(2) Use pre-orders and promote them to your readers If you publish direct to iBooks, you also get more choices for categories which can aid discoverability. When publishing, you can use a series field to link all the books together, so make sure you spell your series name and author name consistently to take advantage of that. George RR Martin 5 book boxset at $34.99. Again, iBooks readers are used to these as they're offered by traditional publishing at pretty high prices e.g. There's also no $9.99 cap on royalties so you can sell higher priced boxsets. IBooks readers are also less price sensitive because there is no subscription model, so even if you give the first away as a free starter, you can still put the rest at full price.
IBooks has specific promotions for free first in series and iBooks readers are used to using them as a way into a new author's books. (1) Write in a series and use a permafree series starter
So if you're ready to go wide, or if you want to expand your sales, here's how to sell more books on iBooks. You can publish direct on iBooks if you're a Mac user, or you can take advantage of all the same opportunities by publishing through Draft2Digital or Smashwords. I make an increasing percentage of my author income from Kobo and iBooks, and of that money, an increasing amount is from non-US sales.Īnd some authors even make more money from iBooks than they do from Amazon, for example, Liliana Hart, interviewed here. ( More on the pros and cons of exclusivity here).īut authors who are serious about building a long term career with their books, who want to sell on all platforms, to all markets, mostly choose to take their books wide.
If you're a new author with one or two books, then it can make sense to go exclusive with KDP Select, because you're building your backlist and getting to grips with everything that goes into being an indie.