Do Amazon-exclusive or wide books get more clicks?

One of the biggest decisions an author will make is whether to make their book exclusive to Amazon, or whether to make it wide and sell it at multiple retailers.

There are pros and cons to each option.

Going with Amazon exclusively makes it easy to set up free days and transition back and forth between free and bargain status.

At the same time, going wide gives you access to all readers, including countries where Amazon is not the dominant platform.

We know many of you feel passionately about this. We are not taking sides.

But we’re still going to answer this question: Do Amazon-exclusive or wide books get more clicks?

We dug into a month’s worth of free-ebook promotions to get some answers.

Overall, wide books get about 8 percent more clicks. This isn’t entirely surprising, as wide books are just accessible to more of our readers — Nook, Apple, Kobo, and Google Play in addition to Kindle. But it confirms what we suspected, that most of our readers use Kindles. We're working to add more users of Nook, Apple, Kobo, and Google Play, and having more wide books certainly helps with that.

When we broke it down by genre, Amazon got the edge in two genres — children’s and historical fiction.

Four categories were essentially tied — cozy mystery, erotic romance, paranormal romance, and romantic suspense.

The remaining genres gave an edge to wide books. In three genres — horror, LGBT, and literary fiction — we didn’t have enough wide books to get a valid data sample.

I’d say there were two surprises — the advantage that wide books had in African-American and Christian was fairly significant.

It’s definitely worth further study.

Here’s the data by genre:

• African-American: Wide +25%

• Children: Amazon +17%

• Christian: Wide +26%

• Cozy mystery: Tied (literally)

• Erotic romance: Wide +1%

• Fantasy: Wide +10%

• Historical fiction: Amazon +4%

• Mystery: Wide +11%

• Nonfiction: Wide +19%

• Paranormal romance: Wide +1%

• Romance: Wide +10%

• Romantic suspense: Amazon +1%

• Science fiction: Wide +12%

• Thriller: Wide +16%

• Young adult: Wide +5%

That’s the data for this month. If you missed our last study, we answered the question of which day of the week is best for scheduling your promotion.

Also, our genre click data for the first half of October is now available, and you can check out all results from recent free-ebook promotions.