The theory of separate markets

This theory is just that: My explanation of how things work. The primary division of markets for indie book-writers is kindle, kindle unlimited, paperback, wide, acx/audible. Wide means you sell in all indie markets, Barnes & Noble, etc., everywhere you can, whereas sticking with ku means promising not to do that. But the theory of separate markets means that if you don't appear at Barnes & Noble, for example, you lose some people altogether. People are less likely to shop for books in various places, and mostly go to the same places over and over again.

This is especially true of the ACX/audible people, who have decided that it's worth their while to get books they can listen to, while driving or whenever, and now they always read their books that way. Being known in that world does not transfer over into another world. They are not more likely to buy your hardcover or paperback because they heard your book. We think they might be more likely, but I have no proof that they are.

So I carry on with what I've got. At first I was so discouraged at having no paperback sales, that I almost gave up. But when I found out I could increase kindle sales by heavily marketing online I got hope again. As a result I have some books that do pretty well on kindle, and still barely sell at all out on the open market for paperbacks; my paperback ratings have been dismal since forever. So I have to say, on an absolute level, there are very few of my actual paperbacks out there because nobody buys my paperbacks. Yet on kindle I sometimes break the top five hundred.

The online kindle/ku community is the one I know best. The reason I consider them separate is that if someone has ku, that's how they get their books, and they don't go buying books other places because they've already put $10/mo. down on having enough to read. If they are kindle but not ku they might be checking the free and half-price deals on Amazon, and I do sometimes go after that crowd but am not sure I've made any real inroads with them. I know that if you only get 1/3 cent for a page someone reads you have to have more than a ku audience to get anything going financially.

But even these markets are fractured into independent, separate markets. So of the people who have ku and use it primarily for their source of reading, some check the amazon ads, some check other places to find good ku reads, and sometimes they get bored because whatever their source, they've dried it up. If you look at it entirely from the reader's perspective you have a strategy that goes like this: Use the usual source, over and over, do whatever is easiest, as long as you keep getting acceptable results, and then when it starts drying up, start looking for other sources. But in this process do you find people who say, "Maybe it's available on ACX/Audible?" My theory is no, they're not going to switch over. Because reading in a car is so fundamentally different from the other kinds, that they don't really consider it in the range of possibility. Now they might have switched altogether over to Audible/ACX, but that's more because they got a job driving a truck, or uber, or spend hours in the kitchen needing something to think about.

I'm curious what others think about it. I just put this out there because it's worth learning more about it. You heard it first here.