Kindle's ecosystem sucks, their censorship sucks, and their monetization sucks. Amazon/KDP pays the lowest percentage of any publisher, and the Big Three are already close to Vegas mobsters for how hard they drive a bargain. To give you an example, traditional publishers take 85-92% of the book's purchase price, and KDP take about 70-80% just for printing your book out. No cover art assistance, no editing, no formatting help, no publicity, no agent... just sending your book to a machine that prints it, binds it, and spits it out.
It's also the only option for publishing ebooks and actually making serious money off of them. There's basically nobody buying ebooks off of Smashwords or any other retailer compared to Amazon to a degree that it's not worth even clicking the submit button.
Kindle's ecosystem sucks, their censorship sucks, and their monetization sucks. Amazon/KDP pays the lowest percentage of any publisher, and the Big Three are already close to Vegas mobsters for how hard they drive a bargain. To give you an example, traditional publishers take 85-92% of the book's purchase price, and KDP take about 70-80% just for printing your book out. No cover art assistance, no editing, no formatting help, no publicity, no agent... just sending your book to a machine that prints it, binds it, and spits it out.
It's also the only option for publishing ebooks and actually making serious money off of them. There's basically nobody buying ebooks off of Smashwords or any other retailer compared to Amazon to a degree that it's not worth even clicking the submit button.