Is publishing outside Amazon worth it?

Yes, and the work is small: the EPUB you already built is what every other retailer takes. Apple Books, Kobo and Google Play together represent a large minority of the ebook market — Kobo alone is the spine of library lending through OverDrive — and none of it costs exclusivity. The only thing wide distribution costs is the half-hour per platform.

Should I use an aggregator like Draft2Digital or publish directly?

Both, usually. Direct accounts with Apple Books and Kobo pay better and give you promotional tools; an aggregator covers the long tail of smaller stores and library channels for a share of sales, with no per-store maintenance. A common pattern is direct for the big two, an aggregator for the rest.

Do I need an ISBN to sell an ebook outside Amazon?

Generally no. Most ebook retailers assign their own internal identifiers and do not require an ISBN, though owning one makes the edition recordable and reportable across platforms. For print editions distributed through the trade, your own ISBN is required — the distinction is in the ISBN guide.

What happened to KDP Select if I publish wide?

Select requires the ebook to be exclusive to Amazon, so a book enrolled in it cannot be sold anywhere else for the term. Publishing wide and enrolling in Select are mutually exclusive per book — it is one of the decisions in the publishing guide, made per book rather than per career.

Publishing beyond Amazon: Apple Books, Kobo, and the rest

Amazon is the largest ebook retailer and roughly half the market — which means the other half is not a rounding error. Apple Books carries affluent readers and whole device ecosystems; Kobo is small in store share and enormous in libraries, through the OverDrive and Libby apps that most public library lending runs on; Google Play is the Android world’s bookstore; Barnes & Noble, smashwords-era survivors and regional stores fill the rest.

The pleasant surprise is that this half of the market is the easy half: every non-Amazon retailer takes the same EPUB you already built for Kindle. No conversions, no format forks — the file from the formats guide uploads everywhere. The work is accounts and metadata, not files.

Direct: the two accounts that matter

Apple Books — through Apple Books for Authors. Apple takes the EPUB directly, pays a standard 70 per cent royalty (subject to price floors), and its storefront is curated: editorial placement is real and reachable, particularly for design-forward books. Apple’s reviewer is among the strictest about EPUB quality, which is a feature — a file that passes Apple’s validation passes everywhere.

Kobo Writing Life — Kobo’s direct portal. A 70 per cent royalty band, promotion opportunities (runs, features, the annual promotion catalogue), and — the strategic reason to bother — Kobo’s infrastructure is the library channel: books on Kobo Writing Life flow into OverDrive’s library lending with a checkbox, and library lending is a genuine revenue line, not exposure.

Both accounts are free, both want the same things from the file — EPUB, cover image, description, categories — and both are a half-hour to set up.

Direct: the rest

Google Play Books accepts the EPUB and PDF, reaches the Android installed base, and behaves more like a marketplace than a curated store. Barnes & Noble Press carries the Nook store plus print options. Each is worth an account when the back catalogue justifies it; neither is where a first book’s afternoon is best spent.

Aggregators: one upload, many stores

An aggregator — Draft2Digital is the standard, Smashwords now part of it, PublishDrive another — takes the EPUB once and distributes it to a long list of stores and library channels, taking a share of each sale (Draft2Digital’s cut is around 10 per cent of net). What you buy:

The long tail without maintenance. Dozens of smaller stores — tolino in Germany, Paperplus in New Zealand, the library channels — that are individually too small for an account and collectively meaningful.
One dashboard for metadata, pricing and updates across every store it serves.
Library distribution handled as a checkbox rather than a project.

What you give up: margin on every aggregated sale, direct promotional relationships, and some control over timing. Aggregators deliberately do not distribute to Amazon — Amazon is always your direct account — and the big-two question (Apple, Kobo direct or through the aggregator) is a margin-versus-maintenance trade each author makes per catalogue size.

The ISBN and pricing picture

Ebooks outside Amazon generally do not require an ISBN — retailers assign internal identifiers. Owning them is still quietly valuable: the same identifier across platforms makes sales reportable and the edition portable. Print through the trade, by contrast, requires owned ISBNs outright — the reasoning is in the ISBN guide.

Pricing outside Amazon is simpler: the 70 per cent royalty band applies broadly, without Amazon’s price-band cliffs, so a single global price per currency is the norm. Watching Amazon’s pricing remain consistent with everywhere else matters more — price-matching bots on the big platform will otherwise discount to match a cheap competitor store.

The exclusivity trade, restated

Everything above is incompatible with one thing: KDP Select, which buys Kindle Unlimited access and Amazon’s promo tools at the price of exclusivity. Per book, the choice is:

Wide: all the retailers above, no Kindle Unlimited. The right default for backlists, nonfiction with a professional audience, and any book whose readers are not predominantly on Amazon.
Select: Amazon only for 90-day terms, enrolment renewable. The right tool when Amazon dominates the book’s audience and Kindle Unlimited’s page-read income outweighs the wide channels — a decision made with data, not habit.

The mistake is treating Select as the default. It is a paid trade, and the other half of the market is the payment.

What “wide” costs, in total

For a book already built: an Apple Books account, a Kobo Writing Life account, possibly an aggregator for the tail — each fed with the same EPUB, the same cover image, the same description and categories, per the metadata guide. A day of setup for a whole catalogue, then minutes per new title. The Amazon guide covers the half that makes it all worthwhile: the book has to exist well first.

“Wide” is mostly a mindset correction: the same file, a few more forms, and readers who will never visit Amazon. The platforms differ in curation and reach, not in file format — which is why the EPUB you built carefully for Kindle is already their book too.

Nueel exports that EPUB once, tested and complete, and the metadata it carries — title, series, description, categories — is the same text every platform’s form asks for, written once.

Common questions

Is publishing outside Amazon worth it?: Yes, and the work is small: the EPUB you already built is what every other retailer takes. Apple Books, Kobo and Google Play together represent a large minority of the ebook market — Kobo alone is the spine of library lending through OverDrive — and none of it costs exclusivity. The only thing wide distribution costs is the half-hour per platform.
Should I use an aggregator like Draft2Digital or publish directly?: Both, usually. Direct accounts with Apple Books and Kobo pay better and give you promotional tools; an aggregator covers the long tail of smaller stores and library channels for a share of sales, with no per-store maintenance. A common pattern is direct for the big two, an aggregator for the rest.
Do I need an ISBN to sell an ebook outside Amazon?: Generally no. Most ebook retailers assign their own internal identifiers and do not require an ISBN, though owning one makes the edition recordable and reportable across platforms. For print editions distributed through the trade, your own ISBN is required — the distinction is in the ISBN guide.
What happened to KDP Select if I publish wide?: Select requires the ebook to be exclusive to Amazon, so a book enrolled in it cannot be sold anywhere else for the term. Publishing wide and enrolling in Select are mutually exclusive per book — it is one of the decisions in the publishing guide, made per book rather than per career.