This last week, Amazon did something really nice, actually. Which is a change to write that, in this era of increasing frustration at the 800-lb gorilla in the book selling market. They made it possible for Indie authors to offer their books both in KU (which accounts for about 40% of my royalty income on Amazon, just to indicate how important it is for many Indie Authors) and to Public Libraries.

Should you? Well, let’s talk about a few things first, to put this into perspective and help you towards researching and making that decision.

During my time as a librarian, which has been well over a decade ago at this point, Overdrive was just evolving into the form it has now, of being a huge library for libraries of ebooks. This is long enough ago, to date myself, that my boss at the library bought a nook and a Kindle, handed them to me, told me to learn how to use them, load them with books, write a booklet on their use, and then be ready to teach our patrons how to use them. I did all of that, and in the process realized that the Kindle would overtake the nook in the market (which it did, just a few years later) because it was more intuitive to use and load books onto. I’d already spent enough time as a businesswoman to know that consumers are rarely patient and tech-savvy. Particularly when it comes to entertainment, they really don’t want to have to endure frustration to get it.

Just at the end of my time as a librarian, or perhaps shortly enough after I was still getting the news from it, I learned that Traditional Publishers were moving to a model of selling ebooks through Overdrive, never to libraries directly, because of the ToS of online book sales (No, it’s not a new thing where you aren’t buying the ebook, you are only licensing it and you absolutely cannot distribute it). What they were including in the contract was the idea that ebooks, like a paper book, would ‘fall apart’ after a certain number of check-outs, and then the distribution service would be forced to buy a new license to continue offering that book. This is why, dear readers, it’s almost impossible to find backlist books through your library’s online catalog. The other thing was the pricing – the prices for ebooks which would ‘fall apart’ was set at truly ludicrous levels, on par with academic textbooks, to offset the fact that TradPub was not selling each and every reading of that book to the library. This, dear readers, is why you’ll really only see the bestsellers and most popular of TradPub’s offerings through your library’s online catalog. They simply can’t afford to accession any but the most in-demand.

The library market is not the general reading market which you may already be confident in. I don’t know what the selection criteria are going to be for the incoming wave of Indies invading the library space, but I can tell you that librarians are snobs. They have to be. They answer to whoever their board is (sometimes this is independent, more often it is made up of town officials), and their check-out numbers are part of how they justify their jobs. This is not always the same thing as a reader’s decisions about what books are entertaining and enjoyable. The pressures are different for a librarian. The other thing is that their budget is often tiny. They operate on a shoestring. I didn’t continue with being a librarian as I was part time, making minimum wage (I made a few dollars more an hour as a cleaner), and knew the only way to become a ‘real librarian’ was to go after a Master’s Degree that would likely cost me $100K to garner, only to work for a small public library (if I could even get a full time position right away, a big if) making perhaps $35K a year. The math, it did not math, and I was a single mother of four at the time.

The last factor in this equation is that in order to get your book into Overdrive, you will have to distribute through Draft 2 Digital. There may be another path, but this is the one I’m familiar with. While D2D is better than Smashwords (a very low bar to clear) it does have some serious problems you’ll want to know before going into it. Their reporting is opaque and messy, which could potentially lead to problems with outlets underpaying or not paying royalties and you not catching this problem. More concerning, their payment processor, which they claim is independent of them, sometimes has trouble accepting an EIN for an LLC, and demand a social security number from the author which is… wrong. And possibly illegal. It would certainly get the author into a lot of hot water with their tax situation to have payments recorded incorrectly to them personally instead of their business. As a sole proprietor, I haven’t had an issue with this, and I know authors with LLC’s who have used D2D so it seems this is an inconsistent problem with them. It is certainly a red flag that you need to know about and proceed with all due caution.

Now, as to pricing. Should you sell licence a copy of your book to the libraries as though you were doing so to an average reader? Maybe yes, maybe no. I certainly don’t advocate for what TradPub is doing. If your books are too cheap, librarians (who are justified snobs, see above) may overlook them. Keep in mind that paper books in libraries are mostly hardcovers, not always bought at list price (at least my library used to look for sales on Amazon), and therefore you could justifiably price your ebook far higher than any rational single reader would pay for it, and it would still be a deal for the library if you don’t bake a poison pill of the book self-destruction after n checkouts. The other thing to factor in is that your covers, blurbs, those need to be on point and on par with TradPub (although again, that’s a low bar these days). The whole package needs to be professional.

Not sure how you’ll be visible to librarians? As with any marketing, word-of-mouth is the gold standard. Once you are set up to distribute through Overdrive (this will take time) let your readers know they can ask for your books at their local libraries. I, for one, am hoping that librarians see the incoming Indie books as a way to bulk out a very much in-demand catalog of ebooks, and a way to do so without breaking the budget. I think they will, some of them, others won’t, but such is life.

So there you are! An exciting new opportunity, to be sure, and one worth trying out since you can do so without dropping the KU income. If you don’t use Kindle Select, and already have your books wide, well, you may already be in that ecosystem where you can be distributing to libraries. But for many, many authors this is very good news. For readers who rely on the library for their entertainment, this may mean that they have a lot more choices, and more enjoyable ones, very soon.