As you are now aware, The KDP Select program requires authors to sell their books’ soul to the Devil (Amazon itself) for a period of 90 days. Earlier this month we had discussed the positive side about this whole thing. KDP Select is a great way to expose your book and your (pen) name among loyal Amazon fanboys. Users can obtain your book for free and lend it to others in the process. When your book is borrowed, it earns you a certain amount of money depending on the total amount of cash available in the KDP Select Fund. You could potentially experience a lot of borrowed books, but even if you do, is the KDP Select program worth the hype?

Let me state the obvious here: Once your book’s soul belongs to Amazon for a 90-day period, you can’t publish it anywhere else on the Web. This includes popular platforms like Barnes & Noble, the Apple iBook Store, Kobo, BookStrand and others. Before handing over such exclusive rights to Amazon, ask yourself if you could earn more money from one place alone than multiple places combined.

Let’s bring another example to the table. At the time of this writing, users get approximately $1.70 from the program’s “money pool,” or the KDP Select Fund. So, if you published a book that normally costs $5.99 and it sells relatively well, it will be completely up to you whether to opt it into KDP Select. At $5.99, you are getting roughly $4.19 in royalties. If you opt into Select, you are essentially allowing users to obtain it for far less money. In this case, it all depends on how many $5.99 sales you actually make. If you are fairly comfortable, I personally suggest you keep all exclusivity to the book. This also applies to .99 cent books and any other that’s selling well without the KDP Program’s help.

All in all, many writers are against the program for the time being, and I am one of them. I had recently opted two different books based on two completely different genres, and the results were not spectacular.