Amazon Kindle’s new “Select” program allows you to get paid by Amazon for lending your book out to people without them actually purchasing it. You get paid out of a fund based on how many times your book gets borrowed compared to everyone else in the program. If your book gets borrowed 100 times and another person’s gets borrowed 1,000 times, they’ll get paid 10 times what you get paid out of the fund – regardless of the price of either book.

Now, to some this may sound like a great deal, but is it really?

Here’s the verbiage straight from Amazon’s website that should make you sit up and take notice.

“During the 90-day period of exclusivity, you cannot distribute your book digitally anywhere else, including on your website, blogs, etc. However, you can continue to distribute your book in physical format, or in any format other than digital.”

Now, if you’re planning to do absolutely NO other marketing, then it may be fine to include yourself in the program. But I personally don’t see an advantage to tying up my rights to sell my ebooks, especially from my own website.

Let’s take a closer look at the numbers. Let’s say Amazon has 1 million books on Kindle and they all get borrowed 10 times. That’s 10,000,000 shares of a $500,000 pie each month. That comes out to each borrow “credit” paying a nickel. Now, let’s say you’re 10 times better than the competition and your book gets borrowed 100 times. That means you made a whopping $5.

Combine that with the fact that Amazon doesn’t give you customer information, email, etc. which means you can’t follow up, and the deal isn’t quite as good. So unless you have a darn good way to capture people out of Kindle books or you plan to only offer your ebook exclusively on Kindle and nowhere else (which I do with some of my ebooks), then the Kindle “Select” program may not be that great a deal.

Taking one last pass at the example above, let’s say instead of 100 people borrowing your ebook, you sold 25 of them instead. Which scenario puts you further ahead? Even at 99-cents, you’ll make more money, net more serious customers, and NOT tie up your rights to sell on your own website or anywhere else you darn well please!

Don?t get me wrong. I LOVE Amazon. I LOVE the Amazon Kindle program and I make a LOT of money from it (along with selling my other products on Amazon). But unless you are ONLY selling on Kindle, it may not be worth your while to try to get your piece of what seems like a great big pie, but in reality you’ll only end up with a tiny sliver of what you could have gotten otherwise with some basic marketing effort.

Still have questions? Here’s a link to the FAQ on Amazon Select for more and you can also read the terms of service for the program:

https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A6KILDRNSCOBA

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Jim

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