Note: Indie Author Magazine, Indie Author Training, and Wide for the Win are sister organizations. Mark Leslie Lefebvre, Kimberly Diede, Paul Austin Ardoin, and Bradley Charbonneau are part of the Wide for the Win team, and Lefebvre consults for Draft2Digital.
There was no single formula for going wide at last month’s Wide for the Win Summit, co-hosted by Indie Author Training and the Wide for the Win community. Mark Leslie Lefebvre began his day 1 conversation with Jane Friedman by calling the wide strategy far more than a checkbox. "Wide is a whole set of decisions," he said. For two days, speakers walked through those decisions one at a time.
The virtual summit ran October 9 and 10, with Bradley Charbonneau and IAM publisher Chelle Honiker as hosts. Day 1 was free and covered whether and how far to go wide. Day 2 was the paid implementation day, with sessions on retailers, print, audio, and selling direct both online and in person. Thirty-five sessions aired, with some live and others pre-recorded and captioned, allowing hosts and speakers to answer questions live in the chat for the more than six hundred authors registered.
Their lessons and advice varied, but they underscored the same message: There are countless ways to publish wide, and authors choosing the strategy can do so with whatever formats and retailers fit their business best.
KU Can Stay in the Mix
In the opening session, hosts were quick to dispel a myth about publishing wide: that it’s not an option for authors who choose exclusivity on certain platforms. Even those authors in Kindle Unlimited can still be wide everywhere else. Charbonneau listed print, translations, hardcovers, and special editions as formats an author can take wide while keeping ebooks exclusive. "Audio can also be wide. And then direct is sort of like the uber wide," he said.
Libraries are one of the easiest places to start. In his session on the topic, Lefebvre reminded authors that Amazon’s policy as of September 2025 allows authors who enroll their ebooks in KDP Select to distribute them to libraries as well. An author who is exclusive with Amazon can leave every retailer unchecked in an aggregator's dashboard and switch on only the library wholesalers. For print books, Lefebvre recommended authors use IngramSpark as a distributor with the trade discount set to 53 percent, which gives a library about 40 percent off retail. However, he urged authors to think first about what they can offer their local library. "Don't ask what your local library can do for you. Ask what you can do for your local library," he said.
Friedman, a publishing industry analyst and the author of The Business of Being a Writer, joined him for that session. She said most new fiction authors will start with ebooks and that established authors miss an opportunity if they aren't thinking about print. "There's no one formula or one way to do this," she said.
Run the Numbers Before the Foil
Special editions and merchandise drew some of the most specific advice during the summit. Kimberly Diede, a wide author with fifteen published books and thirty years in banking, offered her own business’s numbers as an example during the session. She ordered fifty case-bound copies of a novella with dust jackets from BookVault. Her landed cost came to just under $20 a copy, and she priced each book at $35. With setup, proofs, and shipping included, she needed to sell about thirty-three copies to break even. Six months in, she had sold twenty-four: ten through her direct store and fourteen at in-person events.
She advised authors to do "the math before ordering the magic." For every upgrade she considered, she asked whether her reader would notice it and value it. "You don't have to do it all,” she said. “In fact, you shouldn't do it all. It takes too much time, and it takes too much money.”
“There's no one formula or one way to do this.”
—Jane Friedman, author of The Business of Being a Writer
Brittany Kelley, a multi-pen-name hybrid author who runs two direct stores on Shopify, shared that she funds her physical editions through Kickstarter before buying inventory, so the money for a print run is in hand before she places the order. She avoids pricing single ebooks under $10 in her stores, because "that ten-dollar level seems to be when that fraud really hits." Instead she sells bundles, delivered through BookFunnel, with each product's SKU—a code used to track inventory—matched across both platforms. Moving to direct sales and physical editions, she said, "has really kept my business from having sort of the roller coaster effect that you would see in Kindle Unlimited or being driven just by releases."
Metadata That Works Outside of Amazon
In Lefebvre's metadata session, he encouraged authors to simplify their setup across platforms. Kobo, Apple, and Google Play have no keyword field, for example, so terms have to go somewhere else in a book’s metadata. "But wide, your description is your keyword field," he said. He also suggested authors use a book’s subtitle field to list important tropes and search terms in place of a keyword field.
He offered several other suggestions for authors looking to boost their books in retailers’ algorithms, such as looking at a store logged out, the way a reader would, and asking Kobo Writing Life for access to its Promotions tab if it isn't showing. On pricing, he enters his US price in Draft2Digital first, then checks the converted prices, because D2D rounds them to familiar price points in each currency.
In another session, Stuart Grant, of Digital Authors Toolkit, covered how search engines and AI assistants find authors. Digital Authors Toolkit was a sponsor for the summit.
"AI does not trust one source,” Grant said in his session. “It trusts agreement across many sources.” He advised authors to use the same bio and handle on every profile and give each book its own page. He also suggested wide authors list every retailer's buy link on their own site.
Promotions for Wide Titles
Paul Austin Ardoin, a USA TODAY best-selling Mystery author, built his newsletter promotions around book 1 of his strongest series, he shared in his session on paid newsletter promotions on the first day of the summit. His reasoning was that "just about all readers have a problem, and that problem is what to read next," he said. He puts the buy link for book 2 directly after the last paragraph of book 1 rather than on the next page. He also waits about six months before repeating a book in the same paid newsletter to hopefully reach new readers.
“Wide is a whole set of decisions.”
—Mark Leslie Lefebvre, author and director of business development at Draft2Digital
For audiobooks, Ardoin pointed to promotion opportunities at Chirp, the audiobook deals store. Chirp was also a sponsor for the summit.
At the Table
Two panels hosted by Lefebvre covered in-person events, featuring authors K. McCoy, Paulette Stout, Lynne Hancock Pearson, AJ Scudiere, Todd Fahnestock, and Johnny B. Truant. In both sessions, panelists shared their advice for others attending and selling at in-person events.
In one discussion, Fantasy author Fahnestock shared that he tracks his book costs at about 33 percent of the gross at any event, and he sets a target before he books a table. "If I'm not making five hundred bucks above and beyond everything else, then I'm not going again to that con," he said.
Scudiere has seventy books across two pen names, but the author only plans to bring three to any event she attends. "I sold more books when I had three books out than when I had eight and had them all on the table," Scudiere said.
Truant suggests authors open any discussions at an event with a greeting rather than a pitch. He also reminds them to let readers lead. "If you're not a book person, I'm not going to make you into a book person by throwing a sales pitch at you," he said.
Where to Find It Now
Kelley may have summed up the takeaway from the summit best at the end of her session: "Every business in this industry looks completely different." One author’s method for publishing wide may vary from another’s based on their genre, their backlist, and their readership. But that is the purpose behind the strategy. By encouraging authors to publish in more formats and sell across more retailers, wide publishing offers greater control, more security, and the chance to reach a broader audience of readers.
What that looks like in your business is up to you.
Summit replays are available for free at https://summit.wideforthewin.com until November 9; those who purchase the Education Pass for $149 will have access to replays for up to a year after the event.
Indie Author Training's next summit, AI Technology Options for Indie Authors, runs November 20 and 21. Day 1 is free, and day 2 includes paid workshops and walk-throughs covering how to build your own AI executive assistant. Learn more and register for the event at https://summits.indieauthortraining.com/ai-tech.
