For years, Amazon was the perfect place for me. I loved being exclusive, loved the perks. And to be frank, loved the money. However, over the years, Kindle Unlimited seemed to be skewed toward the fast writers, the book-a-month authors who could put out 10-12 books a year, year after year.

I can’t do that. I am a slow writer, and have already mentioned my illness, which complicates my life daily. A book a month? Impossible! It started to feel like I was paddling upstream, and the river was getting more and more turbulent.

Then I found out about Vellum, a wonderful formatting program for Apple/Mac users, of which I am now one. I bought it to reformat the books I already had out to see what it could do. Not only did my books look amazing, but it gave me fully formatted books for Apple Books, Google, Kobo, and Nook.

As I researched more, I discovered that these markets are about where Amazon was when I first started, ready to explode into the same kind of growth. So I took a deep breath, and un-clicked the Kindle Select boxes on my Days of the Judges series. It was scary, but I could no longer compete with the prolific writers on Amazon. I needed to get someplace where my much slower pace would fit.

Going “wide” is a huge challenge, and the learning curve has been steep, but I received some much-needed encouragement yesterday. On a Facebook group exclusively for Wide authors, someone told me, “If you’re a slower writer . . , wide is definitely the place to be. It’s far kinder to those of us who can’t put out a book a month or every two months.”

I am keeping my Regency series in KU just because I think that’s where the market for Regencies is right now. If I find I am wrong, I might well take them wide also, but for now, I’m happy with them still being exclusive to Amazon.