KDP Select or not?

I’ve been looking at my sales figures and am seriously considering enrolling in KDP select.

The only thing that has been putting me off to date is the exclusivity requirement, which means I’d have to pull my books off Smashwords (and therefore Nook, iTunes, Sony, etc.), Google Play, GumRoad, BitTorrent Bundles and only be allowed to sell them on Amazon.

Up until now my thoughts on distribution were to have my books in as many places as possible – get them in front of as many pairs of eyes as I could. Not only that, I have some fondness for Smashwords since they were the first place I went with when I started self-publishing and I’ve grown with them as they have grown themselves.

But when you take a cold, hard, unsentimental look at the numbers, I rarely sell anything there or the ebook sites they sell on through.

My 2013 sales figures show this: Amazon about 330 across all sites, the rest 12 combined (those figures are different than on that linked page because I’ve stripped out the free versions that were given away with promo codes).

So far 2014 is holding up to the same ratio: Amazon 58, the rest 1.

So by going exclusive to Amazon I would hardly be losing any sales elsewhere. The main gains include being able to do Free Book Promotions and Kindle Countdown Deals which have proven to be very successful for other authors and what’s more, I can tie these deals into the release of Killing Gods this year.

And if, for whatever reason, I want to have my book more widely distributed, I can drop out of the plan at any time (although you are locked into 90-day exclusivity periods). Not only that I can enroll on a book-by-book basis so it’s not like my whole catalogue (of three books, ha!) have to be lumped together as one.

So the information points me in the direction I should go. For now at least 🙂