On this episode of Self-Publishing with ALLi, Dan Holloway covers three positive stories: KDP raising the upper price limit for its top royalty bracket from $9.99 to $12.99, effective July 7th; Bookshop.org launching audiobooks for UK readers on a £12.99 monthly subscription designed to deepen ties between readers and their local indie bookstores; and the rise of dystomance — the blend of dystopia and romance trending on BookTok, with a self-published title helping drive the wave.
Listen to the Podcast: KDP Raises Its Top Royalty Ceiling
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
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Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to another week's Self-Publishing News. Last week ended with some big breaking news from KDP: the upper end of the 70% royalty bracket is going up from $9.99 to $12.99. What this means is that if you want to opt into the 70% royalty rate on KDP, you currently have to cap your price at $9.99. If you price above that, the royalty rate drops to 35%. From now on you can price your Kindle books anywhere up to $12.99 and still opt into the 70% royalty rate. This took effect on July 7th.
So from July 7th onward, new books can be priced up to $12.99 and still qualify for the 70% rate. If you write in nonfiction genres, for example, you might very reasonably want to price in the $10 to $12.99 range — and you can now do that while keeping the higher royalty. It is also possible to switch existing books that are currently priced above $9.99 into the 70% bracket. The way the FAQs phrase it, you can ask to be in the 70% royalty rate — there is some implication that it isn't guaranteed, but I haven't seen any reports yet of people being turned down. What is definitely not automatic is the switch: if your books are currently priced between $10 and $12.99, they will not be moved into the 70% bracket automatically. You need to actively change them, or they'll stay at 35%.
Bookshop.org Launches Audiobooks in the UK
On July 8th came another big announcement — this one from Bookshop.org. Bookshop.org is now offering audiobooks to UK readers through the Bookshop.org app. In theory, readers can now use Bookshop.org to buy whatever format of book they want: ebook, print, or audio. And of course, indie bookstores will benefit from all those sales — whichever bookstore you choose to support will receive a cut.
A couple of points of interest. First, the subscription model: audiobooks on Bookshop.org will cost £12.99 a month, on a one-credit-per-account-per-month basis — one credit exchangeable for one audiobook. Bookstores — the bricks-and-mortar shops that Bookshop.org exists to support — have apparently been asking for audiobooks to be available for some time. This is the response. And those bookstores suggested that the easiest model for them to explain to readers is exactly this one: one credit a month, swap it for one title.
What's also really interesting is the vision behind it. Bookshop.org very much sees audiobook recommendations as coming from in-store. The idea is that you're in your local indie bookstore, talking to a knowledgeable member of staff who guides you to the right audiobooks and then walks you through signing up to Bookshop.org, getting your credit, and swapping it for an audiobook. The expectation is that in return, you'd link your account to that store, so they receive the ongoing benefit of your subscription. It's very much conceived as a way of deepening the value of indie bookstores — going beyond what Bookshop.org already offers for print and ebooks.
And of course, Bookshop.org partnered with Draft2Digital back in February, so Draft2Digital can distribute your audiobooks to the platform. That means as indies we can now distribute books in all formats through Bookshop.org and have our sales there benefit our chosen independent bookstore.
Dystomance: The New Portmanteau Genre Riding BookTok
Another fascinating development from this past week is the emergence of a new portmanteau genre. Everyone loves a portmanteau genre. A portmanteau, as authors will know, is a word that's a mashup of two others — the most famous current genre portmanteau being romantasy, a blend of romance and fantasy. (I note in passing that if you count sci-fi as one word, that may well be a portmanteau too — though I'm sure some will feel strongly that's wrong on multiple levels.)
The new portmanteau in town is dystomance — spelled with a Y — a blend of dystopia and romance. According to an article in The Bookseller, it's been doing the rounds on TikTok. The dystopian books hashtag has accumulated 27,000 videos and 150 million views in the recent period.
This fits with something I reported at the start of the year: after the pandemic pushed readers toward cozier, warmer, more escapist fiction, there's now a drift back toward darker territory. Horror was expected to be the breakout genre this year, and dystomance fits that same shift. As the trend has been described, dystomance is dystopian fiction where the dystopia is in the foreground and the romance is a key subplot — the romance is there, but it's not the main driving force. The world-building and the bleaker elements are.
Interestingly, the two authors most associated with driving this trend are very much not new names: Suzanne Collins and Veronica Roth, of the Hunger Games and Divergent series respectively, are both revisiting the worlds of their original series. But perhaps most encouraging for us as indie authors: very much at the core of the movement is H.M. Wolfe's Daggermouth, a self-published title that is genuinely riding the wave and helping propel the trend. It shows, as with romantasy, that readers care about the quality of the book, the characters they love, and the stories that absorb them — not about who published it.
So even though one of this week's stories is about fiction getting darker, it's nonetheless a week of positive stories. On that note, I'll see you again at the same time next week. Thank you.
