Kindle Unlimited Experiment results

I am pleased to report that my Kindle Unlimited experiment for August made back all my advertising costs and turned a profit.

A 37% profit, to be specific. I would have liked more, of course, but that’s still pretty good. It’s popular nowadays to lecture about the Evils Of Profits, but this overlooks how difficult it is to turn a profit doing, well, anything. (Which explains why people cheat and break the law to do it on occasion.)

Like, in the restaurant business, if the restaurant manages to break even it’s doing well.

Way back in the Bad Old Days when I worked for a Big Box Retailer, if the store had a 2% profit for the month, that was doing well. This was a store that could do a million dollars worth of sales over a weekend, but the profit from a single month’s sales wouldn’t even cover the cost of an assistant manager’s annual salary and benefits. And if anything went wrong during the month – like, a blizzard tanked sales for a day, or a freezer mechanical failure wiped out the meat department’s inventory – there went the profit for the month.

So I am very grateful for a 37% profit.

I think we can learn four lessons from this Kindle Unlimited experiment:

1.) Long series of long books can do well in KU.

2.) It does take a lot of advertising to move books in Kindle Unlimited.

3.) About half of that 37% came from audiobook sales. Audiobooks do very well when attached to Kindle Unlimited books.

4.) It’s good not be to exclusively in Kindle Unlimited. Even with THE GHOSTS/GHOST EXILE in KU (but not GHOST NIGHT!) I still have 81 books on other retailers. So even if my KU experiment had been a disaster, I would still have the monthly sales from the other retailers.

-JM