Short version: while a book is enrolled in KDP Select, you cannot sell or give away that ebook from your own website. Amazon's wording is that content enrolled in Select must stay for sale on Amazon only, and cannot be available for free or for purchase in digital format anywhere else, including on your own site or blog. A PDF behind a Payhip checkout counts. A free EPUB for newsletter subscribers counts. Your website is a third party as far as the terms are concerned.
That still leaves a lot you can do, and most authors give up more than the rules ask them to.
What the exclusivity actually covers
Select binds the digital edition of the specific title you enrolled, for the 90 days of the term, everywhere in the world. It does not bind the print edition, so you can sell paperbacks and hardbacks direct, through IngramSpark, or in shops. It does not bind audio, which sits under a separate agreement with whoever produces and distributes it, so audiobooks can go wide while the ebook is in Select. And it does not stop you making up to 10% of the book available as a sample elsewhere. Amazon does not publish a chapter count, so the practical reading is one chapter or 10% of the file, whichever is smaller, and no rolling serialisation that adds up to more.
What you can still put on your own site
Advance review copies are exempt from Select exclusivity, according to the Alliance of Independent Authors' roundup of Amazon's rules, so ARC distribution to reviewers through your own list or a delivery service is fine. Print direct sales are fine. Signed copies, special editions and merchandise are fine. A press kit, a mailing list, a landing page and a full author website are all fine, because none of them involve handing over the enrolled ebook file.
You can also sell an ebook you never enrolled. Select works title by title, not author by author, so a prequel novella, a short story collection or a companion guide that has never been in Select can sit in your shop the whole time.
The two traps that catch people
Bonus content inside a Select book has to be exclusive too. If you give away a short story as a mailing list magnet, you cannot also bundle that same story into the back of an enrolled book. One of the two has to go.
Box sets are the other one. Adding new material to a collection does not make it a new book for exclusivity purposes. If books one to three are enrolled in Select, a box set of books one to three cannot go wide, however much bonus content you staple to the end of it. The set and its component ebooks have to be on the same side of the line.
Watch aggregator leftovers as well. If a distributor pushed your book to Kobo, Apple, Everand or a library service in the past, a stale listing can sit there long after you asked for it to be taken down, and Amazon's crawlers may find it.
What happens if Amazon finds it
The usual first step is an email and removal of the title from Select and from Kindle Unlimited. Under the KDP terms Amazon can also pull the book from sale, withhold Kindle Unlimited payments accrued on it, and in serious or repeated cases close the account and forfeit unpaid royalties. That risk is the reason to sequence a move rather than overlap by a fortnight and hope.
Sequencing a book out of Select
- Find the enrolment end date on the KDP Bookshelf under the title's Select details, and note it somewhere you will see it.
- Turn off auto-renewal. There is no standard mid-term exit, so if 60 days remain, you wait 60 days.
- Build the shop during the wait. Set up the website, the list, the payment processor and the delivery, and stock it with print, audio or an unenrolled title.
- Prepare the EPUB and the product page, but schedule nothing that goes live before the end date, including pre-order listings at other retailers.
- On the day after the term ends, publish the direct listing and send the file to any aggregator you are using. Retailer listings take hours to days to appear, so the gap works in your favour.
The •BulletPoint Toolchest gives you the author website, mailing list, direct ebook delivery, ARC distribution and press kit for one flat monthly fee, so you can have the shop built and tested while the clock runs down, then switch the ebook on the morning your Select term ends.