I’ve said before that I love that there are tools available to artists that allow their work to get into the wild without the barriers of traditional channels, such as publishing.

But this is also a double-edged sword, as without those barriers of traditional publishing, many people a) allow their work to get into the wild before it’s ready, and b) rely too much on platforms like Amazon for distribution.

Point A is something I’ve discussed before, and will again in the future, but this post focuses more on Point B.

On Tuesday, September 2, 2020, I had the opportunity to sit down (virtually) with Alex Hillman, one of the co-founders of Indy Hall (one of the first co-working spaces in the world, I came to learn) and the author of The Tiny MBA.

While the interview (see the video) was mostly about his struggles with Amazon delivering a strong customer service experience for the people that pre-ordered his book (or rather, the lack of them delivering on that experience) and his decision to ultimately pull the ebook off of Amazon on launch day, we did get into marketing and the need to build a platform, especially as an independent author.

A caveat before going forward: this is assuming that your goal with publishing your work is to make some money, and possibly even move into writing full time. If your goal is to simply publish for the sake of publishing and no expectations beyond that, which is perfectly fine, then this probably won’t resonate with you. And that’s OK.

See, here’s the thing: even if you, the writer, decides to go the traditional publishing route, you still need a platform to promote the book. Any publisher is going to want to make their investment in you back and then some, and they will expect you do to some of the heavy lifting. This can take the form of activating your social media following, participating in interviews and book signings (when we are allowed to do such things), and other activities that will help sell the book.

Alex had this audience already. He had spent over 10 years cultivating his audience through being an early adopter of Twitter (“I live there,” he said during the interview) and always looking to help advance the tech and creative communities in Philadelphia.

Because he gave more than he asked (see Gary Vee’s entire body of work for more on that), when it came time to make the offer to his audience for The Tiny MBA, they were quick to jump. The majority of his sales came through the book’s website; this meant that he not only was able to keep more of the revenue in his pocket, he also knew who his customers were.

This is vitally important, regardless of whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction. If you know who your customers are, you can communicate directly with them. You can let them know what you are working on, advances in your next work, when the next book will be released.

KDP vs FBA

First, some terminology.

FBA, or Fulfillment By Amazon, is where you have a product that you sell through Amazon that you own. For instance, when I had my barbecue sauce company, I used FBA to sell through Amazon. I put the sauce up for sale on Amazon and send cases of sauce to the Amazon Fulfillment Center nearest me, someone would buy it, and Amazon would send it. I would know who the customer was, as all I was doing was using Amazon to handle logistics. If you are shipping physically printed books that you had produced on your own dime this way, you would know who your customers were.

KDP, or Kindle Direct Publishing, is a different model where you load the files into Amazon using their publishing tool, they sell the ebook and physical copies that are printed on demand, and they pay you a royalty. In this case, you do not own your customer information, Amazon does.

You also will take a smaller amount of the book sale home, as Amazon will be taking the lion’s share. After all, you are using the leverage of their platform to sell your book.

In Alex’s case, using KDP created a big customer service issue when the book wouldn’t download into certain Kindle devices.

Fortunately for Alex, the Amazon sales made up about 25% of the total sales volume of the pre-sale, so this wasn’t a huge hit to take the book down from the platform. This was because he had taken the time to build and cultivate his audience prior to this.

Is all hope lost?

If you don’t have this kind of audience, is all lost? No, it just means that you will be more at the tender mercies of the platforms you publish on, for better or for worse, and you will need to take that into consideration both when deciding where to publish and how to handle customer service issues.

Does this make KDP evil or bad? No. It’s simply a matter of what you are willing to trade off. You get the behemoth of Amazon’s marketing and sales platform behind you, which makes it more likely (if you do all of the right things) to sell more copies of your book, but you also lose revenue and the ability to talk directly to your customers.

The same could be said for the Audible back-end platform, ACX, for publishing the audiobook version of your work. ACX makes things very easy to produce and publish, but you will be giving up 50% of your revenue (and then 50% of that if you are using Royalty Share to pay your producer), and you won’t know who your customers are. You won’t be able to email them directly and tell them when the next book is coming out, or when you’re making an appearance somewhere.

So, should you be building a marketing platform?

Hell yes. When you opt for the independent publishing route, you need to where all of the hats. You will need to spend time building a community on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook Groups, Good Reads, and anywhere else you can think of that would be relevant.

You should have your own website where you can sell the books in all of its forms directly to your audience. You should be blogging about your progress and the ups and downs of writing your next opus.

Now, you might be saying, “I don’t have time for that!” Listen, I can’t tell you how to spend your time, and yes, doing all of this can be time-consuming. But I can also tell you that if you are looking to make a few bucks on your writing, and especially if you are looking to write full-time, you need to do this. Here’s a resource that will show you how to make this work much, much easier.

By cultivating an audience (and being patient! This takes time!) you can slacken the ropes that tie you to platforms such as Amazon and Audible, thus making them valuable tools as opposed to your entire strategy.

Key Takeaways:

1) Go in with eyes wide open about any platform that you use to publish and distribute your book/ebook/eduiobook, and recognize the benefits and drawbacks.

2) Always read the fine print.

3) Build your own audience. This take work, but is necessary.

4) Be patient. The best time to start building your audience was 10 years ago. The second best time is right now.