Wide Publication: Diversifying Revenue Streams

There is no right answer when it comes to how publish books. If you want to go exclusive with Amazon, that is an absolutely valid choice. Once upon a time, I tested exclusivity with Amazon. I didn’t like it, and I regret having done it. But, as there is no one right answer when it comes to book publication, I gave it a two-ish year stint to see if I could make it work for me.

Spoiler alert: I couldn’t make it work for me. There are many reasons why not, and my lack of sex on the page is one of those reasons.

There are other reasons why it didn’t work for me, but that’s a discussion for another time, likely in the Post Publication Blues section of this site.

Recently (May 2024), I needed to have a heart-to-heart with my readership about one of my series. Recap: one of my main series has reached the ‘dead series’ point, something I discussed already here. This led to readers having questions about why my other vendors were generally being excluded from the posts on earnings.

That led to me sharing a few months of data on the latest release (Whiskers on Kittens) compared to the first book in that series, showcasing sales values wide.

Note: my wide following is largest on this series, and it only goes downhill from there.

Playing with Fire: January 1 to Now

• Amazon: 580 (87.61%)
• Barnes & Noble: 19 (2.87%)
• Kobo: 23 (3.47%)
• All other Wide: 40 (6.04%)
• Patreon: 0 (0%)
• Total Sales: 662

Whiskers on Kittens: December 2023 (release) to Now

• Amazon: 5,899 (76.04%)
• Barnes & Noble: 440 (5.67%)
• Kobo: 306 (3.94%)
• All Other Wide: 356 (4.58%)
• Patreon: 756 (Per Novel AND Monthly combined) (9.74%)
• Total Sales: 7,757

Playing with Fire’s 13% Wide Share is as good as it gets for me for being wide as a general rule. I’ve been working to get this number up to 20%, but it’s been a slow crawl. Now, don’t get me wrong… 13% is an improvement from the 5% it used to be.

The 24% for the release of Whiskers was very nice! However, as time goes on, this figure will gradually head towards the 13%. The reality is, the majority of readers are on Amazon.

For anything retail, I have to pay close attention to Amazon and Amazon’s performance. I check in on the wide stuff, but until that number is closer to 50% combined for wide, the reality is simple: Amazon’s retail performance dictates how I approach series, order them for writing and release, and so on.

Now, there is a special exception to all this: my Patreon. Patreon is a fabulous source of reliable income for me. However, I can’t really associate it with any books; it exists for a few reasons right now: it helps pay my bills and rent and funds Royal States and Audiobooks. (Mostly audiobooks, but it does cover all Royal States books so they’re released into the world free of any debt.)

Patreon is a hefty reason why I have stability as an author, and I’m hugely grateful for it. However, I can’t use Patreon as a reasoning for any retail decisions. (And the Patreon store, while I love it, has a teeny tiny market share.)

But, for the sake of transparency, here is a month of earnings, the expenses incurred, and my take home for said month:

2023 was a “feast or famine” style of year. Some months, I was several thousand in the hole because of expenses. (Editing bills, tax bills, etc, that just came at poor times.) Other months, I brought in my money for the next three months.

I picked a feast month, which covered two months of living. The month after? I had $1,500 in profit. (This is why I plan things so carefully; I need to know when my feasts and famines will be.)

I’m not going to specify which month in 2023… it doesn’t really matter. I will say this much: it was a release month, which is why my advertising spend was so high. It was an important release, which did not perform as well as I hoped for, so it was a lower profit margin than I wanted. It, at least, did earn profit, so that’s good.

On the Contracted Labor front, I had an entire set of editing bills, I had three cover art bills, and I had my regular audiobook and proofing listener bills, so it adds up quickly.

I did NOT have a tax bill this month because I had dumped down my taxes in the previous month, taking a hit on my profit margin then. (The previous month was a feast month, and I made the decision to pay ahead on my taxes so I had a smaller feast month the previous month and a solid feast month in this month.)

It kept the anxiety demons at bay.

Spending

• Advertising: $13,591
• Contracted Labor: $10,349
• Misc Expenses: $2,910

Earnings

• Amazon: $14,149
• Barnes & Noble: $1,464.02
• A Library Vendor: $94.96
• Findaway (Audiobook): $2,089.77
• Kobo: $2,907.68
• Google: $72.44
• Draft2Digital: $948.43
• Patreon: $8,423
• Misc Earnings: $457.29

Patreon is not calculated for ‘general book revenue’ in the table below because the revenue earned isn’t from specific books as a general rule. When I count Patreon for a specific book’s sales, I just take a headcount of the number of subscribers on Patreon and that’s the associated number.

As Patreon doesn’t influence my retail decisions, it’s usually cut out. And while I often will poll (and reward) my Patrons, the reality is… they are two totally different kettles of fish.

So, for the earnings for retail, I am excluding Patreon; Patreon does not influence my retail decisions as a general rule. I have also excluded audiobooks; audiobook performance does not at ALL influence my retail decisions.

The Misc Earnings were also not from retail performance, so that is also being excluded.

A note on Kobo: a lot of my earnings are from the Kobo Plus Subscription program, which is paid out based on the number of minutes users read my books. It’s impossible to allocate specific books to these numbers; as such, which Kobo is included as a share, I do not make any retail decisions based on Kobo due to the subscription service. I love the program, please don’t get me wrong, but at least 10% of that 14.87% is from subscriptions, so it’s realistically only a 4.87% retail allocation in terms of the decision making process. For the sake of this chart, it’s not worth the effort to try to dig into Kobo’s records and get exact figures on the Kobo Plus earnings.

Draft2Digital is mixed equally between one primary retailer and libraries and subscription services, so this skews things somewhat. (I primarily use Draft2Digital to gain access to libraries.)

Total Retail Earnings: $19,541.57

• Amazon: $14,149 (72.40%)
• Barnes & Noble: $1,464.02 (7.49%)
• Kobo: $2,907.68 (14.87%)
• Google: $72.44 (0.37%)
• Draft2Digital: $948.43 (4.85%)

When you look at the picture this way, with each share of the market out in the open with the associated percentage, I hope it’s easier to understand why Amazon dictates so many of my business decisions.

Would I love to have a higher wide market share? Absolutely. But currently? That’s just not the case.

And once again, I absolutely love my Patreon and the security it offers me on a monthly basis, but I have to keep my general focus on retail performance. If for any reason Patreon falls or stops being viable, I need to have my retail ducks in a row.

I absolutely do wish that my wide earnings were higher and more stable; right now, I can’t keep writing if I were to cut away Amazon from the retail picture.

Still… 72% on Amazon on this specific month does show increased diversification of my revenue streams among the wide retailers. That’s great. It’s not the 50% or less I want it to be, but that’s a major improvement from the 85-95% I was dealing with just a few months prior to this.

Note: I did select a month after I made the changes to including short stories as bonus material to all retail vendors excepting Amazon. I did this to help encourage movement to the other retailers. However, if you look at the Playing with Fire numbers, the problem of lower diversification is still present.

So, it has helped. That’s great!

Recap: I was being targeted often with Amazon’s ‘error reporting’ tool, so I do not include any raw material, like bonus short stories, with Amazon-released titles. Those are on Patreon or at wide retailers.

I can’t afford to have my account put at risk due to readers who want to help but are unaware of Amazon’s draconian policies with the error reporting tool. As such, they don’t get the bonus short stories.

If the tool is ever removed, I may consider adding the shorts to the Amazon master files so people can update their stories. I doubt that will happen, but…

Pick Your Battles Wisely

I know a lot of authors sing about having as many revenue streams as possible, but here is a cold and bitter truth of the situation: unless you can afford someone to handle a lot of this stuff, you need to pick your battles. While I have a PA I love, she doesn’t do my uploads, she doesn’t do my content management, and she doesn’t do any interactions with my readership. (My readers are there to interact with ME, not with someone paid to pretend to be me.)

Yeah, I have a line in the sand on that one. I don’t mind if someone is openly posting as themselves, but when they pretend to be the author, that trips my trigger.

It feels like the ultimate betrayal to me. If someone openly posts for the author, as themselves, I’m fine with that. But pretending to be the author? Nope, I’m out.

When I do bother with an author on the internet, I want to see the genuine them. But, that’s how I roll with my readership. That’s how I want to be treated.

When you are deciding how many revenue streams to open up, you need to be able to manage those streams.

That’s why I closed my REAM; it took a lot of effort and time, it had a lot of growing pains, and it was not worth taking away from paying attention to the other revenue streams. Perhaps in the future, I will revisit it, but until that platform matures and they are able to resolve their developmental pains, it just isn’t ready. (This is my opinion.)

REAM, while a revenue stream I’m sure some will get to work well for them, just wasn’t ready for the prime time. In time, I’m sure that will change. But for now? Their growing pains exceeded what I have the ability to manage with my other revenue streams.

Pick only the number of revenue streams you can readily manage. It is better to have two strong revenue streams than it is to have six revenue streams that you keep dropping the balls on because you’ve given yourself too much work.

My current revenue stream project is boosting my Kobo and Kobo Plus readership. I don’t want to necessarily pillage my Amazon numbers, but I want to find new-to-me readers and direct them to Kobo if at all possible.

That is a 2024-2025 project. Ideally, I will get my Kobo and Kobo Plus numbers up to 25% of my retail earnings by the end of 2025. (These things take time.)

I feel this is a good time to leave a painful reminder about publishing to wide retailers: it’s a slow process. It can take 18 months (or longer) to start getting traction, and you have to claw your way towards victory each and every month thereafter. And if you neglect your revenue streams, the numbers absolutely will drop.

It is an ongoing battle.

But how do you Diversify your Revenue Streams?

As I’ve mentioned many times, there’s no one right way to go about diversification of your revenue streams. For most, I would recommend looking into Draft2Digital for most of your library needs. I would go direct (working directly with) kobo and barnes & noble, as both of these vendors are pretty nice to work with. Work direct with Amazon due to necessity; you can have your books removed from sale due to readers reporting typos. (And while the readers may be trying to be helpful, they often do more harm than good when dealing with Amazon. That’s just how it goes.)

Working with Amazon directly means you can address those situations as they arise. And they arise for me with alarming frequency.

I wish I could give you a set flight path to make it easy for you to diversify, but the reality is this: only you can decide how much you can handle. And how much you can handle is a huge part of revenue stream diversification.

Start small. Add one (I would recommend adding libraries over at Draft2Digital to start with) and go from there. And no, you cannot maintain exclusivity with Amazon (or anywhere else) and go wide. It’s one or the other, not both.

Good luck, fellow author!

P.S.: This link will take you to the basics of book publication page, which includes links to the various vendors I use and give you an idea of how to get started publishing.