Diversify or Die: A Case for Professional Publishers to Expand Their Book Distribution Channels
Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022. As someone who had spent the previous four years building a presence on that app to the tune of 16K followers, I could immediately tell that something had changed (beyond the app's name).
My fellow content creators and I did our best to stick it out, continuing posting our content and adjusting tactics as needed, but ultimately we watched as the algorithm left us behind, priced us out of participation, and (in some cases) was banned altogether for refusing to comply with international regulations. Half a decade and countless hours of platform building was rendered obsolete. So last month, joining 23% of users and 36% of advertisers, I left.
Thankfully, my livelihood was not tied directly to my content creation. I was an avid hobbyist, so the move away from the platform was disheartening but not critical to my ability to support myself. Others weren't as lucky: independent artists, professional content creators, even entire startups who had relied on Twitter as their primary method of lead generation and client engagement found themselves suddenly without a platform, forced to take a critical financial hit while attempting to find somewhere else to rebuild.
"Well," say many sage business owners, "that's what you get for not diversifying. You put all your eggs in the Twitter basket. If your business cannot exist without it or survive the changes that new management brings, that's just poor future-proofing on your part."
I am inclined to agree, which is why this conversation is so important. The same exact criticism could be levied at the emergent professional publishing industry and their over-reliance on Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing as a printing and distribution platform, now more than ever before.
How Does Professional Publishing's P&D Process Work?
Right now, the printing and distribution (P&D) process for professional publishing startups are reliant almost exclusively on two print-on-demand (POD) platforms: Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and LightningSource's IngramSpark (IS). While the latter is valuable for their expanded printing options and global distribution network to brick-and-mortar retailers, the former is truly where the majority of these companies' operational weight rests.
KDP allows publishers to help author clients upload their books directly into the platform. Not only does publishing and distributing through KDP allow for greater royalties and guaranteed Prime shipping for buyers, it also avoids the complexities of Amazon's Seller program, which requires a much more time- and cost-intensive process of shipping and warehousing, along with multiple fees that eat into product revenue.
In addition to being a cheap and easy way to manage P&D, KDP also uses categories and sales data to make achieving bestseller status for a book virtually guaranteed (if you know how to use it). We can talk about the gamification of all bestseller lists, from KDP to NYT, another time. My point here is that being a "guaranteed bestselling author" is a huge bonus for author clients who want to work with professional publishers, and that promise is only possible through the ongoing use of KDP.
The best of the best in professional publishing will find additional ways to supplement this standard P&D process, from working with offset printers to setting up direct sales funnels that allow author clients to own distribution of their books personally. But even if an author client is lucky enough to work with one of these companies, these are supplemental strategies and are by no means capable (in their current form) of delivering on the distribution and sales promises promised. They need KDP for that.
Why Are We Talking About This Now?
So why change things? If professional publishing as a sub-industry is skyrocketing in market share right now (it is) and the last decade has shown KDP to be a (somewhat) reliable P&D partner, why ring the alarm bells now?
Well, frankly, this is not a new alarm bell. I've been banging this gong (albeit with less aggression) since 2022. My experience at one of the biggest professional publishing companies, watching an entire department's resources get eaten up logging phone time on the KPD support line--sometimes going so far as having employees impersonate authors with fake voices in order to convince the customer service rep to publish a book in time for the advertised launch date--gave me firsthand insight into why this would be a problem eventually.
In 2023, I published an article on the subject, highlighting professional publishers' over-reliance on KDP as a key challenge of the industry. Just last week, I wrote about Kindle Vella's closure and what that meant for the integrity of KDP as a publishing platform longterm. My consulting clients and industry colleagues can attest to the fact that this comes up in conversations with me about the future of professional publishing.
Today, in light of the (re)election of Donald Trump as president and the promise of unprecedented influence of billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel on the next administration's policy, there is reason to revisit this conversation with renewed earnestness. We are going to see changes, both domestically and abroad, and in order to survive them we need to be ready.
Understanding Precedent and Predicting the Future of KDP
On October 25th, the Washington Post declined to endorse a candidate in the presidential election. This by itself would have been concerning enough, but it quickly leaked that the WaPo editorial board had drafted a Harris endorsement, which was spiked within hours of Trump meeting with executives of Amazon and Blue Origin, two of Bezos's other companies.
Even before this incriminating evidence came to light, WaPo readers began canceling their subscriptions. Five days later, CNN reported that more than 250,000 (10%) of the newspaper's subscriptions had been canceled. (This is not confined to WaPo, with more and more people calling for cancellations to extend to Amazon Prime.)
This mass exodus fueled by consumer mistrust mirrors the drop in subscribers that Twitter/X experienced (and continues to experience in increasing numbers). In the case of the news app, the most recent waves of deactivations can be traced to the new Terms of Service, as well as an increasing proof that Musk tampered with the algorithm to skew discourse on the app to favor Trump in the election lead up.
Whatever torches you may carry for the this new class of tech oligarch, whatever your political opinions, it would be bad business to not objectively analyze the data when it comes to how Musk, Bezos, and others are increasingly willing to disrupt and remake their own services to fit personal agendas (or at the very least avoid answering to political agendas that might impact their bottom line).
Now, I am certainly not suggesting that Amazon, Twitter/X, or any other tech oligarch-run platform will face lasting financial hardship as a result of these boycotts or subscription cancelations. If anything, these individuals and their flagship companies are likely going to do very well over the next four years, as they sit alongside elected officials in the halls of power. What I am saying is that we have seen--and will continue to see--that these men are willing to sacrifice public perception, platform integrity, international reach, and billions of dollars in order to continue to align themselves with power. What we consider to be institutions of the marketplace of ideas today are a few lines of throwaway code tomorrow.
How does this relate specifically to KDP? Right now I'm seeing two primary concerns looming on the horizon, as indicated by the results of the last year.
The Cost of Censorship Is 10%
Books have been under attack for the last few years in record numbers. In August, the American Library Association reported that in 2024 there had been 1,128 books targeted for censorship by ultra-conservative watchdog groups. PEN America identified over 10K instances of book bans during the 2023-2024 school year. Starting in 2025, publishers and libraries are predicting that they will only get more widespread. If you aren't clued into this ongoing conversation and are making your money off publishing books (any kind of books) you need to start paying attention and planning for the future.
Censorship--not just of political opinion but of anything that might contradict the company line--is something publishers are going to have to grapple with. This is not new; publishers have always been first before the metaphorical firing squad during regime changes. And again, while I'm not saying that book burning is imminent, censorship becomes a lot less complicated for the powers that be when the entire industry relies on a single platform.
Recommended by LinkedIn
As I said in my post last week, Amazon began as an online bookseller and has been able to dominate 80% of the book distribution market, but books sales through KDP only make up about 10% of its revenue worldwide. Bezos has already made a decision that impacted 10% of one of his company's revenue in the service of censorship. There is no reason in the world to imagine he wouldn't do so again.
The Intrusion of Mandatory AI
Leaving censorship aside for the moment, let's talk about another very real possibility: the implementation of an AI scraper. This was a huge motivator for users to abandon Twitter/X, as the new Terms of Service require subscribers to allow Grok (the platform's AI program) to use their content:
“By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to make your Content available to the rest of the world,” the terms of service said, which includes the right to analyze any of that content “including, for example, for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type.”
The lawsuits already brought against these TOS changes are likely to be dismissed thanks to an increasing conservative presence in the courts, but that's not what should concern professional publishers. Rather, what should concern publishers who rely on KDP's P&D process is a growing contingent of artists, content creators, and authors who are opting out of platform usage because of this policy.
Should KPD follow suit and announce that anything published on the platform is fair game for their AI scrapers to mine, repurpose, and sell its own content (most certainly with priority on Amazon search results), we will see an exodus of authors using the platform. Professional publishers who are unable to accommodate this will begin to see a self-limiting market share almost immediately. Not to mention an ongoing decline in value as KDP becomes increasingly associated with an AI content mill.
How Do We Start Diversifying Our Distribution Channels?
Microcosm Publishing, an independent publishing company based out of Portland, OR and Cleveland, OH, announced "The Microcosm Guarantee" on November 6th of this year. According to the website, this is a distribution solution that allows independent bookstores who place direct orders through Microcosm's website, sales reps, or in-house sales team for a 48-hour shipment turnaround.
...the Microcosm Guarantee was conceived to streamline the ordering and shipping process, get vital texts into readers’ hands, and strengthen partnerships with independent booksellers on the frontlines of their communities’ needs.
Joe Biel, Microcosm's CEO, has been planning this for a while, and spoke about the company's goals in a February interview with the Independent Book Publishers Association. This article also highlights Microcosm's proprietary publishing software, WorkingLit, which allows "our fellow publishers the freedom to market and sell your books, understand your business, and painlessly pay royalties."
If tomorrow KDP restricted its services or closed down altogether, Microcosm would not only be able to survive as a publisher but would be in a position where their software and business model could step in and fill the gap meaningfully (and in a financially lucrative way). This making of hay while the sun shines has not negatively impacted Microcosm's ability to grow, either. In fact, Publisher's Weekly has named it "Fastest Growing Publisher" for the last three years in a row.
Now, Microcosm is not a professional publisher, aka a publisher whose main source of revenue is providing publishing services for author clients as opposed to acquiring and selling author IP. Not everything this publisher--or any traditional publisher--does will be able to apply one-to-one to the professional publishing sub-industry. However, those who want their professional publishing companies to survive and thrive would do well to take a page out of their book here, no pun intended.
We talk a lot about disrupting the professional publishing industry, about standing out from the competition, about growing and expanding our services in ways that provide real, tangible value to our author clients. Often that growth is horizontal, expanding into new areas of content creation and brand marketing, rather than vertical, growing networks that might not be as sparkly or glamorous, but are the reason the traditional publishing industry we emulate lasted long enough to be something worth capitalizing on.
What would this vertical growth look like on a practical operations level?
This would take work and investment, but let's be honest. Most author clients are thirsty for this type of infrastructural support and would likely be willing to pay a premium for ongoing book sales support. Despite the professional publishing talking point that book sales are secondary to personal branding, that's often a difficult pill for potential authors to swallow. I wonder how many author clients would rather pay an extra $10K for dedicated, ongoing, established book sales support than for, say, a social media calendar or a speaker coach.
This Call To Action Is Not For Everyone
There are unfortunately a number of professional publishing companies that are only interested in capitalizing off a growing sub-industry for as long as it is the fastest and easiest way to make money. And if that's you, that's fine. I'm not going to moralize at you about the sanctity of the written word or romanticize the idea of suffering for the sake of producing great literature. There's too much of that already, it's one of the reasons traditional publishing lost its luster for me.
You are welcome to coast for as long as you can, investing as little as possible into your startup du jour, until something happens and you are forced to pivot into the next low-effort, high-yield opportunity. But if that's you, this article is not for you. And frankly, neither am I.
If you are serious about books, about what it means to be a steward of the written word and a pathway for individuals to share their knowledge and stories with the rest of the world, this is for you. Hell, if you're simply a business person who is interested in future-proofing your company by diversifying distribution channels to avoid established concerning trends in the market, consider this your call to action.
It's time to start growing vertically, not just horizontally. And sometimes that means growing down, spreading out strong roots into soils nourished by a century of industry knowledge. The channels are established and increasingly accessible as professional publishing becomes more mainstream. Take advantage of them. Even if nothing I've warned about here comes to pass, you've set yourself apart from the competition and can use your expanded book distribution services to sweeten the pot for new author clients. And if the worst case scenario does come to pass, well, you get to survive.
Principal Automation Technologist
2moThis was really informative. How do you feel about the direct-to-consumer style that Brandon Sanderson has been experimenting with? He has an agenda against Amazon and Audible, he's been doing what he can to bolster non-Amazon distribution channels, and he himself is blowing out Kickstarter and Backerkit records every time he releases a new title. But to me, that doesn't scale. It's going to result in HIM selling a lot of books, but I feel like headlines will over-rotate and others will miss opportunity. At least he puts up a lot of smaller authors. He does a good job of that. But I wonder what this means for distribution overall.