’s price isn’t fixed and the company can and will adjust the price in order to boost sales. What this doesn’t do is boost the money you make on the book.

Other publishing options such as Ingramspark can have this issue as well due to third party bidding. And the whole time, you as the author are left out of the loop and the payout.

If this is something you don’t love the idea of, you may want to consider selling your book exclusively from your author website, Printify, or Shopify. Companies such as Lulu have a print API that will allow them to  print individual book orders places no matter if it’s 1 or 1,000 books being orders. This will allow you to control your book price, interact directly with customer, make more money per book, while not stocking or shipping the books yourself.

1. No customer interaction 

Amazon doens’t give you the chance to interact with customers. People will buy and review your book and you won’t have knowledge of it until days, weeks, or months later. This isn’t the best strategy to be able to grow your book business and sell more books.

You may say, “I don’t want to interact with customers.” Let me tell you, yes, you do want to interact with them! You should actively be getting you customer’s information in order to connect with them, get reviews and sell more books. This isn’t something that you can do through Amazon. But trust me, Amazon has all the info they need and are selling your customers all kinds of books! You can and should structure your business to do this as well. And there’s so many reasons why you should.

But that’s for another post.

KDP can be a great option for just getting your book out there. I myself have and will continue to use KDP for certain books depending on the book’s goals and audience. If you’re just starting out, it’s helpful to book a consultation with a publishing or marketing expert to help you set goals and align your publishing process to fit those goals.

It’s worth it. Your book is worth it.