So, when I was ready to start unveiling my work, and find a way to sell it to people, I started looking around. And two strategies started unfolding themselves, both seemed applicable at the time I was planning to enter the e-book game. circa 2015.

I could either go wide, and put my e-books up in as many storefronts as possible...

Or go deep, and drop them in Amazon, and only Amazon.

Going wide LOOKED like the better choice. Why stick to Amazon? If I went through Smashwords or used Caliber to turn the manuscript into many different formats, I could sell in the Apple Store, Kobo, the Barnes and Noble e-store, Smashwords itself, AND Amazon.

Whereas if I wen through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing, that would only put me in Amazon.

And yet, most of the research I'd done was saying that authors in my shoes were making more sales in Amazon, than the rest combined.

Why?

I looked more closely, and the reason for that was a little program called Kindle Unlimited.

In a nutshell, it's an Amazon subscription service that functions like a library. When you sign up for it you pay a monthly fee, and can download any book in the KU program for free. You can keep up to 10 at any one time, if you want more free books than that, you have to delete one.

On the author side, authors get paid a fraction of a cent for every page read through the KU program. It's been around half a cent for a while, with occasional dips up and down. And after a while? It adds up.

However, the only way to put a book in KU, is to agree to make it exclusive to Amazon for as long as it's in KU.

So you have to go deep...

I did the math, and that decided me. I went deep, with no hesitation. And so far it's paid off. It didn't matter much when the only thing that was out there was my shorter fiction, but Dire:Born? That puppy's 320 pages. Which means $1.50 to $1.60 in my pocket for every full read through KU. That's a little worse than half my take for a direct e-book sale, but I don't mind. My take on it is...

1. People who might not read it are checking it out because it costs them nothing.

2. Essentially it's a win/win scenario. To them it's free, to me it's like selling the book with a steep discount.

3. The number of books in KU is smaller than the Amazon catalogue on the whole, so I have more of a chance of being read.

4. If someone uses KU to read my book for free and REALLY likes it, they might buy a copy later to keep permanently. Not a common occurrence, but it HAS happened.

5. KU grants access to a few marketing methods and specials that I'd have to pay money to get otherwise.

So.

Yeah, I went deep, and it's been working out so far. But...

The e-book market is constantly shifting. Recently Apple's been gaining on Amazon, with their ibooks program. Amazon's still the elephant in the room, but it may not be that way forever.

So for now, I'm going deep. But once I get my first trilogy complete?

Wellp, it'll be time to sit down, look at the way the wind is going, and maybe consider going wide...