When publishing your ebook, you are not restricted to one platform. There are publishers that will try to convince you that theirs is the only platform worth being on, but you have multiple publishing choices for your ebook that can help you reach a wider audience.
Publish on Your Own Website
The ideal way to publish your ebook is to publish it through your own website or ecommerce store. Our DRM integrates with Magento, Shopify, and other ecommerce solutions. The benefit of publishing your ebook on your own website or in your own ecommerce store is that you keep all of the royalties – not just a percentage of them. Publishing on your own website does not prevent you from also publishing the ebook on other platforms.
All Platforms Take a Piece of Your Profits
No matter where else you try publishing your ebook, you will have to pay a premium to that service for listing your book. Some, like Amazon, require exclusivity with them in order to get any visibility; others, like Smashwords, will distribute your ebook to other sites. If you choose to go through a publishing partner, here are some to consider:
Apple Books
Apple has partnered with Oprah to accelerate their visibility. Indie authors can publish on Apple Books. It’s best to use the epub format, since that will automatically create the required book sample for you.
Barnes and Noble
Barnes and Noble offers a publishing service that directly competes with Amazon’s KDP by offering a significantly higher royalty for books priced outside the KDP price range (books on KDP must be priced between $2.99 and $9.99 to get the 70% royalty rate). Barnes and Noble offers a 65% royalty on ebooks priced higher than $9.99 compared to the 35% offered by KDP.
Kobo
Kobo promises that “you’re in charge. You own your rights, set your prices, and run your own promotions. We don’t require exclusivity, so you’re free to publish elsewhere, too.” However, their terms state that you will only receive 70% of the royalties on books published over the price of $2.99 and that the ebook “must be priced at least twenty (20%) percent below the SRP of all physical editions of the book, if available.” You also must price Kobo versions of the ebook at the same price or lower as any other platform where you have it published.
Smashwords
Smashwords is one of the oldest self-publishing services around. They not only publish the ebook on their own site but provide a distribution seervice to put the ebook everywhere else. While it’s free and fairly simple to publish with them, the royalty rate ranges from 60-80% depending on where the ebook is sold.
The only way to keep all of your profits is to self-publish on your own site. With any other publisher, you will be forced to pay 20-50% on each sale. Our DRM system helps independent booksellers protect their content from unauthorized use while offering ebooks for sale online in a way that lets you keep 100% of your sales.
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Part One – Marketing Your eBook
