Why Relying Only on Amazon Could Limit Your Author Career

Many authors assume Amazon is the beginning and the end of the publishing conversation. And for good reason: It’s where approximately 85% of books are sold. Plus if you sign up for Kindle Unlimited, giving Amazon a 90-day exclusive on selling your ebook, you’ll get an extra bump from their algorithm, potentially generating more sales.

But if you go exclusive, you lose out on some critical benefits of doing what Danica Favorite, author of 30 traditionally published books and community manager for PublishDrive, calls “going wide,” which means distributing your book across numerous publishing platforms. I spoke to Danica recently on The Story Cure podcast, and she opened my eyes to issues I hadn’t even thought about previously. 

I've talked before in this newsletter about how building your email list is the single most important thing you can do to own your audience, because platforms can disappear overnight (that article included a cautionary tale about a doctor whose entire social media following was banned without warning). Well, the same principle applies to where you sell your book. If Amazon is your only storefront, you are essentially building your entire author business on rented land.

Danica shared examples of authors who woke up one morning to find their Amazon accounts cancelled without explanation, or whose sales plummeted overnight because the algorithm changed. Other authors discovered that due to regional restrictions, Amazon isn’t available worldwide, so readers in certain countries will never even find your book. 

Oh, and by the way, on March 6, two Amazon servers went down—taking a bunch of author pages down with them. I received panicked emails from several clients, saying, “My book isn’t available! Where is my book?!” Now, luckily, Amazon worked fast to resolve the problem. 

But still, this story points again to the issue of putting all your books in one basket. If you've been pouring your heart into a manuscript for months or years, the idea that a single platform's policy shift or technical glitch could erase your sales pipeline should give you serious pause.

"The most resilient authors are the ones who go wide," Danica told me, and the more she explained what that means in practice, the more I realized how many authors are leaving both money and readers on the table by publishing exclusively with Amazon.

Going wide means distributing your work across multiple stores and platforms: Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play, IngramSpark, and even library networks, all from a single dashboard through a service like PublishDrive. You're creating multiple streams of income that can sustain you even when one channel has a bad quarter or changes its terms.

And the global opportunity is something most authors never even consider. According to the PublishDrive 2026 Market Intelligence Report, book markets like Germany are booming right now, and yet the vast majority of authors overlook them entirely because they're stuck in Amazon-centric thinking. Many readers in non-English-speaking countries are perfectly happy reading in English, which means you don't necessarily need to translate your book to tap into those international audiences. Danica suggested waiting until you see proven sales traction in a region before investing in translation. This strikes me as the kind of smart, data-driven approach that protects your budget while still allowing you to grow.

Through PublishDrive, you can manage your entire distribution from one place. You can handle print-on-demand and distribute your ebook and audiobook to independent bookstores and libraries, as well as other platforms. And perhaps most importantly, you get real analytics that tell you who is buying your books, from which countries, and in what formats, so you can make genuinely informed decisions about where to focus your energy next.

I've been saying for years that self-publishing and hybrid publishing have leveled the playing field for authors. Danica showed me that the field is actually much bigger than most of us realize, and we owe it to ourselves and our books to play on as much of it as we possibly can.

Are you already distributing wide, or has Amazon been your main focus? Hit Reply and tell me where your book lives right now. I'd love to hear your experience.

Aloha, MeiMei

TIP OF THE WEEK: 

Audit Your Distribution

Take 20 minutes this week to do a quick distribution audit of your published book. Or, if you haven't published yet, use this as a planning exercise for when you do.

Where is your book currently available? Log into whatever platform you're using and make a list of every store and format where readers can actually find and purchase your work.

Where is it not available? Are you missing Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play, or library networks like OverDrive? Each of these represents readers who want books but aren't shopping on Amazon.

Do you know where your readers are? If your publishing platform provides analytics, take a look at where your sales are coming from geographically. You may be surprised to discover pockets of readers in countries you never considered.

Your book deserves to be found by every reader who needs it, not just the ones who happen to shop in one place.

Can't make this one? No problem. Join me on Wednesday, April 29th at 1pm ET / 10am PT instead! Register Here