Sylvia's Soliloquies

What to do? - 6/24/18

Sigh, I am at a loss right now and I do not know what to do.

As I'm coming up on the end of my editing phase I need to start looking towards publishing. The plan had always been to leave my rough drafts here on Wattpad and release polished novels with extra short stories on Amazon, specifically through their Select program. For those not familiar with KDP Select, it's a program that allows authors to include their books in Amazon's subscription services and in return the more your book is read the bigger your chunk from the profit pot will be.

This was all fine and dandy as far as I was concerned but I knew one caveat for joining Select was exclusivity. Now I thought I worked my way around this by the book being a different draft than what would be on Wattpad as well as having the additional short story that would be exclusive to Amazon. However, in preparation for publishing I actually delved into the fine print and they specifically say "bonus content" does not make the book offered on Amazon different enough from the book here on Wattpad. It also essentially says that drafts also make no difference because you can't have more than 10% of the story available for free elsewhere so if you subtracted all the axed material from what's here on Wattpad, what would remain would be identical to what would be on Amazon and it would most certainly amount to more than 10% of the total word count.

Hopefully that made sense, but anyway, my point is I can't leave the full rough draft here for free and enroll in KDP Select.

So what do I do?

I feel pretty loyal to Wattpad. Due to my posting here I managed to crank out 6 books in a year, a feat I never thought possible and I will not stop posting my rough drafts because of this exclusivity thing. This isn't about marketing for me, this is a tool to help me write. So I don't particularly like the idea of cutting my books down to excerpts on here. I wanted the roughs to remain for posterity. However a girl's got to eat and I've got a family to take care of...

In the end I think there's two options:

1) I continue posting full completed rough drafts on here, but as a publishing date looms, I'll give a warning that the full book will be disappearing at the launch of the final product on Amazon and then replace it with an excerpt. That way I can be a part of the KDP Select program and there will still always be several free full novels on here since I still be writing new books that will replace the old ones getting turned into excerpts.

However, I never give excerpts the time of day on here...

So there's also:

2) I say fuck it and leave the books as they are here. I enroll in the normal version of KDP that allows me to publish elsewhere as well. This means I can also sell the books directly off my own site too and I'd likely set up a tip jar type deal for those who enjoy the Wattpad stories and want to show their appreciation but aren't going to buy a book. I know there's Patreon but that requires monthly maintenance and I'm not up to doing that.

So those are the options. If anyone stumbles on this and has an opinion I'd love to hear it, whether it's backing option 1 or 2, or offering a whole new option.

Sigh, I thought I had found such a clever workaround too...but I guess I wasn't the first one to try and find a loophole in this exclusivity thing...