The Publishing Performance Show

Dale L. Roberts - Beyond Amazon: The Strategic Approach to Publishing Wide

• Teddy Smith • Episode 71

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Dale L. Roberts is an award-winning writer and the author of "Publishing Wide," a comprehensive guide for authors looking to expand their book distribution beyond Amazon. With over a decade of experience in self-publishing, Dale shares valuable insights on how authors can maximize their reach and revenue by strategically publishing across multiple platforms, while maintaining control of their publishing business.


In this episode:

  • The concept of "wide publishing" and why it matters to authors
  • The advantages and limitations of Amazon KDP Select
  • Strategic approaches to distributing your books across platforms
  • The importance of understanding platform overlap to avoid duplication
  • How to navigate ISBN options when publishing wide
  • Key platforms for publishing books beyond Amazon
  • Direct sales strategies and tools for authors
  • Common mistakes authors make when going wide


Resources mentioned:


Book Recommendations:


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[00:00:00] Teddy Smith: Hi everyone, and welcome to the Publishing Performance Show. Today I'm really happy to be joined by Dale L. Roberts, who is an award winning writer, and he's also the writer of this new book, which is Publishing Wide. So thank you for joining me, Dale. 

[00:00:17] Dale L. Roberts: Hey, Teddy, it's great to finally get connected. I think you and I have been passing each other in various, like, conferences, we have some mutual friends and such, so I think this was inevitable, right?

[00:00:29] Teddy Smith: Yeah, no, I'm really happy that you finally came on. So I've been chasing you around for a while. So it's good to finally get you on. So your new book is wide publishing for authors. So tell me what, what does wide publishing forces? What does that mean? 

[00:00:41] Dale L. Roberts: A lot of people, they'll see that if you're outside of the business, you're like wide publishing.

[00:00:46] Dale L. Roberts: What is that opposed to narrow publishing? Although that's not a thing yet. Uh, but wide publishing means to get your book out. To every Avenue possible as wide of a reach as possible. That's always the best way to describe it. And the reason why wide publishing has become part of our lexicon, if you will, for, for authors is the fact that, um, a lot of people came into the business through Amazon, Kindle direct publishing and part of Amazon KDP is there.

[00:01:19] Dale L. Roberts: KDP select program where you can enroll your ebook and keep it just on Amazon somewhere along the way. Uh, authors kind of forgot the fact that KDP select only affects eBooks and it doesn't affect the print book or audio book iterations. So what they end up doing is they just believe, well, let me just go ahead and put it over on Amazon and we're good.

[00:01:45] Dale L. Roberts: But you and I both know there's so much more happening off of the Amazon platform than people realize. And I think that's done a great disservice to a lot of people, especially those that enroll in the KDP Select program, getting nothing out of it. But here, well. In order for me to have my breakout success, I've got to be enrolled in KDP select.

[00:02:05] Dale L. Roberts: So I'm just going to stay exclusively on Amazon. And that is just a recipe for disaster and heartache. And that's why, why publishing for authors kind of came in because I have been doing this for over a decade now. And one of the things I've discovered is that. You don't have to have your book live and die on Amazon.

[00:02:25] Dale L. Roberts: It can perform much better beyond Amazon. If you just give it a shot. 

[00:02:31] Teddy Smith: Yeah, definitely. What, what are the advantages of staying just on Amazon? Are there any particular perks you get from Amazon from just being there? 

[00:02:38] Dale L. Roberts: Just being exclusive with your ebook, you're going to get many marketing opportunities that people don't get otherwise through the Amazon platform, including, of course, the five day free book promo, which is excellent for really getting your book into more readers hands and getting more reviews.

[00:02:54] Dale L. Roberts: That's a great deal. You know, promotional tool, a lot of people discount the free book promo, but it can be super, super effective if you've done it properly. There's the seven day Kindle countdown deal, which is in the U S and UK, where you can set a timer. It's like a countdown timer, essentially, and you can do it in various intervals of pricing.

[00:03:16] Dale L. Roberts: So let's say your original price for ebook is 9. 99. You could start it at 0. 99 and then maybe in another couple days it goes to 2. 99 until it gradually goes back up to full price. Uh, there are also the. Hidden advantages. A lot of people don't discuss this enough that, you know, when you enroll your, your book in KDP select, anytime someone checks out that book, it is the equivalent of getting a sale where it will reflect that.

[00:03:43] Dale L. Roberts: Not necessarily in your financial report. You're not going to get as much when you get a sale of a book, unless you have this massive ebook. But what it does is it will affect the Amazon best seller rank like you had done a sale. So it's a little bit of an unfair advantage that Books get when they go into KDP select, but that's the, the main advantage of going exclusive, just those ones.

[00:04:05] Dale L. Roberts: And I'm sure I can probably pick out a couple of others if I sat there and thought about it. Uh, but conversely speaking, if you're not leveraging those marketing and promotional tools, if you're not taking advantage of some of those perks, then there's no point in staying on Amazon. I know a number of authors I've run into where they just.

[00:04:26] Dale L. Roberts: blindly enrolled in KDP select, but haven't done anything with it. They didn't do any price promotions. They didn't like advertise the fact that, Hey, I'm in Kindle unlimited. You can go ahead and check out my book, things like that, you know? So you really need to, when you go into this, go into it with your eyes wide open and be prepared to put in some work because it's just not a simple case of, you know, well, let me just publish and pray for the best.

[00:04:51] Dale L. Roberts: If you really want to maximize the most out of their marketing tools, and especially the KDP select program, you got to go all in, you got to go all in because otherwise there's, there's no sense in doing anything else. Now, you hear me saying go all in, we're talking about wide publishing. I'm speaking about that specific ebook.

[00:05:08] Dale L. Roberts: Remember, because why publishing doesn't have to be, it's, it's not prescribed prescriptive. I'm not going to tell someone like, Well, you got to do this and you got to do this. Well, it's create your own adventure. Choose the, the, the ingredients in the recipe that you wish to make up. And so that's why it's just like, you can do KDP select.

[00:05:28] Dale L. Roberts: And still have wide publishing for your print books and your audio books as well. 

[00:05:33] Teddy Smith: Yeah, definitely. Uh, the reason I was asking is because I've, I have a bit of a mixture of people that I speak to. A lot of them are, um, are just starting out and they're publishing on Amazon. So they're asking me, should I go into KDP selects?

[00:05:43] Teddy Smith: And I'm thinking. Usually probably should for some, for some people, because it's like you've got those free promotion days, you're going to get a hundred free downloads of your book. That's going to be really helpful to get your book into the first people's hands. But the downside is you don't get to publish a book wide at all.

[00:06:00] Teddy Smith: Like you are quite restricted on that. So what does. What, what are those restrictions are like 

[00:06:06] Dale L. Roberts: the restrictions you're going to run into when you're, you're doing KDP select, obviously you're going to have to just have that limited marketing reach that, that's just going to be Amazon alone. Um, but you know, when you, I guess the best way.

[00:06:26] Teddy Smith: So as well as I say was what, what, what, what you restricted because Amazon is, uh, what you're restricted from doing off Amazon is what I mean. 

[00:06:35] Dale L. Roberts: Restate the question again. I'm sorry. 

[00:06:36] Teddy Smith: So if you, if you're in the kindle unlimited and you are publishing narrow, what are your restrictions from outside marketing?

[00:06:43] Teddy Smith: You know, you can't do things yourself. 

[00:06:47] Dale L. Roberts: Oh, gosh. I mean, there's, there's many things you can do inside for marketing when it comes to your KDP select book. I mean, obviously you have Amazon advertising. That one is one of my best tools. I love to tap into that and you don't even have to be in KDP select in order to take advantage of something like that.

[00:07:02] Dale L. Roberts: Uh, but you do have those things, but as far as getting further off the platform, not having that ability right there really does kind of handcuff you because you could have your book and every online retailer and your audio book and every online retailer, but let's just say you have a real. That exclusively is all about eBooks.

[00:07:20] Dale L. Roberts: They're like, I don't want the print book. I don't want the audio book. I want the eBook. Oh, it's on Amazon. Believe it or not. Not everybody likes Amazon. Not everyone is on Amazon's platform. Yes, they do bring in the lion's share of global publication profits. We can both agree on that one right there, but it does come with those limitations just to keep that in mind.

[00:07:42] Teddy Smith: Yeah. So, so if you're not, if you're, if you don't use. So if you do use Kindle, uh, unlimited Kindle select, then you are restricted on the different places where you can put your ebook. That's what, that's what I was asking. 

[00:07:53] Dale L. Roberts: Correct. Yeah. You can't get anywhere else beyond Amazon. When you agree to that 90 day agreement, you say, I'm not going to put this on anywhere else.

[00:08:02] Dale L. Roberts: Now you can do samples, 10%, you can put it over on your website. You can distribute besides your email, things like that. Um, but. You can't take that book in its entirety in digital format and put it on, let's say Apple or put it on your direct sales on your website or any of those other things. So yeah, as soon as it, it goes into that 90 day agreement.

[00:08:23] Dale L. Roberts: And I wholeheartedly agree with you on this here, Teddy, when it comes to newbie authors, like give it a shot for sure. The thing is when you're new to this business, it can be super, super overwhelming. And to me, I say, start out with that 90 day agreement. Because within the first three months, first of all, you're going to learn some new tricks of the trade.

[00:08:42] Dale L. Roberts: You're also going to learn a lot more about some of the abbreviations and you're probably going to feel a little less overwhelmed. And at that point within three months, you'll have that opportunity to say. Yes, this is great for me. It's giving me my value or no, it's not bringing my value. In that instance, if it's not giving you any value, you know, you're going to want to deselect enrollment inside your dashboard for that specific ebook and wait out the entirety of your 90 days.

[00:09:08] Dale L. Roberts: And it'll typically say when your 90 day is up, do not do not. I mean, I do just do not. Ever test them on this don't ever kind of go. Well, I'm gonna go ahead and uh, deselect enrollment Oh, there's two days left. Let me go and publish this you draft the digital Amazon's always watching and I've found many authors who have tested those boundaries heck I even ran into an author that is currently testing that idea out dude told me he's like Point Blank says to me that he was in the KDP Select program and distributing the ebook through IngramSpark.

[00:09:44] Dale L. Roberts: I was like, good luck because Amazon will catch up to you. Yeah, 

[00:09:49] Teddy Smith: also IngramSpark are probably using Amazon Web Services to run their back end. So right. Either way, Jeff's going to find out. 

[00:09:57] Dale L. Roberts: Yep. Yep, exactly. I said that's their job. They, they want to make sure that people are truly exclusive to their platform.

[00:10:07] Teddy Smith: So what are the other platforms that other authors should consider publishing when they're thinking about publishing wide? What we 

[00:10:12] Dale L. Roberts: tapped into one, IngramSpark is fantastic. Great resource, they've been around for over a decade. Their parent company is Ingram Book Group, which is responsible for distributing, Print books to over 45, 000 online retailers, libraries, and institutions.

[00:10:27] Dale L. Roberts: Um, IngramSpark's a good one, Draft2Digital. I'm a little bit biased on that. I got quite a few friends over in the Draft2Digital headquarters. They're an aggregate publisher, much like IngramSpark is, in that they will. Published to numerous platforms on your behalf in exchange for a cut of the revenue. Um, that's the beauty of self publishing.

[00:10:45] Dale L. Roberts: A lot of platforms will do revenue share. KDP does a revenue share. Ingram spark does drafted digital, but then you look over at another platform. One that I really like is called published drive. Now, this one is not for everybody. PublishDrive, you pay a monthly subscription amount for the number of books that you have.

[00:11:05] Dale L. Roberts: In exchange, you get a hundred percent of the net profits coming in. There's no split in revenue other than your monthly dues that you have there. Love me some PublishDrive. Their user interface is probably one of the best on the marketplace. Not sure if you've ever checked them out, Teddy. Amazing interface.

[00:11:22] Teddy Smith: Yeah, I've spoken to them at alternation, but I didn't haven't had a chance to use it out myself. So I have to put that one down to use out. 

[00:11:29] Dale L. Roberts: Yeah, the one thing that's unique about PublishDrive compared to the other platforms, well, there's many things that are unique, but their user interface is all in one page.

[00:11:39] Dale L. Roberts: You know, you go on KDP, it's three steps for the upload process. You draft the digital, I think it's four, five steps. IngramSpark is 50, 000 steps. I'm exaggerating. A lot of people are like, great. I'm going to go to IngramSpark now, Dale, that you told me that. There's, there are many steps, but it's definitely worth it.

[00:11:58] Dale L. Roberts: But those are the ones that jump off top of my head. I think a couple other ones to kind of consider when you're looking to go beyond would be, um, BookVault's great for print on demand. I anticipate hearing very big things about them here in the near future. They just launched a new box set feature, physical box set and slip cases.

[00:12:17] Dale L. Roberts: That was pretty good. They've been teasing me for the last year to two years now about that, but they've also have in the pipeline that they're going to eventually use ebook and audio book for distribution. So I was like, that's exciting to me being able to see that we have options out there because if we're not happy with the Amazon KDP.

[00:12:35] Dale L. Roberts: It kind of stinks because a lot of people think they're left out in the cold. Oh, I got no other way to get on Amazon or I don't have any other way to get my book out there. Having book vault eventually in that game right there. And there's one other one I'd be remiss because I get, I named tons of them inside this book.

[00:12:51] Dale L. Roberts: There's a good reason why it's so thick. It's because it's literally like a directory. But one other one to mention is LaterPress. They're an ebook distribution platform. They are very unique. In that you get a hundred percent of your royalty. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't say that wrong. You get a hundred percent of your royalty, minus payment processing fees, which is like 2.

[00:13:11] Dale L. Roberts: 9 percent plus a 49 cent fee or something like that. Um, but you know, later press is really, really nice. Uh, look into this one. I see very big things happening. In fact, right now they've been teasing doing audiobooks as well. So that means that there's going to be two digital components now. I did push them a little bit and I was like, do we ever expect print on demand?

[00:13:32] Dale L. Roberts: and that was a No, don't hold your breath. So It is kind of nice to see a platform like later press come up to the forefront Especially since they're run by andy authors for andy authors 

[00:13:45] Teddy Smith: Yeah, definitely. BookVault's amazing because the quality of their print is so good. Oh gosh, yeah. They're like, they do the printed edges and the foiling and everything.

[00:13:53] Teddy Smith: So if you've got a special edition, it's absolutely amazing to use. Um, because obviously the KDP printing is a bit like, well, it's not the best. It's 

[00:14:02] Dale L. Roberts: basic. It's basic. Yeah, it's basic. Lower your expectations is what I always tell people. Because there's, there's often times where someone will get a proof from KDP and go Oh, this is what it's like.

[00:14:14] Dale L. Roberts: And I'm like, well, it's not terrible. I don't think anybody's going to buy that book and go, well, this is trash. I, you know, very few people should probably be doing that. Hopefully if you've done a good job of writing a good book, but, uh, yeah. Book vault. Oh my gosh. You're not kidding. And especially the UK based print on demand.

[00:14:29] Dale L. Roberts: That's coming. Like. Their printers are second to none and they're not paying me to say this at all. I, they haven't paid me anything actually, to be honest with you, but they, yeah, they have just great. They do sprayed edges, gold foiling. They got the box sets. You can also sell bundles through your website with them.

[00:14:50] Dale L. Roberts: There are so many, many great things on that. But I, I'm glad you said that because yeah, UK based printing for book vault. Oh gosh. Chef's kiss. It's beautiful. It's the next best thing to offset printing. And a lot of people that aren't familiar with offset printing is if you go to like, say, a local print shop where they actually like will print and cut books, you actually have to buy in bulk.

[00:15:14] Dale L. Roberts: But therein lies the problem. If you're an indie author with working on a limited budget, offset printing is probably not the best option. So that's where a printer like book fault. It's refreshing because Chef's kiss. Man, I mean, you said it, I said it, it's, it's good. And again, we're not being paid to say this.

[00:15:33] Dale L. Roberts: Uh, although I'm going to probably reach out to Luca and I'm going to ask him if he, you know, kick me a couple of quarters. 

[00:15:38] Teddy Smith: Yeah, exactly. Well, if you're just starting getting started, if you're thinking about getting started, sorry, with, uh, publishing wide. Where is the best place to start? 

[00:15:49] Dale L. Roberts: Always start on Amazon KDP.

[00:15:51] Dale L. Roberts: That's just, it's just dead simple. That's usually always my first step. Uh, so I will go to KDP and then I start to expand from there thinking about which avenue reaches what retailers. So I focus on that and I start to whittle that down. So when it comes to wide publishing, a lot of people assume, okay, I can just go ahead and publish everywhere and then be done with it.

[00:16:14] Dale L. Roberts: No, it's way more complex. That's why I wrote an entire book about it. 

[00:16:19] Teddy Smith: Yeah, 

[00:16:20] Dale L. Roberts: it's so much more complex than because here's the problem is. So I mentioned two companies that have overlap. Actually, numerous companies have overlap. For instance, Ingram Spark and Draft2Digital and PublishDrive. Let's just walk it back to IngramSpark and Draft2Digital for now, so we're not making it difficult.

[00:16:36] Dale L. Roberts: Um, with them doing print on demand, they use the same distributor and printer for the books. So this means that for Draft2Digital and IngramSpark, they're both using Ingram Book Group. So you would want to use either. Or you can't use both because there's going to be a clash. Now, a lot of people were like, well, what if I use a different ISBN on each one?

[00:17:02] Dale L. Roberts: Um, yes, but then you're going to have duplicate listings of your book underneath different ISBNs on one website, which is going to confuse customers. Or it's also going to confuse the algorithms because it's not going to share. You know, where do I send traffic to? Should I send it over to this book or this book?

[00:17:20] Dale L. Roberts: So then you're, you're ending up, you know, pretty much competing against yourself. So that's why you got to be super careful about where you go first and the next. So that's why I go KDP first. And one of the things I will say is, first of all, a, if you want your ebook to go wide, do not enroll in KDP select, just don't touch it.

[00:17:40] Dale L. Roberts: You know, if you want to go take that ebook somewhere else. You have to leave that D selected. The next thing is when it comes to the print books for paperback only, they have a, uh, what's called expanded distribution and it comes at a 20 percent less for royalties, which isn't terrible by itself, but here's the problem with the expanded distribution, the people who fulfill that is.

[00:18:05] Dale L. Roberts: Ingram book group. But problem is with that, you can actually go direct to the source through places like Ingram, Spark, or even Draft2Digital for that matter, and actually make more in your royalties. So what I recommend is remove expanded distribution for your paperback. It's not available for hardcover.

[00:18:25] Dale L. Roberts: Will it be eventually? I'm sure it will. And I would still give you the same advice is. Don't put it through expanded distribution. Because here's the problem is you are going through a middleman to get to a middleman, you might as well just go directly to the middleman rather than having a middleman to your middleman.

[00:18:41] Dale L. Roberts: Meaning that let's see here. I go ahead and I published my paper back through KDP. I enroll it in Expanded Distribution, then it gets sent over to Ingram Book Group to distribute. They're going to take their pound of flesh, they're going to send it on over to you, then Amazon's going to take their pound of flesh, and then you're left with way less than if you were to go direct to the source.

[00:19:03] Dale L. Roberts: Now, there's arguments in favor, I totally get it, that some people are like, I don't want to have 50, 000 dashboards, Dale. So if that, if you're that person, you're like, I don't want to be nickel and dimed to death. Let me just select expanded distribution. Go ahead. But let me give you just one small argument, one small argument.

[00:19:23] Dale L. Roberts: I reached out to the KDP team and they weren't entirely sure about this. But if you notice inside the last step in the upload process for print books, you'll see that has expanded distribution for us and UK. Here's the problem though. Ingram book group reaches more than the U S and UK. They hit Australia.

[00:19:44] Dale L. Roberts: They hit areas of Europe. They hit so many other places. So. The theory is, and something that I was not able to confirm with the KDP team is that they're only leveraging US and UK sales by way of Ingram Book Group. So you're not only getting less money by going through KDP, you're also getting less reach by going through them for expanded distribution.

[00:20:07] Dale L. Roberts: So that's why I say deselect that, go right to the source. So typically my upload process works like this. I go and do all eBooks. So I'll open up all of my tabs. I got a folder. I just Open all tabs, boom, get them all logged in and such. And then all I got to do is one at a time. I'm knocking them down.

[00:20:23] Dale L. Roberts: Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Then my next step is going to be paperbacks. And then I do the same thing. Open up all the folders, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. So that way I'm just going and loading these things up. It can take me upwards of about two hours. Total, if I'm just taking my time to get all these published to the various platforms by way of ebook, uh, and both paperback and hardcover that wouldn't include audio book.

[00:20:47] Dale L. Roberts: But if I were to include audio book, that would probably tack on additional half hour tops. 

[00:20:54] Teddy Smith: When one thing you just touched on just previously was with the ISBN number. Now I know with Amazon, they give you a free ISBN number or they can do, does that have any impact on publishing wide? If you take that free ISBN number?

[00:21:07] Dale L. Roberts: Good question. I'm so glad I could tell you you're setting me up on this one. You're like, he's, he's got a good answer in this one. Uh, free ISBNs are fantastic, but here's the problem is you technically. They're not free. Like you're not able to just own that. That is not yours at all. So the best way I can tell you, Teddy is I'm going to invite you over for lunch today.

[00:21:26] Dale L. Roberts: Come on over my house. You can use all of my cookware, cook whatever you want for lunch. But when you leave, you got to leave my cookware. You can't just like, just go wander off of my cookware. And this is the same thing when it comes to the free assigned ISBNs is they're providing you with a tool in order to place your book on their marketplace in order to be identified internationally by a specific number.

[00:21:51] Dale L. Roberts: That's what it stands for an international book standard number. So, um, With that being said, they don't want you taking their ISBN anywhere else. It can only function on that platform alone. So let's just say a, for instance, Teddy, you can't afford to get ISBNs. Maybe you're in a region where it's ridiculously expensive.

[00:22:13] Dale L. Roberts: I know it is in US and UK. You know, sometimes 125 for a single ISBN. Now, if you buy in bulk, you get it much cheaper. So I bought a thousand like a long time ago because I was like, it's a buck 50 per. I don't need to worry about this. I can will this over to like my nieces and nephews when I die. So, um, but let's just say you can't, you can't afford it.

[00:22:33] Dale L. Roberts: Can you still publish wide with free assigned ISBNs? Yes, you can. Um, it's going to be a little bit more difficult as far as tracking where you should and shouldn't go. See, the benefit of having your own ISBN is, let's say I went and published my book through Draft2Digital with a specific ISBN. Then I go over to IngramSpark and I try to use that same one.

[00:22:55] Dale L. Roberts: IngramSpark is going to go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, hang on a second. That ISBN is already in use, man. Do you want to reassign that over to us, or do you want to keep it there? They're just covering it to where you're not doing any duplicate listings. So my problem is, is when you remove that aspect of ISBNs, you don't have your own.

[00:23:15] Dale L. Roberts: You're sticking with free assigned ISBN. Problem is, you can go and publish your book through Draft2Digital and IngramSpark with their free assigned ISBNs, which by the way. IngramSpark does allow for free ISBNs in the U. S. only. So sadly, outside the U. S., that's not the case. But we'll say just for this particular instance, you've got the free assign on each one of those.

[00:23:37] Dale L. Roberts: You now have a duplicate listing. So this is where you definitely would want, go download my book, Wide Publishing for Authors. It'll tell you exactly some of those avenues that you don't want to duplicate lists. So that way you're, you're aware, like, okay. He said IngramSpark or Draft2Digital, not both.

[00:23:53] Dale L. Roberts: Okay. I'm going to go with IngramSpark since I'm in the U. S. Let's say you're not in the U. S., Teddy. You go, okay, I'm just going to go for Draft2Digital because that makes sense since they do the free assigned ISBNs, which makes life a lot easier. So it's just being very cautious about where you're going.

[00:24:08] Dale L. Roberts: Now, it's not an issue for eBooks and audio books. In fact, in a lot of instances, you won't even need an ISBN. However, there are those safeguards put in place again. If you have an ISBN, there won't be a clash then. And this is one of the reasons why I put a, an ISBN over on my ebook and I put it on my audio book.

[00:24:26] Dale L. Roberts: So that way I make sure that I don't forget something at some point or another and just duplicate publish to somewhere. 

[00:24:32] Teddy Smith: That's really good advice because I know a lot of people just want to take that free ISBN there are, if you are thinking about publishing wide, then it can cause some problems. 

[00:24:40] Dale L. Roberts: It's got its limitations, and I think something, Teddy, that we should address is the fact that let's say, for instance, that you really do want your own ISBN.

[00:24:48] Dale L. Roberts: Like, should you wait? I mean, personally, I wouldn't recommend you waiting. Get the book out in the marketplace, start marketing and promoting it, and here's the deal. When you can afford an ISBN, you can always delist that first edition and then publish a new edition with the new ISBN on that. There's a little bit of work behind having to do that, but It's better to get your book out into the marketplace now than waiting till later when you could potentially afford it or not even afford it and then eventually your book just dies under some digital dust inside your PC.

[00:25:22] Teddy Smith: Yeah, definitely. Now with all the different platforms, as we've just mentioned, Draft2Digital, IngramSpark, there's various different ones. What does, does the royalty rate look somewhat similar across all of them or are there any that are particularly good for this royalty rate? 

[00:25:35] Dale L. Roberts: Um, I'm not going to be able to remember specific percentages off the top of my head.

[00:25:40] Dale L. Roberts: I think a lot of people think I'm like the human encyclopedia and I get up and I'm like IngramSpark is this percentage or whatever. Um, but yeah, it's, it fluctuates from one platform to the other. I think I'd mentioned already how, you know, for instance, the print books, you do an expanded distribution, it's 40 percent minus print fees.

[00:25:56] Dale L. Roberts: Whereas if you go through, uh, drafted digital is 45%, or if you go through IngramSpark, it's 45 to 10%. 60, excuse me, 35 to 65 percent based on whatever the region might be that you're, you're selecting. Um, so it, it will vary from one platform. I didn't know it wasn't 35, to 65 for sure. Uh, that's why I say, I don't remember a lot of these things, but yeah, making yourself aware of some of these royalties and.

[00:26:23] Dale L. Roberts: Read the fine print as well. Like for instance, a lot of people don't realize that through KDP you get 70 percent for royalties priced between 2. 99 and 9. 99 for eBooks. But there's an asterisk and not enough people are addressing this and I always just try to inform people that yeah It's 70 percent minus some fees and I have to kind of say that off to the side because they actually do Charge delivery fees based on your file size So if you happen to be let's say a photographer putting out a photography book and you've got these dense files That's gonna pull a lot Of fees from it.

[00:27:03] Dale L. Roberts: I found that out the hard way. I had some fitness books early on in my career where I was putting out a ton of pictures in them and oh my gosh, it was killing my royalty like like those delivery fees are the worst. Now, if you happen to be a. Fiction author and it's nothing but text. It's going to be negligible that amount, but it's read that fine print and be aware of each one of the platforms and some of their hangups and quirks.

[00:27:28] Dale L. Roberts: I tried to cover a lot of that within my publication, but it's always a smart idea. To not just take my word for it or anybody else's word for it, do your due diligence. This is your author business, and it's important for you to kind of know, okay, what's the differences in royalties? What's the differences in perks?

[00:27:44] Dale L. Roberts: What's the differences in the marketability and those types of things? And then make your informed decision. Um, but you know, As far as where's the best royalties and such, I've done a whole series of videos for eBooks and print books. I can't remember them off the top of my head now, but I did base them on royalties.

[00:28:04] Dale L. Roberts: And I, I do know I already gave you one was later presses a hundred percent. If you want to get any better than that, you could do, um, story origin does 5%. I think it is for the payment processing fees, but it's pretty doable if you do direct sales So there's the main platforms of 

[00:28:21] Teddy Smith: similar ballpark. Yeah, you're, you're, 

[00:28:23] Dale L. Roberts: you're, it's, it's gonna be about in the same ballpark.

[00:28:27] Dale L. Roberts: Um, just do your, do your research first. So that way you're, you're not going into this kind of going. Well, Dale said, yeah, but there, there's, there is an asterisk to that much like the way in which, you know. 70 percent royalty over KDP, you're like 70%. It's great. Everybody's like high five and everybody be like minus print minus the delivery fees.

[00:28:49] Dale L. Roberts: So there are those fees that you have to account for. 

[00:28:52] Teddy Smith: Great. So I'll just just try and send. There's not one that's like far and away better. It's like you just got to work out the different ones and how they look. 

[00:28:58] Dale L. Roberts: Yeah, for sure. 

[00:29:00] Teddy Smith: And one of the final parts want to talk about was direct sales. Now, obviously, this is a big part of going wide and You know, sell directly to your customers that takes away a lot of these royalty problems because you can just sell directly to your customers and then you keep most of the money yourself.

[00:29:15] Teddy Smith: So tell us a bit about how direct sales work and are there any particular tools we should be looking at for how you can do those direct sales and provide the books to the customers? 

[00:29:26] Dale L. Roberts: The biggest benefit of direct sales, oh gosh, there's so many, but it's that you're removing the middleman. There's no longer a middleman.

[00:29:34] Dale L. Roberts: You are now in direct contact, hence direct sales, direct contact with your readership. There are so many benefits. So for instance, uh, if you're a marketer, You can put a Facebook pixel over on your website when somebody goes to check out, or for that matter, when somebody checks out, they'll give you their email address, those types of things, you're able to have that direct contact.

[00:29:55] Dale L. Roberts: And of course, since you're removing that middleman, that means you're going to be getting pretty much all of the earnings. Um, as far as tools goes, boy, there's so many you can dive into the direct sales, but You don't have to use them all. So, for instance, if you want to do direct sales for eBooks, you could probably go to a platform like LaterPress, or you can get a marketing tool like StoryOrigin to do direct sales through them.

[00:30:18] Dale L. Roberts: There are many aspects that you can kind of, you know, play with when it comes to direct sales. Popular ones, though, include Shopify, uh, WooCommerce. Um, let's see here. Gumroad's a pretty good one, but PayHip, I feel, is just an They have an edge on Gumroad because they have direct integration with BookVault, which we had already talked about before.

[00:30:40] Dale L. Roberts: And I've had a number of sales through my PayHip store because of BookVault. And the nice thing is the integration took like, I don't know, two, three minutes for me to kind of whip together to do just a product listing. Uh, dead simple, really easy. That's not including the upload process, by the way, you know, that's assuming you already have everything uploaded.

[00:30:59] Dale L. Roberts: You have all that information, go over pay hip, get it integrated. And here's the beauty of it is book vault will only take how much it costs to print the book and ship the book. Everything else is profit in your pocket. So I get way better royalties when I'm selling my print books through pay hip. Not to mention that when someone does purchase a product, I have it to where they get automatically opted in for email marketing.

[00:31:22] Dale L. Roberts: And they agree to it. So as soon as they go ahead and do that, I've got that email and I'm in direct contact with that reader for future campaigns or future books that I'm gonna go ahead and publish. So that way I can remarket retarget and send that on out to them. But there, there are so many things you can do with direct sales.

[00:31:40] Dale L. Roberts: And I see a lot of indie authors heading towards this direction. And I think the reason why is a lot of people are aware now that Amazon KDP is not the only game in town. And sometimes they act rather unfairly to the account holders out there. And so some people are like, okay, screw that. I saw someone who just got banned because Reasons unknown and that makes me scared and I'm with them.

[00:32:05] Dale L. Roberts: It is a scary prospect. If you've built your entire business on Amazon KDP and they just pull the rug out from under you, then you're kind of stuck. So this is why people are looking into direct sales because their thought is okay. Let me go ahead. And if I'm going to have to drive all this traffic myself, why don't I just send it to my own website where I can go ahead and make those sales there?

[00:32:25] Dale L. Roberts: But direct sales is definitely the direction. I believe that most authors should consider not all authors, but most authors should consider having direct sales because it is an option to directly communicate and work with your readership and your and the people that are thrilled to read your books.

[00:32:42] Teddy Smith: Definitely. I guess it also means you can track your book. Advertising and marketing, because you can see where clicks have resulted in sales. If you're driving people to Amazon listing, it's almost impossible to see how that's worked. 

[00:32:53] Dale L. Roberts: It's tough. It's tough. Yeah. Because if you're instance, using Facebook ads to send somebody over to Amazon, you can look at your numbers and look at the Facebook numbers and go, okay, hopefully kind of tie some of those together.

[00:33:06] Dale L. Roberts: But when you start to get like a smaller threshold of sales, it's hard to differentiate and go, well, did that come from Or is that through organic sales? Amazon advertising is probably one of the greatest ways to do attribution, but even then it has its limitations. 

[00:33:21] Teddy Smith: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean, Amazon ads is really the only way to do attribution on Amazon that I've thought I can see properly.

[00:33:26] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Um, with direct sales, are there any mistakes that people make when they're doing it? Like, do they, is there anything that people do wrong when they're thinking about direct sales? Because I know it is quite a, you've obviously got to do all the driving of the traffic yourself. Is there any problems that people come across?

[00:33:41] Dale L. Roberts: I think the biggest problem a lot of people make is they've built the shop, but nobody comes and that's the problem is, I think we've been spoiled by platforms like Amazon where they're like, Hey, publish to our platform for free. We're just going to take a cut of your revenue and then sometimes you can just publish it there.

[00:34:00] Dale L. Roberts: You can publish and pray and sometimes make a significant amount of sales. Could just get organic sales. Whereas with it's your website that you're directing people to, it's on you to go and send that traffic over there and do it consistently. So you can't just publish and pray for the best on your own website.

[00:34:17] Dale L. Roberts: You're going to need to have Good, solid marketing and promotional strategy that's going to drive traffic every day there before you start to see any type of organic sales through search engine traffic. You know, you're going to need to look at this in the long game. Sure. Maybe you're only doing a sale per month on your website.

[00:34:39] Dale L. Roberts: The only way to increase that is good old fashioned promotion. Just get out there, promote, promote, promote. Everybody needs to hear it. You might say it a million times. But guess what the billions of people around the world probably haven't heard it a fraction of those amount of time. So you're going to need say it at least a billion if not a million to millions.

[00:34:58] Dale L. Roberts: So 

[00:35:00] Teddy Smith: yeah, definitely. Well, your book why publishing for authors is all about publishing wide. Why don't you just tell us exactly how you did your publishing wide for this this very book? What was your strategy for getting out there? 

[00:35:11] Dale L. Roberts: Uh, yeah. So that way you think you and I kind of chuckled and laughed when we first connect.

[00:35:17] Dale L. Roberts: I was like, would it be funny if I enrolled that in KDP select? Um, it's not, it's not enrolled in KDP select. Sorry to, to, to burst everybody's bubble. Um, that was a gotcha. 

[00:35:28] Teddy Smith: Yeah. Yeah. I was 

[00:35:29] Dale L. Roberts: like, gotcha guys. There we go. Yeah. Yeah. Get everybody kind of won over for that. But, um. As far as, uh, when I went to publish it, uh, again, I kind of told you a little bit of my workflow goes ebook paperback and then hardcover.

[00:35:45] Dale L. Roberts: Let me see here. I have to remember off the top of my head. I know when it comes to ebooks, I open up KDP. Hang on. Let's see here. I can probably open up my dashboard here and see the actual links that I do exclusive. Yeah, I got KDP. I will open up. Publish drive. I'll do drafted digital. I will open up.

[00:36:08] Dale L. Roberts: Let's see here. It's all jumbled here. My apologies I'm just gonna go ahead and just try to remember it because it's just worse Google Play Books, I will get Kobo writing life I will remember to deselect those avenues through the previous ones I mentioned because I like to go direct with them. It's just preference Let's see here.

[00:36:27] Dale L. Roberts: And then I will typically hit pay hip for the ebook distribution and And Lulu bookstore Because Lulu treats me well. They're, they're always so, they're sweet to me. So I just go ahead and put it over on their Lulu bookstore. Then for paperback, I go KDP, IngramSpark, uh, BookVault, and Payhip. I might be missing one.

[00:36:51] Dale L. Roberts: One print on demand company. I I'm almost certain. I'm probably, um, same thing goes for, for hardcover as well. Hardcover is going to have literally the same aspect to it when I'm going through doing the upload process, but it's definitely all covered in the book. I promise you it's, yes, it's not one of those things I remember.

[00:37:07] Dale L. Roberts: And again, I always just click a button, boom, opens up all the tabs and then we're good to go. 

[00:37:11] Teddy Smith: Yeah, of course. Great. I mean, it's been fantastic speaking to you about this because it's such a big topic. I'm really looking forward to people giving me some feedback about the book because I know I've enjoyed reading it.

[00:37:20] Teddy Smith: So it's been great to hear about all the different parts of the wide publishing. Is there anything about why publishing that you think? You'd like people to know about before we head off, 

[00:37:29] Dale L. Roberts: uh, if you haven't read any of my books before, you're going to find that it's unlike any other books you're going to read out there.

[00:37:35] Dale L. Roberts: I think you'll hear that from a lot of authors, but, um, it's definitely true for a lot of my publications. So you've listened to me long enough here in this conversation. You will find that when you sit down and read one of my book, it's like having a conversation with me and it's, it's for good reason. I.

[00:37:51] Dale L. Roberts: Hired an editor that's fantastic at what she does. She knows my voice. She really honors that voice, enhances it, and then punches it up a little bit. And so the books are super easy to read and wide publishing for authors is going to be relatively simple. There's going to be some portions, for instance, that you can skim over.

[00:38:09] Dale L. Roberts: For instance, you don't need to know every single option available to you for distribution for let's say draft the digital. You might be like, okay, I see all these things. I can come back and look at all those options later on and read through those types of things. So don't let the. Size fool you, you're going to get a lot of value and a pretty short publication.

[00:38:30] Dale L. Roberts: I'm sure you probably can read it in a couple hours. 

[00:38:32] Teddy Smith: Yeah, nice. And if people want to get in contact with you and buy your book direct, where's the best place to do that? 

[00:38:37] Dale L. Roberts: SelfPublishingWithDale. com. Again, that's SelfPublishingWithDale. com. 

[00:38:42] Teddy Smith: Great. Well, thanks for coming on, Dale. It's been really fantastic to speak to you.

[00:38:45] Teddy Smith: I'm glad we finally got to chat. And, uh, yeah, we'll speak again soon. 

[00:38:49] Dale L. Roberts: Thank you. 

[00:38:50] Teddy Smith: Thank you so much for tuning into the Publishing Performance Podcast. I really hope you found today's episode inspiring. I love chatting to authors, writers, and people in the publishing world. Now, just before we wrap up, let me tell you about Publishing Performance, the number one platform for authors who want to increase Amazon book sales, but are not really sure where to start.

[00:39:09] Teddy Smith: Now, this show is all about helping you to sell more books. And if you're looking to boost your publishing game and to maximize your book's potential on Amazon, then Publishing Performance is designed to help authors just like you to grow your readership. And to reach a much wider audience. Now, I know that Amazon ads can be slightly complicated, which is why publishing performance is like having a personalized ad account manager to create your ad campaigns, to choose your best keywords, and to make adjustments in real time.

[00:39:38] Teddy Smith: Now, if you're investing in ads, you really want to make sure that your investment is being used effectively. And publishing performance does just that. It aims to make your budget go further, improve your organic rank, And target keywords more effectively. Just go to publishingperformance. com to get started with Amazon ads for just 1.