Going wide vs. going deep: what your own Amazon sales are already telling you

Every few weeks, an author group asks some version of the same question: if you are publishing wide, what platforms and distributors do you use besides Amazon KDP? The replies come fast and they are always the same list. Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, Draft2Digital, PublishDrive, IngramSpark, Smashwords, direct sales off your own site. It is a useful list, and also one you can find in thirty other blog posts if you google it.

The friction under the list

What is more interesting than the list itself is what authors say once you scroll past it. IngramSpark being buggy. Draft2Digital adding a yearly fee. Someone pointing out that there are so many of these roundups by now that they all blur together. Going wide is sold as an easy win, add a platform, add some sales, but in practice it is another dashboard, another set of metadata to keep in sync, another upload tool with its own quirks, sometimes another fee, for a return that a lot of authors quietly admit is close to zero.

The line that changes the question

In one of these threads, an author summed up the trade-off better than most of us could. Asked what they use besides KDP, they answered honestly: they had tried IngramSpark and found it too buggy to bother with, they were technically set up on Barnes & Noble but had made zero sales there, and every sale they had actually made came from Amazon itself, not just the US store but the UK, Canadian, German, Italian and even Swedish ones.

Take that as one author's experience, not a universal law, every catalog is different. But it is a familiar shape. They did the wide setup. They are technically listed on other retailers. And the sales came from Amazon anyway, including Amazon Germany and Amazon Italy, markets where they had done nothing beyond letting KDP's distribution reach them. English-reading customers exist in those countries, and some of them bought.

Wide adds surface area. Deep adds an audience.

That is the part worth sitting with. Going wide almost always means adding more retailers in the same language, spreading the same English book a little thinner across the same pool of English readers. Meanwhile, Amazon's international marketplaces are already producing real orders with no extra distribution work on your end. You did not build Amazon.de. You did not do anything special to earn a German or Italian sale. It happened because the storefront was already there and a reader who happens to read English found the book.

So here is the reframe. If Amazon.de is quietly selling your English book to the small slice of German readers who read comfortably in English, what is it doing for the far larger slice who read in German? Nothing, because that edition does not exist yet. Germany is widely regarded in the industry as Europe's largest book market, and while any single number you see quoted online is worth a healthy pinch of salt, the general shape of it is not really disputed: it is a large, active market of readers who buy books in their own language.

Adding a sixth English-language distributor spreads the same book thinner. Translating that book into German opens a different pool entirely, on a storefront that has already proven it will sell your work to some readers without you lifting a finger. That is the real difference between wide and deep. Wide adds surface area. Deep adds a whole new audience on infrastructure you are already using.

The homework worth doing this week

None of this makes translation free or instant, and it is not the right move for every book. A real literary translation means someone personally writes, rewrites and edits every sentence so it reads like it was written in German, not decoded into it. That is real work, and it is worth doing on a book that has already shown it can sell, series with proof of concept especially, rather than gambling it on something untested.

If you take one thing from threads like that, let it not be another distributor list. Let it be an hour with your own KDP reports. Sort your sales by marketplace and see what Amazon.de, Amazon.it and the others are already doing for you with zero extra effort. Then ask what the German edition of your best-selling book might do on a store that is already ringing up sales in a language it cannot read yet.