Author freedom

I got another one of those terrifying e-mails from Kindle Direct publishing saying they have discovered INSECTLAND for sale at other online booksellers. And as anyone who publishes through this promotion knows, you have to be exclusive to Amazon.com for 90 days. Violating this can lead to the expulsion of your book not only from the promotion but also from Amazon and Kindle. That would be a huge blow to my market audience of Kindle and Kindle Fire owners. Worried I might lose this book, I quickly checked the stats. I had enrolled the book in early March and had hit the automatic renewal button. It showed a new start date of June 7^th. Fine, I thought, my 90 day exclusive was up nearly two months ago. I have nothing to worry about. Then yesterday, I got another email from KDP saying that INSECTLAND was still on other websites and that it would be withdrawn from the promotion. I was a little flabbergasted and a little pissed. I read the rules and had followed them. I didn’t publish my books anywhere else until I was certain the 90 day period was up losing who knows how many Nook and Kobo sales? I bit the bullet because I believed that KND Select along with publishing for Nook and various other ereaders would turn out to be the best bet in the long run. I didn’t understand what was going on so I decide to post the question of why, after my 90 day exclusive is up that I’m getting my book pulled from the program, on the KDP forum to see if anyone else was having this difficulty. I got two great responses and here they are:

If you are enrolled with kdp select the conditions are that they have exclusivity. You cannot publish any other e versions of your book until the 90 day period has finished. By auto renewing you are agreeing to another 90 day exclusivity!

You said you renewed? Then you start all over with the 90 day exclusivity. The only way to get out of the exclusivity clause is to non-renew on your bookshelf.

There’s the reason. Whereas I thought after my first 90 days were up I’d have free reign to do what I wanted. Finding this out was very disappointing, mainly, like I said before, because I wasted three months on exclusivity instead of marketing to everyone. Though, every author has their own individual goals on who they want to sell to and how, I decided to withdrawal all of my books from the Select program. I want my books out there all over the world and available on everything with a screen. I know not having the free giveaways option may make me have to market harder, but I still think author freedom is worth it.