Kindle Unlimited For Self-Publishers, The Final Month

December of 2014 was the final month of my three month experiment with Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s subscription service for ebooks. In October I started an experiment where I put 19 of my older short stories into the Kindle Unlimited subscription program. My goal was to have at least 34 Kindle Unlimited borrows, since that would match the sales I lost by removing the short stories from non-Amazon sales platforms, assuming the rate that Amazon pays for borrows stays above $1. For October the rate Amazon paid per borrow was $1.33, in November it was $1.39, and for December it was $1.43. I suspect Amazon will boost up the payment around the holidays and let it drop a bit in non-peak months, but we’ll see whether that’s right or not.

In October, the first month of the experiment, I had 49 borrows. In November, 61 borrows, and in December, 62 total. Now that the experiment is over, I’m phasing my short stories out of Kindle Unlimited, and making them available on Barnes & Noble and iBooks and the other sites.

So, after three months and 172 borrows, what conclusions have I learned?

-I think Kindle Unlimited would be most valuable to a writer who’s just starting out. Like, if you have two or three books and are working to find visibility for them. The free days of KDP Select and the ability for people to borrow out your book would definitely help with visibility. For someone like me, with as many books as I have (FROSTBORN: THE GORGON SPIRIT is going to be novel #36), I think it makes more sense to have the books spread across as many platforms as possible. If you have four or five books and have them all on Amazon, you’re not losing out on that many non-Amazon sales, objectively speaking. If you have thirty-six books (and 20+ short stories and 9 technical books) the non-Amazon sales really add up over time. Conversely, if I wanted to start, say, a pen name to write romance novels or political thrillers or something, Kindle Unlimited would be a good way to kick it off. (Not that I’m planning to – I barely have enough time to write books under my own name!)

-Another option might be to rotate an older series into Kindle Unlimited for a boost. I haven’t tried this so I don’t know how it would work, but movie and TV companies do this all the time – movies and TV series appear on Netflix and then disappear again after a while.

-Finally, if you have a nonfiction topic that would primarily be of interest to people in the US and the UK, Kindle Unlimited might make a good home for it, since KU is still primarily popular on Amazon US and Amazon UK. Like, a book on US Congressional elections would work on Kindle Unlimited, since that would be a topic mostly of interest to US readers. Whereas for my books about Linux, I’ve never even considered putting them in Kindle Unlimited because Linux is used worldwide. In fact, on iBooks and Google Play a large part of my sales to countries where English is not the primary language are my books on Linux.

So, that is my opinion of Kindle Unlimited. Feel free to share your experiences with it below, whether as a reader or as a writer (or both).

-JM