How To Sell In Peru ... Or Canada, Or Saudi Arabia, Or ...
There are times when I marvel at the Internet. Here I am, sitting at a computer in the rural tranquility of Shropshire, and looking through my sales data for The Complete Article Writer in 2019, and I see that copies have been bought in Peru, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and Australia (as well as here in the UK and in the USA).
And I’m not referring to sales on Amazon, either.
Such is the dominance of Amazon, it’s easy to upload anything you self-publish to them. However, while they’re one of the biggest sellers of eBooks, they’re no the only outlet for eBooks.
As the old adage goes, Never put all of your eggs in one basket. And that’s what some writers feel they’re doing when an author uploads their latest book to Amazon.
Amazon understand this, and hence offer such authors ‘bonuses’ for being exclusive. Sign up to Amazon exclusively and you can enrol in their KDP Select scheme, where readers who subscribe to their Prime service can download your book for free (and Amazon will compensate you financially for it).
The alternative is to Go Wide as the independents call it, which means not signing up to any Amazon exclusivity, and uploading your book to other online stores, such as Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Scribd and many more.
The quickest way to do this (instead of creating accounts and uploading you book to every one of these different retailers), is to use an aggregator service, such as Smashwords or Draft2Digital.
They take a small percentage of any sales, which, for many, is a small price to pay for the service.
I’ve used Smashwords for the past few years, and I’m just in the processing of switching over to Draft2Digital (D2D’s website is easier to use, a bit slicker, and they distribute to a few more channels than Smashwords.)
The beauty of these distributors is that you upload your book once, set your price, and the distributor does the rest. (One downside to using a distributor is that you can’t charge different prices in different retailers - which some authors like to do, perhaps offering a promotion for a short period, for example.)
But once you’re up and running with the distributor, they’ll process the sales data and revenue from each of the retailer channels, in whichever country those sales appear in, such as Peru, Saudi Arabia ... etc.
So, if you’re planning on publishing a book soon, or you’ve already done so and are looking to expand into new markets, then take a look at the book distributors. They could get your work out to a far wider readership than you ever imagined.
Good luck.