Yet Another Kindle Unlimited Experiment, But This One Worked!

Today I’m going to write about some book marketing mistakes I’ve made, so feel free to skip if the topic doesn’t interest you. Though I suppose it’s human nature to enjoy reading about the mistakes of others, so I suspect most of you will stick around. 🙂

To the main topic:

I’ve tried a bunch of experiments with Kindle Unlimited, but none of them have really worked, mostly because the cost of advertising in Kindle Unlimited makes it difficult to turn a profit.

My second-to-most recent experiment with Kindle Unlimited was with my SILENT ORDER science fiction series, and it lasted from the end of December to the end of March. It went reasonably well and the books sold a lot of copies and had a lot of KU page reads, but in the end, over those three months I wound up spending about $300 more on advertising the SILENT ORDER books than I actually made from the series.

What went wrong? Eventually, I came to two conclusions.

First, the books were too short. Each of the SILENT ORDER books are around 50,000 words. In olden times, 50,000 words was an acceptable length for a novel. But we don’t live in olden times any more, do we? Nowadays, it seems that about 80,000 to 100,000 words is an acceptable minimum length for a novel for most readers. That comes to about 4,000 Kindle locations, roughly 300 pages in paperback, or about ten hours in an audiobook. In Kindle Unlimited, a short book is a serious liability. In terms of advertising, it costs as much to advertise a 50,000 word book as it does to advertise a 100,000 word book, but the 100,000 word book will make twice as much in page reads. (That’s why KU has a consistent problem with black-hat operators resorting to plagarism or formatting tricks to pad the length of their books.)

Second, I wasn’t using one of the popular story structures in science fiction. Most genres have their usual story structures, and if you think about it you can probably name a half-dozen in most genres off the top of your head. Fantasy has “fight the Dark Lord” or “Quest to find the Magic Item” or “Boy or Girl becomes wizard, faces dark powers” and so forth. Detective stories have “Detective uncovers a cover-up that goes Straight To The Top” or “Detective races against time to stop serial killer” or “Twenty-year-old corpse accidentally unearthed at construction site to reveal deeper mystery”. Romance has the classic “Woman meets desirable man, can’t be with man due to obstacle, additional setbacks ensue, obstacle is overcome, woman & man undertake romantic relationship.” It’s not that readers dislike these common story structures, it’s that they expect them to be done well (or combined well). If you want a burger, you want a really good burger. You don’t want to chef to stick a piece of lasagna on a burger bun, add some pickles and mustard, proclaim that he’s experimenting in cross-genre cooking, and then insult you for lacking taste when you point out that you wanted a burger, not a piece of mediocre mustard-tainted lasagna on a soggy bun.

(As an aside, this is why I think AVENGERS: ENDGAME was so much better received than the ending of GAME OF THRONES. The AVENGERS people stuck to Comic Book Story Structure and did it exceptionally well, but the GAME OF THRONES people tried to apply the wrong story structure to a fantasy series and the whole thing sort of fell apart at the end.)

Anyway, It seems the most popular story structure in science fiction these days could be pithily summarized as “Plucky Military Space Boy or Space Girl climbs the ranks to Admiral or General despite obstacles and setbacks, crushes Alien Invasion at great military and personal cost, and also defeats Treacherous & Corrupt Politicians in the process.” Now, there’s nothing wrong with that story structure – I enjoy it myself. Who doesn’t enjoy seeing space aliens defeated and treacherous & corrupt politicians receive their comeuppance? But that definitely wasn’t SILENT ORDER, which was basically “James Bond/Jason Bourne IN SPACE!” I don’t think that’s a popular story structure in science fiction, and so combined with the shortness of the books it was difficult for the series to catch on.

That said, I really appreciate everyone who did read the series to the end! I might republish the series as longer books, but that would be a project for later.

But once the month of March was over, I shifted SILENT ORDER out of KU and back to my usual default marketing tactics – make the first book free on all platforms, make the second book $0.99 USD, and then ignore for the most part.

That said, I had come very close to making a profit with SILENT ORDER in KU over those three months, and I thought my marketing tactics had been much improved this time around. In particular, advertising the omnibus edition of the first three books and not the first book had worked really well. Three books on sale is a better deal than one book on sale, right? If the books had been longer and closer to popular SF story structure, I thought I would have been able to make a profit.

So I decided to try again, this time with DEMONSOULED & MASK OF THE DEMONSOULED. The DEMONSOULED books were much longer than SILENT ORDER, and they followed the favored story structures of fantasy far more closely. I would also repeat my previous advertising tactics – I would heavily promote the omnibus edition of the first three books, and then do a free promotion using the first book of the series. I would use my usual advertisting platforms – Bookbub Ads, Amazon Ads, and Freebooksy/BargainBooksy.

So, here’s how it went.

For the three months of SILENT ORDER’s KU term, I would up spending $300 more in advertising than the books actually made.

DEMONSOULED went into KU on May 7th, and turned a profit on May 18th.

Clearly, it worked a lot better than it did the last time! Even better, I spent substantially less on advertising DEMONSOULED than I did SILENT ORDER. So everything from this point on to the end of the KU term is profit.  Of course, the problem with Kindle Unlimited is that your book(s) need to be in it for three months at a time, and you get the best results in the first month. After that there tends to be a steep dropping-off. The DEMONSOULED books will definitely be going out of KU and back to all other platforms at the end of August.

So, after many marketing experiments, here are what I think is a solid set of Kindle Unlimited marketing tactics:

1.) Have a long series of long books. Make sure the books are as long as possible, but do it honestly through hard work without using black hat tactics.

2.) Make the first three books into an omnibus.

3.) Target the omnibus with ads.

4.) Make the first book free for a few days and target it with ads.

5.) Stick to a strict ad budget.

-JM