New Year, new idea?

Several years ago, I was heavily involved in the creation of a couple of non-fiction books.

At that time of blindly attempting the foray into producing eBooks, I stumbled across Draft2digital. I found their platform quite easy for a complete novice and I liked the wide spread of outlets that the books could be available from. Some large, some small and even some libraries appealed to my general attitude of supporting independent retailing and giving back. On the odd occasion that I needed help, their helpdesk is brilliant. A good team who read the question and reply with straightforward and concise answers that always resolved my issues.

Sadly, though over the years I have had very little sales from any of the outlets in all honesty. Ultimately it was simply down to the fact the books had received a few nice five star reviews but almost zero sales over a number of years.

Having recently noticed more and more mentions and advertising bombardment of KDP I decided to investigate. A lot of it has still left me bewildered and out of my depth, uncertain of much that I read. So I cannot say in truth that I am making an informed decision….more like a truly uninformed decision mixed with a little bit of a ‘why not?’ approach. I have wrestled with my years of loyalty to draft2digital and my general reluctance to dive full in with Amazon at the expense of all other retailers (for 90 days at least).

Based on so few sales with D2D I literally have nothing to lose by delisting these two books and moving them to KDP. Furthermore, there may be a lot to gain in trying KDP. If I do not try I will never know, so I go in with fingers crossed, optimism at something new and I will just see what happens.   

If my sales noticeably improve then I would reluctantly admit it makes sense to take my fiction books over to KDP too. Like any writer, I would love my books to find success. If on the other hand there were no noticeable increase in income, my personal philosophy and general principles would most likely pull me back to relisting with draft2digital.

Therefore, I am going into the New Year with the attitude that I see this initially as a three-month experiment in curiosity. To try understanding the jargon and alien terms throughout the daunting platform.

I am not expecting to get rich; I am not expecting KDP to be the way to get to Netflix or Disney who just might employ a team of talent scouts to scour KDP in the search for interesting new content for them to buy and turn into TV or movies. My dream would be to have them go from just eBooks into paper books on shelves in stores.

There is nothing to stop me from dreaming is there? Whatever happens I will blog my experiences in 3 months’ time.

Fingers crossed.

Happy 2024 everyone!