Going wide, or staying exclusive
Sooner or later every self-published author meets this fork: list the ebook in every store, or commit it to one retailer's exclusive program.
The specific terms move around — payouts, promotional tools and rules change, and they differ by country. The shape of the trade does not.
The shape of the trade
Exclusive means one store sells your ebook and no other store may. In return you typically get access to that retailer's promotional machinery and a share of a subscription-reader pool, where you are paid for pages or borrows rather than for sales. The cost is everything else: every other ebook store, most library ebook systems, and any direct sales of that file. You are betting that one strong channel beats several weaker ones.
Wide means the ebook is listed in as many stores as you care to maintain, directly or through a distributor. You keep every channel, you can sell direct, and no single retailer can end your income with a policy change. The cost is that starts are slower, there is more to keep in order, and there is no one dominant algorithm working on your behalf.
Neither is the responsible choice. They are different risk profiles, and an exclusive commitment usually runs for a fixed term — so this is a decision you revisit, not one you make forever.
What actually decides it
Not ideology. Five practical questions.
Where are your readers already? If the people who read your kind of book overwhelmingly read on one retailer's device and app, exclusivity is giving up shelves that were mostly empty anyway. If your readers are on phones, in libraries, or in a market where another store leads, wide is not a sacrifice.
Does your genre have heavy subscription readership? Some categories — long series, fast-reading genre fiction, romance — have large populations of subscribers who read many books a month and rarely buy individually. Reaching those readers requires being in the program they subscribe to. Other categories, especially nonfiction and literary work, have far less of it, so the main benefit of exclusivity is worth much less.
Are you writing a series? A series changes the math. When book one exists to recruit readers for books two through six, you care about how efficiently a channel delivers first-time readers. Exclusivity concentrates that recruitment in one place with strong promotional tools. Going wide spreads it, which takes longer but builds an audience nobody else controls.
Do you want libraries and bookstores? Library ebook systems and most institutional catalogs buy through wholesale channels that an exclusive ebook cannot reach. If library availability matters to you — and for nonfiction and local authors it often does — that decides it.
How much administration will you honestly do? Wide means more accounts, more metadata to keep matching, more places a mistake can hide. A distributor reduces that to one dashboard in exchange for a share. Be honest about which version of you shows up for this.
In the tools. Whichever way you go, you need one clean ebook file and a cover at the store's size. The Interior Formatter makes an EPUB 3 from the same manuscript as your print PDF, and the Cover Maker exports the ebook cover from the same design as your paperback wrap. Start a book → · about the tools
Print and ebook are separate decisions
This is the detail most authors miss.
An exclusive ebook does not stop you distributing the paperback widely. These programs apply to the digital edition. Your print edition is a different product with its own listing, its own ISBN and its own distribution, and it can go through any printer and wholesaler you like while the ebook sits in an exclusive program.
So the common arrangement is not a contradiction: an exclusive ebook at one retailer, and a paperback distributed through more than one printer to reach bookstores and libraries. Many authors who describe themselves as exclusive are, in print, entirely wide.
Read the program's actual terms rather than a summary, since that boundary is a rule and rules change. But the default assumption — that exclusivity locks the whole book — is wrong, and acting on it costs you the print channels for nothing.
What it means for production
Going wide is not only a listing decision. It multiplies the files you have to make and keep straight.
- More formats. Each store has its own upload requirements, preview rendering and idea of a valid EPUB. A file that limps through one store's converter will be visibly broken in another.
- More covers. Ebook stores want a cover at their own dimensions, separate from any print wrap. Add paperback and hardcover across two printers and you have a small collection of cover files for one book, each measured differently.
- More metadata. Title, subtitle, author, description, categories and price exist in every store you list in, and they drift apart unless you keep one master copy and copy from it.
The practical lesson: a book set up cleanly once is far easier to put in five places than a book assembled ad hoc. If the interior, the ebook and the cover all came from the same source with the same page count, trim and artwork, adding a channel is an upload. If each file was made separately in a different tool on a different day, every new channel is an afternoon of reconciling things that should have matched.
Decide wide or exclusive when you know where your readers are. Build the files as though you will go wide either way — it costs nothing extra now, and it is what lets you change your mind later.
In the tools. One manuscript produces the print PDF and the EPUB together, and the page count goes to the cover so the spine is right; one cover design re-cuts for four printers, three bindings and the ebook. That is what makes a second or fifth channel an upload rather than a rebuild. Start a book → · about the tools
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Categories and keywords · More: Pricing a self-published book · EPUB vs print PDF · Ebook cover size · Where to print