A question I get, periodically, is about where you can buy all of my stories – or, more specifically, why they’re not necessarily all available through every ebook store. Not counting the various things I’ve released on sites like Nifty over the years (hey, “On The Poolboy Payroll“!), there are a handful of books – like “My Sister’s Boyfriend Needed A Ride” and, most recently, “Online Orders” – which you can find at places like Smashwords but not Amazon.
So, why haven’t I released free books like “Riley’s Basement” on Kindle? Sadly you can blame Amazon’s approach to free books for that.
Amazon does support free ebooks, but it wants you to enroll them in KDP Select, first: that’s the catalog of titles offered to Kindle Unlimited subscribers, of which they can read an unlimited amount just as long as they pay a monthly subscription. It’s super-popular with avid readers, especially in genres like romance, but there are downsides for authors. The most significant (which I’ve written about before) is that books must be exclusive to Amazon if they’re enrolled in KDP Select.
If you want to “go wide” – book-world-speak for having your books available in multiple stores, rather than exclusive to just one – then you can’t have your book in Kindle Unlimited. If people want to read it, they need to purchase it outright. (Note, this is different to Kobo Plus, Kobo’s subscription version, which doesn’t demand writers be exclusive; you can find my ebooks in Kobo Plus too!)
I like giving people the choice of where to buy their ebooks
Since I like giving people the choice of where to buy their ebooks, I don’t like to sign exclusivity agreements. But, whereas Amazon will allow you to set ebooks enrolled in KDP Select as free (for a limited period) so that non-subscribers to Kindle Unlimited can download them at no cost, it doesn’t like to price-match rival stores down to $0.00 for non-KDP Select ebooks. Usually, it’ll ask you to either raise the price elsewhere (typically to the minimum for Kindle books, or $0.99 in the U.S.) or remove it from the Kindle store altogether.
It seems wrong, to me, to charge $0.99 for a book like “Riley’s Basement” that you can download free from Smashwords, Apple Books, itchio, or other stores. And even if I was okay with that, Amazon does periodically go checking to see if you’re charging less for books elsewhere, and will proactively either price-match them or ask you to correct/remove titles accordingly.
It’s frustrating, as a person who releases books, because Amazon is obviously a huge store and Kindle books get a lot of visibility. In fact, if you search for my name on Amazon right now, “Alex Pendragon Riley” comes up as one of the suggestions – I can only assume people are hoping to find the ebook for their Kindle!
The good news is, it’s actually pretty straightforward to transfer ebooks downloaded from outside of Amazon onto your Kindle ereader – I have a whole guide for that! So, even if you usually get all your ebooks from the Kindle store, you can generally still download my books (or those of other indie authors) and – as long as they don’t have DRM – load them onto a Kindle device.
Happy reading!