Going Wide: Why Indie Authors Should Distribute Beyond Amazon
break free!
KDP Select is tempting. Amazon promises visibility through Kindle Unlimited, and the 70% royalty rate on exclusive titles sounds generous. But here is the catch: you are locking your entire catalog into a single storefront, handing one company total control over your pricing, your discoverability, and your income. If Amazon changes its algorithm tomorrow, or adjusts its page-read payout rate, you have no safety net. Thousands of authors have learned this the hard way when their KU income dropped overnight with no warning and no recourse.
Going wide means distributing your books across multiple retailers and platforms: Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, library systems like OverDrive, and subscription services like Storytel and Kobo Plus. Each platform has its own loyal reader base that rarely crosses over to Amazon. Apple Books readers tend to be high spenders who buy full-price books without waiting for sales. Kobo dominates Canada, Australia, and parts of Europe. Google Play reaches billions of Android users worldwide. These are readers you simply cannot reach while locked into KDP Select exclusivity.
The Library Opportunity
One of the most overlooked benefits of going wide is library distribution. Through OverDrive, your ebooks and audiobooks become available to libraries and schools worldwide. Library readers are voracious, loyal, and they discover new authors through librarian recommendations and curated collections. Every library checkout earns you a royalty — 50% of wholesale cost for ebooks, 45% for audiobooks — and many library readers go on to purchase your other titles directly. It is a discovery engine that KDP Select authors miss out on entirely.
How Shelf Indulgence Makes Going Wide Easy
The biggest objection to going wide is complexity. Managing uploads, metadata, and pricing across a dozen different platforms sounds exhausting. That is exactly the problem Shelf Indulgence solves. You upload your book once, and we distribute it everywhere: Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play, OverDrive, Storytel, and more. We handle formatting requirements, metadata delivery, and pricing conversions. You keep 90% of net profits from every platform, with a single dashboard to track all your sales. No upfront fees, no per-title charges, and no exclusivity requirements. Your books, your choice, every platform.