Home is where the heart is

This is my promised follow-up about my experiences since switching from draft2digital to Amazon’s KDP. My journey was a wrestling match because I already loved Draft2digital dearly. I liked and appreciated their spread of availability over many platforms.

I was feeling disappointed in the sales numbers and felt the growing noise around KDP was too much for me to ignore. That said I was reluctant to move to giving Amazon full exclusivity and my principles of ‘all the eggs in one basket’ made me somewhat wary. Despite it being the biggest site in the world.

I wish I could make the blog interesting and dynamic in some way to excite any readers but I cannot in all honesty!

As I said at the time, it was an experiment and I went into it open minded. My recollection of getting familiar with the KDP platform/dashboard was not as bad it first looked to me. I managed to upload the covers and manuscripts relatively easy, even for me! When I was working through the process there was a feeling that it seemed full of promise(s) and almost too good to be true. I even dabbled with the print features, the temptation is great when encouraged to create a physical paperback option. Unfortunately I wasted hours, maybe days, frustrated because I just could not get the spine text to accept, that then affected the front and back cover….and don’t remind me of the complications around the bleed!! In the end it was a missed opportunity, a carrot dangled but I gave up defeated. A missed opportunity if it had been easier to offer readers the paperback option to purchase.  My experience of Amazon’s ‘help centre’ was that it was not too helpful. There was generic tutorials to click on and read but none was exactly applicable to my particular woes. I was left with the impression Amazon expect users to already know or have a higher level of basic design skill than I possess.

To make a short story shorter. I have received less than 1 dollar in the 5 months since I made two eBooks exclusively available on Amazon’s KDP. I have left the 90 day exclusive time pass with Amazon and consider the experiment a worthwhile exercise. It satisfied my curiosity that I tried it but I will not be staying there.

I am happy to report that my gut feeling tells me to move back to Draft2digital. Not that I expect any more sales but the ethos of their ‘sharing between multiple platforms’ is more in line with my ethos for readers. Also as a non-techy writer, I can assure anyone that D2D has always had a brilliant support team available via telephone or email. They always resolve problems and give straight answers in a timely fashion. I am not saying KDP is bad because many people love it and do well.

However, my preferred choice is Draft2digital, the platform who helped me get my eBooks out into the world.