Why did I put HALF-ELVEN THIEF in Kindle Unlimited?

HALF-ELVEN THIEF had a very strong launch, especially for something new and unconnected to any of my previous settings. The last two completely new things I tried were COVERING FIRE in 2021 and SEVENFOLD SWORD ONLINE: CREATION in 2023, and HALF-ELVEN THIEF had a stronger first day than both of them, and came within like two copies of having a stronger first day than both combined.

So thank you for reading, everyone!

Rivah Half-Elven will join Caina, Nadia, Victoria Carrow, and Moriah Rhosmor as one of my Angry Thief Girl characters. 🙂 The series will have six books, and I’m going to work on them on the side as I do other stuff in 2024.

I did put HALF-ELVEN THIEF in Kindle Unlimited, which means that it’s only available on Amazon.

I do regret that it’s only on Amazon, though once the series is complete, I will take it wide.

I think I had good reasons for this decision, which I will now enumerate in the Internet’s preferred format for discourse, a numbered list!

1.) I did this before in 2020, and it worked pretty well.

We all dealt with the Great Covid Panic in different ways, some for better, some for (much) worse. Myself, I spent 2020 learning how to use Photoshop and writing an entire epic fantasy series, specifically WRAITHSHARD. I ended up writing all five WRAITHSHARD books in 2020, and I originally put them in Kindle Unlimited and then phased them over to all the other stores in 2021.

This had very good results, and I am hoping to have something of a repeat with HALF-ELVEN THIEF.

2.) Amazon vs. AI problems under control.

Amazon had a bad problem with ChatGPT over the summer of 2023. Scammers were using ChatGPT to churn out “content”, format it as ebooks, upload it to Kindle Unlimited, and then use click farms to harvest page reads. This caused widespread problems, and Amazon finally responded by limiting the number of new books an individual author could publish to three a day. Some of the scammers were uploading hundreds or thousands every day, so this put a crimp in their operations.

I had avoided KU entirely for that time, but since it seems to be stable again, I’m willing to give it another try. We’ll see how things go.

3.) Why put the short story JEWELED CURSE wide and not in KU?

Because then I can give it away for free on my Payhip store. Everyone gets something!

4.) Bad economy.

Don’t believe what you see on the news about good job numbers – the economy suuuuuuuuuucks and has for some time for many complicated reasons. So subscription services are really an important part of people’s entertainment because the value for the cost is pretty good. That’s why (most) of my books are on Kobo Plus, most of my ebooks and audiobooks are on Scribd (or whatever Scribd is calling itself now), and (many) of my audiobooks are on Spotify even though the money from both those particular channels isn’t always super great. It does add up over time, and it is nice to have a lower-cost option for people on tight budgets.

5.) Everything else will stay wide.

Indie authors sometimes get stuck in binary thinking about Kindle Unlimited and wide.

Why not both? I write enough that I can do both.

THE SHIELD WAR, new Nadia books, and new Caina books in 2024 will all be wide and not exclusive to Amazon. Which is similar to what I did in 2020 – WRAITHSHARD was in KU, but DRAGONTIARNA and CLOAK MAGE were wide.

So that is my reasoning, and hopefully we will see more from Rivah Half-Elven in 2024!

-JM