A lot of careers I look at are built on a single point of failure, and the author cannot see it because the point of failure is also the thing that has been working. For most indie authors, that thing is Amazon. It sells the books, it surfaces the also-boughts, it runs the ads, and it pays out every month. When one platform does that much for you, it stops looking like a risk and starts looking like the ground you stand on. Then the platform changes something, and you find out how much of your discovery you never actually owned.
This is the post I have wanted to write for a while, and the timing now makes the point for me. Amazon adjusted its visibility and ranking behaviour again this spring, and the indie author spaces filled up with the same conversation they have every time: rankings moved, ad costs shifted, and books that were steady went quiet for no reason the author could name. The lesson is not that Amazon is the problem. Amazon is the largest bookstore most of your readers will ever use, and writing it off would be a strange way to run a business. The lesson is narrower and more useful. If a single company controls how readers find you, how you reach them, and how you get paid, then a change you did not choose can move all three at once. That is concentration risk, and it is a strategy question before it is a tactics question.
What concentration risk actually looks like for an author
I want to be specific, because “diversify” gets said so often it has stopped meaning anything. Concentration risk is not about whether you are in Kindle Unlimited or wide. It is about how many independent ways a reader has to find you, hear from you, and buy from you, and whether those paths can be cut by the same decision.
Picture a common setup. The author is KU-exclusive, so all sales run through Amazon. Discovery comes from Amazon ads and the also-bought engine, both controlled by Amazon. Reviews live on Amazon. There is a newsletter, but it has fifty subscribers and goes out only at launch. On paper this author has a platform. In practice they have one platform, and everything that feeds it routes through the same company. When Amazon changes ad auction behaviour or how it weights a category, the author has no second channel to lean on while the first recovers. They wait, and they hope, and they call it a slump.
Now picture a different author with the same sales. They are wide, so the books sit on Amazon, Apple, Kobo, and in library systems. Roughly a third of new readers arrive from an email list the author has built deliberately over two years. There is a small but real direct-sales channel for the backlist. Reviews exist across Goodreads, StoryGraph, and the retailers. This author still loses sleep when Amazon shifts, because Amazon is still the biggest single slice. The difference is that a bad month on one platform is a dent, not a cliff. The other channels keep working while the affected one settles.
The second author is not working harder. In several cases they are working less, because email and direct relationships take less ongoing attention than chasing an ad algorithm that keeps moving. They made a different decision earlier, and the decision is what protects them now.
Why this applies across every genre and publishing model
I work mostly with genre fiction authors, and the platform conversation usually starts inside the KU-versus-wide debate, which is a romance and romantasy preoccupation for good commercial reasons. I want to pull it out of that frame, because the risk is not genre-specific and the repositioning of my own thinking over the past year has been toward saying so plainly.
A thriller author selling through a traditional publisher has concentration risk too. If the publisher’s marketing spend and the retailer’s placement are the only two things putting the book in front of readers, the author owns none of the discovery and inherits all of the exposure when either one pulls back. A literary novelist whose entire reach is one well-followed social account has concentration risk shaped like a platform that can suspend, throttle, or simply change what it shows. A science fiction author who is wide across every retailer but has no direct line to readers has diversified the selling and not the discovery, which is the half that actually fails first. The specifics change by genre and publishing model. The structure does not. Ask how many independent paths connect you to a reader, and ask whether one company’s decision can close more than one of them. That question does not care what you write.
The one asset that is genuinely yours
If concentration risk has a single antidote, it is an audience you can reach without permission. In practice, for authors, that means an email list, and increasingly it means a direct relationship that includes the list, your own store if you have one, and the data those produce. I have watched this hold up across more than 275 launches, through three or four rounds of “the algorithm changed,” and the pattern does not move. The authors who stay steady through platform turbulence are the ones who can email a few thousand readers on a Tuesday and see sales by Wednesday, no retailer involved in the decision.
The reason an email list matters is not that email converts better than everything else, though it usually does. The reason is ownership. A retailer can change how it ranks you. A social platform can change how many of your followers see a post, and that number has only ever gone down. Your email list is a set of addresses that belong to you, attached to people who asked to hear from you. Nobody stands between you and them. That is the only part of most author platforms that no outside company can quietly take away.
This is also where I push back on the version of “diversify” that means be on every platform. Spreading yourself across six social channels is not diversification, it is the same fragile thing repeated six times, because every one of those channels controls your reach and can change it. Real diversification moves you toward channels you control. One owned channel that works beats five rented ones that might.
If you want the longer version of how I think about the list specifically, I have written about building an email list as a fiction author and about selling direct to readers, both of which sit underneath this decision.
What I am not saying
I am not telling you to leave KU. Exclusivity is a real trade with real upside, and for a series-driven romance author early in a career, the page reads and the visibility can be worth the concentration for a while. That calculation is genuine and I have walked clients through both answers. If you want the trade laid out properly, I covered KU versus wide distribution for 2026 in its own post, because it deserves more than a line here. The point of this post is one level up. Whatever you decide about exclusivity, decide it knowing how much of your discovery it concentrates, and build at least one channel that survives a change you did not make.
I am also not telling you to do all of this at once. Most authors I work with are already stretched, and adding “diversify everything” to the list is how good intentions turn into a worse kind of overwhelm. The move is sequential. Pick the single channel you would most want working if Amazon went quiet for a month, and that is almost always the email list. Build that one until it can carry weight on its own. Then look at the next gap. A platform built deliberately over two years is sturdier than one assembled in a panic after a bad quarter, and far less work.
Where to start this quarter
If you take one thing from this, make it a question rather than a task. Before your next launch, look at how a reader actually reaches you and count the independent paths. If the honest answer is one, and that one is owned by a company that has changed its rules before, you have found the most important thing to work on this year, and it is not your cover or your ad copy. It is the channel that belongs to you.
If you want help mapping that, building the list, or deciding how much to lean on any single platform for your specific genre and stage, that is the kind of problem the strategy side of what I do exists to solve. You can see how that works on the services page, or read more about the newsletter infrastructure we build for authors who want the owned channel done properly. The books are yours. The discovery should be too.
